Alot of this stuff, I can’t remember exact dates…this was a long time ago…shouldbe interesting anyway…1975 was the year I switched schools…I had been going toP.S. 163…cool as shit…I could walk to school without crossing any streets…Icould see the school from my 11th floor terrace…but then my momswitched me to P.S. 75…two “long blocks down” (east-west blocks on the upperwest side of manhattan are about 3 times as long as north-south blocks)…whitekids!!...there were only a few white kids at P.S. 163 but going to P.S. 75 atleast half of the kids were white…it was weird…after going to P.S. 163 for solong, I didn’t really know how to relate much to white kids…I had two goodfriends that were white but I mean relate to white kids I don’t know…or a wholegroup of them…1975 was the last year I had my first best friend, Chuck Lesch,with me…I don’t recall how I met him, I think my mom was friends with hisparents…I don’t know where he went to school…he lived one floor below…apartment#10D.. and there were two other kids I used to pal around with, Billy and Boris…wewere like the proverbial Four Musketeers…but Chuck and I were closest…
theysaid my mom worked hard to get me transferred there…dealing with the publicschool bureaucracy…that kind of makes her out to sound racist…worked hard toget me out of the school where there were like 4 other white kids that I knewof to the school to a school that was over half white…but no…it was just abetter school…I remember at the time appreciating it…someone went through a lotof work to do something good for me? Yes…it was an odd concept but I rememberthinking it was cool…even though I didn’t want to go to some school that I hadto walk about almost half a mile to…
Mylast teacher at P.S. 163 was a Japanese-American woman named Miss Takagi…I hadtrouble pronouncing it, I used to call her “Mr. Kagi”…I think she transferredover to P.S. 75 after I did…my first teacher at P.S. 75 was Mrs. Karasik…I usedto call her “Mrs. Carrot Stick”…not making fun of her, I just had trouble pronouncingthings…or maybe not…
Iwas really “making the rounds” during the summer of 1975…most of my best ‘70smemories were from the summer…NO SCHOOL!!...once you get into the work forceand especially if you keep the same job for a long time, the years tend to runtogether because there is no major shift in what you are doing like when youare in school, going through the grades, having summer off, etc…
Earlyon in the summer, my mom took me up to Lake George, in upstate New York…she hada friend up there named Robin Dewinder, who let us stay at her place for a fewdays…she had a huge jar full of pennies in her living room and when I met her,first thing she told me “see this jar, there are exactly a thousand pennies inhere and I count them every day to make sure none are missing…now if you takeone I’ll find out about it”…freaked me out…but I believed it…and so I didn’ttouch any of the pennies…I didn’t go near the jar…except on the last day, Itook a few J
Iwent fishing for the first (and only time in my life)…got a bite, too…wow!!...atest of strength vs. a fish…I swore I was going to reel this one in but then itgot away…managed to get itself loose…I guess it’s the same for a lot of kidsbut summer activities almost always involved beaches and swimming pools…so atone point during the little vacation my mom and Robin took me to a swimmingpool, where I almost drowned…
Iwas always fascinated by the “drop-off” in a swimming pool…there’s a shallowend and a deep end to most pools and so you get in at the shallow end and makeyour way towards the deep end and it either gets progressively deeper or moreusually, there’s a big drop-off…I used to love to go to the drop off point…tothe point where it’s too deep…to the point where I should go…and sort of staythere, and dance around…only this time, I slipped into the deep end and startedto feel myself sinking…
It’sfunny, as young as I was I knew certain things instinctively…I knew i couldpossibly die right there…I also knew that the power to save my life was withinme…that if I used all of my strength I could get up to the surface, breath, andkind of dog paddle my way to the shallow end which was not far…and I totallyassumed that none of the adults knew what was going on…that they were all up ontheir beach chairs relaxing and reading their books…
Theentire thing happened over the course of a few seconds but it seemed muchlonger…what I told myself I was going to do was actually let myself sink alittle more…and then with all the power I could muster just thrust myself tothe top of the water and just dog paddle to the shallow end of the pool…at thatpoint there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to live…so I sank a littlebit…maybe a foot and a half…and I was ready to explode myself up when just thenI felt two hands grab me under my armpits and then we both went shooting up tothe surface…the lifeguard must have seen what was going on, and so he got meout of the pool…
Tookme over to the side where my mom and Robin were…I was feeling like it was nobig deal…I felt like I had been in no danger of drowning, once I knew what I hadto do…but my mom and Robin were so upset and freaked out (“oh my god terry areyou alright are you breathing?”) and they were also thanking the lifeguard…andso it was too much drama for a little kid and I burst out crying…
Abit later I wanted to go back into the pool but they were like noooooo, no morepool for you…for a while I remember regretting that the lifeguard did that…I wantto “save” myself…
