Cresskill Chronicles

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.”