by Robert Klein
“You wanna try and take it down? Come on, try it,” said Mueller.
The boy from Brooklyn went right for Mueller’s head with a right-hand roundhouse that just missed, before the general assemblage and Norm could hold him back. It was Steve Murray, who I later would discover was an intelligent, streetwise Jewish tough from the pool halls of Borough Park. He would become a good friend of mine, though he would eventually flunk out of school. Right then, the first time I ever laid eyes on him, he was very pissed off and the veins in his neck were sticking out from his anger, and he wanted to take Mueller’s head off: “You fucking Nazi piece of shit, I’m gonna kick your ass, motherfucker!”
“Watch your language. There’s no need for such filth,” said Norm. “Let’s be civil here.”
“Filth? You’re worrying about filthy language?” said Murray. “That’s filth: the swastika that’s hanging in the room and the asshole who put it there, not my fucking language.” His argument exuded a wisdom far more nuanced than one would expect from a freshman.
“Just a minute,” said a freshman from Niagara Falls. “This guy has a right to put up anything he wants. It’s his room.” There was a quiet but approving murmur from some, and a chorus of “You gotta be kidding” and “Take it down” from others.
Finally, Norm turned to me. “You’re Klein, right? From 201?”
“Yes.”
“First of all, I want you to know that I am reporting both of you to the dean for fighting, and you will both go to his office tomorrow morning. As far as Harold’s room decoration is concerned, I will convey your complaint to Dean Whitlow and let him decide.”
“It’s a room decoration now? You have a problem with the word ‘swastika,’ Norm? Let’s try it together, shall we? S-W-A-S—”
“Don’t be a wise guy, Klein. Nobody likes a wise guy. Mueller, would you take that . . . thing down temporarily until the dean decides?”
“No, why should I?”
“I’ll tell you what,” said Norm with Solomonic wisdom. “At least temporarily, till we get this thing settled, I want you to put it on the wall in the Corsican cross position so it doesn’t offend anyone while it’s turning, okay?”
“Okay. I wouldn’t mind that.”
“Why don’t you just shove it up your ass instead,” said Murray.
“All right, I’m reporting you, too,” said Norm. “I will tell you later what time to be at the dean’s office tomorrow morning, and you’d better be there.”
“Oh, you’re really scaring me,” said Murray.
“Mueller, take that thing off the light.”
Mueller removed it from the light fixture and scotch-taped it to the wall facing counterclockwise. Funny, but it still looked like a swastika to me. Not surprisingly, Norm would prove to be a very unpopular, tight-assed guy with all the boys, regardless of creed. At the end of the school year, the entire dorm would carry his Volkswagen Beetle into the lobby and leave it there.
The next day, Mueller, Norm, Steve Murray, and I were in the dean’s office, a room cluttered with papers and pictures on the wall of past football teams and track stars and old geezers in caps and gowns. Dean Whitlow was a man of fifty, energetic and fit, who favored bow ties and black glasses. He reminded me of Dennis the Menace’s father. The dean seemed friendly enough and made some small talk about the weather before addressing the business at hand. “It will snow in October,” he said in an accent that could have been Indiana or western New York. He lit up a Chesterfield with a Zippo, took a deep inhale, and eased back into his leather executive office chair. “What’s all this about you guys fighting? Bab, tell me what happened.”
“He had a swastika hanging from his light fixture. I don’t think that’s right.”
“It’s not a swastika, it’s a Corsican cross, Dean.”
“It’s not a Corsican cross, it’s a swastika,” Murray groaned.
“What’s a Corsican cross?” said the dean.
Mueller went into his bullshit refrain about the angles, and the counterclockwise, and the ancient valor. The dean shook his head affirmatively, as if Mueller’s argument was valid history and not the stupid rationalization of a schmuck who hadn’t the courage to admit his biases outright. “Nerm, do we have the, uh, cross here?”
Norm produced the thing from a shopping bag, and the dean examined it. After about eight seconds he spoke: “This is a swastika.”
“No kidding,” said Murray.
“Of course it’s a swastika,” I said.
