I’m uncertain whether I developed a fervid competitiveness through playing sports, and particularly pitching fastball, or whether I possessed the attitude all along and athletics merely gave it a publicly sanctioned platform. I do know that loving to win and hating to lose became an abiding mindset, later spilling over into political and environmental issues in which I became involved, my own little personalized reworking of the nineteenth-century maxim that “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.”
BY THE LATE fifties, my old heartthrob Patti Page was yesterday’s darling and the schmaltz of the Four Lads and the Mills Brothers had similarly faded. We kids were swept up in the breakout mania of rock ’n’ roll and its pantheon of stars—Bill Haley, Little Richard, the Big Bopper, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly. Parents everywhere were outraged. I can remember my mother being not the least bit pleased when she overheard me listening on my little transistor radio to Brian Hyland’s “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.” But even we kids were engaged in earnest debate over whether the “clean” songs of Pat Boone and Ricky Nelson weren’t preferable to the lewd wigglings of Elvis or the sinister leer of “the Killer,” Jerry Lee Lewis. A gang of disreputable greasers used to cruise our neighborhood in a big flip-top along the sides of which were painted leaping flames in tribute to Lewis’s scandalous “Great Balls of Fire.”
During these fraught times, walking to Saint Bernard’s school every day along Jane Street, I passed a little music store that had outside its front door a rack containing free handbills listing the Top 40 tunes for that week. The list was a matter of intense interest and considerable discussion among my classmates. Did the blatant teenage pathos of “Tell Laura I Love Her” justify its rating? Did Sheb Wooley’s “The Purple People Eater,” topping the charts in ’58, even deserve to be on the list, it was so spaz? I think the list was compiled by chu m Radio, Canada’s first Top 40 radio station, for whose disc jockeys we developed fierce attachments or dislikes. When the Canadian National Exhibition was on in the late summer, one of our great delights was to stand around an outdoor plaza watching the deejays spinning their discs in a glass booth.
More complicated by far were the sock hops occasionally attempted at school, dreary events at which many of the girls and very few of the boys were mad for dancing. Most of us boys plastered ourselves against the classroom walls and longed for the torment to end. Every once in a while there’d be a dance party at my friend Chuck Savoy’s house, where, despite the best efforts of Chubby Checker and Little Eva, I’d squirm against the twin terrors of dancing and the proximity of flirting girls. The music was in my head, not my body.
For many months a banjo sat on display in the front window of that little music store on Jane Street. Banjos contributed little, if anything, to the music we were all crazy for, and yet I was strongly drawn to this instrument. I looked at it longingly, imagined myself playing it. The price was some outrageous sum well beyond my paper route life savings, and anyway it was inconceivable that I would spend so much on what might prove to be a short-lived whim. I didn’t buy the banjo and eventually forgot about it. But over the years, every so often, I visualize that banjo again, wishing that I had bought it and mastered it, and wonder had I done so what curious avenues it might have led me down.
WANTING TO IMPRESS my friends and to be admired by pretty girls at school helped collapse the innocence of the early days and usher in a more complicated confusion of feelings. I had come to detest being poor, living in a poky house, and wearing cheap clothes. Going grocery shopping for my mum at the local a&p, where I’d often find bargains in the “reduced for quick sale” bin, no longer offered the excitement it once had. These frugalities didn’t seem clever anymore; they were niggardly and shameful. To have owned a car, any car, back in England would have made us gentry, but here our family car was an embarrassment. We started off with an old Ford panel van, my parents sitting up front and us kids perched on crates in the back. Our eventual elevation to the relative luxury of a secondhand 1955 Chevrolet four-door sedan was permanently undermined when my dad hand-painted its exterior by brush. To make matters worse, he began periodically removing the rear bench seat in order to haul home buckets of sewage he picked up at a city treatment plant. His compost heap may have benefited, but the lingering stench never left the car—or, I think, us after riding in the car—and my mother finally put an end to his ingenious scheme for free fertilizer. Parking outside church on Sunday morning amid the gleaming new coupes and panel wagons of the parish, he’d make a great show of locking the car’s doors, as though any self-respecting thief would lower himself to steal that crummy heap. I became embarrassed by my family and envied what looked like the cool, smooth sophistication of my classmates. Traitorously, I ignored the sacrifices my parents were making in order that we kids could have a better life and instead cringed at their idiosyncrasies of appearance and mannerism.
One occurrence typified that painful stage of distancing. Long after I’d outgrown my Wild West phase, I was given an unfortunate new set of clothes, claimed, I suspect, from Eaton’s Annex, a sinkhole at the downtown Eaton’s department store where merchandise returned by dissatisfied mail-order customers was disposed of at greatly reduced prices.
On this occasion the bargain in question was a matching pair of pants and shirt. The trousers were a vivid and thoroughly offensive green. They were several sizes too large for me (“You’ll grow into them” was a guiding principle for our wearables), and to make them fit I had to hitch the waistband up around my rib cage like Stan Laurel. The shirt—also far too large—hung down like a horse collar around my neck. It introduced a Western motif: it was a depressing gray from waist to armpits; then there was a clever bit of Gene Autry–style cowboy silver piping with Western curlicues, above which the shoulders and sleeves exploded with the same reptilian green as the trousers. Thus attired I looked, and felt, like Howdy Doody.
To complete my humiliation I was compelled by family obligation to wear this preposterous getup to Sunday Mass. Entering the church, removing my winter coat in the vestibule, walking up the center aisle past the families of my schoolmates, assuming our pew, I could feel a warm gush of prickly shame rising through my body and blushing crimson across my face. I was certain that my heartthrob of the moment was somewhere in the congregation, observing me, pathetic and ludicrous. How awful it seemed to me that morning, how awful it is to feel poor. Yes, poor little me. Oddly, an old photo of myself wearing that ridiculous outfit, and looking sufficiently pleased with both myself and it, now leads me to wonder whether I haven’t contrived a memory of emotional trauma about it for perverse revisionist reasons of my own.
MY FAITH NEVER wavered even as I entered the maelstrom of puberty, but now my prayers were frequently hijacked by the stirring of strange sensations in my body. Suddenly obsessed with the sweet mysteries of girls, but strictly forbidden to think “impure thoughts” about them, I took to praying for divine intervention toward arranging a successful love life. This attempt to cajole the divinities into giving me a hand represented a logical progression from all the times I’d fervently sought God’s assistance, or the Blessed Virgin’s intercession on my behalf, in getting top marks on a school exam or winning a race on field day. Ravished in my imagination by the charms of the Mouseketeer Annette Funicello, I prayed an entire novena—special prayers repeated in church on the afternoons of nine consecutive Fridays—to the Blessed Virgin Mary that she would contrive, however improbably, to have Annette and me meet, fall in love, and live happily ever after.
The novena apparently fell upon deaf ears, and shortly thereafter I lowered my sights from Annette to another lovely Italian girl named Mary, whose attainability was enhanced by the advantage of proximity: she lived in a large house on Jane Street, the very route we’d walk on our way to and from school. A year younger than me, with tawny skin and eyes that gazed from darkly wonderful depths, this exquisite creature moved like a dancer, with the ease of the truly beautiful. Far too shy to dare speak to her, I spoke instead to God about her. I sought His assistance in arranging things between Mary and myself. As with my Annette