Sea-Zure Disorder

This past February on our cruise, I went snorkeling in the Bahamas. Much to my surprise, it was quite easy and quite pleasant (aside from being very tiring trying to fight a fairly strong current). Now, for me to say that something involving swimming in the open ocean was pleasant is a pretty amazing thing. To say that I am uncomfortable in the water is like saying a fish is uncomfortable on land. I just never learned how to be comfortable with swimming, especially if the swimming is NOT in a pool.

So there I was, flapping around, sticking my masked face into the water and enjoying watching the sea life beneath me. I was relatively secure since I was wearing a flotation device and there were trained people nearby on and around the boat. I actually enjoyed myself.

Well, when I told my daughter Sara this, she said that Ray (her boyfriend) wanted to know if I wanted to try scuba diving, something that is a passion of his. I thought about it for a while and said that I’d give it a try. That March, for a nominal fee, I was able, along with Sara and Ray’s younger daughter, to sample scuba diving in a pool at the Norwalk YMCA. It seemed to be a good experiment so I said I was in.

So there I was, on a Thursday in early April, with Sara, Ray’s daughter and one other student, starting scuba lessons in the same pool. But first…we had to pass a few tests. I knew that we had to be able to swim 300 yards but the instructor had said we could use any stroke we wanted. I figured that was fine because, although I am a weak swimmer, I can go for a long time doing a modified backstroke. When the instructor gave us our directions, though, he said we were not to use the modified backstroke unless we absolutely had to. What? But you said….Crap!

So, I start off trying to relax and not tire myself by going too quickly doing the crawl. I can do that for a half lap, then the sidestroke. Yeah, well. By the middle of the second lap, there I am on my back desperately trying to relax and keep going. By the fifth lap (of six) there was no pretension about using anything but the backstroke. Somehow I managed to get through it…barely.

Next? 35-40 yards underwater on one breath. That wasn’t too bad, but by now my shoulders were aching.

The piece de resistance? Fifteen minutes of treading water. Now, I have treaded water before. In camp, as a kid, I made it all the way to swimming Advanced Beginner. Among the things you had to do was treading water for thirty seconds. So, it was with some trepidation that I approached the next fifteen minutes. I think I made it through three minutes and I was completely shot. My arms were so tired that there was no way I could continue and I came out of the water sure that I had made a very bad mistake in thinking scuba was something I could do.

By the time I had dried off and changed back into my clothes, my mind was made up. The instructor was very supportive (not). “I think I can get you through the program.” You THINK you can get me through? What a ringing endorsement and he would only let me continue if I got a written clearance from my physician. I walked out of there convinced that it was not worth it and I told him to forget it.

Sara, Ray, his daughter and Joy were all very upset. They all thought I should keep going and after a few days I agreed to keep with it. (Yes, my doctor approved without reservations. But, as they pointed out to me, the medical waiver was not a reflection of my health but was a reflection of the instructor covering his ass for liability. Freakin’ lawyers!)

So over the following two weeks, I managed to get along in the pool learning the basics of scuba diving. I got through those two weeks and had I listened to the inner voice, I would have said, “Okay, this has been an interesting experience. Thank you.”

Over the next few weeks, we planned a trip to Key Largo, Ray, Sara, his girls (the older of whom is an accomplished diver), Joy and me. Key Largo, Florida is the scuba capital of (they claim) the world. Ray has been there and knows the people with whom we would be doing our certification dives.

We all have these times where the sensible part of ourselves says, “Don’t do this” but we don’t listen. This was one of those times. I should have listened to the internal signals but I didn’t. I passed off my apprehension as being the same apprehension that I felt before every exam in school or check ride in the Air Force.

Now, aside from the apprehension over actually doing the open water dives, this was also the week that Tropical Storm Debby was getting itself together in the Gulf of Mexico. We were on the Atlantic side, but the winds from the storm were causing seas to run 4 to 6 feet. That doesn’t sound like much and, were we on an aircraft carrier, a cruise ship or a submarine, it would NOT have been much.

Nevertheless, there I was, in the dive shop getting fitted for the gear for the dive certification. I was desperately trying to remember everything I had learned in class. Eventually, we shoved off, the four of us plus two others, one of whom was there for his certification dives.

