This is Switzerland, mind you. Not a country known for its blood sports.
There was a wood down the road we were running along. It was all kinds of spooky at that time of year. It was cold, sometimes bitterly so, and dark in the early morning. There was always a heavy winter fog blanketing everything. Often the only sound was that of the sleepy cawing of ravens in the treetops. That and the slapping of street shoes on the road and the rasping breaths of boys running frantically to escape the howling mob of sixth graders.
If you paused to catch your breath, you’d look back and for a moment all you could see was a bit of clear road that would disappear into an immense wall of fog. Then, nightmarishly, from out of the fogbank would appear the first boy. However big and threatening this boy would be normally, bursting out of the fogbank that way made him even bigger and scarier. It was a little like the climax of The Hound of the Baskervilles. The lust for the chase, the single-minded, bloody-eyed determination to hunt down these pathetic little boys, rip off their tails and knock them brutally into the nearest ditch—all free of adult supervision—had turned him and his classmates into a pack of ravening, baying predators.
We all instinctively headed for the wood. Dark, dripping and haunted-looking as it was, some instinct as old as Time drew us to it. It seemed, despite weeks of evidence to the contrary, to offer shelter from the mob, which, after their initial screaming, had fallen weirdly silent as they approached. The wood was thick, with low-hanging branches and masses of hellish thornbushes that ripped at clothes and flesh. We would stumble blindly into ponds, invisible under mats of dead leaves.
Reaching the woods in their headlong pursuit, the mob of boys would split into pairs or groups of three. Wherever you were, they’d find you, be all over you, wolf-like, then scuffle madly among themselves, barking and snarling for possession of the towel, while we, the prey, ran off into the bush.
Once I thought to out-general them by scrambling up a tree and hiding there, but some sort of animal instinct led one of them straight to me. He scrambled up after me, tore off the towel and then threw me out of the tree into the bush for my trouble.
At some point I had a kind of Darwinian epiphany. It may seem absurdly obvious to you, but one morning, surging through the gate into the road, it suddenly occurred to me if all they wanted was the towel, I’d give them the fucking towel.
A short way down the road, with the other young boys rushing past, I just stopped and waited. Before long, the first boy burst out of the fog to find me waiting for him, towel proffered. He didn’t even stop to hit me—just snatched at the towel and went on his way. The others followed and I was left to take a leisurely stroll down the quiet country lane, eventually returning to the school, spotless and invigorated, in time for my first class.
The other experience at the Collège was even more significant. Unlike the sadistic morning exercise related above, which felt more like a sociological lab experiment gone horribly wrong or an outtake from The Most Dangerous Game, this was an event that gave me another nudging hint about how comedy could be more than just a laughing matter. As many nerds know from hard experience, humor can disarm our enemies.
This case involved a large boy. These things always seemed to involve large boys. This boy’s name is lost to me now, but he was a brooding, silent, solitary type. My memory is that he was Russian, possibly a diplomat’s son, but he never spoke so no one really knew for sure. He was like a great silverback gorilla moving slowly across the playground, his arms dangling from his shoulders, eyes shifting back and forth, as if looking for something weak or injured he could finish off slowly.
This particular day, I was over by the high-jump pit. Believe it or not, for someone my size, I had suddenly been taken with the idea of getting into high jump. When my father found out he almost wept for joy and immediately built one in my backyard. The school pit was really nice, though, with its lovely, deep sand to dive into. I was on my lunch hour, doing a bit of high jump, when this junior KGB character shuffled up and started watching.
For a while he did nothing. I would jump into the sand, get out, raise the bar, jump again. After a few minutes, he made his move.
As I was getting up after a jump, I looked up and was startled to find him standing there beside me in the sand. It was like a shock cut in a slasher movie. Without a word or a change of expression, he struck me in the chest with the back of his arm. I went down like I’d been poleaxed.
