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When I was young, my family and I lived in a small town in Massachusetts called Whitman. The town’s website says that “Whitman is a Boston bedroom community.” I would like to add to that description by saying that it’s the kind of bedroom community where you have a lot of nightmares. Whitman is awful. I mean, really terrible. Ugly and unappealing and stuck in its illustrious past, except it never had one.
Whitman’s history, what little there is of it, is deeply rooted in the shoemaking industry. At one time there were more than 20 shoe-related factories, unappealing brick buildings that have since been painstakingly converted into abandoned unappealing brick buildings. Even if Whitman were still turning out footwear, company stores and mass worker exploitation and belching smokestacks aren’t really the stuff of an Andrew Wyeth painting. However, I can’t deny that the town does have one legitimate claim to fame: chocolate chip cookies were invented there, at the Toll House Inn. Naturally, such a pastoral tale must have meant that the Inn would catch the eye of the undoubtedly grasping-at-straws Whitman Preservation Society, right? Wrong. The Toll House Inn has since been replaced by a Wendy’s and a Walgreen’s. Classy.
Perhaps the whole cookie scenario is the worst thing that ever happened to Whitman. You can be sure that if they hadn’t invented something here with an abundance of sugar and chocolate, someone would have stumbled onto anti-depressant production bandwagon as a viable replacement to sewing shoe leather. The Whitman market is unquestionably wide open, and we all know there is more money in Prozac than pastry. Oh well… I guess that’s just how the cookie crumbles.
Like it or not (and we all know where I stood), I was there. In 1972, when I was 13 years old, my family lived on Blake Street. The best thing about Blake Street was its proximity to the Carol Ann Donut Shop, which I visited every Saturday morning. I’d wait in line outside to buy a dozen piping hot donuts. Once back at home, I’d disappear into my room and lose myself in a frenzy of David Bowie music, cinnamon buns, and blueberry-filled crullers. How I was still stick skinny is one of the world’s unsolved mysteries.
We lived about five blocks from the Whitman Junior High School. This was NOT the best thing about Blake Street. I hated Junior High. Hated it. More than you did, probably. Really. In fact, I think I might have never survived except for two teachers. I loved them even more than the Carol Ann crullers. Well, practically.
As I sat there intently listening, captivated by the words and the music, I think it was the first time I realized that not all songs are happy like hot fudge sundaes with a cherry on top.
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Miss Coughlin not only taught music, she lived it. The summer between my seventh and eighth grades, Miss Coughlin–aka “Miss Music”, to those of us who personally knew her— traveled to Austria to sing opera with a symphony orchestra there. Extremely good-looking, in her early 30s, very slim with long zig-zaggy hair, she was an exotic bird flitting among the squat hippos who made up most of the Whitman Junior High School faculty. She certainly did not look like your typical opera singer, not that I had any fucking clue at the time about what an opera singer looked like. And it wasn’t solely the good-looking opera singer part that inspired my hero worship, anyway. It was finding out about James Taylor’s heroin addiction that did that. Yes, I realize that probably needs more explanation.
One day I walked into Miss Music’s class and blasting on the phonograph was James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James album. (Remember vinyl? I do!) Miss Music made us all listen carefully to the words of “Fire and Rain,” a song that was not yet ruined for any of us. In fact, none of us even knew it. But we didn’t listen straight through. Instead, she lifted the needle off the record after a twenty-second passage or so, to analyze the words and explain Mr. Taylor’s history of drug abuse, and how he committed himself to a psychiatric hospital, and the heartbreak he suffered over his friend’s suicide. This process turned a four-minute song into a forty-minute life-lesson. As I sat there intently listening, captivated by the words and the music, I think it was the first time I realized that not all songs are happy like hot fudge sundaes with a cherry on top, and that music meant something to the person who wrote it, and if you knew how to listen, it could mean something for you, too.
Of course, I went out and bought that album immediately and proceeded to memorize every song, word for word. Little did I know at the time that my future roommate in Provincetown would have James Taylor for her godfather. Talk about coming full circle. Thankfully, he was off the horse by then.
I wasn’t content to see Miss Music only in class, and apparently, she had taken an interest in me as well. At some point during that school year, on a Saturday, when all the other kids were playing kickball at the park, I ventured to Boston for a clandestine meeting with Miss Music and her boyfriend. I felt more important at that very moment than any of those future super-hero senior-class sports stars. I don’t clearly remember the journey in, but I know it involved a bus from the end of our street, and a commuter train after that. Shocking, I know, but back then a kid could take public transportation alone and not worry about the possibility of being abducted and enslaved in a sex camp. At any rate, I met up with Miss Music, and her boyfriend (whose name has been forever lost to me), and we went for a walk, with our end goal being a pizza at Boston’s famous Pizzeria Regina. We set off on foot from the T-station where we had met, strolling through Boston’s North End as Miss Music’s boyfriend (Mr. Music?), spouted the most interesting details about every narrow cobblestoned street and faded brick building and ancient, mossy cemetery we passed.
