November of the Soul

by George Howe Colt

  But when Justin tried to fit in, he was not allowed. In seventh grade he persuaded the track coach to let him be team manager. He traveled with the squad to their meets, cheered for his classmates, and kept careful records of their times. Justin was proud of his position, and he had letters put on the back of his sweatshirt that spelled out TRACK MANAGER. But while the team admitted Justin did a thorough job, he remained an outcast. “Theoretically, he was part of the team, but nobody really liked him,” says a team member. “On bus trips he sat up front with the coaches or by himself because he knew nobody else would sit with him, or if he sat with somebody, they’d just give him heck all the way there or hold their nose or something like that.” Justin managed the team for two years. Eventually, the letters on his sweatshirt started to fall off, and it read CK AG R.

  There were occasional moments of acceptance: when Justin made a difficult move in a basketball game; when he had a solo in the school chorus. In seventh grade, after he had a minor hip operation, his classmates clamored to borrow his crutches, and suddenly Justin was the center of attention. But after two weeks the crutches were gone and so was the attention.

  Mike LoPuzzo was the closest thing to a friend Justin had. Although he was considered part of the easygoing group, Mike himself was a little different—for his music report in seventh grade, Mike had chosen to explicate the genius of Frank Sinatra. He dressed neatly, wore his hair short and carefully parted, and carried a briefcase to school. He was earnest, tolerant, and precocious, qualities not highly prized by his peers. But because he was a big, strong fellow, he wasn’t teased much. He had watched the kids badger Justin since fifth grade when his family had moved to Putnam Valley from the Bronx, and although he had occasionally chimed in, he felt sorry for Justin and admired the way he handled the situation. In seventh and eighth grades, when the class divided up for projects, Mike didn’t groan like the others when the teacher put Justin in his group, and they occasionally talked about school, movies, and books. Sometimes Justin brought in collections of Doonesbury cartoons to show him—Justin was partial to Zonker, a long-haired, leftover-sixties type. Mike found Justin interesting to talk to and liked his dry sense of humor. But, says Mike, they never ate lunch together, talked on the phone, or saw each other outside school. “Justin never said a word about his parents or his home life,” says Mike. “He never talked about girls or about problems. He never talked about his personal life, and he never asked me about mine.”

  Nor did Justin talk about being teased. “It never seemed to bother him—he was always a happy-go-lucky kind of person,” says Mike. “He would just put his head down and say, ‘Aaargh.’ No matter how all the students were down on him, he always seemed to bounce back.” Mike once asked Justin why he didn’t wash his hair. “If you washed and combed it, then people wouldn’t bother you,” he said. Justin shrugged, and Mike didn’t press it. “To me it seemed like such a simple solution, but to him maybe it was symbolic,” says Mike. “Maybe he was trying to send the world a message: ‘Does physical appearance matter that much? What’s important is inside.’ Besides, Justin had more important things to worry about, like Beethoven and Shakespeare.”

  But even Mike admits that he may have drawn back a little from Justin: “Sometimes I was afraid that other people would treat me the way they treated him.” When the eighth grade took its annual four-day trip to Washington, D.C., Justin ended up rooming with Mike. “We chose roommates before we went down,” says Mike, “four to a room. Me and two friends were together in one room. Naturally, nobody wanted Justin. I think he was just hoping for someone to ask him, so I said, ‘Yeah, come on with us.’” When they arrived at their hotel after the four-hour bus ride, everyone was excited and rambunctious. “We started messing up Justin’s bed,” says Mike. “He’d make it up, and then we’d pull it apart again. We got a little carried away. Justin was on the verge of tears. I’d never seen him that upset before. We kept apologizing, but he wouldn’t talk to us. Later I went over to him and said, ‘Jeez, I’m sorry, Justin, we were only kidding around. We didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.’ He said it was all right, and we shook hands.” It was the only time Mike ever saw the teasing get to Justin.

