12. Sleepover at Eric Bobrow’s House

I was often the first friend of the new kid. I was always interested when someone new came into class, and it was like the new kids sensed this interest and sought me out. Sooner or later we would end up talking, and then occasionally hanging out together on the playground during recess. I had my own recess friends, of course, and they didn’t necessarily go out of their way to join me when I was with one of these new kids. But they didn’t give me a hard time about it, either, even if it meant I missed playing our usual games of Kill the Guy with the Ball or baseball with a ball made from lunch-sandwich tinfoil. (We used an open hand for the bat.) They’d just come to expect it of me.

Most of the time these new kids went on to find real friends after a few weeks or months, kids who were more like them, and I went back to my old friends. The one exception was Eric Bobrow, who came to our class near the end of the school year, in April. This in itself was highly unusual and piqued my curiosity: why would someone start a new school so close to the end of the year? What did he think he was going to learn in just six or seven weeks, the last few of which in June everyone knew were just waste time when the teachers did things like have us draw pictures illustrating scenes from our favorite songs, or, worse, showed the movie “The Red Balloon” for the hundredth time? What was so important that this kid’s parents couldn’t wait a few more weeks until they moved?

When I talked to Eric Bobrow, as I true-to-form ended up doing a few days after he arrived, he told me the answer. His father was a high school principal, and was going to be starting a new job in the fall. Not at Monroe-Woodbury, the high school for our town, but at another high school, not too far away. They wanted him to come early so he could spend some time with the principal who was leaving. Eric had begged his parents to let him stay back where they lived in Massachusetts and live with a friend’s family while he finished the school year, but his father said no. His father, Eric told me, said that whatever they did, they did it as a family.

I thought that was kind of cool. I also thought it was cool that Eric’s father was a high school principal. It was one of those jobs you never really thought about real people doing them.

Eric was a sort of nondescript kid, not athletic at all and not so great at school, either. I still ended up spending a lot of time with him at recess. He’d done a lot of traveling, and I thought that was unusual, to be only ten years old and have already been to London and Paris. I’d heard of these places, but I’d never known anyone who’d been to them, not even adults. Eric also knew a lot about the stars and planets, which interested me.

Mostly though what I liked about Eric Bobrow was he didn’t seem to care about anything. It didn’t bother him, being the new kid, it didn’t bother him that he didn’t have much to contribute during class and was totally useless at kickball. I couldn’t really get my mind around it. I cared so much.

My first sleepover was at Eric’s house. I arrived on a Friday just before dinner. My parents said their goodbyes, and I expected to go straight up to Eric’s room, check out his collection of monster magazines or Mads or whatever it was he collected. I just figured he collected something, like we all did.

Instead, his parents immediately made us all sit around the table. Eric had a brother, two years younger. He was there too. There were unlit candles on the table.
“This is called the Shabbat,” Eric’s mother said. “It’s a Jewish ceremony that we do on Friday nights. Jewish, that’s our religion.”

I knew this already. Eric had told me. It was no big deal.

“We’d like you to help light the candles,” Eric’s mother continued. “Would you like to do that?”

“Sure,” I said.

I was nervous. But Eric’s mother helped, struck the long match for me and held my hand steady as I touched the flare up to the candle wick.

I wasn’t crazy about the food, some kind of fish. I didn’t like fish much. But I forced myself to eat it, wanting to be a good guest, wanting to fit in. I did like the bread, which was shiny on the outside, and sweet. Challah, Eric’s mother called it.

Eric’s father was one of those adults who asked a lot of questions. I didn’t have much to say at first, but he kept after me: how did I like school? Which was my best subject? What did my father do for a living? What had my family done at this time last weekend?  I barely had time to chew my food for answering all the questions.

When Eric’s father got bored of asking me questions, he started with riddles and brain teasers. They were very hard, and I couldn’t get any of them, but I didn’t feel that bad because neither could Eric and his brother.

