East Side Stories:Tales of Jewish Life in the Lower East Side of New York in the 1930's (8 page)

 THE ORDEAL OF MR. COOLIDGE

Early spring, those spring fever days, were crazy days. Your body wakes up from the cold bitter winter. It wants to move, to jump, to kick out. Your mind becomes unfrozen, you want to sing, strange ideas race through you like roaring locomotives, speeding here, there, everywhere.

Nothing seems the same, not even at the all-boys junior high school on the Lower East Side that I attended, not even what went on in its playground, its classrooms. Even the Depression takes on a somewhat different tinge, maybe now, soon, something good would happen and the bad days would be gone. Just a bad dream.

That sunny spring day, for some strange reason, all of us, the students, had congregated early in the outdoor playground. We had begun our handball games, a few-minor fights, mostly pushing and shoving matches, had broken out among some of the rougher boys, while many of the other boys, influenced by the new-born bright sun just stood silently, waiting for something unknown, something good to happen.

I was playing handball with Goldie and Max and Joey DeSimone. The four of us were good students, good friends. We studied together for the mid-term and final exams and especially for the most important New York State Regents exams.

Since almost everybody had a nickname, I was called Lion because my first name was Leo and there was a Leo the Lion that roared out when they showed the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movies. That was my nickname.

The students of our school were almost all Jewish, the few non-Jewish boys were those whose families lived on the fringes of the Lower East Side.

For some time, almost from the beginning when I had first met him, I had called him Joey, Yussel, or Yussie, its Jewish-Hebrew equivalent. He didn’t care, he seemed at home with us and when he visited my house when we studied together my mother didn’t even know he was Catholic-Italian.

“Yusseleh,” my mother would say to him on those occasions, “it’s good to see you. You feeling all right?” Yussie, smiling, would nod. “And your mama and papa, they’re all right?” Again Yussie’s nod. “Your father’s working?”

“Sometimes,” Yussie would reply. “You know how it is.”

My mother knew that Yussie’s father was a bricklayer. It wasn’t a usual Jewish trade, she thought, but after all, work was work, you did what you had to. Anything to make a living, anything to feed your family, anything to exist.

“You make good marks in school?” she would ask him.

And he, embarrassed, would squirm somewhat in his seat and say nothing and I would reply, “He’s an A student, mama.”

That was always the catechism when he visited us. After that my mother would serve us a glass of milk and some cookies or a piece of cake, and all of us, Yussie, myself, Goldie, Danny, Max, Izzy, whoever was present, would move all the chairs close to the porcelain top of the bathtub set against the wall in the kitchen and we would begin our studying, asking each other questions. Someone, any one of us, would correct the answers if they were wrong.

My mother, as she worked on the other side of the kitchen, would occasionally stop to stare at us, a huge smile on her face. “Good boys!” she would whisper to herself. “Such good boys!”

For some reason, Yussie preferred to come to my house to study although sometimes we did go to other houses. When I asked him about it he said, “Lion, I feel comfortable in your house, there’s something there that’s okay, you know?”

Even his speech, his cadences, had become like ours. To my mother, to all of us, he was a Jewish boy whose name was Yussie. Only in school when he was called up by the teacher, “Joseph DeSimone,” his last name pronounced by the teacher,”Dess-Si-mohnee,” were we reminded that he was Italian. But even that, over time, had ceased to penetrate our minds. Yussie was Yussie, he belonged with us, he was part of our group.

Once my mother had asked him,
“Fahrshtayst Yeeddish,
Do you understand Yiddish?” a phrase she had used with all of my other friends.

And Yussie had replied,
“Ah bissel,
A little.”

My mother had smiled broadly at that. Ah! Here was a Jewish boy who was learning Yiddish, less and less of the young ones were, here was a good Jewish boy, a good boy for Leo to be friends with.

Yussie ate the Jewish food, the kugels, the pickled herring, the chopped liver, he ate it like all of us, there was nothing that was served to him that he didn’t eat. My mother liked that tremendously, a good eater!

