In the seventies and early eighties, girls obtained their sex information from Judy Blume books, and mothers got their laughs from Erma Bombeck’s syndicated newspaper column about the perils of homemaking. Men were busy hiding copies of Playboy, and boys were busy digging them out. (This was before the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.) If kids couldn’t find copies of Playboy or Hustler, they searched for bare-breasted tribeswomen in National Geographic. It’s possible that when these boys finally encountered actual naked women they were perplexed not to find their anatomy more pendulous and ornamented with gold rings, henna designs, or pieces of ivory.
Nothing demented my junior high experience quite like the release of National Lampoon’s Animal House. Arrested development firmly set in as the world suddenly became our frat house. Though food fights had always been a staple at Sweet Home, especially at the peak of overcrowding, the movie brought the cry of “Food fight!” roaring back to the cafeteria. Likewise, it led to a resurgence of toga parties (“Toga! Toga! Toga!”), a revival of the song “Shout,” neighborhood trees filled with underwear, and exploding toilets. “Double-secret probation” became a code word among teenagers, though for what I still don’t know.
Surprisingly, the largest fashion shift in the seventies affected the geezer set. Oldsters who’d spent a lifetime imprisoned by starched
collars, tight neckties, binding foundation garments, and bunion-
generating footwear suddenly embraced function. As opposed to yelling at us kids, “Is that what you’re going to wear?” and “Put some decent shoes on!” senior citizens were loading their closets with sweat suits and sneakers. Every wedding had at least one grandma in a flowered dress, pearls, and a pair of Reeboks along with a grandpa in a wheelchair, sporting an Adidas tracksuit (it was still a “suit”) with racing stripes down the side and a zipper up the front of the jacket. Flights to Florida carried enough appliquéd sweatshirts to locate the passengers by satellite photograph, should the plane nosedive into the Atlantic.
When compared with the district norm, my high school class was considered particularly disposed to academics and athletics. A local journalist would later write a story about the strange anomaly and remark that there appeared to have been something in the water that year. Dozens headed to Ivy League schools and Big Ten universities and then earned graduate degrees, which was rather remarkable for this middle-class suburb at the time.
The class one year ahead of us was, for the most part, a rather hard-bitten, antiestablishment group of back-of-the-bus smokers; at least the ones in my neighborhood were. They wore jean jackets, rarely carried books, usually left school early in the day, and never checked to see how the chess club was doing.
My friends and I gave a wide berth to these suave rebels without folders as we huddled at the front of the big yellow school bus while clouds of cigarette smoke and the dissonant chords of Black Sabbath’s “Children of the Grave” blasted in the back. The driver would often stop the bus and threaten them. The cult of Judas Priest just laughed and sneered. We’d been told that these disaffected youth were headed for a bad end, but we were slightly envious and worshipful all the same. As each day in seventh grade passed, it was hard not to fantasize about the following year, when we would rule the back of the bus and jostle and tease the lowly seventh graders.
That day finally arrived in the fall of 1978. My friends and I excitedly boarded the bus prepared to take our rightful place in the cool back seats. However, we were still nonsmokers, carrying books instead of boom boxes, and our favorite song wasn’t “Highway to Hell,” but the popular Dr. Pepper jingle.
Much to our dismay, a large group of seventh graders had boarded the bus at an earlier stop and taken over the backseats. My eighth-grade friends and I conferred about this, and I volunteered to be the spokesperson for our disgruntled group. As the bus lurched around the corner, we moved toward the back of the bus, me in the front. This particular lot of seventh graders was unsavory looking—dressed more for a concert than school, the girls wearing halter tops, heavy layers of makeup, and pants so tight it was possible to see the imprint from their days-of-the-week underwear, the boys in black rock-band T-shirts with metal chains attaching their wallets to the belt loops of acid-washed jeans.
“Get out of the backseats,” I said.
“No,” said one scowling preteenager.
“Make us,” snarled another of Satan’s helpers and casually lit up a cigarette.