  Giles and Anne were aware that Justin was teased. “It had come up a couple of times in conferences,” says Anne, “but I had not bothered to go to them for a couple of years. I got tired of hearing the same thing that my mother heard about me and what I’m sure Giles’s parents heard about him, and what every parent under the sun hears in conferences: ‘Your little bastard isn’t working up to his full potential.’ Well, I say if he isn’t disruptive in class, let’s let it go. If he stares out the window, well, so did Edison. For that matter, they thought Einstein was retarded.” At his son’s basketball games, Giles overheard jokes about Justin’s bed-wetting and his sloppy clothes. He once saw one of Justin’s teammates throw a basketball at him on the sidelines. At home Giles would ask him about the teasing, but Justin dismissed it, saying, “Ah, they’re just idiots.”

  Justin’s eccentricities exasperated even his teachers. He was often late to class, rarely raised his hand unless the topic interested him, and turned in careless work. “I think some of the teachers had almost the same attitude that we kids did,” says one of his classmates. “They wanted to avoid him. They wouldn’t go out of their way to call on him or make him comfortable. When Justin didn’t turn in his homework in English class, the teacher would get mad at him. There was another kid who didn’t do his assignments, either, but the teacher laughed at him because he was really lovable. But Justin wasn’t, so she’d get annoyed. In homeroom my friend and I came in late almost every day. The teacher would smile and shake his head. But when Justin was late, he’d get pretty perturbed.” And while some teachers welcomed Justin’s extracurricular attention, others were less receptive. “Justin always tried to hang around with the teachers, maybe because he had no friends,” says a classmate. “Some of them would sort of ignore him, or they’d wave him off—like ‘not this kid again.’ They didn’t treat him badly, but they treated him like an outsider just as much as the kids did.”

  And yet Justin seemed to relish being different. As treasurer of the Grace United Methodist Church Youth Group, he concocted elaborate fund-raising schemes such as breakfasts and bake sales while the other five children planned football games, video parties, and trips to the beach. When one of his ideas was rejected, Justin immediately tried to devise another project that would meet with their approval. The group expected Justin to hatch grand ideas; it was a running joke that Justin always wanted to be president of something. Justin often seemed to delight in dissenting just for the sake of testing his peers. When everyone else voted for Superman for a pizza and video party, Justin fought for Star Wars although they’d all seen it before. One time when the group was planning the music for a party, Justin said he wouldn’t attend because he liked only classical music. After all the arguing, however, Justin usually went along with the majority.

  “He had his clashes with his peers, but on the whole I think he related rather well,” says Marion Cox, pastor at Grace United Methodist and leader of its Youth Group. “I don’t think he had an enemy in our group. There were times when he would take the opposite tack from everyone else and just push and push and push, and the kids would get down on him. But it was never unfriendly. They’d just say, ‘Oh, that’s Justin.’” Cox had moved to Putnam Valley a few years before and was still getting settled in the community. “He and Justin got along famously,” says Anne Spoonhour. “Justin was aware that Reverend Cox was something of an outsider.” Justin appreciated Cox’s corny jokes, and he liked to tease him that his sermons were too long and “dry as dust.” Cox, who was married but had no children, took something of a paternal interest in Justin. “He was a very lively boy with an impish sense of humor,” says Cox. “He liked to test you. But just as you were about to get exasperated, he’d have a twinkle in his eye as if to say, ‘Now really, don’t take it all that serio
usly.’”

  During the summer after eighth grade, Justin spent a week at a Methodist youth camp. It was his first time away from home. The dozen campers slept in lean-tos and cooked their own meals. Justin loved it, but he came on a bit strong at first, giving orders the way he did as “general” of his neighborhood army. The night before the campers returned home, the pastor who led the camp held a small Communion service. As part of the service he told the group, “Before you take the sacraments, if you feel there’s something you need to say to someone because you haven’t understood him rightly or perhaps you mistreated him in some way, now is the time to apologize.” There was a pause, and then all eleven campers lined up in front of Justin.

