Chapter 4 – Broken Windows, Broken Dreams

The greatest souvenirs ever received in the history of souvenir-receiving were in our possession for just 45 minutes. Forty-five minutes.

We did not lose them. Or break them. And they were not stolen.

They were confiscated.

And with good reason.

When she was 18, our sister Linda went on a road trip to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, just a few hours from The Windy City. Lots of Chicagoans travel to Wisconsin to hike and fish and swim and ski. Linda and her friends went there to drink. Legally. Back then the drinking age was 21 in Illinois, but you only had to be 18 in Wisconsin to buy beer and wine.

Now I’m not saying alcohol clouded Linda’s judgment when she picked out those awesome souvenirs for her 6- and 8-year-old brothers, but after reading this story I can only conclude that she must have been drunk.

Has anyone ever brought you a cheap souvenir back from some exotic place like western Indiana or southern Wisconsin that made you stop and stare in utter disbelief?

Linda did. When she returned from Lake Geneva with those souvenirs for Charlie and me, it felt like double-Christmas-in-July. A matched pair of slingshots made from little Y-shaped branches with gnarly bark still on them. They had red rings and white rings painted on each tip, and each had a thick, black rubber band with a leather pocket from which one’s projectiles of choice could be projectiled.

They were sturdy and utilitarian – varnished to last a lifetime. Mom cringed when she saw them, but decided to trust us, and allowed us to take possession of the murderous weapons – thereby doubling the number of Klenn women who exercised exceedingly poor judgment that day.

Then Mom stepped in and took hold of both slingshots while Charlie and I clutched them to our chests, and told us to think long and hard before we went on any shooting sprees. Because if we ever, and she meant ever, used them to shoot each other, family members, friends, strangers, street lights, buses, cars, trucks or animals, they would be forfeited on the spot. And did we understand that? Of course we did not understand that, because all we heard was "slingshots … street lights … buses … animals," as we robotically nodded our heads up and down in faux agreement.

Seconds later, we were out in the alley behind our house, scanning the ground for ammo. I once heard of a place where people could pick diamonds up off the ground as if they were stones. Charlie and me picked up stones from the alley as if they were diamonds.

We lined up a dozen rocks apiece atop the lids of our 55-gallon, metal garbage cans, and paused to ponder the possibilities of the tremendous firepower we had assembled. Then we fell into focused action and began to launch rock after rock after rock over our neighbor’s garage roof and into the heavens, where our slingshots had obviously come from. We imagined our projectiles hurtling through space. Some crashing into other planets. Others being absorbed into the sun.

Where those rocks were actually going was straight through second-floor windows at the rear of our neighbor’s house. It’s hard to believe we never did hear the sound of all that breaking glass, since we later learned that 10 to 12 rocks had punctured two upstairs windows that we could never have hit in a million years had we been trying to. But the street noise must have muffled the sound of breaking glass, because if we had heard it, we would certainly have high-tailed it for parts unknown until the heat died down.

But just because our normal boy ears couldn’t hear the damage we were wreaking, that didn’t mean Mom ears couldn’t pick it up. And Mrs. Klenn swooped down on us like the wrath of the God of the Old Testament.

And just 45 minutes after we had received them, the greatest souvenirs in the history of souvenirs – our slingshots – were gone. True to her word, Mom confiscated them and stored them in the most secure place on Earth – in the top drawer of her bedroom bureau.

Mom probably realized we were idiots, however, I don’t think she had the slightest idea that our incredulity at the sentence she had meted out was sincere. But some primitive, motherly instinct prompted her to declare that when we were mature enough to handle them responsibly, our slingshots might be returned to us.

And forty-some years later, Charlie and I are certain they still reside in Mom’s top dresser drawer, wherever it might be, and we still hold out hope of one day becoming mature enough to get them back.

