While Hitler was blitzing his way through Europe virtually unimpeded, I was muddling through high school. Odd to admit but I was excited about war in Europe. Not to worry , I was a freshman in high school , only twelve, and it'll be over before it ever reaches across the Atlantic. I soon became a passionate student of war and on a large map spread across my bedroom floor and with the help of newspaper and radio accounts I was able to follow the conflict and make a game of pushing colored pins from country to country. "Ma, look out you're stepping on Poland" A move which might not have been accidental.Both my mother and father experienced Polish anti-semitism as young adults. My mother fled safely to America with her mother and sister. My father was drafted into the Polish army. One day he went AWOL , hid in a dense wooded area, and wound up at a farm owned by friendly Poles until he managed to make his way to a freighter bound for America. In Poland an army deserter was known as a hero.
"Wait til Hitler reaches the vaunted Maginot Line in France. That'll be the end of the Wermacht," I told my friends." Oops. Hitler's army marched through the " ImagineNo' Line like a messer through Brie. There went France. This was not going to be an easy war.
My high school was Eastside High in Paterson. We were the Undertakers named for the grounds on which the school was built. No one ever figured out a mascot for this football team. Eastside was the school that gave the world Larry Doby, the first black player in the American League and a Hall of Famer. The school was also to produce the highest ranking creative officer in the advertising agency business. I was not the most popular man on campus but I did earn a spot on the student council. Other than that, especially in my freshman and sophomore years I could have probably been elected class nebbish. Best description of a nebbish: when a nebbish enters a room everyone says, "Who just left?" My most notorious accomplishment those early years happened in French class where I insisted on mixing up French and Yiddish,i.e. "Qu'est vus tist do?" or "Hey, what's going on?" Or "Vous a tit dere vay a vous" which translates into "Where does it hurt ?" I never did get recognition for inventing a new language, Friddish. I taught Miss Crooks more Yiddish than she taught me French. I did passably well in other courses, excelling in the ones that I liked and merely passing the classes that bored me. My personal Abu Grahib was gym, a mandatory class which made me nervous. The instrument of torture to which I would confess anything was the rope I had to climb until touching the ceiling of the gym. I thought to myself as I grabbed that thick hunk of a rope with very sweaty palms, "This is not for me. Jews take the elevator." Tired of being ignored I turned to a tactic developed during my early reading and radio days, a sense of humor. If I liked it and it made me laugh, I adopted humor and tried out my material wherever appropriate. I soon found that a sense of humor characterized my personality and set me apart from my contemporaries. The classroom was the perfect setting for making witty remarks. This became my way of getting noticed and remembered and it came to be expected of me. But while my classmates would laugh, my teachers wouldn't. The class clown does not get rewarded for untimely interruptions so my grades began to get very unfunny. Humor also became my trademark during my years as an advertising copywriter. Much to my pleasure not only was I making kids laugh, I was attracting a new circle of friends,including girls who ordinarily would not acknowledge my existence. It came as an historic revelation, girls like guys who make them laugh. But with all my new notoriety and a welcome bump in female friendships, I managed to go through high school, including the prom, practicing my own particular brand of involuntary abstinence. With hormones stirring and desire alive, fumbling ineptitude kicked in and I graduated with my streak unbroken. To make matters worse, in my senior year acne reared its ugly face. As Buddy Hackett recalled his youth " God came down, took one look and said ' You don't have enough tsoris; here take this and He threw a big package of pimples at my face. Hackett continued, "So when I was busing in the Catskills one summer a counselor took me aside and whispered, ' Kid you want to get rid of those pimples you need to get shtupped.' "When I got back to Brooklyn, I went to a drug store and asked the pharmacist, hey mister can I get shtupped here? " The pharmacist smiled, " You want shtupped? Not here kid, not even with a prescription."
It was not until several years later, in the back seat of a limo in the parking lot at Frank Scalzo's wedding reception that involuntary abstinence gave way to voluntary decadence. In the interest of full disclosure, my pimples did not go away.
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