Installment # 46

I think of the summer of 1961, from the time I graduated from high school until I joined the Army in early November, as “the lost summer.”  Perhaps more accurately, every weekend was a lost weekend, characterized by increasingly wild and irresponsible behavior, culminating in being arrested for disorderly conduct a few weeks before our scheduled induction.  The arrest actually threatened our eligibility for enlistment, but our attorney was able to convince the judge that we were “good kids” who would soon be off the streets, thanks to the Army.  Come to think of it, the judge probably figured that there could be no more appropriate punishment than three years in the Army!  We would probably make for better, more productive citizens after military service than after starting down the road to a life of periodic incarceration.  There is another major, pivotal game-changer in my life!

The arrest took place in New York City.  After a night of beer-drinking we decided to take the train into “The City,” as we called it.  About all I remember of the train ride is that it was crowded and we were standing holding on to those chrome poles and annoying the people around us with our rowdiness, when suddenly we all detected a very foul smell emanating from our midst. We all started blaming Dennis, of course.  As soon as things quieted down and all the passengers were staring in disgust, Dennis turned to a young woman nearby and said, just loud enough for all to hear, “Don’t worry, lady, everyone thinks I did it!”  That may be an old gag now, but hearing it for the first time, under such ideal circumstances, had me laughing so hard it was all I could do to hang on to the pole and stay on my feet until we reached the station we wanted. 

Anyway, compared to the other characters that the judge saw all day in downtown New York City, we probably did seem like “good kids.”  We were white; we were high school graduates; our parents were married (mine separated) and could afford their own attorney.  Dennis’ parents owned their own home on Long Island.  (We had lost ours).  The judge probably hadn’t seen such fine, upstanding citizens in months!  I can tell you that exposure to the penal system was enough to sober me up in more ways than one.  We were only in for one night overnight, not counting the night we were arrested and thrown in the drunk tank, but I never forgot the way I felt during the experience.

The processing in the morning, after very little sleep and a big hangover, was all about standing and waiting and being sneered at by the well-slept, fresh shaved police officers, then following orders regarding finger prints and mug shots.  They took our civilian clothes and gave us prison outfits.  The process was so dehumanizing and frightening.  To this day, I realize how devastating it is to have your freedoms taken away.  Later that morning I remember that we were transported via a police bus with bars on the windows, and as we neared the actual prison I saw my mother standing with Dennis’ parents.   She looked so devastated that her son had reached this low point, and I’m sure she partially blamed herself for not being able to hold her marriage together and provide a secure, loving home life.  At the time, I didn’t see it as her fault at all, and didn’t know how a parent would feel, but I felt like I had really disappointed her big time, and I couldn’t have felt worse about it or about myself.

From the bus, watching people freely walking the streets totally unaware, it seemed to me, how privileged they were to be free, I was mindful of two things: how rotten I felt and how I would never again take for granted the great privilege of being free.  Perhaps that has been one of the key sources of my “attitude of gratitude” that I seem to have had for as long as I can remember.  Some of the events of that summer of 1961 stand out in my mind thanks to my having told and retold the stories a few times, particularly at family gatherings when someone asks to hear them again.

Dennis was two years older than me, so would have been nineteen during our lost summer of 1961.  He had his own car (Oldsmobile convertible), and of course was old enough to buy beer and liquor in the state of New York in those days.  The other guys who hung out with us every weekend were fifteen and sixteen and still in high school.  There were basically four of us: Donald Canarelli (16), Tommy Porter (15), Dennis (Donovan-19) and me (17).  We were often joined by one or two others, but not on a consistent basis.  We would chip in for gas and beer, and Dennis would go in and get us a case or two of beer, depending on our plans.  By the way, we didn’t worry about keeping it cold.  We drank it warm or cold.  It didn’t matter to us.  It was of course illegal to buy beer for minors, and it was actually illegal to drive intoxicated, though you would never have known it that summer.

The Nassau County police were very lenient about that.  At the time, they called it DWI (driving while intoxicated).  I don’t know if they changed it to DUI (driving under the influence), which California has used since I first arrived here.  That does seem more appropriate, at least from a literal standpoint: It should be a lot easier to prove that the driver is under the influence of something (drugs, alcohol, etc.) than to prove the driver is intoxicated.  In fact, signs reading “Report Drunk Drivers” began appearing along the California freeways a few years ago, and when I see one I think, “How the heck am I supposed to know if one of the drivers in one of the cars around me is drunk?”  If he drives erratically, he may be what we are now calling a “distracted driver,” or he may be having a seizure of some kind.  Maybe he just dropped a lit cigarette into his crotch or something.  How do I know?   Now that I think about it, doesn’t the sign really mean, “Fink on each other. If you see someone driving strangely, call us”?

