by Bill Mason
One thing that was new in high school was that differences in social status began to take on increasing importance. Most of the kids in the lower grades weren’t really aware of the family backgrounds of other students and tended to form groups based on shared interests like sports. But as we got older, we became more aware of who came from what kind of background. We were a mixed lot, and once those differences began to surface, there was a clear realignment of friendships.
Shaker Heights is on land originally owned by the Shaker sect and sold to a pair of land developers in 1905. Their idea was to create one of the first “garden city” suburbs in the United States, and part of the plan for attracting a high caliber of resident was to emphasize superior education. Shaker Heights High was one of the top schools in the country, and about 90 percent of its students were the children of wealthy parents, some of them old money and some genuine rags-to-riches American success stories. Those students dressed in expensive clothes, traveled a good deal and got exposed to a lot of culture.
Like Beverly Hills High, though, Shaker Heights High was public and had to accept anyone within its designated geographical boundary. The other 10 percent of the student body, of which I was a part, were from the other side of the tracks—some literally—but entitled to attend by virtue of their addresses inside the school district. Tough guys who wore leather jackets and Elvis Presley haircuts, we were called “rackies” for reasons that now escape me. There was no celebration of diversity, no multicultural festivals of mutual understanding, nothing like that. The more these two groups kept to themselves, the more the differences between them seemed to grow. There was no way my side could keep up with the swells in terms of cars, clothes and other material things, so our choice was either to withdraw and feel inferior or to strut what we had and try to be proud of it. All we had, though, was attitude, and we made sure there was plenty of it. I was among the more belligerent of the rackies, forever getting into fights and other trouble, proud of my bad-boy image the same way the rich kids were proud of their snooty upper-class airs.
My particular situation was compounded by the fact that most of my teachers liked me. The dreaded phrase—“He’s not living up to his potential”—attached itself to me like a persistent rash. If they’d thought I was beyond hope, I could have sailed through high school unmolested, but it seemed that every other week some goody-ass teacher was calling up my parents to complain about how I wasn’t living up to my potential, how I was wasting my time and talent getting into scrapes, cutting classes and Lord only knew what else. My parents’ reaction was to get mad and ground me, which only increased my resentment of those meddling teachers even more, making me surlier and even harder to deal with.
Paradoxically, although I was clearly identified with the rackies, I had a lot of friends among other groups of students, including the wealthier kids and those in the grades above me. People today recall me as having gotten along pretty well with everybody, and that’s my memory, too, even though I got into fights on a fairly regular basis. I played on the school football team, so maybe that was some kind of a sign that I wasn’t a total outsider.
Getting into trouble in that unenlightened era was a self-perpetuating situation. Administrators who meted out punishment didn’t do so with uplifting thoughts of straightening us out and being helpful: They were just pissed off, didn’t know us very well and had already decided we were incorrigible and not worth their effort. They seemed to enjoy making our lives miserable, more in the way of retribution than rehabilitation, or so it seemed to us. This, of course, only made us angrier and more determined to cause trouble, and so around and around it went. We couldn’t wait to get out of school, and they couldn’t wait to get rid of us. The only thing that came between me and expulsion was the strong presence of my father. With him in my life there was a line I wasn’t willing to cross.
Through it all, though, I managed to get halfway decent grades without ever really trying. Maybe that’s why my teachers thought I was worth saving. I graduated in the spring of 1958 and was entitled to attend Ohio University. I don’t think anybody in that high school ever seriously considered that I’d actually go to college, least of all me, but by that time I had a pretty strong incentive. Not to go to just any college, but to Ohio in particular.
One afternoon when I was in the tenth grade, I was pitching quarters against a wall with a few friends. One of them was Bobby Luria, a smallish kid with a slight lisp. I don’t remember how it came about, but it seemed I’d become his protector. (He’s a lawyer now and we’re still friends.)
Bobby pitched a “leaner,” a quarter that stood up against the wall and was an automatic winner. He jumped forward to collect his winnings, but just as he reached down, a hand came around the corner and scooped up the money.
“Hey!” Bobby yelped as he drew back in surprise.
It took me a second to realize what had happened. I ran around the corner and saw some guy running away, the back of his open leather jacket flapping noisily. I took off after him, closing a lot of ground before he figured out someone was after him. By the time he kicked up to a higher gear, my momentum had carried me right to him. I grabbed a loose fold of his jacket, spun him around and pressed him up against the wall of the building.
“Let’s have it!” I snarled at him as his hands wrapped around my wrists.
“What are you—?”
I didn’t give him a chance to finish the question, but pushed harder, lifting him onto his toes. “Givitta me, or I beat the shit out of you and get it anyway!”
My intensity was out of all proportion to his crime, and maybe that scared him a little. He let go of my wrists and nodded. I let him down and stepped back, but kept a fist cocked inches from his face. I recognized him as Bob Benz, an eleventh-grader and a certified troublemaker, like me, but he was a real hoodlum type, and it was probably just as well I’d been too pissed off to take much time to consider who his friends might be.