I have never been on a boat that size with seas of that size. I have been on boats in seas of that size, but the boats were larger and reacted far less to the pitch and yaw induced by the wave motion. I thought that I was just feeling nervous, but as events showed later, I was in the early stages of mal de mere.

After a twenty minute boat ride through those waves, we hove to. That was fun with the boat pitching up and down like a cork. I managed to get into my scuba gear and was foolish enough to be the second one into the water. One of the last things to do before going over the side is to give your buoyancy compensator three breaths so it is sufficiently inflated to keep you bobbing on the surface. I remembered to do that (and how proud of myself was I for remembering?).

So there I am, a human cork in a heaving ocean. Somehow, I managed to get myself over to the buoy line to wait for everyone. And wait. And wait. And wait. Well, that’s how it felt. By now, my stomach was beginning to feel queasy and the thought of upchucking into my breathing regulator occurred to me.

That was when the waves really started. Okay. Intellectually, I realize they were maximum 6 feet. But when you’re a human cork, bobbing on a line attached to a boat and they come crashing over you, well, suffice it to say I found myself an extra in “The Perfect Storm.”

About then, the thought came to me, “Can you honestly see yourself doing this and enjoying it?” And a moment later when I answered that question, “No,” I headed back to the boat and climbed out. That was it. I had tried scuba diving and found myself wanting. The truth is, in the YMCA pool, I was pushing the envelope of what I could tolerate. When the waves started coming and the reality of open water diving set in, I quickly crashed through that envelope. That was the thing that I had not listened to. So scuba diving was added to my bucket list of things I need never do in my life, although the list actually rhymes with “bucket” but has a different name.

Ever sit on a pitching boat already feeling queasy? I don’t recommend it. Queasy quickly turned into feed the fishies time. Let me tell you, seasick is MUCH worse than airsick. And there’s no getting away from that motion. None! We once went whale watching with friends and John was seasick for hours. He said that if he had a gun he would have put it to the captain’s head and said “Take us back to port, NOW!” I understand that now.

And then to add insult to injury, I realized that I had forgotten to take off my t-shirt before I put on the wetsuit. So, until we got back to the house where were staying, I had to sit in a wet t-shirt. Yuck!

Was I disappointed in myself? Yeah. I had to do the obligatory beating myself up for having, yet again, been a failure. Emotion trumped reason for a few days but the realization that I really, really didn’t want to try it again in calmer seas eventually led to acceptance than I had tried something that was just not for me. I was sure that I had put it in perspective when the title for this piece came to me. So, I now recognize that if I am going to be on the ocean, it’s damn well gonna be on a cruise ship!

And now they’ve talked me into trying white-water rafting. Hang on for a few months and we’ll see how that goes….

Class Clown, a Third Helping

Okay: Here’s your warning. If you will be offended by a bit of crudeness, skip this paragraph and go on to the next one. You have been warned! There’s actually one good story from the two months between college graduation and the time I went on active duty in the Air Force. My in-laws, Joy and I were invited to the wedding of the son of a couple who were very close to my in-laws. This was about a month after Joy and I had gotten married and for those two months we were living with my in-laws. Joy was working but I was not so I was home alone and as a consequence, I tended to keep to myself quite a bit. For whatever reason, at the reception, my father-in-law and the father of the groom decided to find out what it would be like to get me loaded. Maybe I’d “let my hair down” and relax. So the two of them bought me drinks as quickly as I could drink them. I became liberally lubricated by bourbon and entered into that “who gives a crap what I say” state. We were sitting at our table when the subject of the wedding night came up. I pointed out that on OUR wedding night, we had a king size bed. My mother-in-law had to ask what difference that made. The following conversation then took place:

Me: Know what the best thing about a king-size bed is?

The MIL: No. What?

Me: You can mess around on one-third of it and sleep on the other two-thirds and not have to worry about who has to sleep on the wet spot.

The MIL: (shocked silence)

I may have added, “well you asked” but I’m not sure if I did. Fortunately, my father-in-law took the heat for that one for having contributed to my delinquency.