I remember Dennis’ father arguing one time that if you can smell onion on my breath, how do you know whether I have had one onion or ten?  This was in the days before sophisticated measuring equipment.  But many times that summer the police pulled Dennis over, chewed us out, tried to scare us, gave us warnings, and off we went. I am so thankful now that we never hurt anyone with our juvenile behavior.  We did bang the car up a bit, maybe hit a parked car and kept going.  More than once we pulled over and slept for a few hours and waited for daylight.

Eventually the police started to recognize and remember us from previous incidences.  One day we were at a stop light in downtown Farmingdale when we noticed a truck with a long, high bed hauling watermelons.  I’m not sure whether Dennis left the vehicle or just gave us the idea to jump out and get some watermelons.  In any case, some of us climbed up the side of the trailer, reached in over the top, and handed down watermelons to others on the ground.  I remember using the huge tire to climb up, knowing that if the light turned green at the wrong time, I could get seriously hurt.  It’s a good thing seventeen year olds are invincible (NOT).  When the light turned green we were back in the car with our haul, and Dennis drove around to the parking lot in back of the Bohack’s supermarket.  There we found ways to split open the watermelons and each get a few pieces that were so big it took two hands and a lot of messy slurping to eat them.

Leaving the car, we were walking up the sidewalk on Main Street, laughing and enjoying our ill-gotten goods, when we saw a policeman walking towards us.  He looked familiar from previous escapades.  I hurriedly whispered to Dennis and the others to act natural and innocent, mind our own business and walk passed him.  If he asked where we got the watermelons, we would just say we found them in the Bohack’s parking lot.  Surely the theft of the watermelons couldn’t have been reported to the police already.  (No cell phones in those days).  In fact, there were so many watermelons in the truck bed that the driver probably didn’t care about a few being taken by a group of kids.  So that was the plan: We would act perfectly normal, not draw attention to ourselves, and if asked, say we found them.  But ringleader Dennis could not resist.

The closer we got to the policeman the more obnoxious Dennis became in noisily slurping his watermelon and spitting/spraying the pits all over the place – sidewalk, gutter, store entrances, etc.  I was horrified.  Sure enough, the policeman stopped us and asked where we got the watermelons.  I almost passed out when Dennis said, “We stole them off the back of a truck!”  So back to the precinct station we went.  It was beginning to be a weekly ritual.  While the police were taking our names and threatening to call our parents, Dennis had one more prank up his sleeve.  He casually asked, “Did you ever get those guys who were up on the Bohack’s roof last week?”  The policeman came completely unglued, red-faced, stammering, fuming, etc.  Let me explain.

The prior weekend we were cruising around Farmingdale, drinking our beer and looking for something interesting to do, and we ended up in the Bohack’s parking lot.  After a while I noticed the drain pipes and fire escapes and thought it wouldn’t be impossible to climb up onto the roof.  I was the most athletic and I figured once I made it to the fire escape landing I could reach down and help the others get up.  (We would worry about getting down later).  Dennis was the least athletic among us and said he would stand guard out front.  Long story short, it proved to be more difficult than I had thought and we gave up the idea after 15-20 minutes, at which point we could not find Dennis.  His car was still there, but he was gone.

We ended up in a diner right next to the police precinct station, still wondering where Dennis was and how we were going to get home or wherever we were going next.  Presently, one of us noticed that a person in the police station was looking at us through the window and pointing at us wildly.  It was Dennis!  The police came over and got us and took us back to the station, sat us down across from Dennis and asked him questions like, “Did you see some boys walking around on the top of the Bohack’s roof earlier this evening?”, to which Dennis very seriously and soberly replied, “Yes I did, officer.”  Then it was, “Can you identify any of these boys as the ones you saw?” to which Dennis replied, “Yes, sir, I can.”  I could not believe my ears or eyes.  I was absolutely dumbfounded.  Then Dennis pointed straight at me and said, “One of them looked exactly like him, except he was real tall and had long blonde hair.”

It took a few seconds for me to realize what Dennis was doing, but the policeman got it right away, and was just livid.  Then I went into a laughing fit that I couldn’t stop.  Ultimately, the policeman recorded our names and addresses, parents’ names, etc, warned us that we were becoming known to them as troublemakers, tried to get us to understand the seriousness of taking up the police’s time, etc, and then let us go.  Now you can understand the reaction the following weekend when Dennis asked whether they ever got those boys off the Bohack’s roof.

