by Robert Klein
There were the three of us, strangely somber and thoughtful. “It was worth it,” Joe said. “Dammit, it was worth it.” We looked at one another and smiled in agreement. Manny looked like he hadn’t made up his mind yet. Whatever the experience was, it had been a watershed, if only because we thought it so and therefore made it so.
My first sexual intercourse was not all it was cracked up to be, but I felt changed, less innocent, a man of more substance, and a thorough coward. We parted at the Mosholu Parkway station in the Bronx and walked our separate ways home. I turned the key, hoping no one was home, but unfortunately, it was a full house and more. In addition to my parents and sister, several doting aunts and an assortment of uncles and cousins were on the scene and greeted me with excited hugs that I tried unsuccessfully to parry. I felt like I smelled of sex and cheap perfume, and my aim was to get to the shower immediately. I had not counted on a gauntlet of aunts with particularly acute olfactory senses, who could smell an unfresh chicken at the market at twenty yards. “Ooh, Robbie, every time I see you, you get taller,” said Aunt Marlena. “You’re so handsome, Robbie,” said Aunt Bessie. “But most of all, you’re such a good boy.”
At this, a shot of heavy-duty guilt went through me. I wanted to disappear like Claude Rains. Some good boy, who just had sex with a whore in Harlem. “I have to take a shower, I’ve been playing basketball, I’ll see you when I come out,” I said.
“Basketball? Who plays basketball on a Saturday night?” my uncle Henry asked. “Saturday night and no girls?” If he only knew.
I caught a break when my mother merely waved from the kitchen and my father became involved in a torrid conversation on the art of parallel parking. The bathroom was a welcome respite from the tiny and crowded apartment; in fact, it was the only respite. I locked the door and began removing my clothes gingerly, as if they belonged to a leper, having discarded the idea of using my mother’s kitchen tongs, whose removal from the kitchen to the bathroom would be difficult to explain.
“Robert, you want some pot roast, darling?” my mother hollered through the door. “Not just now, Ma, wait till I come out, okay?”
“Of course I mean when you come out,” she said. “I’m not giving you pot roast in the toilet.”
I opened a new bar of soap that I planned to discard after use, in order not to inadvertently infect my family. I then proceeded to take the most thorough shower of my young life. Common sense told me that I hadn’t caught any disease, and for what it was worth, Sheree appeared to be a hygienic individual. Yet Manny’s obsessive-compulsive ravings on the train, combined with the possibility that my sexual partner had fucked a thousand men before me . . . Well, let’s just say I scrubbed myself so hard that the image came to mind of a sandblasted building. I rinsed and then scrubbed again, hid the brush to get rid of it later, and dried and powdered, thoroughly, hoping for the best.
Finally, wearing a terry-cloth robe, I joined the family at the foyer table, which was covered with the remnants of what appeared to be a fine dessert. “So, how’s school?” my aunt Bessie inquired.
“Oh, great. Just great,” I said.
“One more year and you’re in college. I can’t believe it, my little Robbie going to college, can you believe it?” No one could believe it. I could make out what people were saying, and I guess I answered appropriately, but it was mainly an amorphous din, and I was on automatic pilot. My head was miles away, sorting out thoughts of shame and triumph and guilt, thinking of Sheree, and the little room with the Vaseline, and the fear in the street, and the man in the elevator who had blessed us.
Chapter Five
Joe College
So I found myself in September 1958 in a college dormitory hundreds of miles from the Bronx. I was a freshman of sixteen, a regular Joe College, and Alfred University had been carefully chosen after prudent scrutiny of two dozen college brochures showing happy students holding test tubes and playing Ping-Pong.
There was much activity in Bartlett Hall, what with the moving in of the flotsam and jetsam of students bent on a four-year stay. There was lots of looking at everybody’s name tag, handshaking, and a variety of shy greetings among the boys, who were, after all, strangers. Boys alone occupied the dorm. In 1958 the girls were housed in a different section of the campus, located a safe quarter mile away, and any incursion of boys into the girls’ dormitory (aptly called the Brick), beyond the lobby, provided grounds for expulsion.