In navigator training I was somewhat restrained. After all, I was a brand new second lieutenant and everything you did and said was under scrutiny. At the Officer’s Club, one of the big fall events was Oktoberfest which always resulted in a rather raucous party. There being safety in numbers, we tended to sit together as classes and squadrons. As was (and probably still is) inevitable, someone started singing “Dixie” and the whole place picked up on it. Well, one of the instructors who was from New Jersey and one of the student navigators who was originally from New York decided enough was enough. They got up on their table and LITERALLY shouted down the rest of the place singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Neither the squadron commander nor my wife was terribly pleased with us….

The real class-clownery began after I got my wings and went on to Navigator-Bombardier Training (NBT). Now, anyone who volunteered for NBT was considered a bit suspect in the sanity area because it was almost certain that you would then go onto B-52s. There were four of us who were gung-ho B-52 fanatics and wanted nothing else and we kind of found each other. The one from my nav class and I became trainer partners and the other two formed a trainer partnership. We were the last class to go through the old curriculum. The way it worked was that the trainer check-ride that determined whether you passed or failed the course was halfway through. Once that was over, you KNEW you had passed the course regardless of anything else you did. So we immediately loosened up a LOT and the fun began. Truth be told, I was the instigator and prime offender when it came to goofing around.

The first course after the check ride was nuclear weapons class. Because the curriculum had been revised, the new class, the one behind us, was starting with Nukes. So here you had one class that had a true “who gives a crap” attitude and another class that was just starting and was apprehensive. Remember what I said about getting laughter in situations where you’re not supposed to laugh? It was glorious. One day, our weapons instructor (who was a loose cannon himself) told us that after lunch we would be watching a two-hour movie on nuclear weapons. At lunch, I said we needed to stop at the Base Exchange. There, I bought one of those giant bags of popcorn. We got to class before anyone else and stashed it under our table. About ten minutes into the movie, I pulled it out, opened it, took a handful and then passed it. The new guys about had kittens when it got to them and we pointed out to our instructor that those guys were passing popcorn around during a movie about something as deadly serious as nuclear weapons.

In another class, we had an instructor who was in training to become a full-fledged instructor. The course dedicated a full hour to the three things that can go wrong with the Bomb-Nav System: the computer can break, the radar can break or they can both break. If the computer breaks, you do a fixed-angle bomb run. If the radar breaks, you do a present-position indicator bomb run. If they both break, you do a time and heading bomb run. That was it. That was the whole lesson. The Air Force is very big on learning by rote and repetition. But after a half hour of the same thing, over and over, it was getting to be too much. About twenty minutes before the hour, the instructor said we were going to review. First question: “What do you do if both the computer and the radar break?” There was a deadly silence that stretched to about thirty seconds before I clearly and concisely said, “You punch the fuck out of the aircraft.” You could almost see this guy deflate in front of us. But then figuring that he was dead meat anyway, he started telling war stories that illustrated the various failures and it was the best part of the class.

We had one instructor who had a very large nose, very bushy eyebrows, a mustache and horn-rimmed glasses. The four amigos went shopping one day and bought ourselves Groucho glasses. (In case you don’t know what Groucho glasses are, they are named for Groucho Marx and are black eyeglass frames with a big rubber nose and furry eyebrows and mustache.) The four of us sat in the back row of the classroom. This instructor liked to walk up and down the long aisle between the two-man tables. We waited until he had walked to the back and turned around heading to the front of the room. We put on our Groucho glasses and didn’t say a word. He happened to be carrying his coffee cup and took a sip just as he looked up and saw the four of us. Suffice it to say the guys in the first few rows had to go home at lunch time to change their coffee-spewed shirts.

We were the first NBT class in several that actually asked for a graduation ceremony. The main reason we did this was because the four of us lobbied for it. We didn’t really care about the graduation ceremony so much as we just wanted to give out “awards” to each one of our instructors. Of course the four of us appointed ourselves awards committee. The best one turned out to be for our class advisor. Our original advisor had been transferred halfway through the course. We presented his replacement with a paternity subpoena that forced him to take responsibility for us. Apparently we had hit a nerve and the look on his face when he heard the word “paternity” was the best.

