Knots in My Yo-Yo String Read online

This innocent era came to a close on a spring evening in my thirteenth year. I was riding my bike after dinner. There were several hours of daylight left. I was cruising Haws Avenue. I had just made my daily pass of Dovie Wilmoth’s house and had crossed Oak into the next block of Haws when I saw several classmates on the sidewalk in front of Kathy Heller’s house. They called. I stopped.

  Someone said, “Want to play?”

  “What?” I said.

  “Truth or consequences.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Kathy was there. And Judy Pierson. And Kenny Hengen. And another girl. Apparently they were short on boys.

  However the truth part of the game went, the consequence was always the same: You had to kiss a girl. I saw Kenny Hengen do it and thought, Uh-oh. He really got into it. Lip to lip, arms around the girl, eyes closed. The smooch seemed to go on for hours, right there on the sidewalk, broad daylight. I had stumbled into the big time. Was I ready for it? Why hadn’t I just waved and kept on pedaling? I wished I were still a cowboy. Nearby waited my Roadmaster like a patient, faithful horse.

  And then it was my turn. And there was blond-haired Kathy Heller, to whom I hardly ever spoke, with whom I had absolutely nothing in common, standing in front of me, taking off her glasses, awaiting her consequence. Had I time to practice, I might have rehearsed with a pillow or teddy bear. As it was, my lip-eye coordination was a trifle off. I did not so much kiss her as smash my face into hers. Our teeth met with an audible clack. But I stayed with it, and so did she. We disengaged teeth and backed off to lip depth and resumed blotting each other. I forgot to close my eyes, however, and to this day I have never had a better view of two eyebrows. When it seemed a respectable amount of time had elapsed, we stopped.

  The kiss itself could not have lasted more than three or four seconds, but in my ruminations later it went on for weeks. I soon began to imagine that I had been as bold, smooth, and masterful as Kenny Hengen. Once or twice I heard my Roadmaster whinny, but it was only in my dreams.

  When I Was

  King

  It was January. Snow lay heaped outside Stewart Junior High School in the far West End of Nonistown. Homerooms had dismissed an hour before, but dozens of ninth graders still milled about in the gym. Earlier that day we had voted for class officers, and we were waiting for the results.

  I had run for class president, along with Bill Steinberg, Susan Lane, and Bob Peterson. A teacher came in and made the announcement. I had won. My old pal Roger Adelman had won, too; he was vice president.

  I’m the second from the left, the newly elected class president of Stewart Junior High School. In the center is Roger Adelman, my friend and vice president.

  I was happy, but I was also uncomfortable. The three other presidential contenders were my friends. In sixth grade Bill Steinberg had finished second to me in the grade-school fifty-yard dash. Now he was my best friend, and here he was trailing me to the finish line again. I apologized to him, he congratulated me, and I think we both took solace in knowing that he was already student council president and that he had gotten faster than I and that if we were to race right then, he would win.

  Susan Lane and I had a close, nonkissing kind of relationship. We told each other things we told no one else. We appointed ourselves honorary brother and sister. We trusted each other. Once when a boy asked Susan for a date, she excused herself, hurried to a phone, and called me to ask if she should accept. When I won the election, I apologized to her, too.

  I would have apologized to Bob Peterson as well, but I couldn’t find him in the gym.

  Once I got the apologies out of the way, I was free to feel good—and not just about winning the election. It seems I had won something else, too.

  For several years I had admired Judy Pierson, mostly from afar. She had been in my grade at Hartranft, but she was always in the other class. She was at Kathy Heller’s house on the Day of the Clacking Teeth, but I don’t recall if I ever served as her consequence. In the early months of ninth grade, she had been Nick Salvatore’s girlfriend.

  But Nick Salvatore was not a basketball player—and I was—and that led to an interesting coincidence involving the “He’s Our Man” cheer. In this cheer, each of five cheerleaders was assigned the name of a starting player—in this case Roger Adelman, Louis Darden, Bob Hopple, Bruce Lindeman, or me. And so it went:

  “Roger! Roger!

