Buffalo Gal

by Laura Pedersen

  Thirty-Two

  It Could Be Worse

  My parents may not have had much in common, but they did share an outlook typical of the era in which they were raised—a strong work ethic combined with low expectations and a sense of impending doom.

  Like many immigrants from Northern Europe, Mom and Dad possessed a fatalistic attitude. My mother’s Celtic ancestry combined with my dad’s Nordic psyche didn’t exactly suggest that the sun will come out tomorrow. They are not excitable people, and neither am I. We do not become enthusiastic over vacations, celebrations, or emergencies. Our internal mechanism automatically assumes that something will go wrong at any moment and we’ll all die or cause the needless deaths of countless others. My mother can always be found locating the fire exits. Ask my dad how he’s doing, and he’ll say that he got up this morning.

  Both of my parents grew up during hard times. The thirties were the years of breadlines, soup kitchens, and hoboes riding the rails, and the forties of food and gas rationing and victory gardens. Working-class people were conditioned by circumstances to gird themselves for the worst. When nothing terrible happened they seemed surprised, and when anything remotely good happened they were suspicious that the bad news was still lurking around the corner. Waiting for the other shoe to drop is the popular sport played by people of my parents’ generation, who were raised with the mentality of trying to get by with the hope that their children would do a little bit better, God willing.

  No one expected much from my parents professionally, and they didn’t expect much from themselves, other than to make a living. Growing up, they were products of the nation’s “proud poor”—a large percentage of Americans, many with immigrant roots, who made do with whatever was available and tried to be responsible citizens. In other words, they treated all comers politely whether anyone was watching or not. When people didn’t have money, good jobs, education, or family ties, they could still take pride in their civility. Like good grammar and the air they breathed, it was free.

  My parents didn’t have any expectations for me either. After telling me to be a decent human being, they viewed my destiny as entirely out of their hands. I quickly realized that I wasn’t the brightest or the prettiest. Not in the world, in the country, in my school, or even on my block. Many of the kids in my class were much smarter, and a few were even headed to Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth.

  Yet there was still one road to success that was wide open: hard work. I’d have to start young, rise early, and stay up late. And even that might not be enough.

  My parents’ stressful jobs were constant reminders that money came the hard way. There would be no inheritance. When I graduated high school, both my parents were in debt, mostly from the divorce; they certainly weren’t extravagant in their spending. If anything, it was the opposite. They drove old cars with lots of mechanical problems and wore the same clothes, coats, and shoes year in and year out.

  In high school, my grades were mostly As, a surprise most of all to myself after a dismal elementary school performance. My friends and I felt as if we weren’t pulling our weight around the house if we didn’t do well in school. Our parents liked to remind us that going to work, keeping a roof over our heads, and putting food on the table was their job, and doing well in school was our job. And most of us saw our parents working very, very hard, coming home exhausted, and yet barely making ends meet. There were conversations about what to spend money on—if we cut down the dead tree (which is about to fall on the house) then we can’t afford new tires for the car. Difficult choices constantly had to be made. Bills were occasionally left to mature as if they were bottles of wine.

  There were numerous Norman Rockwell and Leave It to Beaver moments in our neighborhood—caroling, stringing popcorn for the tree, moms baking in kitchens, dads building go-carts in driveways—but we didn’t grow up completely sheltered. Most of us had an older sibling or cousin who’d become involved with drugs or alcohol or who’d had an unwanted pregnancy to deal with. Some had returned from Vietnam with a lot of problems.

  The city of Buffalo was rife with drugs, prostitution, racketeering, gambling, vandalism, and vagrancy. When I was growing up, almost one-third of the population received public assistance. And living only six miles from downtown, most of us saw bums, winos, and hookers as we were taken to department stores, government office buildings,

  and theaters.

  If one didn’t manage to see the crime-ridden East Side or the mafia-controlled West Side up close, we still heard stories; everyone had a relative who was a cop, a fireman, a social worker, or a lawyer working in the city. They told us about abandoned children, drug-addicted mothers, domestic violence, and the prostitutes down on Chippewa Street. We managed to put two and two together—if a person didn’t go to school and didn’t work hard, the concrete jungle was waiting for them.

  My own small family provided an excellent window onto the wider world—Dad heard it all in the courtroom, Mom had patients living on the city streets and made home visits in the most blighted areas, Uncle Jim worked as a police reporter, and Aunt Sue was by then a schoolteacher at an alternative Buffalo high school (the last stop before reform school or jail).

  Mom’s coworker recounted the tale of two cops who took turns going up in the firefighters’ cherry picker, trying to talk a suicide off a ledge on the coldest day of the year. After six hours of going up and down, one of the freezing cops muttered, “For Christ’s sake, just jump already.” The man did.

  There was the woman picked up for prostitution who insisted she had to go to the hospital. (My uncle explained that everyone who is arrested attempts to be taken to the hospital rather than the jail because it is more comfortable.) The cops were understandably cynical about such requests. “Why do you need to go to the hospital?” asked one officer.