In B-52 Combat Crew Training, I tended to play it very straight. My instructor, cigar planted firmly between his teeth, introduced himself as a screamer. He had spent six years at Loring AFB at the tip of Maine and wanted to go back because he liked bear hunting. I knew I was dealing with a dangerously unbalanced maniac. That, however, did not stop me from screwing around a bit. The radar scope, when it is configured normally, gives a radar plan for 360 degrees (except for straight aft when it goes into a non-transmit mode so it doesn’t irradiate us). That means that the aircraft is located at the center of the scope. The first time he said, “Navigator, show me on the radar scope where we are,” I pointed at the center. Of course, what he was asking was to give a range and bearing fix, something of which I was quite aware. The second time he said it, I pointed at the center. The LAST time he said it, I pointed at the center, then felt fingers grabbing the side of my helmet and pulling it away from my ear and his hot breath accompanied by the shouted words, “Navigator, if you do that one more time, I will kill you.” That was the end of that little bit of tomfoolery. I may be a class clown. I’m not stupid.

We had two pilots who were new to B-52s and how things get done in the Strategic Air Command so it was necessary to bring them along gently. Okay. Maybe they were new to SAC, but they both knew how to fly an airplane. The first two times I asked for a left turn and the pilot turned the aircraft to the right, I gently corrected them. The third (and as it turned out) last time it happened, as soon as I felt the aircraft bank in the wrong direction I got on the intercom and said, “Pilot. Look at the co-pilot. Now turn the aircraft the other way.” I guess they got my point.

My REAL opportunity for letting the inner class clown out was when I was operational. I worked part-time as a wing combat intelligence officer as a career-broadening assignment. One thing the combat intell officers did was to present the weekly intell briefings to the wing staff and to the incoming alert crews. Since I was the less experienced officer in the section and was also a crewmember, I got to do the alert crew briefings. Of course, each briefing ended with an homage to Chevy Chase’s Weekend Update on the original Saturday Night Live when I would finish with the announcement that General Franco was persisting in efforts to remain dead. The best one was that April 1 fell on a Thursday in 1977 (Thursday being the day that we changed over alert crews). The briefing ended with a piece on Idi Amin and Uganda in which I briefed the crews that it was feared that if Amin took a dislike to the United States, it was feared that the country would be killed in a suspicious car wreck. It took a few seconds for that to sink in before I said, “April Fool.” They threw things at me that time.

When I left the Air Force, I had my GI Bill in hand so I knew that more schooling was ahead of me. Oh, just sign me up….

Confessions of a Class Clown, Part Deux

So, with high school over, the big wide world of college awaited. I have to say that my four years at Syracuse University were four of the most fun years I have ever experienced. Ably abetted by a fraternity house full of brothers as well as copious amounts of alcoholic beverages, those four years flew by. Some of them flew quickly because I have no memories of them.

My freshman year (1970) was the first time in the university’s history that first semester freshmen were allowed to rush and pledge fraternities. I really had no intention of joining one, but a couple of the guys at Acacia Fraternity were so nice (and were also in Air Force ROTC) that I made the commitment. By comparison, we were actually a fairly tame fraternity. (Let me get this out of the way right now. Despite what anyone who happens to be the mother of my wife may say to the contrary, we were not the model for the Delta Tau Chi fraternity in Animal House. Okay, we DID have an annual Night on the Nile party where we all wore what amounted to togas. And several years earlier, a couple of the guys led a cow into the bell tower of one of the campus buildings and left it there. But we were never on double secret probation, to our knowledge. And we never wrecked the Homecoming Parade.)

One of the joy’s of pledging a fraternity is what is generically called Hell Week. We called it Initiation Week because unlike some other frats, there was no physical torture involved. Okay, the pledges were kept in a state of sleep deprivation which has been characterized as torture by the UN. And pushups were rather liberally distributed. But there was no paddling or hitting; just a lot of yelling and bracing against the wall when an initiated brother passed by.

One thing that pledges were not allowed to do was laugh because Initiation Week was a solemn occasion. So every time I got caught laughing or smiling, I explained myself by saying, “I’m solemning, sir.” The pledge trainer and his roommate had a room that happened to have a brass door knocker. One of my pledge brothers and I needed to speak with said pledge trainer, so rather than simply knock on the door, I banged with the door knocker. When our pledge trainer asked what we were doing, I said, “We’re playing with your knocker, sir.” My pledge brother and I promptly lost it and the two of us fell down in fits of laughter. Our pledge trainer opened the door, looked at the two of us and just shook his head and shut the door without awarding any swift and terrible retribution. (My pledge brother became my closest frat brother and my roommate and we were later groomsmen in each others’ weddings.)

