This is an ongoing musical memoir. If you are just wandering onto this page and didn’t see the first four chapters of “Blues, Preludes & Feuds,” please read those first:
Prelude
4’33”..
…of SilencePart 1:
Chapter 1: Middle C is Not
Chapter 2: Prepare to Wing It
Chapter 3: Drugstore at the End of the World
Chapter 4: The Myth of the Electric Organ
Chapter 5: Pax Chicagoa
Randall and Perry are beginning their long and prolific career as class bullies at recess today. I’m about to begin my equally long career as one of their primary targets.
We’re in junior kindergarten, four-year-olds running around the playground with semi-reckless abandon—climbing, swinging, sliding, and most of all, chasing. In the general din produced by all of this activity, the whines and sobs resulting from a few kids being tripped or spat upon are just a few more notes in an extended free improvisation—albeit blues notes.
Randall does the tripping, Perry the pushing, spitting, and humiliating. Randall, already an agile athlete, shuffles his feet like a basketball center playing defense, tripping instead of guarding whoever enters his zone. Foul! Alas, the refs (teachers) are occupied elsewhere, probably zoning out themselves. It’s their recess too.
Perry laughs hysterically as he pushes kids Randall’s way, then spits on them once they’ve fallen. They work in tandem. Perry is the rather sleazy—if a four-year-old can be sleazy—set-up man. Randall is the executor and final arbiter of justice. Randall is the leader, Perry’s enabler. Randall’s an angry kid with issues, but he needs Perry, who is well on his way to psychopathy, to do really dirty work.
Perry also needs Randall because he barely has a mind of his own. Randall’s meanness is a form of acting out. Perry just seems to enjoy being cruel. Together, they have already formed an axis of evil that will continue terrorizing kids at Francis W. Parker School for years to come.
* * *
I was in the first of what would be a fourteen-year stay at Francis W. Parker School—junior kindergarten through twelfth grade—following in the footsteps of my older siblings, two and three years ahead of me. There were only a few acceptable school choices in that part of Chicago. Fortunately, my parents could afford to stay away from the public schools with their poor educational standards, decaying buildings, gangs, and violence.
For years, I would wonder whether or not my years at private school made me soft, incapable of dealing with hard ways of the real world. Perhaps it did, but the case could equally be made that the public schools in that era would have—figuratively or literally—killed me before I even had the chance. In any case, besides Parker, there were only two viable choices: Anshe Emet, a private Jewish school, and Chicago Latin School, another private secular school.
My parents tried Anshe Emet first, sending Amy there for a year, before concluding it was too Jewish. There was never any denial of our Jewish heritage in the house, but we didn’t exactly embrace the culture. With the exception of Passover, Chanukah, and the High Holidays—the big four for secular Jews—our family studiously ignored the religion.
Latin School, on the other hand, was too smug and upper crust. While Parker was certainly small and exclusive, it was also progressive and liberal—therefore, somewhat embarrassed and ashamed of its exclusivity. The more conservative, status-conscious Latin School openly embraced its exclusivity. Latin was more like one of those upper-echelon New York City schools that have debutante balls, ritual hazing, and boys wearing khaki slacks and monogramed blue blazers.
My parents—being progressive, if not guilt-ridden liberals—chose Parker for Amy and the three subsequent Saltzmans. All of our local cousins followed in time.
* * *
And then it begins.
“Peter’s a peter,” Perry sings.
“Shut up, pooper!” I’m nearly in tears. I don’t know what he’s talking about, but am not about to ask.
“He’s just a little baby,” Randall scoffs.
As I stare at Randall, trying to come up with a suitable response, Perry pushes me his way, and Randall trips me.
I fall and scrape my knee. Perry snickers, spits, then sticks out his tongue. After assessing the damage, I get up and angrily attack Perry first. Of the two, he’s smaller—and he just pisses me off more in principle. Our teacher, Miss Akimoto, intervenes as I’m chasing Perry.
“Stop the roughhousing, boys!” As usual, they see the reaction to the deed, not the deed itself—again like refs.
“Perry pushed me, then Randall tripped me,” I’m blubbering, barely coherent. “Then stupid Perry spit on me.”
“No, I didn’t, dumb face,” snarls Perry.
Randall just smirks and cooly says, “We were just playing tag, Miss Akimoto, and Peter tripped.” He’s always so diplomatic and suave that even I’m inclined to believe him.
“No, I didn’t, Miss Akimo—”
“Now, boys,” says Miss Akimoto sweetly—actually, too sweetly for my taste. “I think we all have to learn to be nice. Anyway, recess is over. Let’s go inside and wash off that knee. Randall and Perry, get your coats, and be big boys and tell the others to come in.”
Occasionally, P&R are caught, and a gentle discipline is quietly enacted. But this is a progressive school, so nothing too harsh. There may be a week of relative peace before the hostilities continue.
Miss Akimoto takes me inside, cleans off my knee, and applies a Band-Aid. “You’ll be fine, Peter.”
It’s story time. Everyone grabs their rolled-up rug from the corner, unfurls it on the floor, and sits cross-legged as the teacher reads. After the story, it’s nap time. Though I’m happy for the quiet, the twenty minutes seem interminable. We’re nearing the end of our school day, and I’m ready to go home. Or I’ve got to go to the bathroom, but am afraid to ask permission. I never fall asleep. Instead, I spend the time worrying about kids like P&R. I don’t trust the teachers to protect me. They can’t be everywhere at once. And they only pick up a minute percentage of what goes on, even at this age, with those tiny bodies.
* * *
Parker—or FWP, as we called it—was a small, but ambitious school. It strived to be progressive and inclusive, but that noble aspiration inevitably ran up against the economic realities of its size and private, nonsectarian status. It needed money from parents and alumni to survive. Still, compared to most private schools of the time, it was pretty diverse. About a third of the student body received some form of financial aid. During my fourteen years there, I had black friends from the South and West Sides, Hispanic friends from some of the rougher North Side neighborhoods, and plenty of Italian and Polish friends from the tougher non-black West and South Side neighborhoods. There were plenty of the more-privileged, non-scholarship white friends, but only about half were Jewish.
With about 750 students spread among its fourteen grade levels, Parker could afford to be only so diverse. It needed a decent percentage of its more well-heeled families to pay—and pay well. Many, if not most, of the paying families had multiple kids enrolled. More than a few, including about half of the forty in our original kindergarten class, stayed for the full fourteen years.
Inevitably, over a long period of time and limited amount of space, a kind of elitist conformity congealed, where the wealthier kids stuck with their own kind. For me, the place would begin to emit a certain esprit de smugness. A part of that smugness grew, ironically, out of a sense of pride in not being nearly as smug as those damn Latinites, two miles to the south on Clark Street.
The other thing about spending a long time at such a small school was that—to paraphrase the Cheers theme song—just about everyone knew your name. The longer you stayed, the more your identity became a known quantity and the greater the danger your sense of self, through a Borg-like gravitational pull, could be subsumed into the mass collective.
I, for one, needed a plan for creatively surviving in such a world. Intuitively, I found one. I adapted the strategy of triangulation. That is, working both sides of the aisle. I did this well before the Bill Clinton presidency, I might add.
I could hold my own with the likes of P&R. And I could certainly participate in a limited amount of kiddie cruelty. I made friends with the good kids and the bad kids, the clowns, the nerds, the saints and sinners, winners and losers, adapting my personality as needed without ever giving too much away.
But throughout junior kindergarten, I always felt relieved when the seemingly endless half-day ended at noon and my mom took me home.
Next week: Asymmetrical Warfare
Very clever for a four year old. You should have gone into politics.