“No, Dean, it’s a Corsican cross. It was an important symbol,” said Mueller.
“But Dean, it’s not important what it once was, it’s what it means now, in 1958,” I said.
The Dean was pensive for a few seconds, took a deep drag on the Chesterfield, and began his soliloquy of wisdom. “Harold, I believe in your sincerity, but many people would look at this object and believe it is a swastika, a symbol of our enemy from the war. On the other hand, Bab and Steve, you have no right to hit someone because you disagree with them. I’m sorry, Harold, but you’ll have to take it down. Bab, Harold, Steve, you are all confined to the dormitory for two evenings for fighting. Now shake hands and try to start off on the right foot in college.”
This was a difficult handshake, and I looked away as I did it. Murray wouldn’t shake hands but turned and walked out muttering profanities, much to the dean’s puzzlement. Mueller’s artwork would come down, but the dean’s rationalizing crap (“I believe in your sincerity,” “many people would look at this object and believe it is a swastika”) was disturbing. Many people would look at a curvy yellow fruit with a peel and believe it is a banana.
* * *
Busy busy busy. I was in the flow of things after three weeks in college, the proud possessor of two hundred dollars’ worth of spanking-new hefty textbooks. I confess I enjoyed hugging them and smelling the aroma that brand-new books have, that smell that one experiences in anything new, from appliances to automobiles, that signifies it is yours, that you are its first owner. Most of us have had a lot of hand-me-down clothing, toys, and books in our lives; in fact, except for the occasional gift, between the library and school, who owned a book? There is no deprivation in that, but the aura of new resonated with me; all the more because, though my family was not poor, money was scarce. I posed in front of the mirror with several books at my side, as if I were walking across campus exactly like those Joe College guys in the university brochure. I had never owned textbooks before, as the New York City Board of Education supplied them free of charge and expected them to be returned at the end of the term. It was common in college for students to underline in the books, a practice I began against all instinct, since defacing textbooks had always been a cardinal sin in public school. Still, it was one more sign that I was a college student, all grown up and far away from what had been.
I was enrolled in a rigorous premed course for which I was poorly prepared, my last year of high school having been loads of fun and totally unchallenging. Furthermore, having attended DeWitt Clinton, an all-boys school, for the previous three years, I could not help paying too much attention to the female students in class, with their bobby socks and calf-length skirts. I found I was distracted by any leg without hair on it. I daydreamed about romance with several of the prettiest and most popular girls, the ones who dated only the alpha-cool males. These were childish, naive Hollywood daydreams of winning the girl with a heroic act like beating up a bully or scoring the winning touchdown. In reality, these girls would never have considered me, a sixteen-year-old kid, a proper date; not to mention the fact that I wouldn’t have had the courage or confidence to ask. As a substitute, I worked at winning their platonic friendship by being funny, my old standby.
I was in college at sixteen because I had gained a year by being born in February (only those born in March and April were younger than I). I had skipped the eighth grade in a New York City Board of Education program called Special Progress, or SPs. This program was offered, after an e
xamination, to the students who had excelled from kindergarten through sixth grade. I went from being near the head of my class to near the bottom when I encountered a multitude of geniuses in the SPs. Now, in college, I was the youngest again, with a pitiful deficiency of social experience.
As for any real pre-fraternity social agenda for the freshmen, there were three events pending. First was the Jewish High Holiday service. The second one was the freshman social. The third was the ROTC military ball, which would take place in several weeks. Though I was hardly a regular at synagogues, and my mother had fried more bacon than you could shake a stick at, I was compelled to go to the Rosh Hashanah service. The reason was more social than spiritual, as it was the general consensus among Jewish guys that the services were a must in order to meet the Jewish girls, among whom the same idea prevailed. There was an obvious dearth of rabbis in Allegheny County, New York, so a distinguished faculty member from the English department, Melvin Bernstein, did the honors. On the way to the services, there was a small, ugly incident in which some anti-Semitic remarks were tossed out by a few members of Lambda Chi, sitting on their front porch as we passed. Subtle remarks, nothing you could put your finger on: “HEY, JEW BOY, WHERE YOU GOIN’? HOOKER, HOOKER.” I had never heard the expression “hooker” before. It was explained to me that it referred to the stereotypic size and shape of Jewish noses. A couple of embarrassed Lambda Chi brothers scolded their drunk friends and retreated back into the house. A couple of freshman Jews, led by Steve Murray, wanted to make something of it but were restrained by me and a few others. I had already been involved in one brawl, and I had been here only a few weeks; besides, we were wearing our best suits. The identities of the bigots on the porch were duly noted and we continued on our way.