Pizzeria Regina marks the first time I encountered pizza with anything on it except cheese–the list of toppings was daunting. Sitting there in that landmark restaurant, with mystery menu choices in front of me like “Portobello” and “Prosciutto,” I couldn’t help but want my Grandmother Tonello there as a consult, so I could appear more worldly to Miss Music & Co. My Dad’s mother was first-generation Italian immigrant, and while I adored the delicacies she would prepare, I hadn’t paid all that much attention to what they were called. It was a long shot that I would have miraculously come off as a gourmand even if I could remember since, as it was, Miss Music had to show me how to fold the pizza slice in half so that I didn’t spatter olive oil everywhere. None of it mattered anyway. Sitting in the booth with these larger-than-life entities, tomato sauce dripping off my chin, talking about music (which I naively thought I was starting to know a lot about) and travel (theirs, not mine, I hadn’t been anywhere yet), I instinctively knew I had more in common with these free-thinking adults than I did with the kids playing kickball back in Whitman. And I’m pretty sure they knew that too. In fact, I’m almost positive that they might have surmised that I wasn’t going to have the easiest road through Whitman High, and wasn’t too likely to knock up my prom date either. I, on the other hand, was still clueless. But ignorance was surely sweet bliss that day, as I rode home on the Purple line train at dusk, stuffed full on conversation and cannolis, a Mike’s Pastry box clutched in one hand, and a contented smile on my drowsy face.
I loved those clothes. Deeply. I spent hours studying GQ magazine prior to making my next purchase.
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But as cool as Miss Music was, she had some serious competition in the form of the lovely Miss Leff. Naturally, Miss Leff taught art. (You never really hear about iconoclastic algebra teachers.) She looked like Cher; a celebrity whom I naturally—some might say instinctively–adored. She had the same lean frame and extremely long stick-straight dark hair, and her clothes were perfectly bohemian. And, as if that weren’t enough, she rolled into the teacher’s lot every day in her chartreuse-green Fiat Spider. She was, in my wide-eyed gaze anyway, “too cool for television.” She was also the driving force behind the famous Whitman Salt and Pepper Protest. What protest, you ask? Well…
At some point during that 7th-grade year, it was determined by us students that we needed salt and pepper shakers on the cafeteria tables. I’m not sure exactly why this became a point of contention. It wasn’t like any amount of seasoning of any kind was going to make our cafeteria food palatable. A chicken patty is a fucking chicken patty, right? Nonetheless, this was the cause we chose to trumpet. Over at the Superintendent of School’s office, it was determined that we did not need salt and pepper on the tables. Oh boy. This is when my fellow students and I learned the word “protest”, thanks to the loving direction of Miss Leff. Art class turned into poster-making time. One slogan that stands out in my memory is “It’s Our Cafeteria and It Should be Our Choice.” We organized a walk-out. Yes, we picketed for pepper. And yes, we emerged triumphant. Shakers all around. And so the seeds of civil disobedience had been sown.
Perhaps emboldened by our victory (in which I at least felt I had played a pivotal role), shortly after this, I started dressing unlike anyone else in my school. Well, except Miss Music and Miss Leff, but since I was a guy, I had to improvise accordingly. Plaid bell-bottoms, platform shoes, Naf-Naf shirts, big wooden necklaces, you name it. If it screamed the seventies, I either had it or coveted it.
Fortunately, due to my summer job surreptitiously hawking beer from a golf cart at my Dad’s country club, I had the finances to support my flights of fashion fancy. I loved those clothes. Deeply. I spent hours studying GQ magazine prior to making my next purchase. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just the clothes that were interesting me. The chiseled faces and broad shoulders of the models weren’t exactly tough on my eyes either. The reality is, I was acting like a straight guy who says he gets Playboy for the articles. But I hadn’t let myself think about that yet, at least not while I was awake.
With my first homophobia-inspired beating out of the way, it was time to start high school. No more Miss Music, or Miss Leff.
