The Teenager Years is Life’s Most Difficult Phase

I was an astonishingly strange teenager!
by Charlie Leck

As my kids were growing up, passing through their teenage years, I had a difficult time witnessing and putting up with their teenage behavior. They did these things that were so dumb that they reminded me of myself as a teenager – and I didn’t like that. They struggled with all the same problems with which I had struggled. I had not been successful dealing with them, so I had no magical words of advice for them.

I didn’t grow up in a house. I often wondered, when I visited the lovely homes of most of my friends, what it would like to grow up in a house. I grew up in a store.

My old man called it Leck’s Luncheonette and Confectionary. I’m not too sure what that means. The words are too genteel to describe what the store really was. I remember it as a general store. The building was approximately 150 years old and hadn’t had much modernization and improvement over the years. We sold several dozen different magazines that ranged from the Saturday Evening Post to cheap cheesecake rags that were then called pornographic but would be laughable to the real pornographers of our own age. A glass enclosed counter displayed every kind of candy bar known to any sophisticated kid – from Almond Joy to Zagnut, with things like Milky-Way and Mounds Bars in between. There were stacks of penny candies, too. On shelves behind that candy counter were rows and rows of cigarettes, cigars and pipe tobacco. A customer could pick up a copy of the New York Times or the Herald Tribune or the Newark Star-Ledger and then ask for a pack of Lucky Strikes, a pound of bologna, a half dozen slices of swiss-cheese and a quart of milk that came in a glass bottle that revealed a healthy head of heavy cream. I learned to use the slicing machine before I was five years old. he same customer might also choose to buy a pair of work gloves, a new flash light and, perhaps, tickets for the donkey-baseball game that was coming into town in the next week.

There were about five luncheon tables, with chairs, scattered about, mainly surrounding a big, coal burning stove that stood in the geographic center of the old place. There was an ice cream fountain and bar where four or five patrons could sit on stools while my old man or his one employee, Blanche, made for them a root beer float or a creamy chocolate malt. They might order a cheeseburger or a Rueben sandwich that would be made from scratch, using totally wholesome and fresh ingredients in the kitchen off ‘the store’ that served also as the culinary preparation area for our home.Well, that creates the setting in which I grew from a little, runny-nose kid into a teenager with massive amounts of acne covering my face. Aren’t memories grand?

One wintry day, when school had been canceled because of the amounts of snow that had fallen, I was sitting at my father’s reserved table in the store. My back was directly behind the big stove and I was warm and cozy as I munched on a big sandwich my mother had made me. The storm had made business slow and my old man was able to sit with me and we chatted about the coming baseball season. Though he’d never come to watch me, he was proud of the way I’d swung the bat in the Babe Ruth League the previous summer. He was wishing I could go out for baseball in high school. He knew I could make the team. Yet, both of us knew that was impossible. Mother insisted that I get right home after classes so I could help around the store. My one sister and my two brothers had all grown up and moved on to their own lives. There was a lot to do around the place and my mother’s health was failing badly and I knew I was needed. I loved baseball, but I knew my days of playing it were over.

A very primly dressed, proper lady – our only customer on that wintry day – had finished her big bowl of my mother’s home-made split pea soup and paid her respects by sticking her head in the kitchen to exclaim how wonderful it had been. We served soup like that with big, puffy homemade dinner rolls that drove diners wild. People all over town knew my mother was the community’s finest cook – by far. My father rose to take the woman’s payment for lunch and to fetch change for her from the huge, clanky, manual cash register behind the candy counter.

She took her change and made to leave, but detoured by my table and slipped me a little note. Off she went – somewhere – into the snowy day.

I held some sort of wondrous mystery in my hands. An older and quite handsome lady had surreptitiously slipped me a note. My heart skipped a beat as I unfolded it.

It began with an apology and an expression of sympathy. Then it detailed a menu – or prescription – containing instructions for treating my explosive case of teenage acne. The ingredients, I remember, included lots of squeezed lemons and a fair amount of salt. The other ingredients’ have flown from my mind even as the years have flown by. The note told me that I would be quite a handsome boy if I would use the treatment.

Of course, I wanted to cry. Jesus, it was tough being a teenager and twice as tough being a teenager with a ghastly case of acne. Messy, pussie pimples riddled my face – all over my chin and cheeks and forehead. I went through many, many bottles of Caladryl lotion, dabbing, with little wads of cotton, that flesh colored lotion all over the motley, red blotches on my face.

