HERBERT GOLD
635
imagination. The woman next door forbade her son to play with me. Later
he brought my brother and me upstairs, his mother not yet home, and
wanted to "wrestle" with us. He was bigger, he was a couple of years older,
he knew things we didn't know yet. When a sudden smell of punk occurred, a
bitterness in the air, like fireworks, or like sour herring, I realized that
something strange was happening, grabbed my younger brother, and
escaped. My brother and I never told anyone about this incident. We sensed
confusion in the matter for both Jack and Jack's mother. We learned about
sex later-what little we learned.
The police came regularly to our house to say there was a report of
loud talking. "Who, officer?" my father asked.
"Maybe it wasn't talking, maybe it's running the lawn mower on
Sunday?"
"This is Friday," my father said.
The cop looked around, grinning; shrugged; went away. We could see
Jack's mother stationed behind her curtains.
As I reached adolescence, I was no longer invited to birthday parties.
The same girls offered interesting and secret invitations. I was kissed and
pressed against the walls of homes I could not enter. In due course we
studied these matters together without any discussion-Donna and Pattie and
Maggie, a trembling wild creature whom I wanted to take to a dance but
couldn't. Her parents wouldn't permit it. But silent and greedily we could
share, after school, our books spilling from our arms, the smell of dead leaves
and punk rising about us in the mid-Western autumn.
The equation in those days was : Sex is the devil's work; the Jew is
the devil; therefore, if you want sex, you have to go to the devil. At
Lakewood High School, curious anatomists wondered if I had a hidden tail.
Maggie asked me to carry her books home again, then asked to see my foot.
Did I have five toes or only two?
I made friends among the other loners and oddballs. There were the
early drinkers, the ones who wrote poetry, despised their parents, had
secrets-those in the fighting crisis of adolescence. There weren't so many of
them in those times. My parents and name had handed me a ticket of
admission. I decided it wasn't really a disadvantage to be aJew. I still didn't
know what it was, however.
My father, who owned a food market, carried a ball peen hammer in
his back pocket. I loved to see the silvery forked glint sticking out of his
pants.
It
was for opening fruit crates and hitting his enemies.
The Black Legion, out of Jackson, Michigan, and William Dudley
Pelley's Silver Shirts, out of Lake Paranoia, America, and the German–
American Bund were popular allegiances. Bundles of their newspapers were
