Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46

  ‘I dont knaow,’ he says with his London accent, blushing as usual, slouching like a hepcat or like Lester Young the jazz tenorman on a street corner, in loose-fitting beautiful sports coats one different everyday of the month practically.

  Prof Kerwick glared at all of us, eyes popping, face red, glasses glinting. ‘Ha ha ha, it’s the express stops on the Seventh Avenue Subway, you bunch of plop heads.’

  Finally, end of day, with the same guy we had to endure geometry. The only thing I remember learning there was that if you stick a ruler in the ground next to a tall tree, and measure the shadow of the ruler and the shadow of the tree, you can get the height of the tree without having to climb it like Tarzan. I can measure the circumference of a circle? I can draw a circle in the earth and call Mephistopheles, or do ring-around-the-rosy, but can never also figure what’s inside of it. Again the football boys excelled me in this.

  V

  Ah, but now the football field. Practice. We don our regalia, as Don Regalia the sportswriter always says in the New York Sun, and we come out. Of all things and lo and behold, the coach of Horace Mann, Ump Mayhew, is going to let me start every game and is also going to let me do the punting and even a little passing. It seems he thinks I’m okay. I start practicing my kicking and by God after a few days I’ve got some spiraling kicks soaring into the blue and landing sometimes 65 yards away (with the wind behind me). But in cases where the wind is against me, he tells me to spiral em off low, like bullets, which I learn to do off the right part of my turned-in right foot, boom. And further, he teaches me to quick-kick, which means, you’re lined up as tho ready to receive the ball and run with it. You make a step as tho you’re going to plunge into the line. Instead you take one quick step back, still bending low, and just plunk the ball on a low line drive over everybody’s head out over the safey man’s head because in this case he’s running up anyway to catch you running. Result: the ball goes belumping back 30 or 40 yards and everybody runs after it and sometimes we recover it ourselves and that’s one of the tricks that made our team not only the high school champs of New York City that year but what they called in the paper ‘the mythical prep school champs’ of New York City.

  Which is no mean achievement for a high school team.

  Reason why is Biff Quinlan, aforementioned quarterback and present-day coach now, who was a bull of a boy, about my size but with a bigger neck and even bigger calf muscles, and brains, I mean football brains, what you call a field general: the guy who examines the situation and decides what to do next. Then there was the other back, Bud Heilbroner, rangy, fast and wiry somewhat like Kiner of Lowell High School, who was a good blocker and a tough competitor tho he had mainly come to Horace Mann for baseball reasons (a big league prospect). Then we had a nifty little Italian passer Rico Corelli from New Jersey (all these other guys were from New Jersey practically) who had, however, the same flair for dramatization and iddly-piddly that Menelakos had at Lowell. In any case, we didnt need him much, because Quinlan could pass just as well in a pinch.

  It was the line, really, as usual, that made us something to watch. It was the wiry little center, Hunk Lebreon, a blue-eyed black-haired Breton like me (tho he didnt know it or care to know it), who was so ferocious on defense and downfield blocking he had everybody scattering everywhichaway. He was small, but big Ray DeLucia of the Bronx was big, and even with early hurt collarbone, at his end of the defensive line not much got through. Then there was this sort of waterfront tough, a big blond Forrest Tucker-looking type tho not as big, who was scary just to look at and just as strong, Roy Hartmann. There were other good boys, two Germans who came from rich families (not Jews but real Germans), not necessarily real pro type football players but very good. I think the key to our football team was really Gus Bath, who, when you looked at him, looked like a slim lounger around poolhalls, who moved lazy, had no strength it seemed, gazelle sort of, but was all over the place like horse manure, which is another way of saying ‘ubiquitous’, when the chips were down. He was the other end. With Bath and DeLucia on each end, and Lebreon in the middle at center, and Hartmann the blond bull at tackle, and a quiet fellow called Art Theodore mild as spring’s first muddy moon, and Ollie Masterson (really a basketball star but a competitor, and a competitor who got all shot up in World War II later), we had a line that could allow me and Quinlan to roll.