A number of upperclassmen walking the halls were fraternity guys scrutinizing the freshmen for prospects. Some new boys seemed to know a few of the fraternity members through some kind of connection or other. These were the guys who would be rushed the hardest in the next few weeks by the fraternities. The subject was a main topic of conversation in the dormitory.
In the afternoon most of the parents had left, and those mothers and fathers who lingered had anxious sons wishing them to go, so as not to make a bad first impression. It did little for a boy’s reputation to begin his college career with a crying mother clinging to him. My mother was quite nonchalant about the parting. It was my father who looked a bit forlorn as he reminded me, “Don’t forget to call your mother. A little call won’t hurt once in a while.” I was thankful that my parents had gone home early and tearlessly.
I sought out my friend Bob Chaikin, with whom I attended junior and senior high school. He had come up to school alone on the train and had a hell of a time lugging his enormous steamer trunk to its destination. We were grateful for each other’s company among all these strangers with funny accents. Many of the students were from western New York State, and their manner of speech was strange to the Bronx ear. It was a hard-R midwestern accent more akin to Ohio than to New York, in contrast to the wide R of New York downstaters and Bostonians. The word “car” could sound like two different languages: “kare” and “cah.” Spoken by people from Buffalo or East Aurora, the words “marry” and “merry” sounded exactly like “Mary”; my nickname, Bob, sounded like “Bab,” and it took me several months to realize that people were addressing me.
Bartlett Hall was composed of single rooms connected by a door to one’s neighbor. My neighbor was Rolando Hoyt, from Monterrey, Mexico, who would be studying ceramic engineering. He was a sympatico fellow of twenty-three, a little old to be a freshman, slightly thick in the middle, with a receding hairline and a widow’s peak. He was very open and loquacious, and in short order I knew a lot about him. His father was a wealthy Dutch entrepreneur and his mother was Mexican, and he liked to sing as he unpacked his belongings and hung on the wall a huge picture of Christ on the cross. This was not one of those easygoing crucifixion pictures like you see in a barbershop, with a blondish, movie-star-handsome Jesus. This was a suffering Jesus, a bloody, painful, ethnic Jesus, complete with the trickling blood of the stigmata. It was no doubt favored in Mexican barbershops.
I had no objection whatever to Rolando’s display of religious fervor, but his singing, occasionally alternating with whistling, concerned me. Though it is pleasant to hear one sing quietly and pleasantly during work, it wears quickly, especially if one is studying or concentrating on something else and the singer is relentlessly mediocre and persistent. Whistling is another story entirely. Exposure to bad whistling in a confined space like an elevator or a dormitory can be injurious to one’s health, practically fatal, and I was concerned about the possibility of having to endure it for a full year. Totally ebullient and cheerful though Rolando was, I was for the moment grateful for the door that separated us.
The whole building reeked of tobacco smoke, including the ample aroma of cheap, sweet pipe tobacco, the result of pipe-smoking freshmen who embraced it as one aspect of being Joe College. Walking around with a pipe in your mouth, or using it to gesture, was thought to give you gravitas and maturity. I observed that most of the pipe smokers in the dorm looked positively embryonic and did not shave frequently. The air in the dormitory was as toxic as your average coal mine, but nobody gave it a thought in Alf
red, New York, in 1958.
An odor was beginning to compete with the smoke in Bartlett Hall—a human odor, from two hundred boys in close quarters in a stifling building on a hot September afternoon. In 1958 deodorant was merely an option, and taking daily showers was only slowly coming into vogue. I am an olfactory-oriented person, no doubt, but I’ll be damned if the place didn’t smell zoological, and no one had even slept there yet.
I was walking down the hall toward the john when something shiny and large caught my eye through the open door of a room. It was hanging from the light fixture as a kind of homemade silver metallic mobile covered in aluminum foil. It was a form familiar to me. It was a swastika. Hello, neighbor. I saw from the name on the door that the swastika belonged to a Harold Mueller, who had written “Call me Hal” beneath his name, apparently in a gesture of cordiality. He was not there at the moment, possibly organizing a freshman Nazi Bund group on the second floor.
