In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood

How I Got To Cranbury – VI

The house my parents bought in Prospect Plains was quite small. In fact, it looks bigger from the outside than it really is. The front door opened right into the living room, and the stairs to the second story also ascended from the living room. Some prior owner had added a large mirror to the wall next to the stairs to increase the room's apparent size. I always tried to find a way to get into that other room that I could see in the mirror.

The house is still there, and it looks pretty much the same as it did then. (A map shows it was there in the late 19th century, for that matter.) There’s a tall hedge that partly hides the place from the road, a feature that also hasn’t changed. Somehow I think this appealed to my parents’ secretive nature.

I don’t have too many memories from that house, since we moved away when I was four years old. One of the most vivid is of a lamb my parents bought. Frugal is too good a word to use for them, as we’ve sometimes seen: they bought the lamb in part to keep the grass mowed – there was a large and somewhat overgrown back yard -- and partly to eat. Once, as a toddler, I was playing in that back yard, and suddenly I felt a big WHOMP on my rear end, and I went flying. It was the lamb, who had run up behind me and butted me. I got up, turned around, and saw the creature more or less laughing.

I must have been attached to the lamb, because I cried a great deal when it had to go off to the slaughterhouse. My parents thought my grief was funny. They repeated my tearful mispronunciations with great amusement.

How I Got To Cranbury – V

At some point while my father was working for Johnson & Johnson in Philadelphia, he left the company and went into some type of business for himself. This is an episode to which my parents referred very, very rarely, and I’ve been able to discover almost nothing about the circumstances – but my father left many jobs in his career. If I were to make a wild surmise, I would say that some number of the lost jobs involved either a problem with my father’s partying on company time, mixed with some key issue of non-performance, or his tendency toward secretiveness mixed with mendacity, which would result in him being caught in a non-trivial lie. This wasn’t the version we got at home, of course: the official explanation was always that he was too smart for the company.

So, having left J & J, my father made some kind of a try at going into business for himself, but this was ill-advised, since he had neither business sense nor a work ethic. Someone – quite possibly Phil Peck – may have made some type of effort to get my father reinstated at J & J, and this proved successful. So my father was back at J & J, but the job wasn’t in Philadelphia; it was at the company headquarters in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Cranbury is something of a bedroom suburb of New Brunswick. We moved to a tiny crossroads called Prospect Plains, just a couple of miles outside Cranbury, in about 1949.

My Latest Short Story Publication,

"The Project Team", is up at Holy Cuspidor.

How I Got To Cranbury – IV

My father was anything if not worldly, so another issue that puzzles me is why, right around the time Uncle Phil thought we should take a shower together, my parents sent me to the Saturday activities at the YMCA, which had by that time been known for generations as a gay haven. Among the activities was swimming, which, by YMCA custom (at least there) was done in the nude. Again, I thought there was something a little strange about this, since at the beach, at other swimming pools, at summer camp, guys wore swimming trunks. My parents were fully aware of the custom. Perhaps they thought it was good insofar as it saved money that might otherwise have gone to buying me a batching suit. (I will say that, unlike what Uncle Phil could get away with in our home, nobody ever bothered me at the YMCA.)

My father, when he was home, nevertheless severely castigated any developing mannerisms I might affect that struck him as in any way swish. Later, when I was in in high school, my father did all he could to screen my friends for incipient gayness. My recent reading of Laud Humphreys’s Tearoom Trade offers several insights into what may have been happening with him. Humphreys observed a certain segment of the population that engaged in rest-room fellatio as economically prosperous and highly conservative in their outward demeanor. They adopted what he called the “breastplate of righteousness” as a way to distract attention from any possibility that they were gay. Indeed, they tended to support crusades against “deviants” in their own communities, sometimes going as far as complaining that the police weren’t doing enough to stop the activities in public rest rooms in which they themselves participated!

And in fact, Humphreys suggests some segment of the tearoom population isn’t gay as we normally think of it: getting off in that manner is quick and cheap. Men who don’t get much sex with their wives can stop off in a public park on their way home from work and relieve their frustrations without cost or commitment. Their marriages remain intact, at least in outward form, and to many, this is all that matters. My father was a very secretive individual, and there’s no way to speak definitely about the things he kept secret. But I tend to think, after my reading of Humphreys, that gay sex and tearooms were among his extracurricular activities. A big factor that's led me to that conclusion was his tendency (when he was home) to find excuses to pop out of the house in late afternoons and evenings for half an hour or so. As a child, I always found something unconvincing about them, but could never put my finger on why, or what he might have been doing. You don't pop out to visit a girlfriend for half an hour, after all.