Even before allowing the stars to clear, I was back on my feet, only to be bludgeoned back down again. This time I lay there for a few seconds, considering my options.
They appeared limited. The kid was standing there like a mountain, as if he had been there since the beginning of time, massive and expressionless. He didn’t dare me to get up but it seemed to have occurred to him that he had stumbled upon a potentially endless source of amusement and he wasn’t going anywhere.
Neither was I, apparently. And strangely enough, this is when Dick Van Dyke popped into my mind.
In these early days, there was a small group of comic actors who were beloved heroes of mine: Laurel and Hardy, Jackie Gleason and Dick Van Dyke. Van Dyke’s eponymous television show in the U.S. had been one of my favorites, and there was an episode of the show that I particularly loved and had already worked up an imitation of for friends and family back home. The story was Van Dyke’s character, straightlaced comedy writer Rob Petrie, undergoes post-hypnotic suggestion. Whenever the phone would ring, he would instantly become falling-down drunk. He would snap out of it when his wife talked to him. His unsurpassed ability to go almost instantly from falling-down-in-the-gutter-drunk back into his normal upright self was unforgettable.
So, for some reason, Dick Van Dyke seemed to appear to me at this moment to show me the way. The next time I was hit, my fall into the sand was a pratfall. Then, again. And again. Every time this kid knocked me over, my fall was more exaggerated. Funnier.
There was now a curious crowd of students standing around the sand pit to watch. I’m not sure my tormentor was aware of them at first, but as my falls became more extravagant, people started laughing. The first laugh, I think, startled him. He was in mid-hit and he may have thought someone was laughing at him. By that time, I wasn’t just falling funny, I was rolling around in the sand, struggling to get up, taking longer and longer, before planting myself in front of him for the next hit. And I was now controlling the hits! Instinctively! First lesson in stage combat!
The crowd got bigger and it was apparent that whatever else was going on that lunch hour, this two-hander at the jump pit was the hot ticket. Now there was a slightly brain-damaged smile appearing on my bully’s face as he realized he was actually a part of an act that was amusing all the children who would normally scatter in panic before him as he shambled across the yard.
In other words, we were a hit.
It was a one-off, thankfully. He didn’t pick on me again and over the distance of all these years, I feel happy for him. It was his moment in the spotlight and for at least one lunch hour, he was popular. All of these kids were strangers in Switzerland, sometimes a little scared and lonely. Even though it had never been his intention, he had helped spread some laughter and joy in our little corner of a scary and uncertain world, and I like to think he felt good about that. As far as I know, that was the peak of his performing career. It was a lesson for me, too.
Many years later I had the chance to work with Dick Van Dyke and we spent an afternoon on the set. Mainly we talked about Stan Laurel, his close friend and the ultimate comic hero we both adored. But I also told him the story about how he had saved me from being beaten as a child and he was charmed.
“That’s it!” he smiled. “You keep ’em laughing, you keep ’em off guard!” At the end of the day, I brought out my copy of the classic book on Laurel and Hardy by John McCabe, Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy, which included the eulogy Van Dyke gave at Stan Laurel’s funeral. He made some self-deprecating comments about his writing and then
signed it for me: To Curtis—Keep ’em laughing! Dick Van Dyke.
School in Switzerland was one thing, but it was there that my comic education really took root, thanks to a tiny theater just at the edge of the Vieille Ville, next to the city’s only department store, Le Grand Passage. This was the sort of thing you imagined only existed in Europe at the time: a cinema that showed only classic comedies and cartoons, all day, every day. There was no schedule that I was aware of, no logic to what was shown. But for a boy who had been given a steady diet of mediocre American television since birth, this was a revelation.