“Don’t hafta get crazy,” he said as he handed over the coins.
“Kid’s half your size!” I shot back at him.
“Din’t know whose it was, asshole. Was four guys pitchin’ quarters.”
“So what’d you think . . . out of four guys not one was going to come after you?”
It was like he’d never even thought of that, just had an impulse and went for it. He looked at me quizzically, then scratched his head. “Fuck,” he muttered. It was that kind of thought process of Bob’s that would get me into a lot of trouble later.
I can’t recall exactly how it happened, but Bob and I became friends. His father, who owned a bar in Beachwood, was hardly ever around, but I liked his mother a lot, and she liked me as well. I was always welcome in their big old house on Warrensville Center Road. I don’t know if his parents realized at the time how much trouble Bob and I got into together. I lost count of how many times we’d been caught sitting in his car right near the school, smoking cigarettes instead of attending class. As dangerously impulsive as Bob could be, he still had my admiration for his brashness and his guts.
I also came to admire his sister.
Although nearly a year younger than her brother, Barbara Benz was also in the eleventh grade, which put her a year ahead of me. (Bob had missed a year of school when he was younger because of an operation on his leg.) She was beautiful—five feet six, slim, dark-haired and dark-eyed—and smart, too. Though shy, she was self-possessed in a way not typical of a high school junior. One of the “good” girls in the school, Barb was often embarrassed by the very visible shenanigans of her brother the hood, and at first looked askance on the new friend he started bringing home. Soon, though, a mutual attraction began to set in, but we danced around it for quite a while, even as we began to spend time together.
Barb knew I was a rackie, as were most of the guys who came from the Woodland Avenue area in the western part of Shaker Heights, but she also knew I was very much my own person and friendly with kids from a lot of different groups. I wa
s even dating the homecoming queen, despite the fact that she was sixteen and I fifteen. Barb hung with a bunch of nice girls, all seniors. I got along with them and we enjoyed one another’s company, so it was natural for all of us to do things together. Eventually, though, the sparks flying between Barb and me were too bright to ignore, and we began to date on a more “official” basis. We always doubled, though, usually with another guy from Woodland and his girl, because I didn’t have a driver’s license yet.
I got one when I turned sixteen, in my junior year, and with the money I’d saved from paper routes and helping maintenance men in apartment buildings, I bought a 1949 Ford convertible. It had no heat and so many rattles you could hear me coming three blocks away, but at least I was mobile now. I began driving clear across Shaker Heights to pick Barb up for school and going over to her house nearly every night after dinner. Dating was so much simpler then, and you rarely needed more than five bucks. A movie for fifty or seventy-five cents, popcorn for a quarter, a burger afterward and you still had change from the fin. A few minutes of frantic necking in the driveway topped off a perfect evening.
By summer we were an item, and there are few better times and places to be in love than in small-town America in the summer. The days were long and lazy and hot, and Barb and I would drive thirty miles to Mentor to swim at the mile-long natural-sand beach at Headlands Beach State Park. Not surprisingly, one night I got a traffic ticket for something or other, and in those days they didn’t fine minors—they suspended their licenses. It was a fate worse than prison (or so I foolishly thought at the time).
By coincidence, my parents were heading out of town the very next weekend. Unable to drive, I had the perfect excuse to have Barb over to the empty house, not realizing that I didn’t really need an excuse. It was an unforgettable weekend of amorous exploration, two people who deeply cared about each other expressing it in as many ways as two novices could come up with on their own.
Neither of us wanted to break the magic of that glorious summer by bringing up the fact that she’d just graduated and was going to start college soon, but there was no getting around it. “It’s Ohio University,” she reminded me often. “It’s not like I’m going to Outer Mongolia. We’ll be able to see each other.”
“But not every day,” I’d respond morosely. I’d gotten used to being with her all the time, and I didn’t know what it was going to be like when that was no longer possible.
As it happened, I missed her terribly, even though she was only a four-hour drive away and we did manage to see quite a bit of each other. My grades up until that point had not been all that awful, but suddenly I had some real motivation to do well academically: I wanted to go to Ohio the following year. I had nothing better to do anyway, because I was without Barb most of the time and didn’t feel like dating any other girls, so I knuckled down—or at least what passed for knuckling down relative to what I had been doing—and had a pretty good year. I graduated and was accepted into the university.
Barb and I had another terrific summer together. There was no holding back on how we felt about each other, and we were excited that we’d be going to the same college in the fall. Skittish talk about marriage came up occasionally, but mostly in a far-off, what-if kind of way, and my life was looking up.
That August, though, just days before I was to join Barb at the university, it all started to fall apart.
2
Circumstance
IT WAS a Tuesday night, I think, although with no school it was tough to keep the days of the week straight.
I had been out with Barbara and came home about midnight to find my father lying on the living room sofa, a hand clutching his belly, his face grimacing in pain. My mother was visiting Aunt Nell in Detroit, so he’d been by himself all evening.