Whee!

It's been several months since I've had a piece accepted, and among the rejections, I've had a number of rather nasty comments. So this morning I got this in my e-mail:

Thank you for submitting to [redacted]. We've reviewed your story, "The Project Team," and decided to publish it in our next issue. Congratulations.

Note that this is a longer piece than we generally go for, but despite that we do not want to cut any portions or amend it in any way (good job, there). It has a straight-forward quality we don't see enough of around here and is thoroughly believable.

I'll post the link when the story is up, which should be very soon.

This is especially gratifying, since one zine told me, after reading this same story, not to bother sending them anything else.

How I Got To Cranbury – III

Phil Peck was gay. We can ask how much my father knew and when he knew it, but there can have been no question a decade or so later, when I was 11, and Peck, at our place on a visit, sat next to me on the sofa in the TV room, put his hand on my knee, and suggested we take a shower together. My father, my mother, and my father’s parents were all there when it happened, and nobody batted an eyelash, except, I guess, my father, who made a sort of shifty-eyed sidewise glance, but nothing else.

I couldn’t quite understand why someone would want to take a shower with someone else. The whole idea sounded creepy. Beyond that, I was trying to figure out how two people, even one of them a kid, could fit into the shower stall. (Maybe that was the point.) And it’s perhaps not fair to gay people to call Peck just a gay guy, since according to the sociologist Laud Humphreys, most gays abjure the underage as being trouble, big trouble, far more trouble than they’re worth. It’s probably more accurate to say that Peck’s hedonism simply knew no limits, and sexual orientation wasn’t much of a consideration.

At least I was able to dodge Uncle Phil for the rest of his visit, and he was never able to follow through on his intentions. But my father, if (we’ll allow) not necessarily anyone else in the room, fully understood what Uncle Phil was proposing: the guy wanted to molest his kid. Wouldn’t an appropriate reaction have been to say, as tactfully as possible, that I didn’t need to take a shower with Uncle Phil, ha ha, and maneuver Uncle Phil away from me (hand on knee) with all deliberate speed? And then perhaps wonder if Uncle Phil was the best sort of guy to have around the house, what with his designs on an 11 year old boy?

Nothing of the sort took place. As the years have passed, I’ve gone back now and then to the questions this raises.

How I Got To Cranbury – II

The early discharge from the Army Air Force got my father a head start on the postwar job hunt, and he landed a sales job in the Philadelphia area with Johnson & Johnson, the manufacturer of bandages and medical supplies. They had a sideline making industrial adhesives, and that’s what my father sold. The work was easy, not like selling insurance: as long as you showed up now and then, bought the purchasing agent lunch and gave him a fifth of scotch at Christmas, you got a cut of the business, which meant everyone was more or less comfortable and more or less happy. This was likely because the prices were fixed, of course, and one supplier was the same as another.

What made this situation unique for my father was his colleague Phil Peck. Peck, somewhat older, had lasted with a J & J sales territory through the war, and he broke my father in on the new job. Peck was no dummy. He saw how the game was being played, and he recognized that, as long as the suppliers were fixing prices and the buyers were handing out equal shares of the business, there was no sense in anyone busting his tail, especially when a lowly salesman couldn’t change the system.

So Peck showed my father how to meet his quota with maybe an hour’s work a day, and how to hide from the bosses the rest of the time in some conveniently out-of-the-way tavern. In an era before pagers and cell phones, this was an effective strategy. Peck was something of a party animal, but I doubt if he taught my father anything new in that department. The two of them hit it off. My father had been bringing him home since before I was born, and when I reached the age of lisping speech, I was taught to call him “Uncle Phil”, and I saw Uncle Phil regularly into my teens.

We may assume that the sort of partying my father and Uncle Phil engaged in when closeted at local taverns involved drinking, but precisely what else they did has puzzled me more as I’ve grown older, and that question goes to what may have opened fissures in my parents’ marriage at an early date.