My parents started by dropping my sister and me at this place when they would come into the city to do a day’s worth of shopping. They could take their time, eat lunch, come back hours later and there we’d be: besotted and beaming with pleasure, having gone through Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Fields, along with classic Disney, Warner Bros. and Max Fleischer cartoons. I love to imagine the little mad man in the projection booth, almost buried among some of the greatest classic comedies ever, just throwing on one massive reel after another, barely able to hear over the clatter and rattle of the projector, the squeals of laughter and the patter of applause from the mix of pensioners, necking teenagers, military conscripts, drunks, ex-pat children and exhausted shoppers in the house. The theater had probably done service at different times as a legit theater, a music hall, an adult movie theater for all I know. What it became for me at that tender age was a graduate school offering degrees in pie throwing, pratfalls and the art of injecting, with the lightest possible hand, unexpected moments of grace, sentiment and friendship into a chaotic world.
I was raised in a warm, supportive, loving environment in which respect for conservative values was paramount. Because of our social and economic position, I was protected from much. Unfortunately, given our snipe-like darting about the world at the time, I never got the chance to fall in with bad company. Even as a child, I was young for my age. I would probably have developed at a normal speed had I remained in Detroit, but the combination of extensive travel, a total separation from everything familiar, exposure to children from other cultures and, with a near complete absence of pop culture via television and contemporary movies, a deepening reliance on books and music, the changes I went through between 1964 and 1967 were seismic.
Just the fact of living in Switzerland gave me a different perspective on the world. By the time I returned to the States I may have had opinions and experiences far beyond those of my schoolmates, but in other respects, I was a mere babe.
What I didn’t learn in Switzerland was, in some ways, as important as what I did learn. Which brings me to masturbation.
I’ve been told masturbation comes naturally to babies and monkeys, but it was a mystery to me. I understood masturbation was something that was done. The problem was it was done by pretty much everyone but me. My father was almost boyishly eager to explain a kind of meat-and-potatoes variety of the facts of life—including oral sex—in surprising detail; but he left out any mention of any form of sexual pleasure that did not involve growing up, finding someone and getting married first.
I understood the overall idea of masturbation and certainly grasped the purpose of it. It was the mechanics of the thing that eluded me.
I had male friends who masturbated. They talked about it all the time, especially in my second school in Geneva, the Lycée des Nations. The Lycée was actually the original gatehouse of the Rothschild estate, though, being Rothschilds, they had done it on a grand scale. It was a mansion to us, with classes held in former bedrooms, and science classes in the horse stables.
At the Lycée, during recess, we boys would gather in groups and the conversation, which was never at a very elevated level anyway, would turn, almost inevitably, to masturbation. After all, it was Switzerland in the early sixties, and we were ten or eleven years old. Other than skiing, what were we supposed to talk about? And think of what an improvement this was over Detroit, where we wouldn’t even have had skiing as an option. This was like an evening at Gertrude Stein’s in comparison.
My friends would joke easily and at length about whacking off, but of course no one ever talked through how they actually did it. It was kind of like hanging out in a bar with a bunch of Masons hearing them joking about something funny that had gone on down at the Temple that week. They’d think it was hysterical, but if you weren’t a Mason it didn’t matter how good the story was, you just didn’t get it.
And I felt instinctively that this wasn’t a subject that I should bring up. I tried to imagine it: one of the guys finishing up a really good masturbation story and then, once the laughter died down, me saying, “Oh, Nicholas, man, that’s really funny!!” (Beat.) “But, how do you do it, exactly?”
You see the difficulty. Once I came up while one of them was talking about having whacked off with a pillow. Everyone was laughing. This was so frustrating. If I’d come up two minutes earlier, he might have let something drop that would’ve given me some clue as to how it all worked. Out of desperation I very uncharacteristically just slapped this guy down.
“Bullcrap,” I snapped, in the heat of the moment not even caring about my language. “A pillow? A PILLOW? Come on!! I don’t believe it!” I thought at that point, Derek or whatever his name was would get all defensive and say, “No, I swear! It really works! You get a pillow…” And then he’d spell out his method and, like magic, I’d know how to masturbate.
Instead, of course, all the boys just stared at me for a moment before one of them started talking about cricket or something and the moment passed.