There was a time when 4 or 5 of us were walking along an expressway – don’t know whether Dennis was too young to drive at that time, or what, but a policeman pulled over probably to tell us it was too dangerous to walk along the expressway or something.  After a little sass from us he decided to try to scare us by taking our names.  Tommy Porter, Donald Canarelli and I answered truthfully, but a guy named Johnny Jones was with us, and when he responded the policeman thought he was making up a fake name and became somewhat agitated and threatening.  When we finally convinced him that our friend’s name really was Johnny Jones, he then turned to Dennis.  Actually we all turned to Dennis, thinking that if he would just cooperate we could all be on our way.  But Dennis had had time to think, so he said, “My name is Yahoo Yavanovich!”  Once again, we about died, first of shock and disbelief, then uncontrollable laughter.  The policeman roughed Dennis up a little, mainly trying to scare him, got his real name, told us he might contact our parents, etc. This was before the watermelon and Bohack’s episodes, so our names did not yet ring a bell with him.

Dennis always seemed to start feeling the beer before the rest of us.  It just occurred to me that maybe, unbeknownst to us, he started drinking before he picked us up.  One time we had just arrived at the Jones Beach boardwalk, maybe one beer under our belts, when Dennis started acting up.  We were in one of those penny arcade places playing the ski shoot game, where you roll the wooden balls one at a time and try to land them in the highest-scoring circles.  Dennis started giggling and gathering all of the balls into his arms, yelled for us to follow and took off running down the boardwalk.  When the owner/operator started yelling, one of the uniformed security people started giving chase.  He was not a real policeman, but had authority and carried a baton.

We were about 100 feet ahead of him when Dennis stopped and started rolling the balls down the boardwalk at the security guard, who had to dodge and jump over them to continue his chase.  We were all scared and astonished that Dennis would get us in so much trouble right at the beginning of the evening.  I was thinking that we were going to make a mad dash for his car and get away, when Dennis instead jumped up onto the top rung of the boardwalk railing and shouted, “Don’t come any closer or I’ll jump!”  The drop was about six feet into soft sand, so was a completely farcical threat.  We had to laugh in spite of our fears.

The security guy was understandably furious and pulled Dennis down from the rail, ready to use his baton.  But Dennis knew when the gag was over and became polite and cooperative.  The guard whacked Dennis once and asked him how old he was, to which he responded truthfully, “19.”  I remember that we had no shirts on, and the guard turned to me, whacked me across the belly, and asked, “How old are you?”  I said “17” whereupon he whacked me across the belly again and asked again, “How old?” By that time I realized I needed to say “18”, which I did.  He then turned to Tommy Porter and asked the same question.  I guess Tommy was rattled, because he first said “16” which was false, but not false enough.  After his second question and second whack, he said “17” and after the third whack said “18.”  I think Canarelli had it figured out by then and said “18” as a first response.  He only got one whack.  We had red welts on our bellies that were still visible the next weekend.

We were gradually learning that the police and others in authority really didn’t want to get involved with fairly innocent teen-age pranks, and in those days, incredible as it may seem, underage drinking and driving was considered fairly innocent nonsense to be expected of teen-agers.  But that was on Long Island.  As noted, the New York City police were not amused by our antics.  As best I can recall, Dennis and I got arrested in the City for being our usual Long Island selves.  He did something to get a cop to chase him, and then ran through a restaurant and back into the kitchen.  A Nassau County policeman probably would have let it go, but the NYC policeman gave chase and got quite physical with Dennis.  I ran after Dennis and the cop, bursting into the kitchen in time for the cop to grab me by the front of my shirt and stick my head into a sink of soapy, dirty dishwater.  I came up sputtering, with a wet, ripped shirt, but sobering up enough to realize that I was messing with the wrong policeman.  Tommy Porter and Donald Canarelli had wisely stayed out of the action and were able to let our parents know that we had been arrested.

Dennis and I thought the policeman was really over reacting and that we would be released with a warning, once his sergeant got involved.  Guess not.  While in the drunk tank with a few dozen other sorry looking individuals, Dennis had us all laughing, which the police found quite irritating.  There was a cartoon character in those days called “Potsy, the Fat Cop.”  I remember that there was a policeman walking back and forth outside our cell who looked a lot like the cartoon character.  Of course, every time he walked by Dennis would yell in a high, falsetto voice, “Hey, Potsy!” I don’t know if the policeman understood the reference, but our fellow drunk tank buddies thought it was hilarious, which infuriated the cops.

