My Mistake Read Online Free PDF Page B

the beer cans we’ve just emptied—and then marvel at how warm piss is. We practice flatulence as a second language.
    For all these and other mild delinquencies, at Dartmouth, where he careens around the Northeast on “road trips” to women’s colleges, betting his life against alcohol and sleep, Mike becomes more and more conservative, in reaction to our family’s radical background and as a result of hanging around with kids much richer than we are. He wants us to put “estate lights” around the house in Nyack and is embarrassed that the windows don’t have beautiful curtains. In law school and for a little while afterward, he supports the Vietnam War, which makes my parents and me both angry and sad. Eventually, though, he changes his mind, no doubt partly because of the strong views of his girlfriend, who works for a nonprofit agency. He seems to be headed toward the liberal fold—the fold into which most children of the mid-century Socialists and Communists my family know have folded themselves. He never gets all the way there.
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    Fifteen
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    My biology teacher, Mr. Z., asks the class if anyone knows the name of the bush that has yellow flowers early in the spring. I raise my hand, am called on, and say, “Forsythia.” A few minutes later, when the class ends, Mr. Z. asks me to stay behind for a minute. He says to me, “You know, it’s a good thing that you know the names of flowers and things like that, but you might want to keep that kind of stuff to yourself.” He adds: “You know.”
    â€œNo,” I say. “Why?”
    â€œWell, because other kids might think you’re a homosexual.”
    It will take me years to purge most of the racism and homophobia that I inhale in the Fifties at Nyack High School. I actively dislike myself for giving in to these and other bigotries—though it’s true that my friends freely, relentlessly use such slurs against and among each other, along with insults (a lame white version of the Dozens) to each other’s mothers and disparaging nicknames based on the way we look. My nickname for six years was “Schnoz.”
    Honestly? Vestiges of these hateful reflexes remain in me to this day, like a splinter or buckshot under the skin which never works its way out.
    I steal 45s from the little record store in Nyack. The owner of the store follows me out the door one Saturday and grabs me by the shirt collar and drags me back inside and calls the police. A red-faced cop yells at me for half an hour. He asks me who else steals records. I give him the name of a bully—someone everybody detests. I doubt that he steals records. The cop then calls my parents. They come to pick me up, and they say nothing to me about this embarrassment except, from my mother, “This is very disappointing.”
    I never steal again. Well, I do. That summer, in the record store in Great Barrington, I steal the same record I had tried to steal in Nyack when I was caught. It is a two-disc Elvis Presley 45 album with four of his biggest hits, including “Blue Suede Shoes.”
    I soon learn that this is a cover of Carl Perkins’s recording of the same song, the song he himself wrote—as Pat Boone covered Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti,” hilariously, and the Crew Cuts covered the R&B hit “Sh-Boom” (with a little less self-embarrassment). This appropriation makes me indignant, now that I have gone straight, at least with regard to other people’s property.
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    Sixteen
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    I get a summer job as a park attendant at Hook Mountain State Park, in Upper Nyack. The boss is a guy named John. He does the Jumble in the
New York Daily News
in thirty seconds flat. There is a park cop on duty here in the summer. He is a high-school teacher in a nearby town during the school year and is for some nutty reason allowed to carry a gun here at the park. A gun. In 1957. He keeps touching