And when he went home, to his own neighborhood, his speech patterns changed, the Italian rhythms and words returned to him, even in his English. Yussie was a language chameleon.

He was my partner that morning on the handball court. We lost. As we left the court, I said to him, without malice, “You’re a lousy handball player. You don’t have that swing.”

“I know, I know,” he replied. “But I sure as hell can run, can’t I?” He had won a number of track events during our school’s Field Days in the nearby park where athletic competitions were held. “You can’t have everything,” he said with a smile.

“Try,” I said. “Practice that swing. You swing like a rusty gate. If you got a real good swing you could be good in handball too.”

Goldie was leading the way to the school building, we were following him. Max, Goldie’s partner in the game said, “We sure as hell beat you, didn’t we? We skunked you.”

“Come on,” Yussie said. “All you need to win is Goldie. Put him on the court without a partner and he’ll beat any two of us. You know that.”

“What’s he saying?” Max turned to me as he pointed his head in Yussie’s direction. “That I can’t play? Is that it?”

“Maxie,” I replied. “What he’s saying is that Goldie don’t need any of us to win, that’s all. You’re not bad, Maxie, you play a good game, but Goldie don’t need you.”

Max said to me with a trace of anger, “I can beat you. Anytime.” And to Yussie, “And you too.”

“You’re on,” I said. “Lunch time I’ll play you.”

“Me too,” Yussie said to him.

We went to our classes that morning. None of that closed bitter winter feeling remained, it was all gone, even the good students began acting up, laughing loudly at whispered jokes. In the hallway we engaged in the game we called Baseball, when someone with his clawed fingers ripped at an unsuspecting student’s fly. If two buttons were whisked away from their fly eyelets, it was a two-bagger, if the fly was opened totally, it was a home run. There was always a roar of laughter from the onlookers, especially if there was a home run. If there was time before classes, victims became perpetrators, the game went on until it was time to enter the classroom.

In the classrooms, the rough boys, the older boys, began their thumb tack maneuvers. When a student who was not of their clique would go to the blackboard to write something, or went to the front of the class to read or recite, a few members of the older clique surreptitiously would place five or six thumb tacks, points up, on his seat.

The entire class, aware of what was going on, would watch and wait while the intended victim returned to his seat, sit down, shout out a surprised, “Ouch!” and jump up from his seat as he ran his hands gingerly across his bottom to remove the tacks.

We would all laugh at this spectacle, it was impossible not to. We held our laughter bottled inside of us, staring goggle-eyed at the teacher, our hands on our desks while the teacher said sharply, “What is it? What?”

“Nothing, nothing,” the victim mumbled, sitting cautiously down in his seat after he had made certain no more tacks remained to harm him.

Everybody, every student, before sitting down, would run his hand across the seat of his desk, flicking the thumb tacks away to the floor, if there were any. It didn’t take too long for a student, when called to leave his desk, would swing his seat up, so that at right angles to the floor, it was impossible for the tacks to be planted.

Impossible, until one of the older boys brought some chewing gum, chewed it slowly and imperceptibly so that the teacher wouldn’t notice, the gum turning soft in his mouth. When someone not from his clique was called upon to go to the front of the room to recite, the gum chewer would secretly remove the wad from his mouth, tear it into small pieces, and would implant the thumb tacks, points up, into the soft wad. He would place each small pointed piece onto the seat and slowly raise the seat to its upright position.

The class waited. The victim would return to his desk, pull his seat down, sit down and immediately spring up yelling a pained, “Ouch! Ouch!”

We could not contain ourselves, the uproar became tremendous, the teacher banged on the desk shouting, “Will you be quiet! Will you be quiet!”

That day, the assistant principal, Mr. Burger was passing by in the hall, heard the noise of a tack attack and immediately entered the room. “You! You! You!” he pointed to three laughing students. “Go to my office! Immediately!” The room suddenly became quiet, we sat erect in our seats, unsmiling. Nobody moved. We knew what would go on in his office, the sharp stinging slaps of the heavy wooden ruler on the palms of both hands, sometimes one, two or three times depending on how Mr. Burger felt. He asked the teacher, “What happened?”