  “Because I’m having flames in my eucharist,” was the woman’s reply.

  Similarly, a drug dealer who demanded an emergency-room visit claimed that he was “suffering from multiple confusions of the upper body.”

  My favorite story was about a man who went to the police station to report being bitten by a dog. In the seventies, Buffalo was one of the few cities where dog bites still had to be reported. The man told the clerk at the police station that a neighbor’s Dalmation had bitten him. The clerk on duty was not a strong speller, and so he began to write D-A-L-L. But he crossed that out and began again with D-A-H. That didn’t look right either, so he scratched it out. After one more false start, the form was becoming messy, and so in big letters he wrote, “FIRE DOG” and that was the end of that.

  Aunt Sue had summers off from teaching, and when she wasn’t working at Bethlehem Steel, before it closed, or teaching summer school, she went court watching. Court watching was practiced by inner-city neighborhood organizations to ensure that when drug dealers and pimps were arrested, charges were actually pressed or the perpetrators were sent to treatment programs, and not simply released back onto the street, which happened to be the same street my aunt lived on.

  Mary’s dad, a detective for United States Customs, would show us the lockers containing all the drugs confiscated from people trying to smuggle them into the country over the Peace Bridge.

  The bridge to Canada was only a few minutes from downtown Buffalo. Whereas we were only ninety minutes from Toronto by car, New York City was almost an eight-hour drive. We could ride or walk across the bridge whenever we wanted. The sidewalk was narrow, the bridge was steep, and there was usually some construction under way. When I rode my bike over it to go to the racetrack on the Canadian side, the journey would become very surreal. On my left, huge trucks would quake and rumble past, spewing gravel at me and occasionally even touching my arm. On my right, far below, was the swirling water of the Niagara River. I accelerated toward Canada, since it was downhill and there was no way to brake without losing control, all the while considering whether I wanted to die under a Mack truck or by falling over the ledge and plunging several hu
ndred feet into the mighty Niagara. It passed through my mind that it might be fun to have a place in the history books as the first person to go over the falls on a ten-speed bicycle.

  Thirty-Three

  The (Sweet) Home Stretch…Faking It

  As it does with many students, senioritis hit hard. Junior year of high school I was busy. There were advanced placement classes and chemistry labs and college admissions tests—the SAT, the ACT, and achievement tests. There were college applications, that pesky driver’s test, and a class ring to order. It was one thing after another. Most of them required money.

  So I started a new business that year: writing term papers for cash. It was still a decade before the Internet, and thus impossible to patch something together using search engines and websites, or just outright purchase a paper online. In fact, only one boy even owned a computer back then. Arlan was head of the nerd herd, our Hobbit-carrying

  Dungeons and Dragons aficionado and connoisseur of A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Check under Middle Earth in the phone book, and he’ll probably be there.

  I’d write papers by hand, and the only job of the purchaser was to copy it over in his or her own writing. I charged twenty-five dollars for an A, twenty dollars for a B, and fifteen dollars for a C, and could almost always get within half a grade of what I’d promised. However, there were no refunds for half-grade differentials.

  This enterprise had a unique set of challenges. First, there were the knuckle draggers who turned in the papers without rewriting them, as if the teacher wasn’t going to pick up on a dramatic shift in penmanship. And though the customer was now screwed, my identity was safe because there were around two thousand kids in the school, far too many to undertake a handwriting analysis. Also, the teacher’s first guess would have been that it was recycled from an older brother or sister. As for snitching and turning me in, forget it. The kids who bought term papers may not have been good students, but they never ratted anyone out. Still, they were slow to comprehend that after flunking a class all year it isn’t realistic to suddenly turn in an A paper. They constantly wanted to pay top dollar for A papers, and I actually had to talk them into the more reasonable and lower-priced B and C models.

  The business finally became too hellish. One of the English teachers, Don Reidell, assigned The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk to all five of his classes, at least a hundred kids. Forget writing about the 560-page tome; nobody would even read it. I realized too late that I could have easily doubled my prices on that fiction fiasco. As it was, I stayed up every night until 2:00 am scribbling away about nasty old Captain

  Queeg, using every study guide available. By the fifth paper, I’d exhausted all the symbolism, having done everything with that quart of strawberries short of turning it into shortcake. Although it had been a profitable voyage, I never wanted to hear the name Willie Keith or the words court martial ever again.

  Writing about The Caine Mutiny is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a religious experience. When, after handing in the last of the papers, I went to my Unitarian church, guess who was the visiting minister for the summer? None other than Don Reidell, the English teacher who’d assigned The Caine Mutiny in the first place. During every sermon I couldn’t help but wonder if he was looking straight at me and contemplating a church martial.

  My only total walk in the park during high school, aside from gym and health class, was French. My teacher, Mr. DePass, concentrated more on planning cheese parties, making a good bouche de noel, and playing Monopoly en français rather than teaching vocabulary and verb conjugation. Though I knew it was wrong, I rather appreciated this focus on our social lives during the midst of an otherwise full academic schedule, especially the trip to Quebec, weeks off for quiche-cooking competitions at area colleges, and the many, many fondue parties.