Chapter 3 – Triple Play

One hot summer night when I was 7 years old, I pulled the most hilarious stunt imaginable on my 5-year-old brother, Charlie. As dusk was approaching, I was perched in front of our black-and-white Zenith® when I heard Charlie calling my name: “JIM-mee! JIM-mee!”  he shouted.

            Recognizing the urgency in his voice I shut off the TV and hurried to hide in brother Bill’s closet where Charlie would never find me. I left the closet’s sliding door partway open to create a more inconspicuous hiding place (who would be foolish enough to hide in a closet and not completely shut the door?). And so I could hear Charlie shouting my name. And so it wouldn’t be too dark in there.

            “Jimmy! Where ARE you, Jimmy?” he cried as he made his way from room to room calling me. I kept perfectly still, barely breathing, and he kept calling my name, over and over and over for what seemed like a very long time. And every time he called my name I had to cover my mouth with my hand to suppress a wave of laughter.

            Finally, it got quiet and I decided Charlie had had enough, so I snuck out of the closet and drifted nonchalantly out into the backyard to celebrate the tremendous success of my epic practical joke. But Mom was alone in the yard.

            “Anybody looking for me?” I asked, the picture of innocence.

            Mom raised one eyebrow and looked up from her copy of Good Housekeeping®, eyeing me suspiciously. “Your brother was looking for you for I don’t know HOW long,” she said. Her response added immeasurably to my glee, and tried to force the silent laugh-buzz in my belly up through my esophagus and out my throat.

            “Phillip Cavelle took him up to the park for a swim. Charlie was looking for you so you could go with them.” Mom’s explanation hit me like a solid jab to the gut.

            My head began to spin and it was suddenly difficult to breathe. Why? Because Phillip had taken my naïve, little brother, who had done his level best to share his good fortune with me, for a night swim up at Gage Park.

            “But you gotta be SIXTEEN to get into night swim,” I whined with an idiotic grin fixed on my crestfallen face. “Charlie's only FIVE!”

            “Well,” Mom said, “Phillip said he knows the lifeguard.”

            One moment I’d been floating up in the heavens. The next minute I’d come crashing down to earth. Little did I know I was about to be hurled down into hell.

            “Which way did they go? Maybe I can catch them!” I pleaded.

            “You'll never catch them,” Mom said. “They went in Phillip’s new car.”

            “In the TRIUMPH®?!” I wailed, reeling from the right-cross that followed the gut-punch.

            My five-year-old brother was in Phillip Cavelle’s brand-new convertible at that very moment, racing down the streets of Chicago to a 16-and-over night-swim. Could it possibly get any worse?

            In a word, yes.

            “When will they be back?” I asked through my thickening throat.

            Then Mom delivered the knockout uppercut which felt like it had started from her shoe-tops: “Not for a while. When they’re done swimming they’re going to Gertie’s.” (Gertie’s was the premiere homemade ice cream parlor on the Southwest Side – maybe in the world.)

            “Phillip took Charlie night swimming … in the Triumph … and then they’re going to Gertie’s.” I said, trying to fathom why oh why my God had forsaken me.

            “Your brother tried to find you, but God only knows where you were and what you were doing.”

            Maybe Mom was on to something. Maybe only God knew I’d been hiding in that closet. And maybe The Man Upstairs had decided to teach me a lesson sooner than later, to be sure I’d make the connection. Maybe God had wanted me to think I had hit a home run, and then while I was doing my showboat slow-trot around the bases, Our Lord and Savior revealed that I had actually hit into a triple play. An unassisted triple-play. At least that’s what it felt like. And looking back, I guess I’d gotten exactly what I’d deserved. And come to think of it, I guess Charlie did, too.

Chapter 2 – Losing Tommy Bosworth's Lunch

In the 2nd grade, everybody brought their lunch in a brown paper bag. Unless they were unfortunate enough to have to carry a lunchbox. Carrying a lunchbox on Chicago's Southwest Side in the ‘60’s did not make a boy cool. It made a boy a target. The kind of target bullies could identify by lunchboxes, rubber boots, yellow rain slickers, mittens and gaudily patterned umbrellas bought by mothers with the best of intentions and the worst possible taste.