There was almost a culture of masturbation at the Lycée des Nations. A lot of the boys were English, after all, and to hear them tell it, English schools in the sixties were just places where boys went to play rugger and cricket and toss each other off. The headmaster of our school was English. He was young and hip. He was married to the young French teacher, who was French and hot. He was also a teacher, but he didn’t like that part of his life. In class he had to be the thing he hated, and he resented it. He had no patience for those of us who didn’t grasp things immediately. “Armstrong, it’s a simple concept, really absurdly simple!” An intolerant teacher, as many of them were, but when he was being headmaster, he was in his element. He remade the whole idea of what a headmaster was, essentially re-creating it in his own image. He loped insouciantly about the place, running his fingers distractedly through his hair, and dressed like a young poet with a private income. He liked the Rolling Stones and he played the bongos. Not in a band or anything. He played solo bongos, which made him, if possible, even cooler; or, if you were musical, even more irritating.
There were eyebrows raised when he allowed the sixth-grade boys access to the cellar of the old mansion that was our school. This was to be, as it were, a clubhouse for the upper-form boys. It was cold and dark and smelly. Perfect for sixth-grade boys. But no one other than sixth-grade boys were allowed down there under any circumstances, so of course rumors sprang up about what was really going on down there. One story, the gospel truth according to the classmate who passed it breathlessly on to me, regarded a ritual that any new kid had to endure in order to be allowed the right to sit in a dank cellar with a bunch of stupid boys.
All light was extinguished. The boys would kneel in a circle around a piece of bread. They would then whack off, there in the darkness, onto this piece of bread. Then the light would suddenly come on and whoever had not yet come on the slice of bread would have to eat it. Inevitably, it seems, the new boy would lose.
(I’ve told that story to men repeatedly over the years and they always say something like, “Oh, yeah. The cum on the bread thing…” So this would appear to be a more common hazing ritual than I imagined at the time. Maybe it’s just me, but it is just this kind of thing that makes me hate boys. Some are okay, I guess, but in numbers they really bear watching. As P. G. Wodehouse might’ve said, they call into question the whole idea of Man as God’s last word.
)
Weirdly, the headmaster would sometimes go down there with the boys. He’d take his bongos and disappear into the cellar with the sixth graders. We would be in class when the ghostly sound of bongos would start coming up through the ventilators. We’d all exchange meaningful glances. He is down there again, the glances would say. With the sixth graders …
He was something of an eccentric, this headmaster. In chemistry class—for he was also our chemistry teacher—he was bragging about how he knew the exact ingredients to make the kind of gas that the Germans used to kill people in World War I. And then prepared to show us.
“Yes, it’s quite simple, really.” He mixed some chemicals in a beaker and then held up a bottle of something else, the stopper removed, and held it over the other beaker.
“Now, if I were to mix this with these other ingredients, that would be … oh!” Then something happened. I don’t know if he absentmindedly added this other chemical, or if it slipped out of his hand or what, but the next thing I knew I felt my chest constricting alarmingly. Everyone was screaming. He was carrying one of the girls out, yelling, “Outside!! Outside!!! Everyone!!!” We all somehow made it out and collapsed under a tree, coughing and choking and vomiting until finally our lungs cleared.
The headmaster was eventually let go due to some kind of arcane contractual dispute and not—as you might think—for the German-death-gas incident.
But one final thought on masturbation. I did finally discover masturbation some time in high school. It coincided with the first time I got really drunk. Not blackout drunk, because I somehow managed to get myself into my pajamas and into bed. That was the night I was, in a manner of speaking, introduced to myself. Sometime in the middle of the night, in a smelly, sweaty, cotton-mouthed haze, I awoke to find myself taking advantage of myself. It was a revelation. It was like I’d been doing it forever. As my old headmaster might have said, “Quite simple, Armstrong, once you grasp the fundamentals!”
Revenge of the Nerd Page 5