The Last Holiday (7 page)

It may sound strange, but I didn’t look ahead. If I had, I might have realized we would get to the Civil War in American history. That was going to come up. But I swear it snuck up on me,
and the ramifications snuck up on the class. When we did get to the Civil War, it was like reviewing it from the loser’s locker room. I don’t know how many classes I’d had about
the Civil War up to that point, but none of them had ever been from a point of sympathy with the South. Okay, so now the South was the home team.

We landed on a page with a picture of a Black man in chains, a slave. It was as if nobody knew it was coming. Everyone froze for a minute. Then this one guy, Stevie, who was a real pain in the
ass, snickered. The teacher chastised him and took over again and we moved on.

I have come to the conclusion that “The Spirits” played a part in integrating Tigrett, in making it work so smoothly. I found out later that right after New Year’s Day the city
council wanted to make a deal. It was a secret that stayed that way until we were already in classes, leaving no chance for opposition to build. If they could integrate the schools quietly, without
confrontation, they could save money, avoid any bad publicity for the city, keep down the potential for rednecks to stir up trouble if the question had gotten into the news. The council had some
specifics when striking the deal with the NAACP lawyer: only junior high students, and Tigrett would be the “test school,” in part, I’m sure, because of its location, far from
Main Street. The council also wanted to go immediately, with as close to zero noise about it as possible.

I suppose they must have sat down and said, “Hey, it’s coming—like tomorrow morning, and judgment day, and color TVs you can afford,” and decided to get a jump on things.
I don’t want to prop up the Jackson City Council as societal visionaries, but their plan worked pretty smoothly. And it was a move that advanced the city’s economic potential a thousand
fold: it made clear that Jackson’s politicians knew the Civil War was over.

By the spring of 1962, as eighth grade at Tigrett finished up, the bulldozers and road graders working on the new highway were just over the rise to the south, only a few miles
away. My uncle B.B. had organized a three-bedroom place for us to share with him in the Bronx. My mother and I were moving to New York.

The night before we were scheduled to leave Jackson, I went around to see some people one more time. I had known that we were going to New York for months, but held on to the hope that before we
left something would come up, something that could save me from the big city. I didn’t think about what had happened to my grandmother. I didn’t consider what my mother wanted, or what
my uncle had planned. Nobody else’s life mattered but mine. I realized what that was: it was terribly selfish.

I recognized my feelings for what they were. They were my sight, my hearing, my senses of taste and touch and smell, all together. They were my sum total and I didn’t look for this total
to give me answers because somehow no single sense of what was happening to my life could make sense of it all. Only when I asked myself how I felt could I relax as though I knew something. I knew
that “how do you feel?” wasn’t the right question to ask most people. It was rhetorical, irrelevant, a question as mundane as it was insignificant. To most people. But not to
me.

I could blame it on geography. The move to New York wasn’t something that my mother or anyone else was responsible for. We
had
to move. Somewhere. If not to New York then to some
other new somewhere. The “urban renewal” project that had been rumored for so long as part of Jackson’s future was literally just over the hill. From Church Street I could see the
bulldozers. For years it had been vaguely rustling offstage like a coming storm, but now it was starting to rain.

I didn’t want to go. But I came to the conclusion that there was no villain, no one who should be the target of my disappointment. I was just one of a thousand people from South Jackson
who had to get the hell out of the way. And I felt better about myself by the time the train reached Chicago, halfway to New York.

When we arrived in New York, we moved into the apartment my uncle had found on Hampden Place in the Bronx. Our street was only one block long, and just two blocks from the 207th Street Bridge
just over Fordham Road. It was within walking distance to Uncle B.’s job at the Social Security office on Jerome Avenue, and only a fifteen-minute walk from what would be my new junior high,
Creston. This new place seemed a long way from the place on 225th and White Plains Road where I had stayed a year and half before, after my grandmother’s funeral. Both addresses ended in
Bronx, NY, but that’s all I knew that connected them. My six weeks at the other place were not long enough for me to have lost my rookie status.

The apartment was different, for sure. It was pretty nice: it was on the second floor, which was the top floor, and my room had plenty of room for all my junk and a window that let in a nice
breeze. Our things from Jackson had arrived before us, and our black-and-white TV was in the living room. B.B. had a color set on a stand in his room. And I was allowed to watch his TV when he
wasn’t there. That ended up being a couple of nights a week and most weekend nights. But I didn’t feel comfortable, that’s all. I felt stupid and awkward around my uncle and at
the store and everywhere else. It was disquieting to move from a place where you knew every blade of grass to a place where there was no grass. And New Yorkers made you feel that you were beneath
or beyond their notice. I wondered whether I could or should adjust to that, to try to be like that, or just to try to ignore it. That’s what they did, just ignored everything.

Living with my uncle was a great benefit for my mother. She had someone she trusted and respected to share the expenses with and, once school started, someone to challenge me on what had become
a mediocre academic performance and question the silent hours I spent in my room writing short stories and essays. Beginning the year before, in eighth grade, I had wanted to write: stories, songs,
poems, essays, whatever. I read and I wrote. But what I read was not my homework or lessons. And what I wrote was primarily practice for myself. The time I spent on it was nonnegotiable.

My uncle’s position was that there was no excuse for my doing less than excellent work in my classes, getting less than the straight As all the Scotts had worked for and gotten. The fact
that I had finished Tigrett with no As was not up to his standards.