Naturally, I remember the details of that day only vaguely, but I remember very clearly that I rose from the table and passed through the kitchen. I handed the note to my mother and turned to the little, creaky staircase that led from the kitchen to the group of five bedrooms on the floor above. I stopped in the strange bathroom at the top of the stairs and peered into the mirror above the little sink. I knew that if I had to look at myself very often, for any sustained period of time, it would make me sick!

I went to my bedroom and flopped on my low, little bed. I was too sad and too depressed to cry. I had been taught not to use any serious obscenities, so I didn’t. I just lay there, as if a character in a Turgenev novel, lost in this place as if it were a giant haystack on the Russian steppes. I heard my mother calling to me. I didn’t answer.

Then I heard her climbing the stairs and then walking down the hallway. I remained motionless in both body and mind. The sickly, weak woman came into my room and sat, with great difficulty, on the very low side of my bed. There were big, watery tears in her eyes and she looked at me sadly. Having been a parent, and having gone through such moments myself, I understand now how much she wanted to perform a miracle and wipe away the ugliness that inhabited my otherwise fairly handsome face.

Why then couldn’t she understand why it was so difficult for me to meet the school bus each morning and go to that place where all those other kids would look so strangely at me and turn away so quickly, before I could see the revulsion in their faces? I hated school so much. I hated looking at kids with soft, milky, clear complexions. I hated it that teachers couldn’t look directly at me because the army of white-headed, red pimples turned their eyes away.

Why couldn’t my mother understand why I spent so much time closed in my room, listening to the tinny, AM radio playing the day’s top popular music hits? I would fantasize that I could sing such songs about my own teenage romances. Of course, I had none.

On ‘picture days,’ when group or individual photographs were supposed to be shot at school, I would stay home by feigning some kind of stomach and intestinal illness.

“This silly woman,” my mother sulked, “is dangerous. She wants you to drink this mixture a few times a day. That’s crazy! She could give a note like this to someone to whom such a recipe would be very dangerous. No one should drink that much lemon juice in a day, with all that salt mixed into it.”

I didn’t realize it then, but one day I would. It is so difficult to be a parent. As awful as it was for me that day, and as sorry as I felt for myself, it was much more painful and difficult for her. She wept sadly and could say no more, but I understand her feelings now. She wanted so to take it all away from me and make me the pretty boy I should be, but she had not the power to do that.

She patted my leg and rose. She pulled the door closed behind her and left me alone there in the ghastly quiet of my room.

Cute and Not-So-Cute

Roxbury High School, Succasunna, New Jersey: Class of 1958 50th Reunion, 28 and 29 November 2008
Go to this 50th Reunion Web Site for more information.

She was one of the cutest little kids the eye could behold. I fell madly in love with her in the fourth grade and made the calamitous mistake of telling her so. For the next 7 years she treated me as the pariah of our class. Oh well, it was my own fault. I must have frightened the beejeebers out of her.

Now she’s putting together the big reunion of our high school class of 1958. Fifty-years have passed since that day that Roxbury High School deemed me eligible for graduation even though I understood virtually nothing about advanced math and less about chemistry or physics. It’s comical the way folks rant today about low science and math scores. Mine were comically low and I was passed along anyway. I believe it was because I did so well in English and history and all my social science classes. I was successful in dramatics, speech and debate. I look at photos today of our wonderful chemistry and biology teacher, Ms. Corby, and I remember how hard she tried to get me to get it; however I was a feckless science student. She was sweet and kind to me and passed me along because she was hopeful and optimistic about my future. Ms. Guerin and Coach Gibble did the same in math. Ms. Guerin, a friend of my sister, spent hours with me in private tutoring and, though we weren’t successful, I’ll always be grateful to her.

A guy (big) who was our senior class president is helping her (little) put the reunion together. He was not quite so pretty, though he was popular, ubiquitous and extremely friendly to most people. He had a wildly crooked nose that made you think he might have gotten into a street fight in the south Bronx. It gave him a mean and tough look. He made me nervous and I kept my distance from him. I had an ugly enough nose myself and if it were made crooked in addition, it would have given me a laughable appearance.

I’m helping out a little bit with the reunion and I often spend a few quiet moments in the morning thinking about my assignment. Always to my mind come images of her and him. I realize that the reunion is in good hands. They always got things organized and accomplished in high school and they’ll do it again now.

