One friday night before Penn transferred to the big public high school (Plant high), he and I were doing what we thought normal sophomores did at Jesuit who weren’t on the football team; drinking schlitz malt liquor bull in the parking lot. Father Rocha, the assistant principal, whose job was basically school cop, who was a physical cross between Lurch from the Adams family and Frankenstein, collared us cold. I cannot remember what the fallout was for Penn, but in my case, my mother was livid that she was compelled to appear at the school the following Monday morning to learn of the incident. Her vitriol was directed at the school and not me.
I became friends with Penn the old fashioned way; I inherited him from my parents. This is to say that since our parents were friends before we were born, we became friends automatically. When one is 3 years old, one is not out winning friends in social gatherings. Hence your 3 year old birthday party is peopled by the offspring of your parent’s friends.
A routine set in during our childhoods whereby the Penn’s house on became the default gathering spot on Sunday afternoons for about 4 families. This was a convenient way for our fathers to bet on and watch pro football, our mothers to socialise, both groups to drink themselves merry, and due to swimming pool in the backyard, the kids to swim and run rampant.
I spent countless Sundays there with Penn and the rest of the kids. One of my earliest memories is a report that took on epic proportions, that a snake had been seen in the yard but was allowed to escape and still be at large. Thereafter an obligatory activity was to get Penn’s dad’s nine iron and set out hunting for the snake all over the grounds in order to dispatch it and end the danger. The snake was never apprehended.
Another favorite activity was the “hot bricks.” The sidewalks in the front of the house were red brick. Penn invented an activity where we would get out of the pool soaking wet and run to the bricks which in the summer were certainly 120 degrees, and lay down on them. Our wetness would barely prevent us from being burned. A shadow of our bodies in water would be left as outline on the bricks which we would delight in observing. In retrospect i realise that this activity was invented as a trial by fire, a test of mettle. My guess is that Penn adopted it after seeing in the credit sequence of the tv show “Kung Fu” that the main character’s last test was to pick up a burning urn between his inner arms and move it out of the temple and then with his brand collapse in the snow.
vignettes 