The service was mercifully brief, in Hebrew and English, with much surveying of the room by the boys and girls assembled. Afterward we had a light meal and time for socializing. The guys with the social gift instantly made their way to the prettiest girls, like iron filings to a magnet, and commenced to charm them into a date. Ironically, some of these guys would fall in love and drop out of circulation, and several marriages would result down the line from this evening. We had seen the crop, and they had seen us.
For better or worse, the Jewish kids were drawn to one another by social habit, and in some cases parental admonition. Even among the nonobservant, there was an unwritten code in 1958 regarding not being serious with a girl who was not Jewish. It was obvious that the gentiles had similar proclivities. This provincialism was much reinforced in the Jewish students’ case by the fact that we were far from home and were a distinct minority on campus who were not welcome everywhere. The barrier between religions and cultures would eventually bend for many, as a fair number of interreligious relationships would form over the course of four years, and eventually, some marriages. These were touching liaisons, formed against the counsel of authority, parental and otherwise, in the hope that love would conquer all.
The pending freshman social was causing a lot of discussion in the dorms. Many of the boys would have liked to check out the freshman girls, but the event was touted as a stiff, boring affair. What the hell was a social, anyway? Some guys even suggested that one could lose some crucial status with the fraternity guys if he attended. Most of us decided to go to the social at Howell Hall, which was the place for receptions and ceremonies, a white-pillared, two-story Jeffersonian building, neat as a pin. Various faculty members in a line greeted us as we entered and picked up our name tags. The girls in their Sunday-go-to-meeting dresses ladled a harmless orange punch into stemmed glass cups for the boys in their ties and jackets. There was a formal, nineteenth-century air to the gathering, with the din of polite, quiet conversation: certainly not the sound of two hundred teenagers at a party. I could hear a recording of the Alfred Glee Club singing the school alma mater.
At first there was a distinct physical separation between the genders. Eventually, the commingling began, started as usual by the most confident boys: the hustler-smooth cocksmen, who showed off their stuff and moved in for the kill. Their targets were predictable: The prettiest were swarmed, the plain attracted a few, while the homely were ignored and conversed with one another. I noticed that the girls were not flocking to me in large numbers. I shared a cup of Kool-Aid with a first-year nursing student named Virginia Duncan, from Hamburg, New York, near Buffalo. She was cordial and full of smiles, and it was clear from our conversation that she came from a culture that to me may as well have been Martian. She had always wanted to be a nurse, she told me. She was eighteen, like most of the freshmen, yet she did not flinch when I revealed that I was sixteen: a good sign. She had been to New York once in her life, with her parents, to see the Thanksgiving Day parade, and clearly had no idea of the size of the city. She asked me, “You from New York? Do you know a guy named Tony Johnson?” I couldn’t believe my ears. One may as well have asked: “You from the Western Hemisphere? Do you know a guy named Tony Johnson? You’re from China? You know a guy named Wong?” It turned out that I did know Tony Johnson, but there is still no excuse for a ridiculous question like that.
Virginia and I strolled outside, and I walked her to the Brick. In the lobby, on couches and easy chairs, boys and girls sat at a discreet distance from each other under the watchful eye of a matronly head resident. Virginia and I had run out of conversation, so we shook hands and parted with no particular sweet sorrow. A few days later, we bumped into each other at the student union, and I asked her to go to the campus movie, Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. We were congenial and going through the motions of what proper boy-and-girl first-year college students did socially.
