That fifteen months I spent in Boston gave me what I came to regard as my second education.
My first education had to do with books and classrooms, teachers and grades and papers. From the time I was six until I turned twenty-four, I was enrolled in school. During my college and graduate school years, I also attended summer school. I worked part-time, received some financial aid, and hoped someday to teach in a college. Looking back on my first twenty-four years, I regard my years in a classroom as ordinary as sand on a beach.
Then my wife left me, and I left school, and my second education began.
My first education had to do with books and classrooms, teachers and grades and papers. From the time I was six until I turned twenty-four, I was enrolled in school. During my college and graduate school years, I also attended summer school. I worked part-time, received some financial aid, and hoped someday to teach in a college. Looking back on my first twenty-four years, I regard my years in a classroom as ordinary as sand on a beach.
Then my wife left me, and I left school, and my second education began.
After taking up quarters in my dumpy rooming house and finding work in The Old Corner Bookstore, which was at that time operated by Doubleday Publishers and was also the oldest ongoing retail bookshop in America, my schooling began in earnest. I have already written about James Winston, who burglarized my room. James Winston was my first teacher in Boston, but the streets, bars, and rooming houses of Beacon Hill’s Backside offered up all sorts of other instructors—prostitutes, thieves, con artists, drug addicts, working men and women, and a nurse.
Here are some of my professors from 1975--1976.
First, there was Kristin who lived two floors below my room on Joy Street. Kristin was a Maine girl who had grown up so poor that she and her siblings had eaten popcorn with milk for breakfast. I doubted the truth of this tale until I later read that in colonial times popcorn and milk was a common New England breakfast dish. Kristin had pale skin, bad teeth, and reddish hair that looked as if it had never experienced a brush. When I pull her up from my memories, I see her as a sort of chubby pixie, always ready with a kind word or smile, always, too, looking sleepy, as if she had just roused herself from a long nap. She was one of the sweetest people I met that year.
Kristin had in her possession a grocery store buggy, doubtless stolen, that she pulled onto Joy Street on appropriate evenings to go, as she put it, “trashing.” Several times I accompanied her on these expeditions. She’d rescue all sorts of things from the curb and garbage cans—broken lamps, battered furniture, children’s toys, and so on—and sell these items to junk stores in the neighborhood.
It was Kristin who introduced me to Anna, a plain woman with two small children. Anna worked, as Kristin joked, as “the call girl for the call girls,” and she took me one late evening to catch a glimpse of Anna at work at her worksite. We entered a house near the bottom of the hill, and there was Anna in a dark, small room, sitting behind a desk on which were some telephones, pens, and paper. Anna was a tall, quiet woman whom nature had left unadorned in the department of good looks. When a phone rang, Anna would answer, copy out some information, and hand the slip of paper to the man running the prostitutes, who would then disappear into another part of the house. Meanwhile, Anna’s toddlers ran around the room, playing with some broken toys. Between calls Kristin and Anna visited, the children amused themselves, the pimp sat sullenly in a chair in the corner, and I stood beside the desk feeling out of place and filled with wonderment at how I had strayed from my roots. After half an hour or so we left, and I never saw Anna again.
Then there was Larry. Fresh out of Walpole State Prison, where he had served time for the robbery of a jewelry store—he hadn’t used a gun, but only kept one hand concealed in a pocket—Larry had found work serving as a flunky to a man who owned several businesses on the Hill. Larry was short, about my size, stocky, and frog-faced. Never once that year did I see him smile.
I retain one vivid memory of Larry in action. I was sitting in the Laundromat near my apartment, reading Faulkner’s The Sound And The Fury while my clothes were in the washer. (For whatever reason, I remember with clarity of detail where I have read certain books: Ulysses in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland; The Brothers Karamazov in the break room of a Hunter’s Bookshop where I was employed in El Cajon, California; James Webb’s Fields Of Fire on an airplane bound for Hawaii; Anna Karenina in the upper room of Shakespeare and Company in Paris; and many others.)
At a table near the center of the laundry sat a young and fairly attractive demented woman. She was drawing with different pencils and pens on an enormous sheet of paper and talking to herself: “We’ll put the dogs here and the station here and then maybe mom will come to visit me again and the walls for the fort by the station and the airplane hanger for the Martians can go next to the barn….”