Eric’s mother cleared the table, and I thought I’d finally have a chance to go off alone with Eric but instead we had to sing songs. I wasn’t much for singing, but these Bobrows weren’t embarrassed at all about it, they just sang out around their kitchen table as though they were in the middle of a concert hall.

I would have figured they would sing Jewish songs, but it wasn’t anything like that. They sang songs like “You Are My Sunshine” and “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore.” I mostly just mouthed along and tried to smile. There was one song where you yelled “Noah, Noah” after every verse that I enjoyed.

“Okay,” Eric’s father said. “Game time!”

There was checkers, of course, and Chinese checkers, and they taught me a card game called Cribbage and a board game named Facts in Four. Everyone had to play every game against everyone else, we just took turns pairing off. I had always thought I was pretty good at games, and often won on the rare occasions we played games as a family at home, but against the Bobrows I was terrible. The only time I won was when I played against Eric’s little brother.

They didn’t have the TV on as we played, which would have been unheard of in my house. The silence made me uncomfortable. I told myself it was part of the reason I was doing so badly at the games. I couldn’t concentrate without the TV on.

We went up to bed way past my bedtime, at nearly eleven o’clock. I slept on the floor in the sleeping bag I’d brought, right next to Eric’s bed. I was so tired I fell right asleep without saying a word to Eric.

We had barely stumbled downstairs before Eric’s mother decided we should have a breakfast cookout. Eric’s father was already gone, she told us, he had some work to do at his new school. I was glad he wasn’t around, I was too tired to answer any more questions.

"How does that sound to you, Chris?” Eric’s mother asked. “Make a fire in backyard? Have a breakfast cookout?”

“Great,” I said.

It should have been fun, but it was just too strange. Going out on a Saturday morning, making a campfire in your backyard, it didn’t make any sense, it wasn’t what you were supposed to do. Why didn’t Eric’s parents seem able to leave us alone for five minutes? Did Eric really like this attentive a love? Would I, if I was their son?

Then, in the middle of the breakfast cookout, Eric’s mother finally did leave us alone. We had run out of eggs, and she went inside to get some more.

We were all silent, Eric and Eric’s brother and me. I couldn’t think of a thing to say to Eric, although he’d always been easy to talk with while we were at school.

There was a pail of water next to the fire. It had been one of the first things Eric’s mother did when we came outside, fill the pail from the garden hose. “Always best to be safe,” she said.

“You should pour that water on the fire,” I said to Eric’s brother.

“No, don’t,” Eric said. “I’m still hungry. I want to cook some more eggs.”

I ignored him. “Go ahead,” I said to Eric’s brother. “It’ll be fun. There will be sparks.”

So he did it. He did it because I asked him to.

Eric ran to the house, returning minutes later with mother. She looked angry. “Gregg, why did you put out the fire?”

Eric’s brother immediately began crying. “He told me to.” Gregg pointed to me.

“Did you tell him to put out the fire?” Eric’s mother demanded.

“I was just kidding,” I said. “I didn’t think he really would.”

I was lying. Eric’s mother looked like she knew I was lying.

She comforted Gregg. She told him that it wasn’t his fault, Chris had just been teasing, it was okay. She told Eric she would make him some toast inside. Every word made me feel uncomfortable, but it was an uncomfortable I knew, recognized. I’m sure my parents, when they came to pick me up an hour later, must have thought the reason I was so glad to see them was because I’d missed them.

11. Death of the Vampire

It started with a full-page advertisement I happened to see in a Daily News my father brought home. Korvettes was offering a full sound movie-making package for $100. You got a movie camera, you got a microphone, you even got a projector so you could watch what you created. The ad made the package look beautiful: the equipment was black, and came in a case you could take around with you to location shoots.
I saw this ad and immediately started thinking making my own movies. I had begun writing science fiction and horror stories, and there were a couple of those I thought would make excellent films. I could see them in my head, these short films of mine, almost as if they were finished.

“We already have a camera,” my father said, when I asked him to buy this package from Korvettes.

The camera he was about was an old silver thing I remembered from Christmas mornings when I was younger, my father pointing it at us as we gazed over our always too lavish assortment of gifts. We hadn’t used it in a while. We’d fallen out of the habit of making home movies. We didn’t even take that many photographs anymore.