  He’s our man!

  If he can’t do it!

  Louis can!”

  “Louis! Louis! … ” and so on to:

  “Team! Team!

  They’re our men!

  If they can’t do it!

  Nobody can!”

  To my delight, it was Judy Pierson who had my name. Often the cheer was performed while we were gathered around the coach during a time-out. To anyone looking at the huddling team, I must have appeared to be listening intently to the coach. As a matter of fact, I was listening to Judy Pierson, her lone girl voice echoing through the gym, calling my name:

  “Jerry! Jerry!”

  I’m here, I wanted to say. And then I was listening to the bleachers pick it up and roar back at her:

  “He’s our man!”

  And then I was peeking at her, at the arms churning, the orange and blue sweater:

  “If he can’t do it!”

  And I was wondering, was it just dumb luck that she got my name, or had she made sure?

  I had been hearing reports that since Christmas she had been less than happy with Nick Salvatore. And now I was in the gym not to play basketball but to accept congratulations for winning the election, and Nick Salvatore was nowhere in sight, and Judy Pierson was.

  I walked her home that day, down snow-flanked sidewalks. She wore red mittens. Somewhere along Marshall Street I asked if I could hold her hand. She said yes.

  There are few times in a life of which it can be said: Nothing is wrong. The twenty minutes that it took for Judy Pierson and me to walk from school to her house on Kohn Street was one such time. It was as if a train I had been riding had dropped me off at a solitary station, and the next train would not be along for twenty minutes. Gone were the shakes and sways and rattles of the old train, yet to come were the distant rumbling mysteries of the next. In the meantime there was only silence and stillness and a brisk cold white world and a girl who had taken off her mitten so that our hands could touch.

  I left her at her house on Kohn Street and walked on. As I approached 718 George Street, I saw that my old girlfriend Judy Brooks was making out on the porch with Bob Peterson. I hoped to get by unnoticed, but they took a breath and saw me.

  Bob, knowing that I had stayed after school for the election results, called, “Who won?”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him. “I don’t know,” I said. “I left early.”

  At home that day, no one but Lucky was there to greet me. She yelped and jumped. Her white-tipped tail wagged so violently that it took her entire hindquarters along with it. Lucky, then, became the first in the family to hear that I had been elected class president—and the only one to hear whom I had walked home with.

  Judy Pierson and I were now a couple. Each weekday morning one of us—whoever got there first (usually me)—waited for the other in front of Care’s Drug Store, on the corner of Kohn and Marshall, and we walked to school together.

  We went to school dances together. The dances were held on Friday nights, about one per month. We slow-danced and jitterbugged to 45-rpm records of Elvis Presley, Bill Haley and the Comets, and Ivory Joe Hunter singing “Since I Met You Baby.” Once, my parents were chaperons. I danced with my mother while Judy danced with my father. It was now these dances, not Sunday school, that I saved my best outfits for.

  On other Friday nights we walked downtown to the Norris movie theater, where we paid more attention to each other than to the screen. Across the street at the Garrick, Roy Rogers and Gene Autry still rode and yodeled through Saturday matinees, but I was no longer there.

  On Saturd
ay nights we walked up to Grace Lutheran Church on Haws Avenue. The church welcomed teenagers into a basement room for Ping-Pong, dancing, and refreshments. We danced to “Love Me Tender” by Elvis, “Gone” by Ferlin Husky, “Boppin’ the Blues” by Carl Perkins and “The Great Pretender” by the Platters. The latter was “our song.” If it came on while I was playing Ping-Pong with one of the guys, I put down my paddle and met Judy on the dance floor.

  As the months went by, Judy Pierson and I took our place with such other high-profile couples as Kenny Hengen and Honey Magen, Judy Brooks and Bob Peterson, Marianne Stagliano and Bobby Ruth. We were “serious.” We were “going steady.” To prove it, Judy wanted a ring.