During Initiation Week, the pledges were required to wear ties and jackets and, at all times, have with them their pledge paddle, their membership manual and their local membership supplement. If the pledge happened to “lose” any of these things, he was given a larger, heavier (and far less useful) substitute. You may ask how one “loses” their materials. Well, it was a phenomenon known as the “Theta Chi Chameleon.” Theta Chi was the frat behind ours. The chameleon was an evil member of Theta Chi who could look astonishingly identical to any of our brothers. It HAD to be the chameleon because no brother would treat any other member, brother or pledge, in a bad manner. Honest. It was the Theta Chi Chameleon. Honest.

Anyway, in one particular pledge class two years after mine, I was very friendly with one of the pledges. (He and I later became roommates and we were also groomsmen in each others’ weddings. In fact, the night before my wedding, I slept with him. No, you dirty-minded people, I mean we shared the double bed in the motel where the bunch of us stayed the night before.) Anyway, the Theta Chi Chameleon impersonated me four times to steal his pledge materials. Can you imagine? My favorite pledge and the Chameleon chose ME to impersonate. By the end of Initiation Week, he was carrying two pencils (less useful substitutes for the written material) and a highway sign (that had been liberated several years earlier by another brother) that was about six feet square for his pledge paddle.

Once a semester, our Little Sisters (of whom my wife was one) would throw a 5:00 AM TGIF party. Because there was a combination lock on the door of the frat house, they needed a brother in on it to get in and set up. Because Joy could not have gotten out of bed without my knowing, I was the de facto choice for inside man. This one Friday was a spectacular success with whiskey sours, mai-tais and Bloody Marys. Coincidentally, Friday was also uniform day for ROTC students. Now, my fraternity big brother never made it to class because he over-served himself. I was just drunk when I went to my ROTC class. This was the year I had The Major who did not particularly approve of me. During class, he asked me a question and I slurred out the correct answer. The following conversation ensued:

The Major: Mr. Gutis. Are you drunk?

Mr. Gutis: Oh, yes sir.

The Major: At this hour?

Mr. Gutis: Oh no, sir, I was drunk by 6 AM.

Well, he reported me to the colonel. Now, the colonel was a good ole boy from North Carolina who had flown bombers his whole career. He knew I wanted to fly B-52s and the colonel really liked me. He called me into his office and asked me to explain myself. I told him exactly what had happened. He looked me up and down, thought for a second and then said, “Real fine. Keep up the good work.” I saluted and left.

Our house was directly across the street from the primary women’s freshman dorm. On the third floor of my fraternity, there was an amazing array of optical devices because it took many of the girls quite a while to recognize that there was a frat full of healthy, red-blooded, young men across the street from them and they left their blinds open. There was also a birch tree in front that blocked the view of many rooms. The summer that I had to go to AFROTC field training in Plattsburgh, New York, I drove through Syracuse on my way home and spent a few days. There were always a couple guys who stayed there year round so I had company. As fate would have it, one night, we had acquired some alcoholic beverages and we, shall we say, over-served ourselves. At some point, I said, “We’ve talked about it. No one’s around on campus. Let’s cut the tree down.” The initial guffaws quickly led to a steely determination. Have you ever noticed that trees look smaller than they really are when they’re standing up? For some reason, we tried to drag it into the back yard and it got jammed…just as the university police arrived. We scattered. I managed to run around to the other side of the house and come in the front door. Very innocently, I walked out the back door and asked the police officers what had happened. When they explained the obvious to me, I said, “Oh, I noticed a couple of guys running out towards College Place.” They thanked me and I innocently asked them what they wanted to do with the tree. They looked at me like I had two heads and said that if we wanted the wood we should just cut it up. So we did. And for the next two years our fireplace had the nicest supply of white birch wood.

And lest you think that I only picked on my fraternity brothers, let me tell you this story. My girlfriend (now wife) Joy and I were lying on my bed watching the movie The Ten Commandments on TV. Shortly after Moses leads the Children of Israel out of Egypt the following conversation took place:

Joy: Was Moses married?

Me: Yes.

Joy: Do you know his wife’s name?