I couldn’t think of a way to accomplish our mission aside from challenging them to a spelling bee. My friends and I returned to our old seats up front, huddled around the bus driver, and had the pleasure of being the first ones off for yet another year, along with enjoying close proximity to the emergency kit. At least we kept custody of the fire ax.
Twenty-One
Enter, Stage Left…O.B. (Order Big)…
A Decent Docent Doesn’t Doze
It was at the start of eighth grade that I met an extraordinary individual, assigned to be my social studies teacher for that year. Peter Heffley looked like a combination of Gandhi and a Keebler elf, acted like Mary Poppins and Peter Pan rolled into one, and dressed as if coming from one of Jay Gatsby’s parties. He would become my mentor and lifelong friend.
What Gertrude Stein said turned out to be true: “It is inevitable when one has a great need of something, one finds it.” At the time, I felt certain there was a phenomenally happy person trapped inside of me who didn’t quite know how to get out. Pete shared his love of books, music, art, theater, and, most importantly, he gave me a tremendous amount of his time.
Pete is an incredibly joyous human being, overflowing with energy (and musical numbers). Born in 1945, he was a laughter enthusiast long before I came along, based on reports of Pete swinging out across his high school auditorium on the curtains and riding around in a sports car flinging thousands of buttons into crowds and fountains.
Pete brought his joie de vivre and je ne sais quoi to the classroom, incorporating all the latest movies and Saturday Night Live skits into his lectures. For a lesson on World War I, he pretended to be the great-aunt of Roseanne Roseannadanna, a popular character from the show in the late seventies. A wealth of interesting and unusual historical information, Pete would offer such tidbits as how the White House bathrooms had to be enlarged for the corpulent President Taft, and that F. Scott Fitzgerald became addicted to Coca-Cola back when one of the ingredients was actual cocaine. Pete revealed that FDR had carried on an affair with his wife Eleanor’s private secretary, Lucy Mercer, and that First Lady Eleanor
and journalist Lorena Hickok appear to have shared an especially close friendship as well. Our all-time favorite historical footnote is how Hickok, known to her friends and colleagues as Hick, was given the nickname Hickey Doodle by a previous girlfriend.
Pete rarely came to my house, but I distinctly remember the first time he did and the exchange that took place between him and my mother, since it was so characteristic of them both. My parents were having some church friends over, and Pete was going to be in the neighborhood for another party, so I told him to stop by. When he arrived, I introduced him to my mother. She offered him a gin and tonic. Pete said he’d like that very much, but could she leave out the tonic. Then he asked if she minded if he used the bathroom, since he had “horrible diarrhea.” She pointed Pete in the right direction and yelled after him, “Be sure to open the window!”
After most introductions, Pete’s next line is usually, “Where’s the bathroom?”
Between bad nerves and irritable bowel syndrome, or perhaps a spastic colon, Pete is no stranger to the lavatory. When friends return from vacation and tell him about Milan’s La Scala Opera House, the Tuileries Garden, or the castle at Rothenberg, Pete will describe the bizarre restroom he used at each location.
It wasn’t long before Pete asked me to be his assistant for the musicals he directed at the high school. There was always a lot of laughter, and it was clear that the aspiring young dram
a students loved to be in his presence. Pete was a natural for center stage, as long as the appearance was informal. He claimed not to have the nerve to perform professionally. In fact, when scheduled to make a speech at his parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, Pete had a few substantial Manhattans beforehand and collapsed into a potted palm, leaving an uncle to improvise the toast.
After several years of working on musicals at Sweet Home, Pete was invited to direct at a nearby Catholic girls’ school, complete with an attached barracks full of nuns. Pete directed the musical Sweet Charity,
and the nuns were oblivious to the fact that the dance girls were actually hookers. Because the nuns were hard to tell apart, and so many were called Mary, we usually just referred to them by their job title or some other distinguishing feature. For instance, there was Sister Mary Attendance, Sister Mary Basketball Coach, Sister Mary Janitor, and Sister Mary Wheelchair. Pete could get the otherwise somber Sister Mary Wheelchair to burst into high-pitched giggles by asking her to pop wheelies and jump garbage cans.