In all my childhood on Decatur Avenue, with all the Irish-Jewish ill will, I never saw a swastika. This one was very disturbing to me, but the incident could have been predicted, given the social structure at Alfred. The university tolerated a discriminatory fraternity system in which four of the six houses did not admit Jews or people of color. To put further pressure on the situation, each fraternity was allowed to add no more than twenty-five new members each year. I could not help but notice that there were a fair number of Jewish freshmen and a handful of blacks and Hispanics and not enough room for all of them in the fraternities. Anyone could do the math, and it was disquieting.
There was no alternative social life, the student center being a Quonset hut left over from World War II that served Cokes, though the drinking age was eighteen. There was no alcohol for thirteen miles around, either in bars or retail, as the snowbound village lived by the rules of its Seventh Day Baptist founders. But there was plenty of music and fun and all the booze you could drink at the fraternities, and I had my eye on Kappa Nu, which was one of the two nonsectarian houses on campus, famous for its parties and athletes.
Right now I had my eye on Harold Mueller, who had returned to his room. He was a redheaded, unremarkable-looking guy about three inches shorter than I, which was a source of some comfort.
“Hi, I’m Bob Klein from New York.”
“Hal Mueller.”
“Hey, Hal, what’s that thing hanging from your light?”
“What thing?”
“That swastika thing.”
“Oh, that? That’s not a swastika. That’s a Corsican cross. That symbol is hundreds of years old.”
“I’ve seen plenty of swastikas, and it looks like a swastika to me.”
“Well, that’s too bad, ’cause it’s not a swastika, so if you don’t mind leaving my room, I got some things to unpack here.”
This guy was full of shit, and doubly insulting by denying what was clear to anyone. “Wait a minute. Are you trying to tell me that’s not a swastika?”
“Are you hard of hearing? I told you, it’s a Corsican cross, and it’s none of your business.” He nudged me toward the door, a gentle push, really, but I shoved his hands down and pushed him. “Don’t push me,” he said as he pushed me.
I don’t remember who threw the first punch, but we caught each other pretty good in the face and tried to grab each other’s hands like hockey players. I wrestled him down to the floor, and the tumult attracted a few boys who came in to break it up. I got in one more nice painful squeeze to Hal’s red face before I let go into the arms of the peacemakers and their “Hey take it easy” and “That’s enough” and “Calm down.” I made a grab for the Corsican swastika, but I was held back and dragged away.
By this time the ruckus had attracted the dorm’s head resident, Norm somebody or other, and he was not pleased. Norm was a twenty-six-year-old graduate student in ceramic engineering who performed his dorm duties in exchange for room and board. He was carrying a slide rule and acted as if he had been rudely interrupted in the middle of a delicious calculus problem. Norm wore the jacket of Lambda Chi Alpha, a fraternity where one would be hard-pressed, shall we say, to find matzos in April. “What happened here?” he said.
Mueller spoke up immediately: “This jerk started a fight with me for no reason.”
The head resident entered the room and went right to Mueller, who was eight inches from the swastika. Norm being a taller man, the thing could practically poke him in the eye. “What do you mean, no reason? Did you provoke him?”
“Look! Look! Right by your head,” I screamed.
“Pipe down!” he said. “You’ll get a chance to explain in a minute. Right now I’m talking to him.” He turned back to Mueller and continued, “Fighting in the dorm is a punishable offense. We are adults here, not street brawlers. Now, what happened?” This conversation was occurring directly under the swastika, like mistletoe at Christmas. Instead of kissing, I expected both of them at any moment to give each other the fascist salute. “I asked you, what happened?” said Norm.
“Ask him. He’s got a problem with my Corsican cross, he tried to pull it down.”
“A problem with your what?”
“My Corsican Cross.”
“What Corsican cross?”
“This Corsican cross,” said Harold Mueller. The head resident’s neck arched back as he gazed with his half-spectacles at the thing. He took a few seconds, examining the swastika like an archaeologist. “This is a swastika,” he said.