Me: Yes.

Joy: What was it?

Me: Mrs. Moses.

With that she shoved me off the bed. This might not seem significant but I had the top bunk of a bunk bed.

We tended to be very tolerant of brothers having “guests” spend the night. This tolerance, however, was pushed to the breaking point when one of them moved his girlfriend into the frat house. She was actually giving our phone number and address as her number and address. He, of course, denied that she was living in the house but she had several suitcases worth of clothes in his room. Oh, and did I mention she was the daughter of one of the university vice-chancellors? Well, when we had the infamous 5 AM TGIF that led me to run afoul of The Major, the other Little Sisters did not tell her about it. At the weekly brothers’ meeting, the brother in question raised the issue. Once again, always the lawyer, the following conversation took place.

Me: Let me ask you a question. Isn’t the purpose of the 5 AM TGIF to surprise people living in the house?

Frat brother: Yes.

Me: Well she was surprised, wasn’t she?

End of conversation.

Let me say this. I have never been a big fan of practical jokes. It is just far too easy for them to go badly and dangerously awry. But…my junior year, the national fraternity sent one of its traveling secretaries to visit us. Aside from the fact that the chapters in the northeast detested national because they detested us, this individual was particularly unpleasant…no, let’s be honest. He was an almost total asshole. When he visited us, he came down with the flu bug that was running rampant across campus. For reasons unknown to me, my big brother who was chapter president, allowed this yutz to take his bed for the visit. At the time, we had an alumni brother, Larry, going to grad school and who was living in the frat. The guy from national did not know him. As a “med student,” Larry looked in on him and I had told Larry to tell this detestable yutz about a weird strain of the flu they were working on and Upstate Medical Center. What Larry told him was that if your urine turned blue, it meant that the flu was fatal within days. The last day with us, he felt well enough to interact with us. One of the other guys got me some methylene blue. I had an eye-dropper full of it that I palmed into his black coffee when he wasn’t looking. Guess what methylene blue does to urine? We understood from our Cornell chapter that he never made it there. And they were quite pleased about that.

One of the last things I did in college involved the same two individuals who had been surprised by the TGIF. The frat house had been built in two stages. The back part of the house was built after the front part and had a separate furnace and the thermostat was upstairs where Barry and I and a few others lived. The brother in question was the house steward. (He got a discount on room and board by being the in-house repairman.) A window in his room was cracked yet he refused to fix it. Rather he would constantly whine about us not turning up the heat enough. (Syracuse, NY winters tend to get verrrrrry cold, BTW.) So, the first nice warm day in the spring, we finally felt very guilty about the heating situation. So we took the cover off the thermostat, packed ice on it…and cranked it to 90 degrees. The best part was we could hear him stomping up the stairs in enough time to pull the ice, replace the cover and hide the ice. This went on all afternoon until we determined that our heat debt had been repaid.

Like all good things, though college came to an end, so it was off the Uncle Sam’s Air Force. Stay tuned….

Confessions of a Class Clown

“You’d be bored and you’d figure, ‘Well, why not deprive someone else of their education.’” – George Carlin, Class Clown

For as long as I can remember, I was always tempted to be a smartass. It seems strange, in retrospect when you consider a couple of facts. One was that, near as we can tell, I was born with markers for clinical depression. The other is that I was always the kid who was afraid to get in TROUBLE. Remember that? Do you remember when “You’re in TROUBLE” was one of the most frightening things you could hear? Well, I do. I hated being in trouble but I also never learned to keep my mouth shut. It is a matter of historical record that my first day in kindergarten, that is to say my FIRST DAY EVER in school, I was given detention for talking when I wasn’t supposed to.

After way too much education, time as an Air Force navigator, then as a librarian and finally as a lawyer (in a variety of incarnations) I continue to be vexed by the question, “What do I really want to be when I grow up?” The smartass answer is retired and, honestly, that’s not very many years away. But the honest answer is I want to be a comedian. I always have. And I’m actually very good at telling jokes, I have a great sense of timing, a quick ability to find a humorous link between certain words and I do dialects well. Unfortunately, I can’t write my own material. I think of things on the spur of the moment, but to sit down and write a full bit is beyond me. (It’s a subset of the “I write well but I can’t plot so I can’t be an author” syndrome.)