While Pete was working onstage with one or two individual cast members, I’d often sneak back into the nuns’ private residence to perform an experiment. I had a theory that nuns would never flush a live goldfish if they found it swimming in their toilet. Sure enough, every time I left a goldfish, it could be found in a bowl on the counter the following afternoon. By opening night, they had enough to stock a pond.
Outside of Sister Mary Librarian’s office, I’d happened upon a box of books that were being discarded, and one from the early fifties caught my eye. It was essentially a manual on how a good Catholic teenaged girl should behave. At the back was a quiz with questions such as:
What should you do if a boy comes over and your parents aren’t home?
A) Invite him inside for something to drink.
B) Go for a ride with him in his car.
C) Tell him to come back when your parents are home.
I loved the retro-ness of this handbook, and every free moment I’d climb the ladder to where Sister Lois worked the lights and have an in-depth discussion of each situation with her, as if these could be actual circumstances facing a teenager in the eighties. Lois treated the questions with extreme seriousness, and for the one about a boy coming over she suggested that it might be okay to sit on the front porch with him and drink lemonade, so long as he didn’t come inside the house and provided you told your parents about it later. Meantime, as we were speaking, the girls in the show were slipping away from rehearsal and out to the parking lot with the boys (who had been brought in from another nearby Catholic school) and racing toward home plate. The phrase good Catholic girl oftentimes best served as an example of an oxymoron.
It was once said about President Teddy Roosevelt that he wanted to be the bride at every wedding, the baby at every christening, and the corpse at every funeral. I think the same thing might be said about Pete, so long as the show was spontaneous. When we walked into the shops on Buffalo’s artsy Elmwood Avenue, Pete would give impromptu performances for the customers and sales staff.
One bit that always got a laugh centered on Pete’s baldness. His hair had bolted for the exits in his twenties, leaving behind a two-inch corona of fringe along with a neatly trimmed beard and mustache. We’d be standing in line at a store and I’d suddenly shout, “Pete, your toupee!” Everyone’s head would whip around to stare at Pete, while a look of abject horror crossed his face. He’d throw his hand on top of his head and go, “Oh no, my hair!” We’d both search the floor the way people do when they lose a contact lens.
When strangers ran into us on the street and confused Pete for someone else, he’d immediately assume that identity, and a bizarre and usually hilarious conversation would follow. The person would frequently refer to someone totally unknown to Pete, an Aunt Gladys, for instance, and Pete would do a wonderful conspiratorial aside and whisper, “I always thought she was a secret drinker.” Whether the person smiled knowingly and confirmed or vehemently denied, the accusation made the encounter equally funny.
Pete certainly didn’t inherit his theatricality from his mother,
Mildred. The tagline for her was adapted from the title song of the musical Mame to “You put the dread in Mildred.” The town where she lived, Angola, I quickly renamed Angina. Mildred was very astute when it came to people and business matters, but such a pessimist that she was actually a source of great amusement. Not only did she see the glass as half empty, but as having cracks in it and providing a breeding ground for germs that were likely to kill us.
The three of us were having a lovely brunch at a restaurant called the Old Orchard Inn, and, after Pete and I battled it out over the basket of sticky buns, Pete remarked what a gorgeous day it was and pointed to the stunning blue jays right outside the window. “They’re mean bastards,” Mildred immediately chimed in. “They steal the eggs from the nests of other birds.” If we said that her flowers were nice, she said, “They’re about to go on the turn.” If we said the weather was beautiful, she shot back, “It’s supposed to get real bad tomorrow.” And my all-time favorite: If we said that it’s so much warmer than it was yesterday, she announced, “This is the kind of weather that makes people sick!”