  VI

  Now the typical first day was over: we showered after practice, dressed up and went our various ways, me down the hill to the subway with my books, bone-weary of course, dark over the roofs of upper Manhattan, the long El ride dipping down into the subway, zoom down thru old Manhattoes, me thinking ‘What’s up there above this hole? Why, it’s sparkling Manhattan, shows, restaurants, newspaper scoops, Times Square, Wall Street, Edward G. Robinson chomping on a cigar in Chinatown.’ But I had to stick to my guns and ride all the way to Brooklyn and get off there, trudge to Ma’s roominghouse (we called her Ti Ma) and there was my huge steaming supper, eight thirty, almost time for bed already, barely time to talk to old Nick about Father Coughlin or Greek pastries and of course no time to do any homework in my room.

  I went up to my room and looked sighing at that first entry I’d made the night before, the big ‘opening night’, which ended: ‘I am now making elaborate preparations for tomorrow. I’ve set the clock, gotten my clothes ready, etc. Tonight I evolved a plan of self-tutoring which I commenced officially. The subjects are five in number and I shall take one per evening, with a subsequent self-examination for the week after. The subjects are Mythology, Latin, Spanish, Literature, and History. As if I didnt have enough studies coming up from the ivy halls of Horace Mann. However, my motto is “The more you study, the more you subseqently know; naturally, the more you know, the nearer you get to perfection as a journalist.”’ So then.

  So now, Sept 25, 1939, I write wearily: ‘Today was very hectic. Opening of school, practice, arrival of mail and typewriter, and all the subsequent excitement and work render me incapable of record.’

  And so the Journal ended there.

  Time enough to get around to that later, them thar journals and stuff, as you’ll see.

  VII

  After a few minutes of dozing at my great bookish table I just got up and went to bed, first making my lunch downstairs and kissing Ma and Yvonne goodnight and listening to Joey in his undershirt explain to me what’s happened in New York today.

  In the morning at six I get up, take lunch, but no books, I’ve made up my mind. I ride the subway standing up all the way to Times Square but instead of doing my homework I’m watching the faces of New York at leisure. It’s just like in Lowell again, I’m playing hookey to study other facets of life. It’s like, I could have called this book ‘The Adventurous Education of Jack Duluoz’. I get off at Times Square all tingling with excitement, come out on a sparkling fall day, and go down to the Paramount Theater which I know at this time wont be crowded, wait around wandering the theater marquee streets till the doors open, go into the huge carpeted movie palace and sit right down in tenth row front to watch the huge neat screen and the stage show that follows.

  Then I come out, hungry, eat my lunch at a counter with milk shakes, outdoor counters of Times Square, as thousands of junkies and criminals and whores and working people and whatnot rush by, my what a sight for a smalltown boy, and then, idly and almost suavely, knowing exactly where to go, I saunter to yon Apollo Theater where it says on the marquee: ‘Jean Gabin in The Lower Depths, Also Louis Jouvet in Bizarre, Bizarre.’ . . . French movies! And in those days they were presented in French soundtrack, as originally made, but with English subtitles below, so that if Professor Carton missed me that day in HM French class, he shoulda been with me to watch them eyes of mine dart from subtitle to face of actor, to mouth of actor, as innocently, I tried to figure out why these people of Paris spoke so much through their throat, spitting like Arabs, instead of on their tongues, frankly, th
at is, franchement, one of the many things to say the least I was going to learn out of school. (Gabin spoke good French.) (As for the film at the Paramount, it was probably Alice Faye in the rain with a spaghetti signboard because she failed to pay her restaurant bill.)