So not being able to write my own material, I took to stealing from others, one of whom was Bill Cosby. I had several of his comedy albums and I would listen to them so many times that I could repeat them word for word. How many times did I have to listen to my mother say, “Well! If you learned your school work that well you’d be getting better grades!” Woody Allen was another of my comedy inspirations. I mean, a short nebbishy, curly-haired Jewish guy from New York with an inferiority complex. What were we? Twins separated at birth?

I think the class clown stuff really started coming out in Hebrew school. Why you may ask? Well, I suspect it was a combination of factors. For five years, from ages 8 to 13, I and a bunch of the other unfortunate schmendriks were subjected to two hours of school twice a week AFTER regular school plus another two hours on Sunday morning. And don’t even get me started on Bar Mitzvah lessons on top of all THAT! So, there I was, a captive in the synagogue (where my mother was the bookkeeper, by the way), six hours a week. And what’s better to make fun of than religious stuff? In fact, doing it in Hebrew school had the double advantage of being both school and religiously oriented. And we all know that getting suppressed laughter where everyone knows you’re not supposed to laugh is the BEST. I was aided and abetted by my friends Andy and Matthew who were in the same class as me. My father took to referring to us as “the unholy three” because we seemed to find humor in the most solemn of things. Like George Carlin said, getting people to laugh at inappropriate times was the best. (More on the necessity of being badly behaved at religious observations later.)

Most of the things I said in class were of the smartass variety. The one I particularly remember was in Torah class. (Just in case you’re not sure, the Torah is the first five books of the bible.) We were up to the part of Exodus where Moses gets his marching orders from God to set the Israelites free from slavery in Egypt. When the Mose-man asks how he should identify God to the Israelites, he is told “Tell them that I am that I am.” (Exodus 3:14) Of course, without missing a beat, I chimed in with, “That’s all that I am. I’m Popeye the Sailor man. (too-toot).” (Yes, I added the toot-toot. In for an inch in for a mile.) After having to explain that one to the Hebrew school principal, I got to explain it to my mother. But, OH, it was worth it.

And lest you think that I was only a smartass in schools of various formats, let me tell you about a couple of things I did to my grandmother. I spent more time with Grandma Fanny and Grandpa Joe, my mother’s parents, than I did with anyone other than my parents. My mother was the younger of two. I was an only child and I was the first grandchild on either side of the family. Yes, I was the golden child. And the truth is that Grandma Fanny adored and doted on me. Now, Grandma came from Poland. And let’s all not forget that I am one of the pickiest eaters on the face of the earth. As a kid, I seldom finished everything on my plate. Grandma would lament, “Children in Poland are starving and you’re leaving food….” Somewhere when I was still in single digits of age, I had heard that once too often. I turned to her and said, “Whether I eat it or not, they’re still gonna starve. So what difference does it make?” And that was the last time I heard of that particular phrase.

The other thing I did to her took longer to come to fruition. My grandparents and parents were fluent in Yiddish. Whenever I’d tell Grandma that I was bored, she would say, “Geh shlug zich cup in vahnt.” Very early, I learned that meant, “Go bang your head in the wall.” After years of hearing this, one day (I believe I had made it into double digit age by that time) I said I was bored. We were in the kitchen at the time and she gave me her usual answer. I said, “Okay” and went into the living room and started banging my head in the wall. Now, these were sturdy plaster walls that did not resound well, so it took a while of some fairly hefty head-banging for her to hear me. When she finally came in to see what the noise was, she was horrified. That was the end of that phrase until…I started saying it to my daughter whenever she would tell me that she was bored. The best part is that she uses it on kids, too. (She’s very careful about it, though, because she teaches special education and some of those kids really are head-bangers.)

High school was a glorious time. It was the sixties. Flower power was in bloom. Kids were just starting to grow their hair long. And my two best friends were also class clowns. Now Andy, who wanted to go to medical school, was a bit more conservative in his clownishness than I was and Tom, who was a good bit ballsier than I, was a bit more extravagant. Together, though, we were a devastating combination. This was exacerbated by the fact that we were smart (I was the least of the three of us, but all our classes were Level 1 or higher.) Bored and smart is a dangerous combination.