“That camera doesn’t work,” I answered.

“Of course it does.”

“It doesn’t have sound.”

“Start off with that one. If you think you need sound after making a few movies, we can discuss it.”

I tried a few more times to convince him, and even went behind his back to my mother, but she agreed that I should try making a few movies with the camera we had and then maybe we could buy something better.

This surprised me. My mother usually got behind whatever wildly ambitious idea I came up with, especially if it was creative.

It was fine, though. It just made me want to make a better movie. When people found out I’d shot my film using some ancient1950s camera, I told myself, they’d be even more impressed.

The movie I decided to make was a vampire movie. I loved vampires. Dracula was probably my favorite movie of all time: the old Dracula, the one with Bela Lugosi. That whole beginning part, in Dracula’s castle, I watched that every time it was on Creature Feature, reciting along with the dialogue.  “I never drink…wine.”
My movie was called Death of a Vampire. It starts with a title card, describing how the vampire must return each morning to his native soil for rest. There’s a cut to the sun coming up. I managed this effect by making a sun out of cardboard, tying a string to it, and then slowly pulling it up the wall in our living room.

Another title card appears, introducing two vampire hunters brave enough to attempt to rid the world of this evil menace. Cut to: my mother and brother, as the vampire hunters. They are wearing dark clothing, to stay unseen under the cover of night. They creep slowly across the living room, and then recoil in horror at the sight of—the vampire!

Me, of course. Lying on a cot we used when we went camping. Cape, black pants, black shoes, a white shirt. Hair slicked back, white make-up on my face, and from my fangs two trickles of blood. My eyes closed: resting, in my native soil.

It had been a hard decision for me to act in the movie, since I really wanted to be the director. But I couldn’t see either my father or brother as Dracula. I was just so much more right for the part. I’d even already gone around as Dracula the previous Halloween. I made sure my father, behind the camera, knew exactly what I wanted for each shot.

The vampire hunters kneel on the ground and lay out their tools, a wooden stake and a rock. I wasn’t able to find a rock the right size, so they were using a whiffle ball instead. I told my mother and brother to try to put their whole hand around it whenever it was on screen, so it would look more like a rock.

The vampire hunters are preparing to drive the stake through the vampire’s heart when, shockingly, the vampire rises! He licks his lips, tastes the blood on them, looks wildly around for who has disturbed his rest. Spotting the vampire hunters, his eyes sparkle: he will have another feeding tonight.

Fear animates the faces of the vampire hunters as the vampire approaches (I’d coached my mother and brother on portraying fear), but then one vampire hunter produces a cross. The vampire shields his eyes with his cape. The vampire hunters move slowly forward, the cross in front of them. The vampire backs away, until he is once again lying on the cot that serves as his coffin.

One vampire hunter produces the wooden stake, holds it to the chest of the now-prone vampire. Takes the stone and strikes down on the stake, plunging it into the vampire’s heart.

The next effect I’d read about in one of the monster magazines I collected. My father turned off the camera for a moment and I switched the full stake the vampire hunters had begun to strike with the rock to a stake I’d cut in half and painted red at the bottom. When I held it against my chest, it looked like the stake was stuck in my chest. I also put blood all over my white shirt, using a mixture of food coloring and Karo syrup.

Again, I’d gotten the recipe from one of my monster magazines.

The vampire hunters look on in awe as the vampire writhes with pain. Finally, there’s a cut back to the vampire’s grave…but the vampire is gone. Only dust (dirt I’d scraped up from the backyard, and after some pleading with my mother been allowed to bring inside) remains. One final shot of the awed vampire hunters, and then a final title card: “The King of Vampires…Is Dead.”

We had to send the film away to be developed. When it arrived back in the mail about three weeks later, it was torture to wait until my father came home to watch it, as my mother insisted. I thought we’d have to wait even longer, until my father had dinner (my mother, brother, and I ate before he got home), but he said no, no, put it on, he would warm something up later. He seemed as excited as the rest of us.