  Now, midafternoon, I came out of the French theater, knew it was impossible to go to football practice two hours away and uptown, and could not attend anyway from stiff muscles, so I looked around for still another movie, across the street from the Apollo, say, where was Errol Flynn and Miriam Hopkins in Virginia City and boy what fun, emerging in the glittering lights of autumn dusk and all set to go home to Brooklyn with a whole day’s different kind of learning in my belly. The New York Public Library was only two blocks away but since I had the choice of more than just the Lowell Rialto . . . and anyway time enough for that too.

  The moral of what I’m saying is, as when I said ‘Adventurous Education’, let a kid learn his own way, see what happens. You cant lead a horse to water. Just as I’m writing exactly what I remember according to the way that I want to remember in order, and not pile the reader with too much extraneous junk, so, let a kid pick out exactly what he wants to do in order not to grow up into a big bore rattling off the zoological or botanical or whatever names of butterflies, or telling Professor Flipplehead the entire history of the Thuringian Flagellants in Middle German on past midnight by the blackboard.

  In these cases, the mind knows what it’s doing better than the guile, because the mind flows, the guile dams up, that is, the mind strides but the guile limps. And that’s no guileless statement, however, and that’s no Harvard lie, as MIT will measure soon with computers and docks of Martian data.

  VIII

  The first game of the year we had to face a powerful team called Blair, undefeated, and we were not ready for them mainly I think because we’d just met anyway and came from all over the eastern map. We had a couple of school frumps in the lineup anyway that we weeded out later. In the first part of the game we almost went all the way for the first touchdown but the big Blair boys stopped us and rolled us back and went over us 13–0 so everybody figured HM was a frump team as usual.

  They werent reckoning with that core lineup of tough eggs of ours. In fact, on the basis of that first seasonal loss, Columbia, which had probably intended to send the Columbia freshman team to play us the following week as per schedule, simply sent up the Columbia freshman seconds. It was a sin. By that time we had practiced all week and got our signals straight and in a pouring rain clobbered them 20–0. In this game, as against Blair, I got off all those pesky quick kicks, and then, from deep punt formation received the long pass from Lebreon at center, pretended to punt, but ran, through the open sieve of defenses, and went all the way. Quinlan also scored, and Heilbroner. Another long run I made and a longlegged fellow came up behind me in the mud and caught me right near the goal line from the back, just as in the Nashua game, recall, but this time he had me by the scruff of the shoulderpad neck and just dumped me down on my noggin. I was knocked out. Good enough, getting it back after that Halmalo incident in sandlot Lowell.

  Funny, too, that after I regained consciousness, and they figured I could go on, it happened to be the moment of the change of quarters, so we had to line up going in the opposite directions. What they didnt know was that I was still dotty and woozy. In fact I leaned there in the huddle with my mates in the rain and was asking myself, ‘What are we doing on this rainy field that tilts over in the earth, the earth is crooked, where am I? Who am I? What’s all that?’

  ‘I said, four, seven, three on the scobbish’ (the more-or-less quarterback instructions as I registered them).

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Whatsa matter you dotty Dulouse?’

  ‘He oughta be, he just got knocked out.’

  ‘Well just stand there, or run, or fall down, let’s go, boys.’ And they all ran back to assume their positions and I stood there in the rain watching them, watching the tilted earth, with a goony-bird look (maybe I’m crazy and my parts are scattered still), and bang, the play develops, I just stand there watching it. It was the first time I was ever knocked out, except for a childhood tumble in Massachusetts, when I felt it had all happened before in exactly the same way. I’ve heard of men dying saying ‘I remember this’ and in fact up ahead in the story is just that . . .

  But we won the game easily, 20–0, and after the game we all ran into the gym and I felt sufficiently recovered to accept Jonathan Miller’s challenge to a wrestling match in the regular ring they had there near the lockers, little Jonathan Miller (on the wrestling team) wearing full wrestling regalia: me in my jockstrap only, I’m afraid, fall down on my back, grab his legs with my feet squeezing, turn him over to his belly, jump on his back and pull out an arm (not hurting him) and bend it, put my other arm through the bend, and fold a knee over the whole shebang and give him the old whango bango, holding him locked there like a lobster claw as the football players, watching me wrestling a goon, yell ‘Hey the great Dulouse, look at him go.’ But I’ll bet you, nobody on that team challenged me to wrestle, that was a fast move, faster than that when you consider I didnt hurt him. As you know, wifey, wrestling used to be a big art in Lowell and at one time I was the Masked Marvel of Pawtucketville, as my older cousin Edgar was, and my father used to promote wrestling matches from Lowell to There.

