As a solid B/C+ student, I often had to rely on other resources than my somewhat anemic brainpower. A brain transplant was out of the question and studying hard just did not seem to be a viable alternative — it was too hard and required too much concentration (as ADD had not yet been invented, even though many of us had it, none of us got credit for it). My mother tried hard, she went to the supermarket and purchased cheap encyclopedias — the first 3 were offered at something like 49 cents each, but at the letter D it skyrocketed to $.99 , thereby putting too much pressure on the Engel food budget. I was told to read the dictionary to enhance my knowledge and I soon memorized everything on the planet beginning with the letters A, but alas, was stumped once it went to D.
My recourse was simple: whenever possible, take advantage of the situation and bring on the survivor skills mastered at home. Let me provide several examples of my talents, or in some cases, lack thereof. One of our science teachers was an old man, Mr. Williams. He had to be in his 70s and while a very nice guy, did very little to safeguard against cheating. He had taught 3 separate classes to our grade and yet each had the same exam. So the early morning class would be the first to go; they would be severely disadvantaged as they would go in blind. In this class there was a kid, Rich, who was very smart and also very timid; he thus became bullied by Larry to provide all the answers to the test once he took it. He became very good over time in capturing the entire test by somehow writing the correct answers on a piece of paper. He was an A student so odds were he would always do well. Once he completed the test he would rendezvous with Larry in the cafeteria where about seven of us waited anxiously for the transfer of knowledge to take place. Here is where Larry’s sheer brilliance kicked in: he would set the Scantron answers to the alphabet song, so a typical test might be translated as such: B B B D C A B D B A A C C D. It was thus very easy to memorize in a short period of time all the right answers. And, if Rich got one wrong, well, we all got that same one wrong, but nothing was automated in the 1970s and I am sure Mr. Williams did not have an algorithm that detected such conniving skill. We would walk into class, having not studied at all (probably drinking at Babyman’s or Bryan Field instead), sit down and begin filling out the test without even looking at the questions by humming to ourselves B B D C A B… I would finish this hour-long test in three minutes and spend the rest of the time drawing pictures on my arm or something equally moronic. Then, with a flourish and a minute or two left, I’d walk up to turn it in, usually following this with something smart alec like “boy, that was brutal, glad I studied for a few days for that one, Mr. Williams.” He of course never caught on and if you were to ask me what a bunson burner was, or anything at all about the elements, – fuhgetaboutit!
Spanish was also tough for me. I had learned to curse quite proficiently while caddying, for many of the loopers there were Spanish drug addicts from New York City who could only conjugate a sentence by cursing. It was that, of course, that I picked up and to this date I can curse perfectly to my landscaper and cleaning ladies. However, Spanish class was tough and I used to have to write the word translations anywhere I could: my arm, my sneakers, on the desk. One midterm required many, many, many words and there was no way in the world I could get them all on my body, pus, my sneakers were already full of math and English cheating notes. My solution was a piece of paper that I wrote upwards of 50 words on. I had to shrink it down so it was small handwriting on a small piece of paper, but I got that task done instead of really trying to learn the material. I got into class, the teacher handed out the exams, and I deftly removed the paper from my pocket and put it between my legs. In doing that I dropped my pencil and had to reach down to the ground to grab in. Somehow, in doing that, the paper disappeared — I could not find it anywhere and could not get up to look for it. But then, a miracle happened: It turns out that by copying the translations to paper I had actually through osmosis somehow memorized much of them and got through the test pretty easily. I was super proud of myself for actually getting this foreign language. When I got up to hand in my paper, confident in my answers, a piece of paper fluttered out of my seat onto the ground.
“What is that? cried Mrs. Alvarez, and she went to my seat to discover the cheat sheet. “Cristobal, you are cheating, I am giving you an F.”
“But I didn’t even use it,” was my lame-o, pathetic retort as she took out a big red pen and put a huge F on it. This being a Cresskill class, the entire class started mocking me: “But I didn’t even use it” became my mantra for days after that. As finals neared Mrs. Alvarez pulled me aside and in a kind voice advised me that she would “pass me in Espanol Uno if I promised not to take Espanol Dos.” Knowing a good thing when I heard it I jumped on the opportunity and closed my career with a solid D+.
