China, eighth-grade autograph book, The Beatles, and truancy.
how Carter had little "liver" pills.
digging to China.
-I guess so I could get all the tea that was there.
my brother Morris' entry into my eighth-grade autograph book:
To a brother who is fatter than I
Because he eats too much pizza pie.
Dell's entry into my book [she and Donna were twins, very cute,
and about three years older than me]:
The devil sends a naughty wind
To blow the girls' skirts high
But God in just, sends the dust
To blind the bad man's eye
-Years later, when scanning the sights at windy intersections,
I would be sure to roll up my car windows.
going to see the Beatles at Shea Stadium with James Elieff in 1965 instead
of playing the "Casino" at Palisades Amusement Park with my band.
-Some thirty-odd years later, I had pizza at Patsy's in Brooklyn with
Sid Bernstein, the promoter of that first-ever ball park concert. Talk about
"six degrees of separation."
going with James to see the premiere showing of The Beatles' first movie,
"A Hard Day's Night" at the Lowes Theater in Newark.
and thinking about how difficult it will be for me to run away from the
throngs of screaming girls when I became famous.
my truancy
and its origin in grammer school when I would chew a mouthful of cookies,
spit them into the toilet bowl, and tell my mother that I had thrown up
[chocolate chips seemed to have the best mix of color and texture]
and then watching "I Love Lucy," "The Real McCoys," and the folks from
Mayberry on TV, while eating my mother's fine cooking.
-My mother never seemed bewildered by my swift recoveries. I would be
vomiting at seven and feasting at eight. Perhaps she liked the company. I know
she liked to see me eat. It was cute back then for a kid to be chubby. I was
one-hundred and ninety-eight pounds in the eighth grade. A real cutie pie.
high school
and being absent so many days in my senior year that the principal gave me
an ultimatum: "Come to school everyday for the last two months of the
year or you're not going to graduate"
and taking off two days the very next week.
-I was one of two high school dropouts in my law school graduating class.
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