  Unfortunately, after three years of recipes and reading about fashion and celebrities in his copies of Paris Match magazine, we were faced with the New York State Regents Exam in French. Fortunately the first part was oral and we had Monsieur DePass to guide us. He’d read some French gibberish that was supposedly a scene or dialogue. The only words I recognized were s’il vous plaît, and that was only from saying, “Pass the hors d’oeuvres, please” at parties. (Though with my pronunciation of hors d’oeuvres sounded more like “horses ovaries.”)

  Next, he read aloud the questions. For instance, he’d ask if Sylvia was at the movies, the school, or the pool. However, he would place an extreme emphasis on the correct choice. Also, prior to the exam, Mr. DePass kept stressing that we were allowed to ask for help during the exam if we didn’t understand the question. He was, of course, not allowed to tell us the answer (oh, mon dieu!), but it said right in the proctor’s guidebook that he could answer questions about the question if we didn’t understand it. Though I don’t know how the hell we were supposed to understand any of the questions since they were all in French!

  Anyway, he basically went around the room pointing to the right answers. The essay was another matter. We had to memorize a few paragraphs of text word for word right before going in, immediately spew it onto the paper, and then find some way to make it fit by strategically plugging in the names we saw in the question. Most of us couldn’t even figure out what the question was in the first place. But thanks to Mr. DePass’s generous grading system, voilà, we all passed.

  When senior year began, I had more free time. So I imagined myself a sort of Renaissance student and signed up for first-year Latin, with the notion that it would serve as a lifelong vocabulary aid and allow me to watch the original Spartacus starring Laurence Olivier. Almost any time a grown-up defined a word, they knowingly insisted that studying Latin had made this extraordinary feat possible.

  However, it quickly became apparent that the only Latin teacher, a man, didn’t appreciate the girls as much as he did the boys, and I feared a bad grade would ruin my high average, which was necessary to maintain for college scholarships. When it came time for the Latin award, there’d oftentimes be a girl practically jumping out of her seat right before the winner was announced because she maintained the best average, perfect attendance, and had flawlessly completed every homework assignment. Then, out of nowhere, a boy’s name would be called and a strapping young athlete would stride to the stage and collect the certificate. The Latin teacher always made it very clear in his presentation that the award wasn’t just for good grades, but also for participation.

  I thought I’d also tackle physics, even though a fourth year of science wasn’t required. There was all sorts of talk about the cosmos back then. Carl Sagan was riding high, and I wanted to be ready to live on Mars, especially as it didn’t appear to receive any direct sunlight. However, my teacher turned out to fancy himself an Western New York incarnation of the Dalai Lama. He took the liberty of writing the following memo to his students. (Spelling, punctuation, and grammar are in their original form.)

  To My Students 9/21/82

  I’ve been setting here working on communication with your for about two hours.

  We have a problem where I see parts of our world very clearly and I am working to be your teacher.

  My world view is in pictures. My average mind moves through the pictures of our physical and behavior world at about the speed that you leaf through a bunch of

  photographs.

  For me as a high school physics teacher this is a beautiful but lonely world view. Other teachers and administrator have not learned this clarity of a physical world view (or behavioral world view).

  As I was writing and listening to music, the song

  kodakrome was played on WBUF-FM. The words said “When I think of all the crap I learned in high school, it is a wonder I can think at all.”

  I wonder if you see the problem of our culture that the song is talking about?

  Background

  I grew up in a farm town. We had a two room school. My life was rich and exciting. We raised plants and

  animals. Every day we were i
n nature (out in the field). We played hunted, fished, ice scated, sledded, swam, trapped, hunted and built things.

  School was a distraction from a very exciting life. I failed first and seventh grade. When I got through Jr. High I turned 16 and quit.

  I went on the road till I turned seventeen and then jointed the Air Force.

  They gave me tests that told them I was not a dumb as my teachers had led me to believe. Note that I did not need my teacher’s approval to feel good about my self.

  My life has continued to grow by just doing what was interesting to me.

  At 43 my clarity on human behavior and the physical world are beyond what the people I’m in contact with understand.

  I see how our culture disables people. Operationally by this I mean I see the attitudes and distractions that you use to disable your potential for growing and seeing clearly. I see your lack of confidence.

  The problem of caring about you and trying to help you is almost more than I can deal with.

  I have only one friend that sees the problem as clearly as I do. That is John Marvin III.

  John and I talk about once a month. Without that sharing I would leave teaching.

  If I am able to function this year some of you will be on your way to seeing clearly. (Maybe some of you are already)

  I can see a world filled with people that see you clearly. If you want to you can learn physics from me. Your sincerity

  and honest feed back on where you are at will help me function and direct your attention.

  Don’t worry about me or my being heavy. I respect you as soverign beings and ask the same in return.

  Please understand that you are not fully baked yet. You need to trust me to learn. You will only be able to evaluate me as your teacher after the fact of the experience.