In gym, there was one grading system where you had to report on how many sit-ups, push-ups, chin-ups and other moves you did in 5 minutes. The teacher was the football coach, so not only did I skip that class to go to Jolly Nick’s off campus for hot dogs for lunch, but when he asked me the next day what I did I made up each number to be the class leader. I was given an A having never touched my toes, pushed my body up or even tried to do a chin-up or two.
Of course my no talents extended into construction: For one class assignment, we were partnered up with a classmate and told to build something for history class. Babyman could build anything: He was super handy and had an engineering brain, as opposed to mine, which yearned for the couch to watch “The 3 Stooges. Mike came up with an idea to build a boat, and sure enough, he was able to get a beautiful wooden boat made and painted. It was a small-scale boat, of course, probably a foot long, but a real replica of something out of the 1600s. He asked me to help and the best I could offer up was having my mother, an outstanding seamstress, make the sails. So she stitched some canvas into perfect replicas of those old squares and triangles, Mike attached them and proudly we walked into the class. The teacher was pretty impressed and asked us to prepare a presentation on how we built this together. Mike and I to this day laugh over what my line was: “My mother made the sails” was all I could offer.
Babyman (Mike) lived with his mom, Rite (short for Margarite) and two brothers, Greaterman and Homely Man (as we called them). Because his mom was divorced she was often out, either working as a cashier at the diner or on dates as part of some organization called Parents without Partners. Whenever we got wind of a PWP date, we would run over to Babyman’s and hang out. He had one of the first color televisions so it was a treat watch “I Dream of Jeannie” and other sitcoms in something other than black and white.
There are many classic stories about what happened here but I will limit this chapter to two of my favorites. The first centered on our friend George. At that point in our lives, “bare-mooning farts” had become quite the fad. The idea was simple: when you had to fart, you would whip down your pants and underwear and bounce it off a surface like a wooden bench, table or chair. The theory was that your gas would make a much louder noise when freed from the muffling that pants would provide. We took it to the next level by adding fire: you would roll over on your back, lift your legs, hold a match to your butt and release the fart. Once you light the fart it shoots out like a flamethrower, which is, of course, tremendous entertainment for any teenager in America. If you have never done this, I don’t recommend starting, as I witnessed several pairs of pants catching fire.
One day, as we were sitting around Mike’s living room, George cried, “I have to fart!” That incited multiple cries to “bare-moon it,” so George obliged but with a highly unique methodology.
“Bare-moon on wall,” George declared, and he pulled his pants down and farted against the living room wall. What was not expected, though, was that George actually crapped when he farted, so the wall now had his doody on it. Not missing a beat, George picked up the little schnauzer that they had, held it up to his mess and declared “The dog did it!” That quote still resonates today as the ultimate blaming for something you obviously had committed.
The second story is about guys doing the wrong thing. One night at Mike’s there was a gang of us, and one of the girls, Laura, (aka Bimbo) got extremely drunk on some blackberry brandy, our preferred poison as youths. She was mumbling and stumbling and bumping into things and just overall very messed up indeed. My friend Frog seized upon the opportunity by grabbing a tape recorder and interviewing her. I have that tape in my desk drawer to this day and I play it on days I’m feeling down, as it invariably cheers me up.
“Laura, how you doing? Laura, you’re on ‘Candid Camera,’” opened Frog.
Bimbo responded with a belch.
“Laura, how do you feel?” continued Frog. “You’re on television’s greatest show! Now the whole world can see you and how drunk you are!”
“Go to hell,” she replied.
“Me, why should I go to hell, I’m just interviewing your for ‘Candid Camera.’”
“I feel sick,” uttered Bimbo.
“Laura, you don’t look to good” replied Frog. “Are you ok?”
“Say something good” interjected Babyman.
“I feel sick, I feel really sick,” Bimbo said, burping between each word. “Can I have something to throw up in?”
“Laura, are you ok?” asked the ever-so-not-sensitive Frog, giggling like a hyena into the microphone as poor Bimbo’s head rolled back and forth like a bobble head doll.