BeforeI left Lake George I got this little bank…”cuss” bank…allegedly whenever yousaid a bad word you had to put a certain amount of money into the bank…it was asmall wooden cup, about the size of a small tea cup…it had a cool smell…cedarshavings like what people would put in the bottom of a hamster cage…it had thesmell of a cigar box but without the cigars…on the outside it said “cussing iswrong and it just ain’t funny and if you cuss it will cost you money”…”damn,and such = one cent; egads and such = five cents; @#$%^& = ten cents (itwas for kids, so there were no REAL cuss words)…it had a plastic or rubber topwhere the slot was where you were to put the coins…I lost that part of it andso I used to keep the cup upside down in order to lock in the cedar smell…I woundup losing the damn thing but I think I was able to hold on to it for a longwhile…lost it in the early ‘80s…
Thevast majority of summertime activities for city kids involved getting out ofthe city…it was always good if you had a friend who lived someplace niceoutside the city…I would visit my aunts, uncles, cousins in Freehold, N.J. andwe’d go drive the two hours to Manasquan Beach…from 1976-1980 I had sleepawaycamps to go to…and even the day camps were all about going someplace a littleupstate or going to the beaches of Long Island or Westchester County…after thetrip up to Lake George, I went someplace in upstate New York and I think tothis day I’ll never hear the end of it: The Fresh Air Fund…
MyNew Jerseycousins made so much fun of me…for YEARS afterwards…because the Fresh Air Fundwas considered to be mostly for black inner city kids…on the bus and subway adsfor the Fresh Air fund there was always a picture of some black kid or anotherenjoying himself in the country…
Whatthe Fresh Air Fund was, or is, is that families from nice, country or at leastsuburban areas offer to take in city kids for a week…poor, inner-city mostly ifnot all minority kids who “don’t have a chance” to get out of the city…and sothey stuck me on a bus to who-knows-where, probably a few counties up north ofthe city but to a little kid it’s like a million miles away…
Thefamily that took me in was The Scofields…us city kids all got on a bus for atwo plus hour trip upstate and we got to this one bus station and each familywas assigned a kid ahead of time and each family had the kids name on a pieceof paper…so it was chaos it was kind of like a planned meeting someone you’venever met before, at an airport, I guess…so some adult asked me my name and I toldhim and then he found the family with my name on the piece of paper and therewe were…
I stillremember how the big room was where we slept…the family had 5 kids, if I remembercorrectly…I gravitated to the two older kids…it’s funny, but the oldest onesort of looked like my cousin Tony a little bit, and the second oldest onelooked a little bit my cousin David…they reminded me of my cousins from Jersey…wasI thinking all country people and suburbanites looked alike??...and there was alittle kid named Mark and they called him Markie but he could pronounce itcorrectly, he called himself “Mercy”…I was already cussing a little by then andI so taught the little kid some curse words and he went and told his parents…butit was fun…we used to eat hot dogs and we’d get milk and cookies before bed…nicepeople…the mom would come up and kiss me goodnight…
By 1975 I wasa full-fledged baseball freak but didn’t know how to play…I was scared of theball…I was totally into watching it on TV even though there’s no action most ofthe time…I still loved it…I guess I had been to a game or two…and I lovedbaseball cards…more on that later…I had a huge collection, I loved them…readingthem, looking at the pictures, the stats…I also liked hitting but when it cameto fielding I was scared of the ball…all you had to do to get on base was hitthe ball to me cos I was gonna miss it and I couldn’t throw for shit…
It was kindof like Lupus from “The Bad News Bears”, even though this was before that moviecame out…someone would hit the ball towards me and I’d stick my arm out and tryto not let the ball get near me…
So one timewe were in the yard playing baseball and the second oldest kid hit the ball andit went towards me but it wasn’t going towards my head, it was low…I rantowards the ball a little bit, stuck my glove down and caught it!!...first timeever…I stood there looking at the ball and the older brother said “what are youdoing?”…and I said “I caught it”…like it was the most amazing thing in theworld…and he said, “so what? People catch fly balls all the time. Now throw it!”, which I did…but I felt alittle more human after that…I don’t think I had ever felt that accomplished inmy life up to that point…
Later thatsummer, in August of 1975…I went to visit my cousins in Freehold like myparents and I used to always do during the summer…it felt odd being around themafter spending a week or two with the Scofield boys…like I said, the two olderkids reminded me so much of Tony and David and then here I was with them…surrealin a way…
That October,I watched the world series, every game of it…It was the Reds vs. The Red Sox…easyto remember!!...they were both Red…and it’s funny how mature I was at that age…Iwas starting to realize that in pro baseball, 90% of it is boring…the dramaticaction like someone hitting a grand slam to win the game happened only once ina blue moon…and I was cool with that…I was never like “this is boring” andwanting to not watch…it was all amazing to me on some level…watching theplayers…Dave Concepcion (why a white first name and a Spanish last name?),Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, one dude named Foster…and then for the RedSox it was Carl Yastremski and Carlton Fisk…
So I watchedthe game every night with my mom and had an apple each night…that was myroutine…even then…I was still the biggest candyface you’d ever seen…I was sortof once in a while thinking I should eat healthy…
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