  The next fall Justin entered ninth grade at Putnam Valley Junior High. In the previous year he had grown rapidly. “Every time I looked up, he seemed to have grown another inch and put on another ten pounds,” says Giles. At five-eleven and 140 pounds, Justin was gangly but broad-shouldered. The features on his round face had grown larger and sharper. When Lora Porter saw him at Christmastime, she noticed how much he looked like his father. Anne bought him a new sports jacket, brown corduroy with elbow patches, size 20 collegiate.

  That same fall Leah entered seventh grade. Although her appearance—a tall, skinny body topped by a pale face and a shock of frizzy white hair—made her a more obvious target for teasing than her brother, Leah possessed a certain sheer nerve that drew people to her. She quickly found herself at the center of a tight circle of friends; whatever the “norm” was that Justin wasn’t part of, Leah was at its core. While Justin ate alone at lunch in his last year at the school, his sister, in her first year, was surrounded by giggling friends. Unlike Justin, Leah was often asked home by her classmates, and they frequently visited the Spoonhour house for afternoons and sleepovers. Justin would arrive home to find his sister and her cronies gossiping to a background of heavy metal music. He would groan and yell at them to keep quiet. “You’re weird,” the girls would answer. “Why don’t you go read a book,” Justin replied scornfully. “Don’t you do anything with your head except wear hair on it?”

  Justin and Leah’s rivalry had always been strong, though no worse than that of other siblings their age, Anne and Giles thought. They were intensely competitive playing board games, and at Youth Group meetings they occasionally argued. Justin needled Leah about her marathon telephone calls, her cooking, and her taste in books, while she teased him about his taste in TV. Their musical preferences were a particular problem; their parents finally decreed that they must alternate afternoons in control of the stereo. Genuine love lay beneath the teasing, Anne believes.

  Justin seemed to be making modest social progress of his own. That summer his psychologist had agreed that Justin didn’t need the socialization group anymore. And while Justin had no real friends, he had a small circle of what Anne calls “associates” with whom he played Dungeons & Dragons. Given the basic instruction manual for his thirteenth birthday, he quickly became an avid player. He spent long hours alone in his room filling stacks of notebook paper with maps, sketches of new characters, and equations calculating the characters’ chances for survival. He occasionally played the game with a few people at recess or lunch. Although Justin rarely used the telephone, since discovering “D and D” he might call a classmate to discuss a character he had just created or to make plans for a D and D session. In October, for his fourteenth birthday, he asked his parents for a D and D party. A half dozen boys arrived at noon and stayed through the evening, poring over battle plans at the dining room table, filling up on pizza and popcorn, and taking occasional breaks to throw a football in the yard.

  Justin had another way to step out of his own world into one over which he had more control. He had grown up listening to his parents’ recordings of West Side Story and The Fantasticks and had attended several Broadway shows on school trips or with his parents. After seeing Can-Can on the eighth-grade trip to Washington, Justin said, “When I grow up, I want to be rich enough to be a Broadway producer so I can revive all the good old musicals.” He also talked about an acting career. In eighth grade he played the title role in the school production of Whatever Happened to Ebenezer Scrooge?, a contemporary sequel to Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. He threw himself into the part of the crotchety old miser, wearing his nonprescription spectacles offstage, nattering on in his “Scrooge” voice. “When he got a role, he took it very seriously,” remembers Anne. “He would truly identify with the character.” Although Drama Club was hardly the cool thing for Putnam Valley boys, his classmates had to admit that Justin was talented.

  In ninth grade he was cast as a curmudgeonly senator in Outrageous Fortune. Playing opposite him was Diana Wolf, a classmate who had also been in Scrooge. “At first it was like I didn’t want to shake his hand, but the drama teacher took me aside and said, ‘He’s different—just give him a chance.’” Diana and Justin got along fairly well. In Outrageous Fortune, Justin had some trouble with his lengthy role, particularly with one long speech. “He knew his lines, but he was so nervous he’d start stuttering and garbling the words,” says Diana. “He’d get frustrated and ask to start again.” She and Justin devised a remedy. “At one point he was supposed to be showing me something in his briefcase, so we taped some of his lines in there.” Opening night did not go well for Justin. Before the curtain he wanted to make his hair neat for the show. He went from cast member to cast member asking to borrow a comb. Each of them said sorry, he didn’t have one. Onstage, recalls Diana, “he messed up so badly we all had to cover for him.” When his mother saw the production, however, she was impressed. “Most of the kids acted the way eighth and ninth graders act—flat line readings with a lot of hesitation and missed cues. But Justin was that senator.”