“Pl-ee-e-a-se, I’m sick, please help me,” cried the not-so-lucid Bimbo.
“Don’t worry,” retorted Mr. Sensitive, Frog, continuing to goof on her. “In the morning, you’ll be ok and you’ll look back on this and laugh.”
With that, Bimbo let out a large burp began puking into the microphone and all over Frog.
Seven eight graders screamed in union. She continued to throw up on the floor, on herself, all over, so we brought her outside into the backyard and her friend instructed her to strip. Bimbo proceeded to take off all her clothes, and Frog dragged the green garden hose out from underneath the stairs and turned it on her like he was dousing a fire. Laura was half-comatose at this point and we had her surrounded in a semi-circle as Frog continued to hose the puke off. A few minutes into the cleansing we heard a car pull into the driveway: It was Babyman’s mom, back early from her date! RUN! Everybody took off in a different direction, leaving Bimbo lying in the grass, now sleeping, with the hose running next to her. As I dashed from his house towards the sanctuary of Bryan Field, I could hear his mother screaming “Boys, what’s going on here?” Babyman was left to booshee (bullshit) his way out of that mess alone while we all dashed home, laughing our heads off over what just happened.
Filed under: Cresskill language, Pranks, School | Tags: dodgeball, firecrackers, hasbrouck heights, murderball, sports
The stuff we did would put you on the news or in jail these days.
Our foreign exchange student from Chile, Pedro, lived with his hosting family a few blocks from my house. When his faux father was out, he would invite us over to watch the 8mm porn movies he had found in the house. My pal Larry, always the entrepreneur, hatched the bright idea of showing those movies in the school auditorium at lunch hour. Word was put out that for $1 there would be a special showing in the auditorium. Ticket sales were brisk and there were well over two dozen people, male and female, in the auditorium for some unknown viewing. Larry, as a Bronx born transplant, managed to force Richard Z., who worked on the AV team, to set up the projector and pull down the screen.
Each door had a guard assigned to it and if anyone who had not purchased a ticket tried to enter, a call would go out, the movie would be shut down and we would make up some BS excuse that we were having a planning meeting of some sort. Soon enough it was lights, camera, action – the movie clicked on and there it was on a large screen: bad pornography from the ‘60s. Pedro, having memorized each movie after seen it a million times at his house, went on to narrate in his broken, pigeon English. The place was rolling on the ground with laughter: there on a screen normally reserved for bad National Geographic movies was larger-than-life porn, all for the small cost of $1.
This being the class of ‘75, there also had to be some additional reckless behavior involved, so after the show Larry took out his pen knife and proceeded to cut up the backdrops that the classes before us had raised money to get for each year’s senior class play. Estimates for that cost were well over $1,500, and yet in a few quick swipes of Larry’s switch blade (didn’t every kid carry a blade back then?) the hard-earned backdrops were reduced to uselessness.
Sports accorded us many opportunities to show off our delinquency and criminal traits. I recall hearing that the wrestling team managers disassembled a weigh-in scale from an away event, put it in their bags and reassembled it in their house so they could have private weigh-ins. Seems like a lot of work to me.
My friend Pete and I played football and our arch rival was a team in Hasbrouck Heights. A season’s success or failure normally was based on how we did in the fall match up. As sophomores, we were not going to play in the big game, which was made even more important by the fact that both teams were tied for first and it was being played under the lights at their field. The tension in the locker room was palpable, but all Pete and I were fixated on was breaking into the other team’s lockers and stealing their jerseys. We had somehow gotten our hands on a crowbar and were pulling at the sides of the metal lockers with all our might. We were given an opportunity to focus on this crime when the team was gathered in another room, listening to the coach read a telegram from one of the players’ dads who had been hospitalized for a heart attack and was extolling the team to win one for him.
It was a page right out of Knute Rockne with the team in one room all emotional from this motivating deathbed telegram. For Pete and I it was an answer to a prayer: All their noise drowned out the banging and yanking of our metal-on-metal efforts. We managed to spring free a few jerseys which we stuffed into our bags for prosperity. Neither of us paid much attention to that game; instead we spent most of our bench time plotting our next away game’s theft.