He became a Methodist pastor and probably a darn good one. In school he had hands like the proverbial blacksmith – big and powerful. I imagine him standing in the back of the church after a Sunday morning service, shaking hands with his parishioners as they cast off from the sanctuary. Most of them would feel as if their hands got lost within that overwhelming grip of his. He was a better than average student in school and very responsible. He was an outstanding football player and a constant officer with the student council. He’ll be one of the stars of the reunion. There’s no question about that.

And so will she, though she is almost the total opposite of him in every way. She is dainty and delicate and soft and mild of personality. She went on to become a school teacher and, again, I’ll bet a darn good one. She was very responsible in school and involved in darn near everything. She was also one of the senior class officers. Flipping through our 1958 yearbook, one sees her photograph everywhere – on the staff of the yearbook, the nature club, the future teachers’ club and the drama club. In my yearbook she wrote: “I know your mother is certainly proud to see you graduate from high school.” Translated that meant: “I know your mother is awfully relieved and somewhat astonished to see you graduate.” That was the truth!

It would be a few years out of high school before I would finally catch my stride and begin to figure things out. A wonderful professor convinced me that I had a brain and he showed me how to use it.

Unfortunately, in high school, I wasn’t close to either her or him because they both frightened me somewhat. My pals were less terrifying kids who were generally as goofy and irresponsible as I.

I’m really sorry I won’t be there, so I could slide back in a corner and watch the two of them operate so smoothly and successfully – the same way now that they did 50 years ago. When you’ve got that something special, you’ve just got it! And they’ve got it!

First Love

Who would want to go to a 50 year class reunion?
by Charlie Leck


My high school class of 1958 will celebrate
the 50th anniversary of our graduations
next year and, of course, a big reunion party
is in the works. The organizers have
successfully tracked me down, captured my
address and formally warned me that they
will harass me for the next 8 months, trying
to convince me to attend.

This essay is the second in a series of four about
what a dunce I was in school days and why
I would never have the courage to show my
face at any class reunion. Another series of
four will follow in two or three weeks.

Love consumed me the first time when I was 9 or 10 years old. I didn’t say I fell in love, mind you. I was totally consumed by love. It overwhelmed me and it made me dim-witted. Instead of doing my math homework assignments in the evening, as I should have, I sat in my room thinking of her, my first dear love. At baseball practice, standing out at the third base position, I would take a line drive in the thigh because I wasn’t paying attention. I was thinking of her and how beautiful she was and what a perfectly wonderful smile she had.

It was unrequited love, believe me. She thought I was a jerk and she was certainly correct about that. She never looked at me and she didn’t even nod a ‘good morning’ or ‘thank you’ when I allowed her to go first in the lunch line. I’m not saying I blamed her. I didn’t. Even now, I don’t.

Had I kept this love to myself everything would have been fine. The world would never have discovered what a fool I was – how completely I had allowed ‘love’ to conquer my ‘sense and sensibilities.’

I’m not saying it was her fault, but had she not left our little, northern New Jersey township to go to Georgia every winter, none of my foolishness would ever have been discovered. Her family took her out of school around Christmas time every year and they went to Plantationville, in southern Georgia. They stayed there until springtime arrived and thoroughly settled over all of New Jersey.

It was in the fourth grade, I think, that I somehow I got hold of her Plantationville address. I must have mailed her a half dozen love letters – really mushy stuff – telling her how beautiful I thought she was, and how I could think of nothing but her, and how bleak and boring the days were without her in them. (You see, even then, I thought of myself as a writer! I’ve never stopped kidding myself.) Upon her return, it was impossible for me to look her in the eye and she, of course, was so completely embarrassed that she wouldn’t have allowed it any way.

Now, put yourself in my place. How would you feel on that day in April when she returned to the classroom in our little school? Where would you have cowered? Under which desk would you have crawled? How many consecutive days could you have feigned an illness serious enough to keep you home and in bed? Oh, my God, it was overwhelmingly awful! No human could ever have been more embarrassed. One could never feel smaller or dumber.

I sat frozen at my classroom desk, staring straight ahead, pretending to be anxious for the teacher to begin our day’s lesson. My cheeks burned with the fever of embarrassment. The palms of my hands were soaked with perspiration. My vision was blurred.

That was the year my math skills went to hell. I couldn’t deal with fractions – especially turning them upside down and dividing their denominators or whatever the heck our teacher was asking us to do. I just wanted my letters back. I wore myself out praying that, somehow, the postman had not made his appointed rounds.

