A Freewheelin' Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

I lived in Jackson Heights. When I graduated in 1960, at sixteen years old, my prospects were limited to an extended version of what had been my summer jobs. My father had died suddenly in 1958 and I missed two weeks of school. The first week was for obvious reasons, and the second was a gift of a trip to Puerto Rico.
    My mother worked for Samuel Rosen, an ear doctor who had originated stapes mobilization, a surgical procedure that cured a certain kind of deafness. The singer Johnnie Ray was one of his patients, but Dr. Rosen wasn’t able to do much for him. My self-educated mother knew French and Italian, and her job involved translating correspondence, some medical papers, and writings about his procedure.
    After my father’s sudden death, Sam and his wife, Helen, gently insisted that my distraught mother and I come with them, all expenses paid, to a medical conference in Puerto Rico. At fourteen years old I had never been in a hotel, but I knew this was an especially luxurious one, with a pool, a balcony, room service, and all. The Rosens were wonderful people.
    When I returned to school I was even more distracted and withdrawn than usual, and I didn’t do well. The only class I looked forward to was Drama Workshop, or maybe it was called Theater History. The teacher, Mr. Kaufman, did not give me a hard time about what I had missed. I was in the plays the class put on for the school, and he made sure I continued reading and doing scenes.
    Other teachers were less sympathetic about my circumstances. The science teacher gave me a D, citing excessive absence. Others left out the written comment but gave similar grades. I distinctly remember one teacher who chose to tell me directly what a loser I was and that I had better shape up or I would never amount to anything. He was the same English teacher who in my sophomore year felt it was his duty to use me to illustrate to the class what the expression
lack of poise
meant. Justice was mine, however, because many years later, while I was waiting for a subway train, I spotted him walking along the platform mumbling to himself with a large wet stain on his crotch. I knew who he was despite the change in his demeanor, but he didn’t recognize me.
    With nine hundred kids in the graduating class, Bryant High School worked on shifts, and the classes were overcrowded. I was aware that the teachers were overworked and underpaid and didn’t always know their students, but understanding that didn’t help. My attitude changed. I stopped caring and didn’t even attempt to keep up. I preferred the extracurricular activities the school offered. In addition to Drama Workshop, I did artwork and layout for the school newspaper and joined a current events discussion group. The result was a low average, which was not helped by the fact that I scored slightly above fool on my SATs. I didn’t do well on tests. In any case, college material I was not.
    Wrapped up in grief, my mother was in no condition to care. At forty-seven, she was widowed for a second time—her first husband had drowned in an accident when she was in her early twenties—but now she was left with two teenaged daughters. It was not comforting or comfortable to be around her. She spent a lot of time trying to find survival skills inside a bottle.
    Life at home was thrown off the last vestiges of balance. It was the end of our world as we had known it, the end of childhood—the end of innocence and the beginning of a new kind of fear.
             
    M y father had suffered what was diagnosed as a mild heart attack two years earlier, shortly after President Eisenhower suffered a serious one. I don’t know if Eisenhower smoked, but my father did. He was six feet tall and in no way overweight, but he had had tuberculosis as a child, making him unqualified for military service. I’ve heard it said that TB takes a toll on the body, even if one recovers from it. Cigarettes certainly took a toll, but smoking in his day was