Dennis had been our unofficial leader for several years.  Back when he was too young to drive or buy liquor he instigated pranks such as stealing outdoor light bulbs from houses before Christmas, and Christmas trees from backyards after Christmas.  In the latter case, the joke was on us, because people were only too happy to be rid of the trees.  Our thrill was jumping over their fences, taunting their dogs, throwing the trees over to our waiting buddies, and getting out before being bitten.  In the case of the light bulbs, the people were rather upset.  We again enjoyed the challenge of getting all the way up to their houses, unscrewing the bulbs, and getting away before they heard us and came after us.  There were some young husbands who could easily catch at least one of us and hurt us badly.  Once we had more light bulbs than we could carry we would start throwing them in the air to hear them make a loud pop on the sidewalk.  This led to throwing them against the sides of houses, and then at passing motorists.

Dennis used to like to get a chase going in an area that we knew how to run through in the dark, but that was treacherous for an uninitiated adult to try to traverse in the dark.  Sometimes they would go back and get a flashlight.  We would be well hidden by then, and Dennis would taunt the man with his high pitched, falsetto voice.  There was a stretch of woods in those days bordering Broadway Avenue in North Massapequa, between Kings Avenue and Queens Avenue.  Dennis showed us how to get two-three boys on each side of Broadway at night and pretend to be holding a rope that we were going to pull taught just as a car approached.  He knew that the driver would see the boys on both the right and left sides of the street in his headlights and think he knew what they were going to do, even though he could not see a rope on the road.  The driver would also know that one or more of us were going to get hurt if we were dumb enough to pull the rope taught and hold on.

At least once per night a driver would be angry enough and have the time to pull over and give chase.  We would let him see us run down one of the streets (Kings or Queens, depending on the direction he was coming from).  But before he reached the corner to follow, we would dart into the woods and run across to the other street.  As the poor guy peered into the woods looking for us, Dennis would yell things like, “Here we are” and “Catch us if you can” in his high-pitched falsetto voice, trying to get a chase.  Often the guy would go back up to Broadway and over to the other street (say from Queens to Kings) and we would run in the dark through the woods from Kings back to Queens, and the taunting would start again.  The man would eventually give up and drive away.  I still remember the sound of Dennis laughing while running, barely able to breathe, but having the time of his life.

We also crashed a lot of home parties that summer of 1961.  Even without the social media of today, word would spread about someone (usually a gullible girl) inviting a few friends over because her parents were going to be gone overnight.  By the end of the night there would be dozens of boys she had never heard of partying and taking irresponsible advantage of the situation, breaking things, making a mess, etc.  We would also, of course, be trying to take advantage of any girls we could.  They were usually not that gullible.  I remember Dennis asking me during a party one night how far I had gotten with one particular girl.  I told him what I had attempted and that she said, “I don’t go for too much foolin’ around,” to which he replied, “You should have asked ‘How much foolin’ around do you go for?’”  Isn’t it great that the younger guys can learn from the wisdom of the older guys?

One weekend the usual foursome, with Dennis driving of course, went out to visit my girl cousins at the Carter’s summer home in Shirley, a location commonly referred to as “out on the Island.”  Donald, Mom and I had stayed there during the summer of 1960, so this was a year later and a few months before we joined the Army.  We had our usual one or two cases of beer with us, drank some with cousins Sandy and Maggie, and left in late afternoon to go find something more inappropriate to do.  We were less than a mile from the summer home, driving up behind a young girl riding her bicycle, when we thought it would be fun for all four of us to start throwing the empties at her at the same time, creating a barrage of beer cans.  It was a funny sight.  It probably scared the girl, but surely didn’t hurt her.  Only a few minutes later, however, we were pulled over by a policeman.  I guess the girl’s father saw enough to have a description of the car and called the police.  We thought we were “in the middle of nowhere,” so to speak, and that there would be no repercussions.  Oops!

I guess in order to explain why we were in the area and to seem more harmless and innocent, I told the policeman about Aunt Alice and Uncle George’s summer home.  So he followed us back to their place to confirm and establish our identities, which we did.  I just thought it was harmless and funny, but Uncle George was very mad at us for being so stupid as to 1) do what we did, and 2) lead the police back to his house.  I didn’t see what the big deal was, but he said that when you are raising girls, you do not want police cars in front of your house.  The neighborhood would be all abuzz about what kind of trouble his kids may have gotten into.  Hmmm, I never thought of that.  But then we were on our way back toward Farmingdale and the prospect of having more juvenile fun.  I mention it only because it sticks out in my mind, and just for the record.  If I don’t write these things down, the stories will be lost forever – which admittedly would not change the course of history – but maybe somebody someday will find it interesting.