In the ensuing months, however, I caught the young beauty’s mother taking peeks at me, with a silly grin on her face that told me what a little fool I was – that she had read each and every word of my barmy correspondence.

For the next nine years, until I could get out of New Jersey, I had to do everything I could – use every imaginable device and procedure to avoid allowing my eyes to collide with those of this pretty, young girl. I ruined my peripheral vision by concentrating so hard on only what was straight ahead of me. My neck and upper body became rigid; for I refused to turn casually for fear that I might encounter her full-faced.

Somehow I managed to avoid encounters for many years. It was sometime in high school that I first ‘stumbled upon’ her again. It was probably in our third year there and I came roaring down a set of stairs far too quickly, missing a final step, and nearly fell into her. She was looking intently at me, in a pleading kind of way. Her eyes tried to tell me that it was all right now – that she had forgiven me long ago for my silliness – that I could relax and limber up my neck again – that I could say hello occasionally – that I might even invite her to go have a soda.

My transgression had been too serious, however. I couldn’t ever, ever trust myself to not say again something utterly and unforgivably brainless. I gulped and turned away, graduated and got the hell out of town.

She? She went on to marry, I learned years later, and to have children. Eventually, she made her home in Plantationville – in that little southern village with the tiny post office that had handed over the remarkable love letters of a nine-year old boy.

A fifty-year reunion is coming up. How silly are reunions? Who would go to one? Who would want to remember and relive how shatteringly unremarkable he was as a child? Who would want to look one’s classmates in the eye and say hello again?

Becoming a Ball Player

What ever happened to Tommy Pugh?
by Charlie Leck

My high school class of 1958 will celebrate the 50th
anniversary of our graduations next year and, of
course, a big reunion party is in the works. The
organizers have successfully tracked me down,
captured my address and formally warned me that they
will harass me for the next 8 months, trying to convince
me to attend.

This essay is the first in a series of four about what a
dunce I was in school days and why I would never have
the courage to show my face at any class reunion.
Another series of four will follow in two or three weeks.

My dream last night was extraordinary; however, the most extraordinary thing about it was that, when I awoke in the morning, I remembered it in detail. That doesn’t happen often.

I watched a bit of the Little League World Series last night. You got it! There wasn’t much on and I was pretty bored. Yet, it was quite intriguing to watch these kids pour so much of their souls into their ball games.

So, I went to bed. I was tired and sleep came easily. Some time during the night, the dream started. It was a replay of an actual moment in my life – approximately 55 years ago.

There was green, green grass everywhere and this wonderful fence out there in the outfield. I’d never seen anything like it. We were in Brookside, New Jersey for the first organized Little League game in which I had ever played. The League had just been organized in our county and my age qualified me by only a day or two to play for one season. I was a big kid for my age and there I was, in my dream, towering over all the other players.

Our own town had just a ball field. It certainly did not look like a “ball park.” However, there in Brookside is was really different. It felt like we were stepping on to a major league field. There was a grass infield and level outfields and an attractive fence, set at Little League standards, which ran all the way around the outfield. There were real dugouts and bleachers for spectators. A number of flags flew from bright white poles.

Our manager, Mose, threw batting practice. I easily rapped several balls over the left field fence. It was very exciting, but Mose grabbed me before the game started and warned me that the pitchers wouldn’t be throwing at batting practice speed, and I shouldn’t get too excited.
Well, as the visitors, we were up first. The dream kept playing. Buddy and Hank both rapped solid shots to the outfield. Toby went to the plate and I stood in the on-deck circle and watched him take a couple of pitches. He was always a patient guy and liked to look for a pitch in a particular spot.

This guy’s stuff looked slower than the pitches Mose threw up to me. The ball seemed to be huge coming up there. Toby banged a line drive that almost took the pitcher’s head off. Buddy raced easily across the plate. Hank pulled up at second.

I was very excited. Something was jumping around inside me and I could sense that my eyes were stretched wide open. I couldn’t relax. I grabbed handfuls of dirt in an attempt to dry my hands. This was the most extraordinary moment of my little life. I looked to that fence in left field. It was so close. A ball hit to left field in our own town would just roll and roll for hundreds of yards and the fielders could just race after it and after it.

Tommy Pugh was on the mound. Within months of this day he would become one of my best friends and I would spend plenty of time with him. He was a cool dude with a really funny walk. His arms hung straight down at his sides when he walked and they remained very still with each stride, but his hands jiggled very noticeably. We all laughed at him until we got to know him. Then I got to thinking it was the neatest walk a man ever had. I tried it and couldn’t pull it off.