We had a movie screen somewhere in the attic, but no one wanted to wait for my father to go rummaging up there, so we just set the projector up pointing at one of the living room walls. My father threaded up the movie, and I leaned back on the couch to watch.

Right from the very first scene, I hated it. The title cards I’d created, with my explanation of the vampire’s native soil, were blurry and unreadable. Then, during the shot of the sun coming up, you could see my hand pulling on the string. “Dad,” I said angrily, “why did you do that?”

“I couldn’t tell when I was filming,” he said. “Shhh, I’m watching.”

It got worse. The vampire hunters: they didn’t look like vampire hunters, they looked like my mother and brother in raincoats. You could tell they were walking across the living room, you could see my father’s lounge chair in the background. You could tell the whiffle ball was a whiffle ball. My vampire make-up was pretty good, but the scene where I writhed to my death went on forever, and there were a few spots when I got overexcited and let the half stake lift up from my chest, totally ruining the effect. My mother and brother’s looks of fear and awe at the vampire turning to dust were completely fake.

I couldn’t wait for it to end. I wanted to crawl under the couch, run off to my room and slam the door. I felt embarrassed and angry. Not angry at my father, I knew it wasn’t his fault, although his shaky camerawork didn’t help. More at myself, for letting my expectations get so high, and for failing so miserably.

“Wow,” my father said, when it was over.

“Rewind,” my brother said. “I want to watch it again.”

“That was excellent, Chris,” my mother said. “That scene where the vampire jumps up, that was very scary.”
I thought they were just humoring me, trying to keep me from feeling bad. But as they watched it another time, and then another after that, it became clear they weren’t trying to make me feel better. They really did love it. They were getting a kick out of seeing themselves on screen, that was part of it. But they were also impressed.

 “I wonder if that sale at Korvettes is still going on,” my father said, as the movie was rewinding after the third showing.

I wanted to accept their praise with a smile, point to myself and laugh, like my mother and brother were doing. They were all enjoying this so much, and I wanted to enjoy it too. I couldn’t, though. How, I kept thinking, had what ended up on the screen gotten so far from what I’d been seeing in my head?

10. Jill Tierney's Dandruff

Jill Tierney had the worst case of dandruff I’d ever seen and was always asking me what I got on my math test. She was always asking everyone what they got on their math tests. As the teacher passed back the yellow papers with their smeared purple x’s and scribbled grades across the top to our fourth grade class Jill would bounce around the room saying to anyone who crossed her path, “What’d ya get?” “What’d ya get?”

We all knew Jill herself had straight one hundreds, although when asked she’d smile and answer, “I did all right.” She had straight blonde hair and a small mouth through which she’d call the boys “Shitheels” whenever they chased after her at lunchtime and stole her scarf. It was a curse word I’d never heard up until then. The thing about Jill was, she wasn’t just smart, she was popular. I’d watch in wonder as she galloped around the swingset after the boys, watch them slow down so she could catch them, watch her slow down so she wouldn’t.

I knew Jill and I were going to end up boyfriend and girlfriend. I just knew it. To begin with, there was the fact that we were the smartest girl and smartest boy in Mrs. Wortmann’s fourth grade class. My math tests too were straight one hundreds. And there were other signs. For example: when we trooped down in October to get our yearly photos taken, I was put in line behind Jill. The picture came back a few weeks later and there we were, our faces side by side on the bottom of the full class sheet, Jill with her blonde hair (the photos were in black and white, but when I looked at the picture I saw blonde) and me making a squinched face smile. We looked so good there together!

After Christmas break, Mrs. Wortmann rearranged the classroom tables into a boy-girl pattern, and of course put Jill and I side by side. I was still too shy and intimidated to say anything to her. Instead I took every chance to study the side of her face and structure of her inner ear. I found myself fascinated by the white specks of dandruff she’d leave behind on her desk when she went to the bathroom or to talk to our teacher Mrs. Wortmann during free times. I’d pick the flakes up on the tips of my finger, crumble them against my thumb.