I remembered my mother reading to me from letters Uncle B. wrote us before the move, saying there were a lot of kids Scotty’s age in the neighborhood, that he saw them all the time. But
either they had all moved away in the meantime or B.B. had been drinking too much. There didn’t seem to be any young people around. After going out every morning and afternoon and not seeing
anybody younger than the hill that went up to the dead end at the end of our block, I was miserable.

I finally gave myself a break and started looking at the advantages. The main one seemed to be that I was returning to New York at the same time as National League baseball. The new New York
team was a collection of old New York players from old New York teams that made the new New York team’s games like an old timer’s day every day. I became a follower, if not exactly a
fanatic, of New York’s Metropolitans, who were slickly and quickly transformed, shortened, to the Mets, probably for back page headline convenience. There were thirteen letters in the long
way to say Mets, and sometimes the whole back page headline was thirteen letters. Something like
METS LOSE AGAIN
fit perfectly, and often, that first year. They were firmly
ensconced in last place by the time I got to the Bronx, with no dream of advancing. I gloried in headlines like
METS WIN 1 IN A ROW
.

Eventually, I also found the kids my age B.B. had sworn were around. There was a small fry, a kid about eight years old, who I met one day when I was out throwing my rubber ball against a wall.
I asked him if there were other kids around, any guys my age, any kids who played ball, real games. He said yes, yes, yes, and yes, and explained that games of stickball and softball were played at
“the Deegan.” He was too young to have left the block, though, so he couldn’t tell me how to get to the Deegan. He headed home.

But the kid, the first New Yorker I’d met who didn’t know it all and admitted it, returned a little while later with a thin white guy in his early twenties, known as Jimbo to his
friends on Hampden Place. Jimbo knew quite a bit. Within fifteen minutes I had told my mother, gone back out, and walked the five minutes it took to reach the Deegan.

My aunt Sammy went with me on my first day at Creston Junior High. I had been thoroughly saturated by then with stories that might best be titled “Tales of Creston.”

Well, needless to say, Creston was not fatal. Aside from the fact that it was all-male and that Aunt Sammy signed me up for a vocational program that had me taking metal shop and electrical
shop. My mother straightened that out, but her motivation to become a presence at my school wasn’t because of my lackadaisical absence of enthusiasm for the simple-minded remedial courses I
was taking during the first months at Creston. She went to Creston because I never had homework, and she finally saw a report card listing the courses I was in.

The day after the first report cards were issued, I was called down to the vice principal’s office. There was a murmur of respect for me when the announcement went out during after-lunch
homeroom. His office was responsible for discipline.

I had been there before. Related to his real job. When something went down at Creston, or if Creston students were suspected of something in the neighborhood, including a two or three block
section of Grand Concourse, reprimands or an investigation and a suspension might be in order. These punishments were administered by the vice principal. I had seen him after I engaged another
ninth grader in a slap fight.

This time he opened with his taking-charge voice.

“Heron,” he said, tossing out a soiled paper plate and hanging up his coat. “Your mother is a very impressive lady.”

He turned into my surprised expression with a shark’s grin and reclaimed his seat behind his desk.

I knew now this wasn’t about his usual business. He left me standing above him, a position he would never have conceded to an adversary or someone who was about to receive bad news or bad
treatment.

“She was here this morning,” he continued, opening a folder. “And she’s got an unusual complaint. She says remedial courses for you are nonsense, ya know? That you could
have handled remedial before you were enrolled. That the time you spend in the classroom probably feels like detention and that even in her worst nightmare she never saw you at a vocational high
school.”

He leaned back and appraised me, as if looking at me for the first time. Perhaps he really was. I looked at him for eye contact. He looked back at the folder.

“I went to talk to your teachers, ya see? Your mother wouldn’t have been the first one to suspect that her son was more Einstein than Frankenstein, ya know?”

He liked that one.

“More seminal than criminal,” I muttered, tiring of being played with. He started eyeing me suspiciously.

“Well, it was damn near unanimous, and they agreed with her. Ha! When I told her I’d look into it, she said she’d wait. Ha! I don’t think she necessarily believed me. So
I assured her I’d have a response today that you could give her when you got home. I was really beginning to think she knew what she was talking about. Her dress and bearing and vocabulary,
everything . . . anyway, there was a bit of a discussion with Mrs. Kaufman, and she said you’d have to work on your math.”

I nodded. He stood up, folding the folder on me as he rose.

“So we’re moving you to 9-2. Mrs. Kaufman will be your new homeroom teacher. Mrs. Katz has a note from me and everybody else will be informed by tomorrow and have their class rosters
amended.”

I nodded again, like Uncle Buddy.

“You can move now, but be sure to give my regards to your mother.”

He reached for my hand.

I also advanced my music career greatly at Creston. Actually I had no musical ambitions at the time. I liked to sit down at the piano and play the chords to “Ooo, Baby Baby” by
Smokey Robinson. But that was about it. Until I got a break. A little red-headed music teacher at Creston summoned me to her classroom one day. When I got there, she asked me to read to her, to
read a part of a script. I didn’t know it at all, but it turned out to be from
The Mikado
by Gilbert and Sullivan, and she had me read the lead role, Ko-Ko, the high executioner.