All Prepped Up With Nowhere To Go
Becoming a preppy turned out to be pretty serious work, actually, and I guess I wasn’t exactly cut out for it nor do I feel like I ever really got the gist. My parents put a lot of effort into my indoctrination into preppydom after we moved to Bedford, New York from “To-le-da, O-hi-ya.”
I made a pretty pathetic first attempt at 7th grade at the monstrously huge local middle school in New York, after which it was pretty clear my parents needed to seek advice from their uber-upper crust acquaintances living the lifestyles of the rich and famous there. My Dad the Episcopalian minister was called there from Ohio, and we were not at all of that social or economic stratum. We were a lot more like the rest of the hired help: butlers, gardeners, maids, golf caddies, cooks and house cleaners.
I remember well a jingle that played on the radio in Toledo promoting the city. “T-O-L-E-D-O. T-O-L-E-D-O. The girls are the fairest, the boys are the squarest in T-O-L-E-D-O.” Strangely apt, especially when it came to me. But we had suddenly moved into the land of milk and honey. People like E.G Marshall, George C. Scott and Carl Icahn lived there. Martha Stuart lives there now, and Bill and Hillary Clinton live close by.
So, you get the picture; we were Ohio rubes seriously out of place, and hideously awkward is the kindest set of modifiers I can use to describe my gangly pubescent self at the time. We moved in the summer of 1963, and after my underwhelming performance at the middle school where I had the distinction of flunking French and Shop and getting mugged by miscreants, my parents thought it time to take action and put me on the preppy path.
The winter of 1964 the Beatles came to America and rock n’ roll was all there was as far as I was concerned. I was 13 and couldn’t get enough of it. My first actual stage appearance was in the middle school talent show that year. Three buddies and I molded tin foil on our heads, cut out guitars from cardboard and lip synched “Chapel of Love” by the Dixie Cups. We called ourselves “The Chrome Domes.” A spark in me that would not easily fade had been ignited.
But back to the preppy preparedness yarn. Note: everything my parents did to help me acclimate to a new environment was without question well intentioned and loving at its core. That disclaimer aside, these experiences often struck me as cataclysmically weird and I can safely say I mastered none, as my focus at that age was rock n’ roll, girls and getting some “kicks,” as they say in the sixties vernacular, pretty much in that order.
What the parents orchestrated seemed to be cascade (or maybe blizzard or avalanche) of engineered experiences facilitated by my parents’ well-placed friends and acquaintances, many of which served on Dad the Pastor’s vestry. First example: an excursion to Times Square to see “Goldfinger” with the bank president’s kid, who ended up being my arch nemesis at the country day school they transferred me to for my second attempt at grade 7 after a summer of being force-fed English and Math as preparation.
The “Goldfinger” experience was fascinating, in that we were late, stood in line around the block for tickets and sat in the extreme outside edge of the front row. But hey, James Bond is James Bond, and it began my intense adolescent interest in the sex-filled works of Ian Fleming, which I read voraciously at summer camp attempting to avoid as much human contact as possible.
The coolest interlude ever happened at spring break that year when my crazy sister took me with her on an international excursion to places like Beirut, Lebanon and Egypt. She worked for Pan American Airlines and could do these things. We flew first class, ate wild duck and drank champagne, and Thelonious Monk sat just a few rows ahead of us.
I read “Catcher in the Rye” for the first time on this trip, and the book and the travel really opened up my teenage eyes to a lot. It was an amazing experience that was actually the antithesis of the preppy prep, and it stuns me still that anyone would do that for me. Pretty freaking awesome.
But the summer camp thing was a big part of the preppy assimilation experience. It was the camp that all prep school bound boys went to and even had its own versions of secret societies, one of which used a scary “skull and bones” pin to identify its members. Masters of the universe? Well, there is a class of people that think they are, and I’ve witnessed it first hand.
And at camp I serendipitously bunked next to the guy whom I would room with for the better part of four years at prep school and who is my best friend today, over a half century later. He, too, didn’t quite fit the preppy mold, which is one very good reason why we got along so well and do to this day.
My parent’s surrogates for these learning experiences had their hands full with the scope: a snow skiing weekend in Vermont for a complete novice, golf and tennis lessons at “The Club”, hiking in the Berkshires with complete strangers who seemed to speak an English dialect I was unfamiliar with and dancing school, one of the few tasks I undertook that thankfully involved girls. Another very cool thing was football games at West Point with a guy they knew in med school in New York.