            In those days, instead of a refrigerator to put our lunches in at school, we had a cloakroom, which was kept at a constant 81º Fahrenheit year round. And whether stuffed into a Baggie® or wrapped in Cut-Rite® Waxed Paper, every lunch spent hours wilting in that warm, dark room, waiting. And waiting. Which meant that when some poor kid brought a sardine sandwich, before the end of the first period the whole class knew what they were having for lunch – pungent-smelling fish that were warmer dead than they had ever been during their lifetimes.

            Like so many other meaningful Catholic practices, lunchtime at St. Clare's revolved around a strict reward/punishment system:

†      Love thy neighbor as thyself – go straight to heaven.

†      Kill thy neighbor or covet thy neighbor’s mate or steal thy neighbor's 10-speed or dishonor thy parents or lie or cheat or call your brother a four-letter word you didn’t even know the meaning of – and go straight to hell, possibly with a lengthy layover in Limbo.

†      Finish every last morsel of your lunch – go straight to the playground.

†      Throw a single molecule of food away – spend eternity (the remainder of the period) in the classroom instead of on the playground.

            And with Sister Steve Austin on duty, it would be foolhardy to attempt to pitch even the tiniest portion. It would have been easier to escape from Alcatraz. Try to sneak part of a sandwich back into your lunch bag and her bionic eyes would see it. Hide your celery sticks in your pencil case and her bionic nose would smell them. And if her visual or olfactory sensors should ever malfunction, her bionic ears would be able to identify the entirety of your tuna casserole that you had crammed into your empty milk carton by the sound it made when it hit the bottom of the battleship-grey, metal waste can.

            On that day which shall live in gastrointestinal infamy, after wolfing down my PB&J, I waited anxiously for Tommy Bosworth to finish his lunch so we could hit the blacktop playground. His sadistic mother had prepared a taste of hell for him that day. I have seen huge stacks of flapjacks that were not piled so high as that baloney. Tommy worked halfway through his sandwich the way Andy Dufresne had worked his way through that Shawshank Prison sewer line – with painstaking disgust. But finally, Tommy could not bring himself to risk another bite, and resigned himself to a lunch period bereft of fresh air, sunshine, and laughter. Unfortunately, I was not smart enough or lucky enough to trust Tommy’s instincts and decided to take matters – and Tommy's sandwich – into my own hands. Like Paul Newman's fellow-prisoners in “Cool Hand Luke” I wanted to help Luke (Tommy) finish his plate of rice (baloney sandwich) so he wouldn't have to spend a night (lunch period) in the box (at his desk). With the resolve and focus of an Olympic athlete I dove into that processed meat-like substance, taking an enormous bite that hit the bottom of my belly like a diver hitting the bottom of an empty pool. I felt as if I had tried to swallow two of my own fingers. And as I raced for the bathroom the dive began to replay itself in reverse. The Flash could not have made it to the bathroom in time. I had just cleared the threshold of the classroom when a torrent of baloney cleared the threshold of my lips. Followed by P, B, and finally J.

            Most days were fairly uneventful for our 8th-grade hall monitor, but that day turned out to be an exceptional exception. Thanks to Tommy Bosworth's disgusting baloney sandwich, on that day our hall monitor would know a mop and a bucket, and a wailing and a gnashing of teeth.

Chapter 1 – Dave W.

            “You’re ugly.”

            Those are the first words Dave Wojtowicz ever said to me.

            “You’re ugly.”

            At least that’s the way I remember it. That day back in 1965 when we were first graders at St. Clare de Maltese Falcon (St. Clare de Montefalco, actually). His class was lined up in the basement hallway of “The Old Building,” waiting for Sister Charles Catherine to lead them back to their classroom after their bathroom break. And my class, with Sister Margaret Matthew in charge, was lined up to take our turn at the row of urinals that stretched from our noses to our toes.