“The usual,” he grunted when I asked him what was wrong. “Goddamn ulcer.”
But I could see that this was much worse than usual. “I think we maybe oughta get you to the hospital,” I suggested.
“You too?” He waved it away and tried to sit up. “Already got an appointment with Uncle Rudy,” he said with some effort. “It’ll wait till then.” Then he groaned and sank back onto the cushions.
“What do you mean, ‘You too’?” I asked.
Turned out he’d actually spoken with Uncle Rudy, who’d not only suggested he get to the hospital but had already made arrangements to admit him. “Except he’s not there tonight,” he added, which was probably why he didn’t want to go.
I made it clear we were through negotiating, got him into the car and drove him to Doctors Hospital atop Cedar Road in Cleveland Heights. Uncle Rudy, who had founded the facility, would examine Dad the next day.
I had no interaction with any of the doctors there. I hung around after they whisked Dad off to a room, but it was clear nobody was going to tell me anything. Just before dawn, dog-tired and mentally exhausted, I got into my father’s Chevy and headed home.
All I can figure is that I fell asleep at the wheel, because the next thing I remember was coming to in a hospital room, covered in bulky bandages and in more pain than I ever thought possible. I had trouble speaking. Couldn’t move my mouth for some reason.
Seemed I’d run right into a tree on Fairhill Road at high speed. Slowly, so as not to shock me, the nurses eventually ran down the inventory of my injuries: tongue torn half off, most of my upper teeth knocked out, jaw broken, leg broken, a handful of internal injuries and so many stitches in my face and leg they’d lost count after the first hundred. They also described some internal injuries, but I didn’t really understand most of those.
They also told me I was in Saint Luke’s. It hurt just to turn my head, but before I lost consciousness again I managed to let them know I wanted to be moved to Doctors so I could be with my father. When I woke up again, my mother had arrived. I found out later that when the hospital had called her, they’d told her I might not make it. She explained to me that my jaw had been wired shut, which was why I couldn’t speak clearly. With some effort I told her that I wanted to be moved to Doctors Hospital. It took some doing, but that afternoon I ended up in the same room as Dad, who’d been operated on the day before.
Two days after that we were both doing much better. I was hazy from pain medication but not so out of it so as not to notice when I was moved to another room.
“What’s going on?” I asked a nurse who’d come in to check my blood pressure. I was getting better at making myself understood while my teeth were still clamped together. “Where’s my father?”
She smiled vacantly and said, “Everything’s fine.”
As she headed for the door, I called her back, as best I could with my immobile jaw. “I didn’t ask you that; I asked where my father was. Why was I moved?”
“You get some rest,” she breezed back, then left.
Angry at the curt dismissal and worried about my father, I reached for the call button and hit it, then hit it again, then again and again until another nurse appeared, a scowl on her face.
“Where’s my father?” I demanded.
She stared at me stonily. “He’s fine. Now, why don’t you put down that—”
“Why was I moved if he’s fine!” It was agony to speak but angry adrenaline overcame the pain.
“Would you please lower your voice!” she insisted.
But I wouldn’t, and shortly thereafter they told me my father had a blood clot in his leg. I insisted they take me to his room, and after a lot of arguing they finally did, although they weren’t too gentle with my wheelchair.
My father’s eyes were closed and there were tubes coming out of his mouth and nose. Sinister-looking machines whirred and clicked, and there were a lot of blinking lights.
There were also a lot of nurses and two doctors. They peered intently at the machines, took notes, felt his pulse and took his temperature and consulted one another in low voices and frowned. . . .
But nobody was actually doing anything for him.
&nb
sp; “What’s going on?” I managed to mumble.
“Blood clot,” someone answered.
“So what are you doing for it?”
“We’re monitoring him,” a doctor said.
“I meant, about the blood clot.”
“Your father’s physician isn’t here,” a nurse finally said. “We’ve put in a call. Don’t worry, everything will be fine.”
“But who’s doing something until he gets here?”
“Dr. Renner is in charge of his care,” a different nurse informed me archly.
“But he’s not here!” I could feel panic creeping into my garbled voice. “Shouldn’t somebody do something?”
There was a lot of shuffling and averted eyes. Was the staff so intimidated by Uncle Rudy that they were afraid to lay a hand on one of his patients? My father was unconscious and deathly pale. I pleaded with them to do whatever needed doing. They ordered me not to get myself agitated. The doctors kept looking at instruments, while the nurses plumped my father’s pillows and shuffled in and out of the room with great purpose but no effect. I grew more and more tired, having been weak to begin with and worn out even further from the frustration of futile negotiation on behalf of my father. Eventually I sank into sleep in the wheelchair.
When I awoke, I was back in the other room. My mother stood in the doorway, nodding dumbly as the same doctors who’d been with my father, cowed and submissive then but supercharged with confidence now, explained things to her in officious tones, told her why it couldn’t be helped, how they’d done everything possible for him. They patted her arm comfortingly, which was a good deal more than they’d done for my father, who I now understood was dead.