Senior year, the one class that all three of us were in together (other than gym) was English class. We actually liked our English teacher, but she had an unfortunate hair style that poofed out in the front, resulting in the less than complimentary name “Tumor Head.” The fact that her last name began with a “T” made the alliteration even more appealing. Yes. I admit it. It was cruel but we never actually called her that to her face.

I forget what book we were going to read but it was not one that was part of the normal curriculum. She decided to ask if we minded paying a dollar for a copy and the entire class agreed. Well, almost the entire class agreed. I exercised my right to say that a teacher could not compel us to spend money on school materials. (Trust me. A lawyer even then, I checked the school regs and knew I was on strong ground.) I refused to pay for it. Knowing I was actually within the letter of the law, she gave me a copy anyway and dramatically said that she knew eventually I would pay for it. Flash forward to the end of the year. We had written short stories as 70% of our final grade. I had gotten an A on that so I knew no matter what happened on the other 30%, I would pass. The day of the final, I walked in with my hands behind my back and apologized for having been so obstinate about paying for the book. With a look of joy on her face, she thanked me for having seen the light…until I dumped one hundred pennies on her desk from a paper bag.

An unfortunate thing did happen to her in the middle of that school year. She had been mugged in her apartment building and was out for about six weeks. The school made the mistake of having a different substitute teacher each week she was off. Now, substitutes are notorious for receiving, shall we say, a less than appropriate amount of respect. Well, at least notorious among us. One of them was attempting to get us to read poetry…out loud. So when Tom was called on to read Joyce Kilmer’s Trees, Andy and I stood up on either side of him, raised our arms and swayed in the breeze. With another substitute, the three of us imitated a steam calliope by alternately standing up and down in our seats and making calliope-like sounds. That one decided she didn’t need to put up with us and asked us to leave. We shook her hand and thanked her as we filed out.

French teachers were among my favorite targets. I’m not entirely sure why, but my goal was to push them to the edge of a nervous breakdown without pushing them over. Now, I had scraped through French class since the fifth grade by getting just enough to make it through the year. This was not because I didn’t want to try. It’s because my inability to learn foreign languages is exceeded only by my inability to learn mathematics. So French class was truly a case of being bored and depriving everyone else of their education.

In ninth grade, my seat in French class was in the front row. As a result, it was very easy for her to see the look on my face. The look on my face was often one of confusion. For the first seven months of the school year, whenever she saw that look on my face she would stop and with all teacherly concern ask me if I understood. Inevitably I would take a moment of thought then say, “If you say so.” Finally, some time late in the winter, she had heard that one too many times and she detonated. So from then on, whenever she asked me the same thing, I just said, “Okay.”

My senior year French class was French literature. The teacher was a charming little woman whose name happened to be Bella Friedman. Whenever we would read a play, we’d all take a part and read out loud in class. She would really get into the part and emote like a ham. After several months of this, one of the girls in glass gushed, “Oh, Miss Friedman, you should have been an actress.” She just glowed and said, “Yes. Some day my name will be up in lights.” At which point I piped in with, “Yeah, flashing on and off, ‘Bella’s Bar and Grill.’”

The final high school class clownery in which I was involved was in the nature of being one of the instigators. In my school, there was a tradition called Senior Dress Down Day. On that day members of the senior class could wear anything they wanted. OUR senior year, they did away with it because they said that the student body had taken to dressing down every day so there was no need for it. Tom, Andy and I were talking about it and Andy jokingly suggested someone should walk naked to protest. I said that wasn’t practical but how about wearing nothing but a jock strap (a/k/a athletic supporter)? Tom looked at me and said, “How much?” I said, “$10.00” and Andy said he would match it. Now, in 1970, $20.00 was a tidy sum and Tom needed train fare to visit a girl so he took the bet, with the condition that he could wear a shirt that hung down in the back a bit. We agreed. The morning of it, he went to the boys’ locker room and came down wearing a shirt, his jock and sandals. He made it halfway down the hall of the second floor before he was apprehended. It was one of those things that were just too outrageous to be punished for. The principal said to him, “Son, you may be crazy, but I have to admit, you’ve got balls.” The only repercussion was that Tom was stripped of his office as president of the school’s chapter of the National Honor Society.

College awaited, but that stuff will have to wait for another day….