She told him all she knew was that there had been several outcries of ouches! a tremendous burst of laughter in the room, but the last time had been the worst. Mr. Burger glared ominously at us, his face turned on his body as on a swivel, his steely eyes on each of our faces, he made us feel guilty. Finally he left the room.

The last two victims of the thumb tack war remained in the classroom. Two innocents and one perpetrator were in Mr. Burger’s office receiving their punishment. That was the way Mr. Burger operated. Over the school term he managed to get everybody in the class to his office, the innocent as well as the guilty.

Once, some time before, during the early winter, a substitute teacher, a young woman, perhaps twenty-four, had taken over the English class for the day. The regular teacher had taken sick. The class, at least the one I was in, was unmanageable from the start. Whistles, laughter, conversations shouted across the room while the powerless young woman had banged frantically on the top of her desk, asking for quiet.

I had felt sorry for her, she was young, she seemed nice. The students, not all of them, mainly the rougher and older ones made her life miserable. She had blinked several times behind her glasses, on the verge of tears.

Someone, I thought it was Gimpy, the tough one who been born with a limp, had made a paper airplane, dipped its tip into the inkwell on his desk, and had thrown it in her direction. The paper plane had flown in the air, gone between the substitute teacher’s glasses and her cheek, its tip had hit the side of her nose and had streaked ink on it as it had slid down her face. She had looked up for a moment in shocked anguish, had run her hand down her face, stared at her fingers stained with ink and had begun to cry, almost uncontrollably.

Someone, one of the students had laughed, almost a bray. For some reason, out of nervousness perhaps, we all began to laugh, the sound welled up to a roar while that poor woman stood crying. Suddenly the door of the classroom had opened, Mr. Burger stood there, and his finger pointing had said, “You! You! You!” I was one of them. “Go to my office! Right now!” I had tried to protest but he hadn’t listened and he said to me, “To my office, I said!”

Three of us had sat in his office, we waited for him as we looked at the long wide ruler that lay across the green blotter on his desk. About ten minutes later he had finally appeared in his office, red-faced, angry.

I had begun to say to him, “Mr. Burger, I didn’t do anything. Honest. I really didn’t.”

“You just shut up,” he had said to me. “It’s a shame what you did to that woman, a terrible thing! Come here!” He had said loudly to me as he went to his desk and picked up the ruler.

I hadn’t moved. “But I didn’t do anything,” I had said.

“Come here!” he had shouted. “When I tell you to do something, you do it! You’re going to learn, all of you.” He had glanced at the other two sitting in the chairs beside me, “that you can’t do these things. You’re going to behave like human beings, even if I have to beat it into you.” And to me he had said, “Get over here!” Against my will I had moved cautiously, slowly, in his direction. “Put your hand out!” he ordered.

I had begun to shake my head, begun to recite my phrase of innocence when he had grabbed my hand, whacked it once, twice, hard, with the ruler, snatched the other hand, whacked that one too.

It had hurt, a pain of fire. He had wanted to hurt me. He had meant to make me cry. But I had made up my mind, in that instant, that I wouldn’t, that at least in that, I would thwart him. I hadn’t done anything! Hadn’t I felt sorry for that poor teacher? What did he want from me?

Our next class was Miss Mason’s music class. It shouldn’t have been held that crazy spring day, not with that spring fever going around. For the protection of everybody, students and teachers, the school should have been closed down. Now the old rumors cropped up again, Miss Mason, an attractive brunette lady in her early thirties, it was whispered, was doing it with Mr. Coolidge in the students’ clothes closet in her room when there was no class scheduled at the time.

The students who recited the story had practically sworn they had seen both of them go into the clothes closet, slide the doors shut and had emerged smiling about ten minutes later. Sure, what do you know, they did it, they did it in the clothes closet, sure, sure I’m telling you, I seen them go in. Those sliding doors closing up and later they shook, I can tell you what a banging went on!