Unlike his mom, Pete can find humor in almost any situation. During a Mexican-themed party given for members of my church, over burritos and gazpacho a woman was telling Pete and our friend Russ how she’d attended all the church functions, including a beaver party. That was all he needed to start asking her as many questions about the beaver party as possible, in an effort to coax her into saying things like, “We had nice, hot beaver. They roasted it on a spit.”
When not a slave to his unpredictable bowels, Pete gathered friends to attend plays, concerts, dance performances, and musicals. Not just in Buffalo, but at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, and others in Toronto, New York, and even at the National Theatre in London. Once, when tickets to Amadeus were sold out, we ended up seeing the bawdy Broadway
musical Oh! Calcutta!, where the performers were naked throughout most of the show. It became a running gag that Pete took me to my first blue musical at age fourteen while he was supposed to be acting in the capacity of teacher and chaperone. I’d create skits in which the board of education finds out about Oh! Calcutta! and Pete is forced to clarify in what ways the experience was highly educational.
During the day, we traipsed through antique stores, museums, and galleries; Pete would explain what we were looking at, unable to help himself when it came to elaborating on whatever the nearest docent was saying. However, his attention span was slightly shorter than mine, which was about a minute, and so we spun through life at a pace that courted tetanus in rust-prone Western New York.
Summer afternoons were often spent in lawn chairs reading aloud from The New Yorker about Martha Graham, Rudolf Nureyev, or
Josephine Baker and her Rainbow Tribe. We waded through enormous biographies and delighted in finding hilarious anecdotes, like when Dwight Eisenhower was asked if he knew General Douglas MacArthur, and he replied, “Yes, I studied dramatics under him for seven years.”
***
Pete was a solid meal ticket from eighth grade on. Rarely did we go anyplace expensive, but he was always good for a stop at Burger King, the soda fountain, or a hot-dog stand. When it came to food preferences my motto was “If it’s free, then it’s for me.” Pete’s motto: “Lunch means never having to say you’re hungry.”
Early on, I learned that Pete rarely ordered enough food for himself and counted upon eating everyone else’s meal, even when he was paying for it. Pete believes that food has fewer calories when a person doesn’t order it himself or if it’s consumed while cooking or standing around. So if I wanted a small then I ordered a medium, and if I wanted a medium I had to order a large.
I’d try and persuade Pete to order first, as a way of gauging the potential for shrinkage. For instance, when Pete insisted he wasn’
t hungry and didn’t order anything, I knew to order big across the board. He’d look aghast, mostly for the benefit of the counter person, “A large? You must be awfully hungry!” And I’d think, I’m not, you are! As soon as the fries hit the tray, before I’d so much as salted them, before he’d even paid, before we’d moved away from the counter, Pete would stuff a quarter of them in his mouth while saying, “That’s way too much. You’ll never finish all that.”
However, if Pete ordered a chicken sandwich or even just a small french fries, I’d have a couple minutes head start as he polished off his own food first. Otherwise, he struck like lightning and could scrape all the whipped cream and hot fudge off a sundae before I set the tray down on the table. Once, and only once, I made the mistake of being in the restroom when the food arrived.
In addition to assisting with the school play, I also worked at Pete’s frequent parties. His apartment was the entire upstairs of a large house on Gates Circle in the Silk Stocking District of Buffalo, crammed with antique furniture, lamps with ornate bases or hand-painted shades, gilded mirrors, stunning old clocks, elaborately decorated porcelain vases, and oil paintings with fancy frames. Brilliant red kimonos festooned with intricate embroidery were mounted on the walls, and the floors and shelves were home to statuary of all shapes and sizes. Our friend Suzy Benzinger, a Broadway costume designer, dubbed the apartment
Versailles-in-Buffalo. Indeed, the Louis XIV–interiors were photographed for several magazines. One could make a case that between the maroon moiré silk window treatments, matching couches covered in turquoise shantung, white marble clock inlaid with onyx, oil paintings of voluptuous women, and the life-size statue of a naked Venus, only Toulouse-Lautrec, busily capturing the scene for posterity, was missing.
Buffalo Gal Page 21