  Onstage Justin seemed to be able to express things more freely than he could in real life. In Scrooge, Justin’s character had legions of elves working for him. “Justin really liked the role because he got to be in charge,” says a cast member. “Usually people picked on him and didn’t listen to him. But in the show he was the boss, and he could yell at people.” Similarly, in Outrageous Fortune, Justin played another adult who got to tell off the other characters.

  Offstage Justin was less and less able to attract attention. “After a while I think people got used to him, and they just ignored him, which probably drove him even more crazy,” says a classmate. “I guess it’s more or less like a wart on your foot. First it bothers you, then you think it’s gross, and then after a while you just don’t notice it anymore.”

  At home Justin kept his problems hidden. Anne had taken a job as a dispatcher for the Putnam Valley Police Department and worked many evenings; Giles commuted to his job in Manhattan. Although their schedule of volunteer activities was busier than ever, they believe they spent as much time as they could with their children, as much as most parents. If Justin needed more, he didn’t show it. “Very rarely would he approach us to talk about things or ask for help,” says Giles. “Very rarely would he take the initiative.” Adds Anne, “But it’s not as if he was taking his problems to anyone else as far as we know. He just didn’t express his problems, period.” It was difficult to tell when Justin was upset. He rarely raised his voice and never threw tantrums; when angry, he grew quiet and disappeared into his room. Occasionally, however, Justin left a curious clue to his mood. Several times Giles came home to find a pile of wood shavings on the living room floor. When he asked Justin about it, he learned that Justin, exasperated over the failure of some scheme, had taken a knife and a stick and begun whittling.

  As Justin grew older, Giles felt frustrated at not being closer to his son. “I would have liked to have more conversations with him about what was going on in his life,” he says. “I remember going through a lot of turmoil in my own adolescence and not having anyone I could sit down and talk to. I never had heart-to-heart talks with my father, and I was looking forward to having them with my son. I was hoping that as he became intereste
d in girls, we could talk about that. I had ideas that I wanted to share with him about what to say and what to do and what not to say and what not to do.”

  But Justin rarely talked about girls. “In a lot of ways he didn’t know what he was yet,” says Anne. “Sex almost hadn’t entered the picture. He was still in the ‘girls are to throw rocks at’ stage.” Justin spoke admiringly of a young actress on Buck Rogers, and once, chatting with his mother, he mentioned a girl he had known in seventh grade who was, he allowed, “pretty okay.” But as far as Anne knows, Justin never mentioned his feelings to the girl. “He was very male-oriented,” says Giles. “He did not seem to have much of an interest in girls. I was a little concerned about that.” Girls were even less interested in Justin. When asked what his female classmates thought of him, one girl responds matter-of-factly, “Nothing.” She explains, “No girl would go out with him because it would be so damaging to her reputation. I mean unless she were incredibly ugly or drugged out, she wouldn’t be seen with him unless he totally changed.”

  Giles attempted to get closer to his son: “I tried to do it as naturally as possible. I didn’t want to make a point of ‘Okay, now we’re going to sit down and talk.’ There were times that we would talk about things, and I was hoping that from general worldwide problems we could get down to specifics in his own life. But I was not very successful in getting him to open up.” Though the issue of sex came up, it tended to come up as another dinner-table topic, like hunger in third-world countries. “I can’t remember having a ‘man to man’ talk with him or anything like that,” says Giles. “It was always in a family context with his mother and me and sometimes even his sister there. We would talk about it in general, about young people getting involved sexually.”