I forget the kids’ names, but they moved into town while juniors in high school and were thus never quite accepted. I would hang with them now and then but they were also clearly not the sharpest tools in the shed. They lived in a house next to the woods, and a there was bank next to the woods. One of them had the great idea to tunnel into the bank and break in, as no one could see anything going on in those woods. Yeah, a great idea.
For a week we dug dutifully after school, Shawshank Redemption-style, extending our tunnel a few feet each day, getting closer and closer to our prize. No one ever gave any thought to the repercussions of trying to break into a bank, or how in the world we would get into it once we hit the foundation. That detail became painfully clear when our shovels first made contact with the foundation. Only at that point did we give any real thought to how we would break in – the best idea we had was to tape together a bunch of M80 firecrackers, tie a long fuse to them and put it up against the wall. Well, wouldn’t you know it, but once we set the M80s off, all it did was cause a cave-in and our bank robbing days had come to a stupid conclusion.
In the ‘70s in gym someone invented a game that took dodgeball to the next level. The class was divided into two groups. Five kickballs or dodgeballs were thrown into the middle of the floor and you grabbed as many as you could. The object of the game was simple: If you were hit by a ball, you were out; if someone caught a ball thrown at them the person throwing it was out. The game continued until one side was eliminated. Of course, there were some strong guys with good arms hurling these balls at people, and with five in play it was almost impossible to know where the next missile would be coming from. It was not unusual to get hit in the face or the head, and the game soon became known as “murderball.”
Our class, like most I guess, had an assortment of gay kids, spastics, and also, in the days prior to special need schools, kids that were just not mentally right. They became known collectively in gym as the “rees” (Cresskill language for “retards”). They would typically huddle in the very back during this dangerous game, fearful of being maimed by a streaking dodgeball. As they cowered in the back, often a cry would go up: “aim for the rees!” At this point, they knew they were in trouble. Most tried to avoid being hit, but lacking any athleticism whatsoever, they were normally pinged ferociously. It was all in good fun, though: In fact, the gym teacher himself would every now and then pick up a ball and hurl it at the rees. Why not?
Kudos to my friend Paul for reminding me of the time that (once again) during lunch, we found an underclassman whose name escapes me. Off to the side of the cafeteria they kept the huge rubber wrestling mats rolled up against the corner. Years later that practice would be banned for health reasons, but back in ‘75 there was no cause for sanitation alarm in spite of the fact that the entire team broke out with impetigo, a skin rash that was housed on those very same mats. Nice to know that they were where we ate as well. The kid, let’s call him John, was a grade or two behind us and in yet another act of ridiculous stupidity, we decided to roll him up in one of those mats. If that was not terrifying enough, we also mounted the matt onto a metal pole on wheels which was used to move the mats around the cafeteria. Once we locked him into this cave of darkness, we proceeded out of the cafeteria and down the hall to a class where a teacher with a good sense of humor was in the middle of teaching. Someone popped open the door and with a good push, we sent the mat housing John right into the middle of the class, shut the door and ran away shrieking with laughter. When they opened the mat they found a sweating, highly shaken John. The teacher took no action against anyone and instead deemed it good fun. Only in Cresskill!
Pete’s dad owned a Laundromat in town. Like every other cop he needed two jobs to make ends meet and this provided a cash flow of hundreds of quarters a day. Pete worked there many nights to keep an eye on the place, make change, etc., and it soon became a bit of a hangout for us on school nights. A frequent visitor was George, a kid a few years younger than us, quite small, who was always high on pot. He could also be quite annoying, so one night when he pushed the wrong button too many times with all of us there, we shoved him into one of the large dryers designed for heavy loads and loaded it with quarters. Sure enough it was strong enough to tumble him, and for two or three minutes we stood and watched the “load of George” spinning in the dryer with a crazy grin on his face. I have to assume something like that could cause suffocation or, at a minimum, some sort of harm to his body, but in our town it was simply more good fun watching a 15-year-old spin like a load of white linens. When he came out he proceeded to throw up, which made us even madder, but before we could stick him in the washing machine to clean him up, he had wisely left the grounds and did not return to the laundry mat after his “spin session.”
Cresskill Chronicles 