“See? See? I told you,” I said, overreacting to the first fragment of sanity since the incident began. “The guy is hanging a swastika from his ceiling, for Christ’s sa—for God’s sake.”
Mueller was unmoved. “It is not a swastika, it’s a Corsican cross.”
“I’ve never heard of a Corsican cross,” said Norm, “can you tell me what it is?”
I could not contain myself: “I can tell you what it is, it’s a fucking swastika, that’s what it is!”
“Hey, control yourself. I’ll hear you in a minute, and there’s no need to bring that kind of language into the issue.” Norm was disturbingly tolerant of this bullshit conversation, which was becoming more and more surreal. “Now, what exactly is a Corsican cross, Harold?”
“It’s an ancient figure, religious I think, consisting of a cross with arms of equal length. Each arm, as you can see, is at right angles to the other arm. It’s not a swastika. The swastika faces clockwise, the Corsican cross faces counterclockwise.”
“Not if you look at it from the other side,” I said.
“What do you mean?” said Mueller.
“When I first saw it, it was facing clockwise,” I said, “it was a genuine swastika.”
“I can’t help it if it turns on the string it’s hanging from.”
“That thing has been turning the whole time,” I said, “so are you trying to tell me that it’s only a swastika half the time?”
“No. It’s never a swastika any of the time.”
“What about when I saw it clear as day facing clockwise?”
“It rarely turns that way. When it does, it’s only temporary.”
“I see, so now it’s only a temporary swastika. It’s only a swastika for a few seconds, until it becomes a Corsican cross again, is that what you’re telling me?”
This was beginning to confuse Harold Mueller. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“So you’re admitting that it’s at least part swastika?”
“No. When it turns, it always comes back to the counterclockwise position.”
“That’s a load of crap, it definitely seems to favor the swastika side. And anyway, while it’s turning, someone will see a swastika, at least for a few seconds, depending on where they’re sitting in the room.”
“Just a minute, hold on here,” said Norm. “Harold, you’re saying this is a Corsican cross and not a swastika?”
“That’s right.”
“Is this a religious symbol for you? Some Christian sect?”
“Not exactly,” said Mu
eller. “But it represents gallantry in battle and spirituality from ancient times. Anyway, I like the way it looks, and it’s a free country, and the First Amendment protects my right to free expression, you can look it up.”
A large young man stepped forward. He had a blond crew cut and the stereotypic look of an offensive lineman. He was angry, and regarding this argument, I somehow didn’t think he would side with the angels. He addressed the head resident. “Hey, what’s your name—Norm?” He was from Buffalo and pronounced it “Nerm.” “Uh, Nerm, this guy is trying to bullshit you. That’s a swastika plain and simple, and it means one thing: Nazis. My mother’s brother, my uncle Joe Thornquist, was killed in Belgium in 1944 fighting those Nazis, and it isn’t right for an American to hang that thing in his dormitory room. He should take it down.”
“Absolutely, you’re right,” I said to this big guy, whose book I had erroneously told by its cover.
“Hold on just a minute,” said Norm. “Dean Whitlow will have to decide on this. He’s the dean of students. I don’t think I have the authority to take down the ornament.”
“It’s a swastika, not an ornament,” I said, “it dishonors everyone who fought in the war, like this guy says, and it’s a huge insult to . . . Jews.”
“Jews? What do the Jews have to do with it?” said Herr Mueller.
“What do the Jews have to do with it? You’re a fucking imbecile,” I said.
The big blond boy from Buffalo spoke out again: “And that’s another thing: the Jews. We got some of them in this university, and you got to consider their feelings. They had a million killed in the hollycaust.”
“Six,” I said.
“What?” he said.
“Six million killed” came the refrain from a few of the boys with Berg and Gold and Stein attached to their names.
“He’s full of shit. That ain’t a Corsican cross, it’s a fuckin’ swastika, and he should take it down, goddammit,” said a boy with a pronounced Brooklyn twang who had walked into the room.