  In Norristown in 1956, if you were going steady with a girl, you gave her a friendship ring. It was tradition. It was custom. Everybody did it. I balked. I told Judy that just because everybody else did it was no reason why we had to. In fact, I said, maybe it was a reason not to. Let’s be uniquely us, I said, not like the crowd.

  She didn’t pester, she didn’t pout. She didn’t have to. Little by little the mice of conformity nibbled away at my resolve, until one Saturday morning I visited the jewelry shop on Marshall Street and forked over two dollars for a silvery circle of tiny hearts. Judy was thrilled, and before long I forgot why I had balked in the first place.

  Hardly a day went by when Judy did not pass a note to me by way of a mutual friend. I’ve kept the notes in a large envelope all these years. They are written in pencil on low-grade classroom paper, sometimes lined. Most are folded repeatedly into small cubes. The most interesting exception unrolls like a narrow scroll and it measures exactly fifty-two and three-quarter inches long. Outer wrappings are addressed to JERRY SPINELLI ONLY or MR. SHORTSTOP. Warnings to would-be snoopers range from PRIVATE to DO NOT TOUCH UNLESS YOU ARE JERRY S. to HANDS OFF—THIS MEANS YOU!!!

  The letters close with stacks of P.S.’s and parades of exclamation points and flocks of X’s.

  If I ever wrote a note to Judy, I don’t remember. But I did write notes to myself. Each morning on a small piece of paper I jotted words to remind me of things to talk about as we walked to school. I slipped the paper into my left—or street-side—pocket. If the conversation dragged as we walked up Marshall, I would pull out my crib sheet and take a quick, well-disguised peek.

  As I reread Judy’s letters, I discover they are an excellent reminder of who and where I was those many years ago. Phrases, sentences stand out:

  Good luck this afternoon at the game.

  Almost every note says this or something like it. Games were serious business to me. I seldom got home before five o’clock, as I was always practicing after school. I shared quarterback duties with Bob Peterson on the football team, played guard in basketball, and, of course, shortstop in baseball. Ninth grade was my third year as a varsity starter, and though the curve ball still fooled me, I was as determined as ever to become a major leaguer.

  I hope you win so you are in a good mood at the movies tonight … If a bad mood is good for your hitting, I hope you have a bad mood, but please get out of it by tomorrow.

  As I said, games were serious business—but not as serious as I led Judy to believe. It is true that I felt that putting on a grim “game face” ennobled me and signified my participation in boy stuff that Judy could only cheer about. God forbid I should play at sports as playfully as Louis Darden. It is also true that whenever we lost a game, I turned sullen and sulky. The hidden truth, however, is that this behavior was largely a show—a show for the benefit of the anti-Louis forces within myself and a show to elicit sympathy and admiration from my girlfriend.

  I hope you are not still mad at me.

  At first I was surprised at how many of the letters contain this sentence. But now that I think back, I do recall at times being possessive and picky and unreasonable and immature. Which is to say, I remember being fifteen.

  Remember when you said you probably spoiled my plans about wearing high heels?

  Forty years later I don’t remember what I said, but I do remember my problems with high heels. Namely, they made her taller than I. How I envied six-foot two-inch Bobby Ruth, whose girlfriend Marianne Stagliano barely came up to his armpits. Happily for me, Judy was understanding, and if she owned a pair of high heels, she must have worn them only to church or in front of her mirror.

  But there was nothing she could do about a sidewalk. Each morning on our trek up Marshall Street we came to a half-block stretch where the sidewalk sloped down toward the street, so that Judy, walking on the inside, suddenly became taller than I. I hated that stretch, and until we got through it I tended to drift toward the curb and pick up the pace.

  Good luck in writing your speech!

  After forty years, I fished it out of an old cardboard box: the valedictory speech I wrote, memorized, and delivered at our graduation from Stewart Junior High School on June 19, 1956. I read it aloud with an eye on the clock. It took less than three minutes. I was pleased to note that the speech was not embarrassingly pompous or stiff and that it even contained a stab at humor.