One experience that is forever etched in my brain is the day my Mom and I curiously went to lunch at this woman’s quite posh estate. She just happened to have a daughter my age I was unaware of, who was as equally put off at meeting me as I was at meeting her unannounced. What I soon came to realize was that I was brought to this event (corralled you might say) to give me the opportunity to learn to a ride a horse. As it turned out it was a miniature horse, but not a pony, and the girl person obliquely gave me the reins without instruction and motioned for me to jump on, without a saddle of course.
She tutored me briefly around the stable yard and left me to explore the pasture with the obviously ambivalent animal, which seemed to have a predetermined route in mind, thankfully in that I had no idea where I was or what I was doing.
All was going pretty well, it appeared, until I heard this bell begin to clang in the distance, at which point little horsey took off in a dead run toward the barn through a thicket of low trees apparently trying to dislodge me from the stranglehold I had with both arms and legs on its back. Feeding time, it turned out. The girl and the stable hand had a pretty good chortle at my expense. I was sore for a week and wasn’t able to walk too well.
But those were the types of things that were part of my preppy education. Trout fishing was another, at a private pond and stream that ran through the massive estate of an oligarch friend of my Dad’s. That was a once in a lifetime experience that forever cured my interest in fishing when the catch was unceremoniously bashed on the head to death and thrown in the cooler. Yeah, not for me.
Getting the clothes right was important, especially the shoes: only Bass Weejuns, brown but polished cordovan and never new, always to be resoled and re-heeled again and again for seemingly ever. But a coat and tie and khaki chinos became the norm at the country day school, and I actually did pretty well there, rising to the challenge by gaining a year in age on my classmates in repeating grade 7. My reward was the understanding that I was to then go to one of New England’s strictest boarding schools for four years. Neat!
As noted, I endured most of these experiences without complaint and generally with bemused interest and only occasional horror and the embarrassment at never knowing how to do something half as well as those with which I was doing it. So, I only casually embraced the indoctrination, and was never much better than slightly above average at any of the athletic pursuits. All the while this was going on, my real interest came back again and again to rock n’ roll.
My mates and I formed a band in 7th Grade.v2 and we called ourselves “The Slobs.” I could sing okay, and the others were passable on their instruments for their age and we thought of ourselves as a novelty act like Sam the Sham or the Coasters and did covers like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Poison Ivy” and “Secret Agent Man,” wearing silly hippy costumes and hats found at thrift stores.
Over the course of the next few years we got a little more serious, invested in some gear and had such glorious band names like “The Eleventh Commandment” and “The Fat Sound,” owing to the girth of our drummer Buzzy at the time. But the point here is that with all the preppy prep, it was always the music that was moving me. On one adventure to “The City” to go to “The Village” we inadvertently found Café Au Go Go and snuck briefly into a sound check by the Blues Project. After being asked to leave, we hung out outside the club and listened in rapture. It was just magic for me.
Later that year, a band called the Wildweeds came to the prep school for a “sock hop” and just blew me away. They did it all. Blues, R&B, Rock n’ Roll, Soul and lots of their own compositions. Their lead singer and guitarist was a guy by the name of Big Al Anderson, who went on to be quite big with NRBQ. Their local hit was “No Good to Cry” that was eventually covered by the Hour Glass that became the Allman Brothers Band. But they were just so incredibly cool. I was mesmerized, and knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life.
That summer the tunes on the radio just infected my psyche more. I remember distinctly the first time I heard “Light My Fire.” I was driving my Dad’s Pontiac wagon to the beach in New Hampshire and had to pull over just to listen to it. My brain was going, “What the goddamn hell was that?!” The song sends chills up my spine even today. As does “Somebody to Love,” “White Rabbit” and “Cold Sweat.” Later that summer I went to a dance hall at Weirs Beach in New Hampshire and heard a local band do a killer cover of “Whiter Shade of Pale.” I just stood there with tears in my eyes thinking, “This is what it is all about.”
Coming back for my sophomore year, the seas parted and out appeared a first album by a group called The Grateful Dead. Aspiring to preppydom was officially vanquished.
But all that preppy prep put me in good shape to survive the next three excruciating years of prep school in the tumultuous late sixties, which let me tell you was pretty dang weird, but there was always just one thing that made my heart sing, and that was being the front man in a rock n’ roll band, even one formerly known as “The Slobs.” We stayed together for a while, and I experimented with a few different bands in high school and then in college, and it was always a blast.
And I’m still not too bad at karaoke.