This crazy dialogue just went on and on. Her nonsense didn’t disturb me. She was certainly easier to follow than was The Sound And The Fury.
Then Larry came into the Laundromat. One of his jobs was to collect the money from the washers and dryers owned by his employer. Larry and I had met through a mutual friend at the Harvard Gardens Bar, and when he saw me reading the chair by the wall, he stopped to say hello. We were talking about his job when Larry suddenly swung round, glared at the woman, and yelled, “SHUT UP! SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
The lunatic woman jumped, as did I, and she looked at him and saw what was in his face and eyes and fell immediately silent.
“Now,” Terry said turning back to me, “Where was I?”
To be continued.....
Here are some of my professors from 1975--1976.
First, there was Kristin who lived two floors below my room on Joy Street. Kristin was a Maine girl who had grown up so poor that she and her siblings had eaten popcorn with milk for breakfast. I doubted the truth of this tale until I later read that in colonial times popcorn and milk was a common New England breakfast dish. Kristin had pale skin, bad teeth, and reddish hair that looked as if it had never experienced a brush. When I pull her up from my memories, I see her as a sort of chubby pixie, always ready with a kind word or smile, always, too, looking sleepy, as if she had just roused herself from a long nap. She was one of the sweetest people I met that year.
Kristin had in her possession a grocery store buggy, doubtless stolen, that she pulled onto Joy Street on appropriate evenings to go, as she put it, “trashing.” Several times I accompanied her on these expeditions. She’d rescue all sorts of things from the curb and garbage cans—broken lamps, battered furniture, children’s toys, and so on—and sell these items to junk stores in the neighborhood.
It was Kristin who introduced me to Anna, a plain woman with two small children. Anna worked, as Kristin joked, as “the call girl for the call girls,” and she took me one late evening to catch a glimpse of Anna at work at her worksite. We entered a house near the bottom of the hill, and there was Anna in a dark, small room, sitting behind a desk on which were some telephones, pens, and paper. Anna was a tall, quiet woman whom nature had left unadorned in the department of good looks. When a phone rang, Anna would answer, copy out some information, and hand the slip of paper to the man running the prostitutes, who would then disappear into another part of the house. Meanwhile, Anna’s toddlers ran around the room, playing with some broken toys. Between calls Kristin and Anna visited, the children amused themselves, the pimp sat sullenly in a chair in the corner, and I stood beside the desk feeling out of place and filled with wonderment at how I had strayed from my roots. After half an hour or so we left, and I never saw Anna again.
Then there was Larry. Fresh out of Walpole State Prison, where he had served time for the robbery of a jewelry store—he hadn’t used a gun, but only kept one hand concealed in a pocket—Larry had found work serving as a flunky to a man who owned several businesses on the Hill. Larry was short, about my size, stocky, and frog-faced. Never once that year did I see him smile.
I retain one vivid memory of Larry in action. I was sitting in the Laundromat near my apartment, reading Faulkner’s The Sound And The Fury while my clothes were in the washer. (For whatever reason, I remember with clarity of detail where I have read certain books: Ulysses in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland; The Brothers Karamazov in the break room of a Hunter’s Bookshop where I was employed in El Cajon, California; James Webb’s Fields Of Fire on an airplane bound for Hawaii; Anna Karenina in the upper room of Shakespeare and Company in Paris; and many others.)
At a table near the center of the laundry sat a young and fairly attractive demented woman. She was drawing with different pencils and pens on an enormous sheet of paper and talking to herself: “We’ll put the dogs here and the station here and then maybe mom will come to visit me again and the walls for the fort by the station and the airplane hanger for the Martians can go next to the barn….”
This crazy dialogue just went on and on. Her nonsense didn’t disturb me. She was certainly easier to follow than was The Sound And The Fury.
Then Larry came into the Laundromat. One of his jobs was to collect the money from the washers and dryers owned by his employer. Larry and I had met through a mutual friend at the Harvard Gardens Bar, and when he saw me reading the chair by the wall, he stopped to say hello. We were talking about his job when Larry suddenly swung round, glared at the woman, and yelled, “SHUT UP! SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
The lunatic woman jumped, as did I, and she looked at him and saw what was in his face and eyes and fell immediately silent.
“Now,” Terry said turning back to me, “Where was I?”
To be continued.....