Well, Tommy was a cool guy, all right; but he couldn’t throw any heat at all. He wound up (players had to hold their bases, in Little League, until the ball was released by the pitcher). No one worked from a stretch in this league.

When the ball came out of his hand it seemed like I had long moments to think about it and make my decision. It seemed slower than the pitches he had been throwing to the first three batters and the ball just grew as it got near me. It was right at the letters and over the middle of the plate. I swung as mightily as I could and just knew I’d whiff on that slow ball.

Instead, I felt the sweet feeling in the bat when it encountered the ball and I heard that solid sound of impaction that every batter likes. The ball was flying away toward left field. It was a high line drive that wouldn’t lose its climb for some time and it was still climbing when it flew over the fence and crashed into some trees that lined the flowing brook beyond them.

In the dream, my legs would barely carry me around the bases. I felt as if I might have to crawl. It was the same 55 years ago. It seemed to take forever to get around to home plate. It was silent. Our team had no spectators there except one or two parents who had each driven a load of players. My parents were certainly not there. They didn’t do things like that. My teammates weren’t making any noise or cheering because, given the handsomeness of Tommy’s pitches, it wasn’t any kind of significant achievement to thump on him. Yet, inside, I was screaming like crazy. It was the first time I’d hit a ball over a regulation fence for a home run. I ran down the third base line, trying to making it across the plate. My feet were in concrete. They wouldn’t move and I awoke exhausted. It was dark and quiet and I heard my wife breathing softly beside me.

For a second I’d been a kid again. Now I was back to being old, with legs that can’t run anymore and eyes that can’t see a moving ball very well.

In real life I had homered the second time up, too. It wasn’t quite as sweet, but it cleared the fence by plenty. We moved ahead by about 36 runs – really – and Mose pulled me and Toby and Buddy. Some of the second stringers gave up a run and couldn’t push anything across the plate for us.

It was not uncommon to win 30-0. We beat every team in our league that way all year, right up to the last game of the season. In that one we played Brookside at our place and Tommy Pugh was the pitcher again. Throughout the year he had been showing improvement. He was stronger now and he had some speed. He had learned to move the ball around a little bit, too. Someone had taught him about throwing the ball high and tight. That put the fear of God in a lot of little leaguers. In the last inning, during our last at bat, we were losing 4 to 3. With two outs I sliced a triple down the right field line. Hammerin’ Hank was up for us and Tommy threw one really close to him, that his catcher couldn’t get. The ball got away and rolled behind the catcher. I hesitated on the third base line and I heard Mose screaming: “Go, go, go!” I took off, but that hesitation cost me. The catcher flipped the ball to Tommy, who had rushed to cover the plate. The umpire, big Al O’Brien, screamed that I was out. To this day I don’t think I was. People were tired of us, though, and of all our bragging and of all the whippings we put on teams. I think Al just had to call me out.

From the ground I saw Tommy Pugh dancing a jig and his teammates were lifting him up and you’d have thought they’d won the World Series. We only won every game of the season; yet we lost the last one and we’d have to taste it all winter. Tommy would savor victory all through the cold and snowy season.

I was crying as I got up from the ground. The Brookside parents were streaming on to the field and hugging their kids. I was thankful, this one time, that my parents never came to ball games. Mose and the rest of our team disappeared quickly. I couldn’t stop crying. Warner Johnson, one of the big guys, a catcher who had tried out with the New York Giants, came over and put an arm on my shoulder and told me to stop crying and be, at least, the only player from our team man enough to shake Tommy’s hand. I shook my head, indicating I wouldn’t. He crashed a fist into my arm, just below my shoulder, the way my brother did when he was pissed at me. The shot really rocked me. He pushed me toward the celebration. I went and, with eyes fixed upon the ground, offered my hand to Tommy. He was my buddy by this time. He didn’t take my hand. Instead he hugged me and I could tell he was crying. It was a really happy cry and I knew that he was as jubilant that day as I was on that first day of the season, in Brookside, when the ball flew so high and far out into left field.

“Way to go!” The words didn’t come out very easily, but I said them. I pulled away and started the long, long walk into centerfield and toward the joint, a few hundred yards away, that was my house. Warner fell in step next to me and put his hand on my shoulder again.

“You’ll be glad you did that,” he said. “You just became a ball player!”