How I Got To Cranbury – I

My parents met when my mother was in her senior year at Gettysburg College. She was a legacy – her father was Class of 1914. She was Phi Beta Kappa and a member of a prestigious sorority, which means she was able to manage the outward forms, but I suspect that that the sisters had had enough experience of hysteria and other strange behavior from my mother that there was a general understanding that she was, at least informally speaking, crazy. Nobody was going to attempt a diagnosis – the saner ones had at least that much sense of their own limitations – but there must have been a developing consensus that her behavior was not so much unpredictable as all too predictable in irritating ways.

It was only at their fiftieth wedding anniversary that my mother discussed the first time she saw my father. It was in late 1943 or early 1944. My father had enlisted in the Army Air Force in 1943, and the military had taken over parts of many college campuses for training. My father had been sent to Gettysburg for just this purpose. He was in a detachment of soldiers marching down the street in the rain outside my mother’s sorority. Suddenly, my mother, watching from the window, saw one of the soldiers slip and fall in the mud. She determined right then, she said 50 years later, that she would marry that soldier, who of course turned out to be my father. This to me speaks volumes.

The supply of eligible men had naturally been severely depleted by the war at Gettysburg and everywhere else. Snapshots from the period, as well as my father’s formal AAF photo, show a man darkly handsome in a dangerous kind of way. My mother was more conventionally pretty. The chronology suggests a whirlwind courtship, which would certainly have been something that suited my mother, since it would have allowed her to lay claim to my father before he’d gotten to know her very well. On the other hand, my father's college education was nothing more than a few chemistry courses at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. My mother's father was a high school principal, while my father's was a self-employed chemist whose business fortunes were precarious. He would be marrying up.

They were engaged by the time my father was sent from Gettysburg to training in Alabama, where he learned the job of top turret gunner in a B-24. At some point in the summer or fall of 1944, he was badly injured when the bomber in which he was flying crashed in a training accident. My mother and her parents rushed to the hospital. The accident, which placed my father in a sympathetic light, must have cemented everyone’s intentions, and in one way, it was a fortuitous development, since while the injury earned him his discharge from the AAF, he did fully recover. My parents got married in March, 1945 as my mother completed a master’s degree at Johns Hopkins. They moved to Chester, Pennsylvania.

Some Protestant denominations

have begun to adopt liturgical forms used by Catholics, Lutherans, and Anglicans in their communion services. This is now the case with the Presbyterian church in Cranbury, so that I found the responses and much of the wording in what would be called the “eucharistic prayer” very similar to what I normally see in an Episcopal church, if simplified.

Beyond that, the order of service that was handed out in Cranbury said that the communion would be administered by the congregation filing up to the altar, again somewhat more the way Catholics, Lutherans, and Anglicans receive it. However, once the service started, the pastor announced that there wouldn’t be a filing up to the altar after all; they were going to do it the conventional (for Presbyterians) way. This was probably wise, since a change of that magnitude would really take quite a bit of familiarization and rehearsal – though I’m not sure how the change got far enough to reach the order of service before it was countermanded.

Another issue that’s stayed in my mind is the presence on the altar of a separate, big, French-style loaf, which the celebrant broke at the point where a Catholic, Lutheran, or Anglican priest would elevate the host during the eucharistic prayer. The French loaf was broken, but not eaten at any point, so it amounted to little more than a prop. (The congregation, as I mentioned last time, ate little cubes of white bread that had been passed out by the ushers. I've got to say the French loaf seemed more appetizing.)

This, despite the similarities to the eucharistic service I’ve come to know as an adult, seems rather watery gruel. Not long ago I heard a rabbi describe the religious impulse as being like a prism that, when held to the light, produces a spectrum of color. The various religious traditions emphasize various parts of the spectrum, but the different colors all come from the same beam of light. As to the Presbyterian version of the communion service, well, I suppose so.

It reflects an effort to rationalize and de-mythologize, but as some theologians have pointed out, you can never really de-mythologize: you’re just substituting one myth (e.g., the myth of Freud as Prometheus) for another. Yet contemporary observers of the intellectual roots of the American revolution called them in some measure a Presbyterian phenomenon, and I suppose there is still an echo not just of the Reformation but of the Enlightenment here.

But I concluded from my visit that my childhood Presbyterianism came from the same place as my adult Anglo-Catholicism, and it's also a part of my makeup I may as well accept and acknowledge.