  If people who were there remember anything at all about me that day, I am sure it is not my speech but my outfit: pink shirt with gold cuff links; jacket whose light brown speckled pattern has always made me think of the eggshell of a wild bird, perhaps quail or pheasant; white hanky peeking out of the upper pocket; cream-white linen pants; snow-white suede shoes—called bucks—with eraser-pink gum soles and heels. And the pièce de résistance, the tie: knit, square bottom, the perfect triangle of a double Windsor knot. The color was lemon yellow.

  I hope you like me in my green gown.

  Though it came last, graduation was not the climactic highlight of the year for me. That distinction belonged to the ninth-grade prom, which took place on a Saturday evening in May in the school gym.

  After much deliberation Judy had chosen green—the color of her eyes—for her gown. She looked like a bridesmaid, as did all the girls. The skirt of the gown featured layers of stiff crinoline which, when she sat down, spread out like the wings of a brooding swan. No one could sit within three feet of her.

  Judy’s note about plans for wearing high heels referred to her prom footwear. She was in a quandary. On the one hand, for this occasion of all occasions, she wanted to wear heels. A girl just did not go to a prom in flats. On the other hand, she did not want to violate the Spinelli Ceiling.

  One day she happily announced that she had solved the problem. She had bought a new pair of heels for the prom, but they were not high heels. They were low heels. I had not known there was such a thing. She assured me there was and that she would be wearing them and they would not make her too tall and I should just go and win whatever games I was playing and not worry about it. I worried anyway, and when the big night arrived and I in my white jacket and pink carnation went to call for her and nervously stood beside her in the vestibule of her home on 668 Kohn Street and saw that her green eyes were looking straight into mine, I discovered to my enormous relief that she was right.

  But neither the color of the gown nor the height of the heels was the thorniest problem that night. Straps were. Perhaps recalling some unpleasantness from a previous prom, the school administration had decreed that gowns could not be strapless. The totally bare shoulder was forbidden. The month of May crackled with the fury of ninth-grade girls. They protested and pleaded. They enlisted Miss Bosler, our class sponsor, in their cause. They petitioned the office. The office would not back down.

  Neither did the girls.

  In the golden balmy twilight of May 25, the girls and their dates paraded down a corridor of cheering parents and flashing light bulbs to the main entrance of the school, the only time students ever entered that door. Revealed were not only the girls in their finery but also the extent to which they had stretched the definition of the word “strap.” There were the merest strings and strands, filaments a spider would envy. One girl’s strap was, literally, a thread from a spool. Another girl used ey
eliner to paint straps on herself. There were dreamy wisps invisible from ten feet away, sugary confections that hovered above the bodice like a mist.

  Some girls, to be sure, Judy Pierson among them, wore conventional straps. But they did so willingly, for hidden in their purses were scissors. Long before Bill March’s band played “Goodnight, Sweetheart” for the last dance, every boy on the floor had a bare shoulder to nuzzle.

  I’m so happy you’re King, I always knew you would be. I’m glad I’m Queen with you.

  Judy Pierson and I did not merely go to the prom—we reigned. An hour into the evening all dancing came to a halt as the band struck up “Pomp and Circumstance.” The royal couple and the court gathered on the sideline and began doing the hesitation walk (step right foot, pause, step left foot, pause … ) along the midcourt line. The girls did it smoothly and naturally; the boys had had to practice, and still we kept messing up.

  Me and Judy Pierson on our thrones, reigning over the ninth-grade prom (1956). Judy Brooks, my girlfriend from grades 1 to 4, is second from the right.

  We marched to a raised platform that the prom committee had erected in the space between bleacher sections. Judy and I sat on our thrones while the court fanned out before us. Someone placed a wreath of flowers on Judy’s head and a cardboard crown on mine. Raymond Morris, who was in my homeroom, had made it. The ends of the crown were stapled in back to make a circle. The color was sky blue, with glitter sprinkled like stars throughout. While the gym resounded with applause and whistles, a photographer from the Times Herald planted himself before us. He did not bow to the king and queen, but he did take a picture, which appeared in the paper the following week.

  You will always be my King!!!

  Johnson Highway

  Lucky was dead.