            “You’re ugly.”

            An observation more likely borne from curiosity or boredom than aggression or malice. Or perhaps a litmus test to see if I was made of the stuff Dave expected from a potential  friend.

            “You’re ugly.”

            An unconventional ice-breaker. Not a typical opening gambit, but one that managed to propel a couple of bright, goofy, seven-year-olds into each other’s gravitational pulls, launching a friendship forged primarily by a shared odd sense of humor and a love of sports played in backyards, on playgrounds and in the streets.

            It would be the following school year before our friendship would take hold, the year we shared a homeroom for the first of seven consecutive years.

            Had Dave and I not wound up directly across from each other in the hall that morning long enough for him to lay down his "you're ugly" gauntlet, my life might have been very different. But we did and our friendship burned brightly for seven years, coming to an end as all good things must. But that particular fire was so powerful, the embers still glow 40-some years later.

            The seemingly indestructible bond between us would begin to break during our first year of high school. Not because of some inexplicable, adolescent explosion, but just because that’s what friendships sometimes do. And that’s too bad because it was such a great friendship.

            Even though I was only six years old, I was armed with an arsenal of snappy comebacks like “I'm rubber and you're glue”; “I know you are, but what am I”; and the classic “Oh yeah?” I opted instead for a more ruthless, less original retort. My “You're ugly, too” must have stung him like a serpent's tooth. I can only assume it was much worse than death-by-a-thousand cuts. And a year later, the appearance of Dave’s first pair of glasses would put to rest any questions he had had about my physiognomy.

            Who’d have guessed that the words “you're ugly,” with such obvious potential to cause pain could signal the start of an incredible friendship. And who could have guessed that six years later, the boy who said those words to me would step in to fight a battle that should have been mine, to take a nasty beating as I looked on, horrified – frozen and sniffling – as I wiped a bully’s hocker from my face.

            In spite of, or perhaps because of, the intensity of our friendship, we became fierce competitors on many of the battlefields of youth – in the classroom and in a variety of sports. But then what friendship’s ever been worth a damn that didn’t include a healthy dose of unhealthy competition?

Foreword

I only knew Mr. Michael Eckert for nine months. The nine months that coincided with my freshman year of high school that began in 1972 at St. Rita on Chicago's Southwest Side. He was my homeroom teacher – section 1F, Acient History – and then my Cross Country and Track Coach.

We had sophomoric nicknames like "Smokey" and "Mole" for a few teachers, but we called Mr. Eckert "Big Mike" – a nickname we always used respectfully. Okay, almost always.

He was my teacher and coach for just nine months, but in that short time he eclipsed every other coach I ever had, and he had a positive impact on me as a runner and as a man for decades. When my sophomore year started in the fall of '73, Mr. Eckert was surprisingly and inexplicably gone. Nobody seemed to know why, but there were two stories making the rounds. One was that he slapped a student for barging into his classroom and mouthing off, and that student's mother – a bigwig in the PTA – had engineered his ousting. The other rumor was that he'd been caught misusing track team funds.

I never believed either story. I'd seen plenty of St. Rita teachers smack students with paddles and open hands (some from a painfully close vantage point), but had never heard of Big Mike striking a kid. And based upon how thriftily our track team was outfitted (our uniforms were t-shirts and gym shorts, and our high-jumpers and pole-vaulters landed on a giant net filled with sponges), I don't believe there's any way Big Mike would have ever done anything to diminish our meager resources.

After he left, the cross country and track guys talked about Big Mike all the time, did impersonations of him, and offered new hypotheses about his disappearance.

It took me 35 years to find out what Big Mike did after he left St. Rita, and I shake my head every time I think about it. You can find out once I post the Afterword.

In the meantime, get ready to meet the marvelous collection of knuckleheads who inhabit the coming stories. Although I didn't meet Big Mike until 1972, this story must begin eight years earlier, in 1964. At the beginning.

Jim Klenn
October 28, 2012