GROW UP

by Bert Stratton

I put a latch on my bedroom door to keep my parents out. I was in my early twenties. I was staying at with my parents, who rented an apartment in Beachwood at the Mark IV (featured a couple weeks ago in a Klezmer Guy post). The Mark IV was later known as The Hamptons and is now called The Vantage. I was listening to John Handy’s “Don’t Stop the Carnival” on my record player. There was some talk about real estate and bridge games. I pondered prospective book titles:

Suburban Nightmare

Rebounding from the Bar Mitzvah Trail

Confessions of a Bar Mitzvah Wino

He played Clarinet Between his Legs

Unstuck Pads

The Bar Mitzvah-Goer

Maybe I thought about bar mitzvahs because I never had one. I was Confirmed — Reform-style. (In my adulthood, I did leyn Torah a couple times.)

I swam in the Mark IV apartment pool and got in an argument with an old guy — maybe 65. He said, “You’re going to bump into my grandkids, and you’ll be sorry when you do!”

Bug off. (I love grandkids — 50 years later.)

My dad considered selling me his beater car, a Plymouth Valiant, so I could drive away from Beachwood. He said, “But if you get the car, what are you going to do to support it?”

“I’ll get some money somewhere. I’ll rob a bank.”

“You do that and I’ll wipe my hands of you!” Simmer down. Did Toby think I was in cahoots with Patty Hearst? I bought the car, but I didn’t drive too far. I went four miles west to Cleveland Heights and rented a room in half-a-house.

Where else should I have gone? Boston was too collegiate. New York? I had been there and had had my ride towed. New York is a tough town for cars. Go back to Ann Arbor? Too many teenyboppers. California? Too hard to get to.

Tough times . . .

My dad said, “You don’t know what a tough is!”

Change your place, change your life: I met a girl via the ride board at Case Western Reserve University. (A lot of my life revolved around that ride/bulletin board.) The girl was Jewish, cute and English. We hitchhiked to California, and somewhere near Knoxville she told me she was going to meet up with her boyfriewnd in California. Bummer road (also an album by Sonny Boy Williamson).

The English girl and I even got rides from truckers because of the “chick” factor. (I ran into her again, in Israel a year later. She said nothing materialized with the “boyfriend” out west — and nothing much happened with me and her in Eretz Yisrael.)

California . . . I visited some friends, then hitched back east, solo. When I walked into my parents’ apartment, my dad said, “Isn’t that a pistol.”

It was.

As Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, “Life was too good to us. We had to ask for trouble.”

I looked for trouble but didn’t find much.