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I have a vivid memory of the day that it was determined by some of the other boys in my class that they were going to take their anger at GQ out on me. While I was still deep in denial about my sexuality, apparently that was not the case with my peers. They knew I wasn’t like them, and in the great tradition that started in Sodom and continues to this day, they were determined to beat the gay right out of me. Not that they worded it that way, but the subtext in “You freak, we are going to kick your ass after school” was fairly clear
Sitting at my desk, watching the clock approach 3 p.m., when we’d be set free from school for the day and I’d be sent to my first good face pounding, I sweated it out in my Naf-Naf shirt. The bell rang, sending me skidding into the hallway, where I struggled to figure out an escape route. Then I stalled, pretending to be getting things out of my locker while the rest of the kids shuffled out of the school. I stared into that open locker for ages, as though a solution could be found somewhere in its crumpled paper and gym socks. Then I leaned my forehead against the cold metal of the door for a while, eyes closed, mind racing. Finally, I opened them, only to find David Bowie staring at me alluringly–from the postcard of him I had scotch-taped up in my locker. He gave me comfort, but no advice. If only life were a teen movie. Anyway, lacking both a dream sequence and a better solution to my dilemma, I slipped out the back door of the school, skirted the parameter of the football field, and jogged into the adjacent cemetery, which I exited on the opposite side, two blocks from my home. This route offered me the ability to avoid the front grounds of the school where I assumed the style-haters were awaiting me, plus the added melodrama of trotting over graves while I contemplated my own mortality. My plan worked… until the following day. I will report that although the fists hurt, the “gay” that they were trying to eviscerate from my body remained firmly in place—which I guess is a victory of sorts.
With my first homophobia-inspired beating out of the way, it was time to start high school. No more Miss Music, or Miss Leff. How depressing. Also depressing was the fact that when I showed up for that first day, everyone was wearing bell-bottoms and Naf-Naf shirts. Unwilling to be associated with my plebeian peers, I immediately started wearing Lee pinwale cords, Sperry Topsiders, and Polo shirts. I didn’t like this school any better than the last one, but I was learning that there was more to life than winning the acceptance of people I didn’t like in the first place. So instead of sulking, I focused on the more important issues in my life, like decorating my bedroom.
I had a near-obsessive vision of it being covered, from floor to ceiling, in chocolate brown cork. I have no idea where this idea came from; perhaps it was foreshadowing my later years as a wino. At any rate, thanks to the Yellow Pages, I sourced a store a couple of towns away that stocked the cork I desired, and there was no stopping me. With the walls finally done, I was off and accessorizing. I discovered, in some catalogue, a lamp with a cork base, “the piece” that tied the entire room together.
On any given Saturday I could be found reveling in the glory of the cork room, my Carol Ann donuts-David Bowie listening day was now taken to a whole new level of sophistication.
Sundays also brought me otherworldly delights. My family would usually visit my maternal grandmother, Grandma Johnson, who lived in the next town over. Like my other grandmother, Grandma J. was a brilliant cook. She taught me how to make banana bread, Indian pudding, and baked Alaska. I adored this time in the kitchen with her and was an eager student. Along the back of her apartment was a large porch that she called the piazza. (At the time I had no clue that the word piazza was Italian. Had I known I would have asked her for an explanation, as she didn’t have one drop of Italian blood in her.) While waiting for our culinary creations to finish cooking, we often drank tea out on the “piazza” and watched the world (and mosquitoes) go by. Besides cooking, she loved to shop, and she helped fine-tune my innate abilities in that arena as well. She also taught me how to play cards and Bingo, and even how to gamble on the horses. I adored her.
In those years, where I was struggling to figure out how I fit in—if I fit in anywhere—having a friend like Grandma Johnson was invaluable. She spent time with me, talked with me, listened to me, taught me. But more than that, she accepted me. She never seemed overly concerned as to why her fourteen-year-old grandson loved cooking and shopping and playing cards and sipping tea, instead of football and…well, whatever else typical fourteen-year-old boys liked to do. Part of it was that she loved me unconditionally as her grandson–of that I am sure. But like everyone else that knew me then, I’m sure she wondered about me sometimes. I mean the cork room? Come on. But I’d bet everything I have that she also accepted me because she knew I wasn’t making a conscious decision to be different—that she already knew that this was simply who I was, take it or leave it. Oh yes, I would take that bet any day….dollars to donuts.
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Photo Credit: Getty Images
What a great story, Michael! That’s the whole point of living. To just be who you are, as you show up, and be accepted as such. There really isn’t anything more to it than that. And that means for everyone. All the rest that you do, or don’t for that matter, is ALL a result of the basic you, and what you’ve assimilated into the shaping of your. Great story.