Jill, I discovered from sitting next to her, left little to chance when it came to those one hundreds of hers. During tests she’d drop her pencil, dip to get it, and then on her way up lift the top of her desk. After a glance at her notes she’d return to furious writing. She caught me catching her at this one time, but her reaction wasn’t what I expected. “Pretty good, huh?” she asked. “Wortmann is so busy making sure nobody else cheats she never even bothers to look at us.”

Another time during a math test Mrs. Wortmann turned her back to us and Jill started jabbing into my arm with one of the gray number 2 pencils she always wrote with. (Her father worked for IBM and brought the pencils home for her.) When I looked up she started gesturing frantically at me to move my arm. She either wanted to look at my answers or copy them outright, I wasn’t sure. I gave her a serious look—I knew this wasn’t right, and besides, Mrs. Wortmann could turn around at any moment, she had to be more careful—but she smiled a tight smile (the most her lips would allow) and I melted. I moved not just my arm but my whole chair, so Jill could look on as much as she wanted, and continued to do the same for every test we had after that.

For the Valentine’s Party, I volunteered to bring in cupcakes. Usually I did something easy, napkins or paper cups, but Jill had already said she was bringing in cupcakes and I loved the way our names looked up there together on the blackboard, “Patty and Chris” underneath “Cupcakes.” But then I forgot to tell my mother about volunteering, and didn’t remember until eight o’clock of the night before the party. We had no batter, no icing, and I was near tears thinking about coming into class the next day without what I’d signed up for. So my mother grumbled and improvised and managed to make a batch of from-scratch cupcakes.

I appreciated the effort, but the cupcakes were not good. The icing was sugar and water with red food coloring, only not enough red food coloring, so they looked more pink. The insides were a grainy yellow. I brought the eleven of them that looked the best in a shoebox I placed next to the twine-wrapped cake boxes that held Jill’s two dozen cupcakes. Jill’s were devil’s food, with real red icing into which those Valentine heart candies had been pressed. “Be Mine.” “Sweetheart.”

People passed right over my cupcakes and went straight for Jill’s. I knew they were all laughing at me. If someone did take a cupcake of mine, they’d have one bite and put it down on a windowsill.

I knew it wasn’t Jill’s fault, exactly, but I couldn’t stop feeling like she had tried to show me up on purpose.

When Mrs. Wortmann put on our favorite record—“Rockin’ Robin”—and all the boys in the class went up to the front of the room to sing along, I sulked in back. No amount of Hi-C could cheer me up. In this nothing-left-to-lose frame of mind, I decided to accept my fate.

I cornered Jill near the food table, where she was throwing away her empty cupcake boxes. “Looks like you’re going to have to drag those home with you,” she said, pointing to the pathetic contents of my shoebox.

I nodded, took a deep breath. “Hey, Jill. Do you wanna be my girlfriend?”

She flipped her hair, considered it, perhaps weighed my lack of popularity against all the math test answers this would guarantee. “Nah, I don’t think so,” she finally said.

I grabbed one of my own cupcakes and dug in. They didn’t taste that bad. “Oh yeah?” I said. “Good.”

9. Michael McDonald

These were my heroes at the time: Robin Hood, Dracula, Batman, Willie Mays.

And Michael McDonald. Though of course I could never tell him that.

Here’s what he did one time: there was this show we always wanted to see called “Dark Shadows.” It was on in the afternoon after we came home from school, and was supposedly really spooky, ghosts and vampires and things. We often overheard the older kids talking about it the bus stop.

The problem was that neither Michael’s nor my mother would let us watch it. My mother, usually such a pushover about these things, said she was sorry, it wasn’t appropriate for kids. She wouldn’t discuss it.

It made us crazy that we couldn’t see this show. It was even on in the afternoon, not late at night when we were in bed. It didn’t seem fair.