  What annoyed me was the way the football team, that is, the other ringers from New Jersey, looked down on me for playing around with the Jewish kids. It wasnt that they were anti-Semitic, they were just disdainful I think of the fact these Jewish kids had money and ate good lunches, or came to school some of em in limousines, or maybe, just as in Lowell, they considered them too vainglorious to think about seriously. Okay. Okay. Because now the big game was coming up against St John’s Prep which we were s’posed to lose 100 to 0.

  IX

  That was the following Saturday, sunny cold day, beautiful for football, Uncle Nick saw to it I went to bed early Friday night and in the morning I told him I’d take a walk first and then together we would ride the subway to HM and he was going to see me play for the first time. I went out, got a haircut on Schermerhorn Street, staring at my ugly face (I thought) in the mirror, then went down to the local soda parlor and ate two huge hot fudge sundaes. A dim figure lurked back and forth on the sidewalk with gray felt hat, hands clasped at back, sneaking, stalking, but I never noticed it. Full of hot fudge sundaes I went back to Ma’s house, picked up Nick, we got on the subway and rode those hours up along the rib of Manhattan reading the Daily News.

  At the HM field the big day, the maroon-clad St John’s Prep team, undefeated, proud, jumping around and ready for a cinch. Out come me and Biff Quinlan and the gang and get out on that field. I remember at one point a St Johnner getting loose and going up the sidelines by the crowd. I was playing safety, that is, in the position to catch punts and run em back. But in this game, full of good hot fudge sundaes, I was hot to be a defensive player too, just for once. In fact all my football life I only played wild determined defense when I felt like it. I came up on that guy as fast as I’d come up on Halmalo that day in Lowell at age thirteen, actually went past him out of bounds into the crowd, but just stuck my right arm out and took him with me 10 feet into the mob.

  Standing there in that yelling scattered mob (some of them on the ground) was the assistant backfield freshman coach of Columbia, McQuade, who later told me he never saw such a terrifying tackle in his life. ‘How come you’re not hot on defense anymore?’ And nobody was hurt, either, that’s the point of the terror of that tackle. That poor St John runner thought the Lord God himself had swept him off to Heaven, I’m telling you, that’s how swift and easy it was.

  ‘Attaboy, Jack,’ yelled the team beginning to like me. We buckled down to give the favorites hell. Biff Quinlan drilled a pass right into waiting Ray DeLucia’s arms in the end zone, and we won 6–0. All we have to do for th
e rest of the game is smear St John’s and push em back. It was the biggest upset of the season in New York City. We were actually the mythical, that is, the unofficial champions of prep school football in New York City, and such a scandal! That night in the World Telegram a big story told how HM had cheated and brought in bruisers all over from New Jersey, Bronx, Pennsy, Mass. as ‘ringers’ and that it wasnt kosher to do so. But there wasnt one large-sized ‘bruiser’ among us. We were all little guys, relatively, except DeLucia. The reporters were in the showers looking at us and shaking their heads. Who the hell could beat St John’s?

  Why, St John Duluoz and the boys, naturally, and this may sound funny but this was the second time that on a high school team I had participated in the defeat of St John’s Prep. You see, a prep school is a step up over a high school. That other time, written about in Maggie Cassidy, was when me with the leadoff stick, then Joe Melis, then Mickey Maguire, then Johnny Kazarakis, actually defeated St John’s Prep relay team in the Boston Garden in another unbelievable upset (not that I contributed so much in either case, it’s just you’ve got to have old St John aboard).