The movie theater was an ad hoc affair in Alumni Hall, a hundred-year-old wooden auditorium, which was also the location of the eight A.M. Western Civilization lecture that all freshmen had to attend, during which the sound of snoring resonated embarrassingly off the dry, ancient walls.
Virginia and I held hands briefly during the film, which neither of us understood. The difference between us was that she admitted it, while I, on the way back to the Brick, launched into a pretentious, long-winded dissertation on the film’s meaning. Reading the subtitles had given her a headache. She allowed a sisterly, closed-lipped kiss good night at the Brick, thus ending the first date of my college career.
* * *
Two aspects of college life seemed to dominate our attention at the beginning. One was fraternity rushing, and the other was the Army ROTC program to which all able-bodied male students had to belong for two years.
As regarded the fraternities, the administration had preached as often as possible that each boy should see every house before he made a decision. Six consecutive Sundays were set aside for this purpose, so that each week you saw another house, drank some punch, and met the guys. The hypocrisy was thick as pea soup, yet everyone played along with the rhetoric—“see every house,” as if all of us had a choice. It was pretty much an open joke among everyone that certain parties would be wasting their time visiting certain fraternities. There was the gallows humor shared by the Jews: “They say that the snow melts in front of Lambda Chi.” “It’s probably the ovens inside.” “Do you think anyone from Kappa Psi will be attending Yom Kippur services next year? Ha ha ha.” Some of us actually visited a couple of the discriminatory houses and were politely treated and courteously ignored. This was institutional anti-Semitism, not the least bit frowned on by the university administration, and it was a creepy experience for me to be standing there in the belly of the beast. The fraternity rushing had begun in earnest, with brothers having coffee with the freshmen they were interested in. Some, like my buddy Bob Chaikin, were courted openly and robustly, while others had to prove they were the guy the house wanted and needed. I seemed to be more in the second group than the first. This amounted to ass kissing, and it was not a pretty sight, but necessary. Exactly what the criteria were, that is, what made a kid acceptable and desirable, were amorphous and difficult to q
uantify; “dresses well, dates well” was one standard that leaked out among the boys. What the fuck did that mean? In the humiliating ass-kissing mode, the freshman candidate had to be extra nice and totally cool to impress a stranger who had a veto over his social status: a stranger who was a relative peer and a mere boy, just like him.
There was a small minority of guys on campus who wouldn’t be caught dead in a fraternity. These were largely the avant-garde, English major, ceramic-designer types who would be much more prevalent in the counterculture of the sixties. At sixteen, wanting to be Joe College, I felt that approach was not an option. I was optimistic about getting into Kappa Nu, because Al Uger, my friend since junior high, was a popular sophomore member and the funniest guy I knew. He very much wanted me to get tapped by the fraternity and had worked hard to convince his fellow brothers what a great and funny guy I was. Al instructed me carefully on who to meet and shake hands with, who were the hip brothers and who were the assholes.
I visited Kappa Nu the second week. It was a ramshackle old house with a newer dormitory-style addition, complete with a dining room and living room/parlor. It housed about thirty of the brothers, a little under half the membership. But the highlight that they couldn’t wait to show the visitors was in the basement party area. It was a thirty-foot bar, with Carling Black Label and Rolling Rock neon signs lighting the back, and booths and tables like a real bar and restaurant. It had a television room off the main bar area, with dark nooks and crannies for making out during parties. The brothers made sure I noticed the fresh keg on tap, the row of liquor bottles underneath, and everybody’s individual beer mug with the fraternity crest and his name on it. Photos of members and parties past lined the walls, as well as an array of varsity athletes, former and present brothers. The house mother, Lynda Alcott—who had her own tiny apartment on the premises—was a pleasant old gray-haired lady with a cane, who smiled at inappropriate times and seemed on the verge of mild dementia. This suited the members well, as her acuity appeared to be very much in question regarding her duties as overseer. It made for a wonderful combination—sixty-five boys with a thirty-foot bar and no supervision—a perfect prescription for delicious anarchy, and I wanted more than anything in the world to be a part of it.