So Michael found a way. When Jay Himmelson’s family went away on vacation during April break, one afternoon Michael snuck into their house and watched an episode on their TV. He said it was easy. They hadn’t even bothered to lock their back door. The TV was right there in basement. Michael admitted he’d felt a little nervous while he was doing it, had put the sound on the TV down so low he could barely hear it.
He said the show was a little scary but not as good as he thought it would be. He said there was one spooky vampire named Barnabas but he only came on for a few minutes here and there. You had to listen to a lot of talk to get any Barnabas.

Michael had been the lead in our class play the Christmas before. The play was called “Rudolph’s Big Night,” and it was about Rudolph having to take over for Santa on Christmas Eve and being helped out by the Nutcracker and the Grinch. Our teacher, Mrs. Miller, had written it. It was pretty corny, but it was fun to get out of our regular classes to work on it.

I played a toy clown, and didn’t have much to do except sit on the stage during certain scenes and pass a sponge ball back and forth with the other two toy clowns. Michael was Rudolph. He had a very elaborate full-body brown costume with floppy ears, which Mrs. Miller had made herself. Michael also had a lot of lines. I was amazed that he could memorize them all. He told me it really wasn’t so hard. He just listened to what the other actors said and that reminded him of what he had to say.

Michael got beaten up by Mark Carmody because of the play. Mark was only one grade above us but a big kid and occasional bully. He used to give us a hard time at the bus stop, steal our baseball caps during the warm months and mittens during the cold, throw them down near where the sewage pipes let out so they would stink for days and then make fun of us for smelling bad. We were too afraid to give them to our mothers to clean.

Mark was constantly threatening to beat us up but he never did until the time with Michael. He probably wouldn’t have hit Michael either if Michael hadn’t goaded him into it. We were coming home on the bus and Mark came up the aisle from where he sat in the back and said to Michael, “I can’t believe you’re in that play.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Michael asked.

“It’s just lame, that’s all.”

It was usual Mark Carmody bully-talk, and if Michael had just let it go I’m sure Mark Carmody would have walked away, returned to his friends in the back.

“You’re just jealous,” Michael said.

Mark Carmody laughed. “Of what?”

“Jealous,” Michael said again. “That’s all. Jealous.”

It went back and forth. Michael wouldn’t say anything else but the word “jealous,” over and over again. The more times Michael said it, the angrier Mark became. Maybe he was jealous, or maybe he just wasn’t used to anyone standing up to him.

“Shut up or I’m going to beat your ass when we get off this bus,” Mark said.

“Jealous, jealous,” Michael said, in a sing-song.

When the bust stopped at our stop, we tried to run. We were sitting up front, were off first. Still, Mark Carmody caught up with us. He grabbed Michael by the arm and flung him across the gravel.

Mark Carmody must have frightened himself. He took off in a run the other direction. I started running after him, then came back. Michael was sitting up in the gravel. He was sniffling, bleeding. But he was smiling, too. Smiling and crying at the same time.

I told my parents the whole story that night, and my mother and I went over the next afternoon and brought Michael some brownies. He hadn’t come to school that day. Michael was still dressed in his pajamas, and had bandages all over his face. He didn’t want to talk about getting beaten up so instead we played with his demolition cars, which were just old baby-ish cars that Michael had taped pieces of paper on so they looked like they had racing stripes. We stood on each side of his basement and hurled the cars as fast as we could at each other. It was a cool sound when they collided in the middle.

At the beginning of the summer, Michael went to the drive-in to see a movie called Green Berets and from then on his favorite game was Army Guy. In the woods, we’d make believe we were on patrol, searching for Germans. We had to be absolutely silent. Even the slightest sound of a twig breaking could give us away. Michael took the lead: he’d walk up a few steps ahead of me, peer around a tree. Gesture for me to follow him forward if the coast was clear. Or if he saw something, if he was acting like he saw something, he’d make another gesture and we’d both hit the ground, lie close and slow down our breathing. Pull leaves over ourselves for camouflage.

After a few minutes, Michael would slowly rise and give me the signal: the coast was clear. Time to move on. Time to save the world from bad guys.

Batman was great, Willie Mays was awesome. Best was having your hero right there.