Junior High Waste Land

I entered seventh grade at Greenbriar Junior High School, in Parma Heights, Ohio, in the fall of 1964. I had spent the previous seven years in an elementary school where the average number of students in a class was 20, and where by year’s end the teachers, uniformly female, had become benign surrogate mothers. Without exception I adored them – in one case, it was a severe crush – and I remember all of their names.

Without warning, junior high was sustained trauma. Seventh-graders were “moldies” (does anyone know the etymology of this word?), fair game for any thug who wanted to knock your books to the floor or punch you in the face. Once, I watched a kid comb the dandruff from his hair onto a table in the cafeteria. He pushed it into a neat pile with his hands and ate it. The staff was little better. A drunken, red-faced phys. ed. teacher smacked us with wet tennis shoes. A coach who purportedly taught civics spoke admiringly of National Socialism, and a pear-shaped algebra teacher suggested we use baseball bats against rioting blacks. No wonder I succumbed to books.

Off the cafeteria was a bookstore – a dim closet with wood-and-wire racks stocked with paperbacks. The hours were irregular and the selection eccentric. I bought the Bantam edition of The Mouse That Roared, by Leonard Wibberley, but I also picked out the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, a slender yellow paperback published by Harcourt, Brace and World. It cost 60 cents and I still have it. The pages are brown and brittle, and smell deliciously of dry, old paper. I was probably aware of Eliot’s death in January 1965, but I don’t remember. On my own, without prodding from a teacher, I set out to memorize Eliot’s lines, probably as a distraction from the surrounding Hobbesian mayhem – “The Hollow Men,” scraps from The Waste Land, and bits and pieces of the early poems, especially “Prufrock.” Did I understand what I was memorizing? Partially: the music, a tone and mood. That’s what came back to me on Saturday, when the rain never stopped, the sky was low and milky, and the temperature stalled in the mid-40s. Dead leaves on the driveway turned into a thick brown impasto and lines from “Preludes” came back:

“And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.”

At this depth, over many decades, the barrier between life and literature, permeable even at its most resilient, dissolves. Do I understand “Preludes?” In my bones.