When the Eastern Airlines Boeing 737 that I was on touched down on the tarmac at Hancock International Airport I was met at the airport by a bearded, overweight sort of beatnik guy, he was round but not huge, wore sort of a pea cap on his head and dressed in earth tones but not terribly neat; you could call him ruffled. He seemed sort of intellectual and aloof but he was non-threatening so I felt comfortable around him. I'm not sure anymore how we found each other but when we did he held out his hand and shook mine in a firm grip and in a friendly way he introduced him self as Chooch, now I'm sure that this was not his real name but rather a nick name and quite consistent for the times, 1973.
After we retrieved my meager luggage he led me out to the parking lot and I climbed into his old tan Buick LeSabre for the trip to Elmcrest Children's Center where for the next two years I would experience the best of times and the worst of times.
Elmcrest was situated in what could be described as a cul-de-sac, a horse shoe shaped road on a large piece of land. Along the outside perimeter of the road at regular intervals were twelve cottages each named after different things, I lived in Boy Scouts, there was also one named Rosebud, thank god I didn't wind up in that cottage. Each cottage contained about 20 boys of the same age group and three sets of counselors of both sexes who occupied the third floor of the building. At the apex of the road was a smaller road leading to the administration building and the school and various support buildings.
We parked in front of building twelve, Boy Scouts, and I was led into a large three story building that had two large columns in front of the entrance which held up the second floor balcony that was outside the counselor's second floor room. This was the room that one counselor would occupy every night in order to monitor us, sometimes it was a guy, and sometimes it was a girl. The head counselor and his wife would occupy a permanent room on the third floor and never the second floor. The building was brick and stucco and sort of south-west looking like it would be more in place in New Mexico or Arizona. But we were in the north-east in New York.
When you entered you were in the foyer and to the left was a large dining room with many tables and chairs. Towards the back and to the rear were two swinging doors that led into a large kitchen and food preparation area with a cafeteria style milk dispensing machine and an industrial refrigerator. To the right of the foyer was a large reading room/library and in the rear was a Television room with one large TV. Between these two rooms was a staircase that led to the second floor were we all slept.
Inside I met Fred and Callie Doyle, the head counselors. Fred was in his upper thirties and prematurely gray with muttonchops sideburns and a genuinely warm and easy smile. When he was fooling around with you all you had to do was look at his face and if he had a twinkle in his eye and a smile than you knew he was kidding you. I just instantly liked him and quickly he won my respect and admiration and soon I felt closer to him than I had ever felt towards my own father and to this day I think of him more than my father. I remember him telling me that he was in someway a relative of Sir Arthur Cannon Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame and I believed him he had something about him that smacked of good family lines. His wife Callie was younger than him and she was a sweet heart and quite comfortable in her skin, I admired that. She was interested in paranormal stuff and was the first person to discuss Edgar Cayse with me.
They had a beautiful Golden Retriever named George, who I and everyone else loved, what a wonderful beast. In the winter I would walk him, he was so strong and I was so light that he would just pull me along as if I was skiing behind a snow mobile. Now Chooch was the assistant counselor to Fred and shortly the school added Katherine Fox, Kat for short. She was smart and sweet but homely with a skinny body, a recessive chin and no bra, there were just large nipples pointing everywhere and when I saw them my penis took over and her face didn't matter. I was fourteen, full of testosterone and I wanted some kind girl, any girl to do sexual stuff to me that I had only read about in Penthouse forum.
Shortly after Kat arrived Then came Debbie Truex, sweet Debbie, she was dark and hot and also did not wear a bra and had a body to kill for and her nipples never went to sleep. She just figured me out from the start and seemed to like me and knew that I was shy around girls especially ones that turned me on. She would always chase me and try to kiss me, and I wanted her to but I was scared and I ran, she would laugh. I remember once preparing the molding outside the door of the second floor counselor quarters with a butter knife so that when she was in the room taking a shower and getting dressed I could look in and look at her wet body, nipples hard, full pubic hair and flat stomach. This view filled many nights of fantasies of her coming into my room while everyone else was sleeping and making me into a man; I read too much Penthouse Forum.
With the exception of the Doyle's all the counselors were students from nearby Syracuse University earning extra money and gaining valuable experience working at Elmcrest, they were all going in a direction of social work or psychology. The girls were young, in there twenties and nubile and the guys were all classic seventies earth hippy, pot smoking rock dudes and all too cool to pull something over on. One of the Psychologists at this place was Debbie Sobel, she was sort of like Sally Strothers and attractive with large breasts and when I talked to her all I wanted to do was fall into these huge pillows and go to sleep, I wonder if she ever noticed that I spoke directly to her breasts, I can't tell you what color her eyes were.
There was also a guy called Mickey Flanagan a skinny knot of a guy very classically Irish looking like Dave Davies of The Kinks but with blonde hair. I really liked him but he had some kind of a problem with Mr. Doyle and suddenly he was gone and replaced with this guy Bob Roddy who looked a little like a cross between Doug from the New Zoo Review and Gabe Kaplin. He was classic geek, he wore floral and print shirts with collars to big in that seventies, J.C. Penny sort of way, bad cheap pants that were not a good color, black shoes, a cheesy black moustache, nothing interesting to say, no sense of humor and he drove a fucking purple Gremlin; he should have been beaten just because of the car. He seemed to bond with Kat Fox, good for her, someone had arrived for her because all the others were paired off.
Most of the second floor sleeping quarters were multiple occupancy dorm style rooms but there were a couple of rooms in the back that could be private. These coveted rooms were already occupied and I was first placed in a room with other boys whose names and how many there were escape me. I quickly set about making myself very difficult to live with to the other occupants of the room, I wanted to be alone and I was going to achieve this goal at all costs.
By the time I got to Syracuse I was what could be best described as a feral child, wild and out of control and becoming something of a bully. This was the time when I started to grow taller and was becoming stronger. I knew this and I was becoming cute enough to at least be able to manipulate the older females and was smart enough to intrigue the older males, but Mr. Doyle knew me from the get go and for some reason he mattered to me and I actually cared about what he thought or said without question and from day one he had my respect and loyalty.
Now you have to remember that this place was a place for kids with problems, truants, shoplifters, alcohol and drug abusers and assorted sociopathic miscreants in need of supervision. It wasn't prison, there were no walls, no fences and just one old guy who went to all the cottages every night to do bed check and make sure that all the kiddies were inside and asleep.
The only way I can describe my two years at Elmcrest is that it was like going to school and summer camp all year 'round. We were supervised and we had field trips to penny arcades, movies, camping, swimming, concerts, the State fair in the War Memorial and the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. We also had Pot, sneaking out at night to get beer at the 7-11, girlfriends from off campus, jobs and some of us went to local high schools, so really my life style had not changed except that the only difference was that the dark cloud that hung over me and my life for so long was lifted and for two years the sun was shining on me and I was able to explore my boundaries and make mistakes and expand my horizons with abandon.
By these days I was singing all the time. I had a record player a bunch of my favorite records and a radio, wherever I went I was always singing to my self or writing poems to eventual songs. Also by this time Elton John was becoming a large influence on me as to my songwriting. He was writing perfect songs, each one was a gem and the arrangements were flawless, except after 1976 when he must have lost his mind and committed career suicide. Clearly he should have retired on top of his game and left an endearing and enduring legacy like The Beatles did; now he is just a hack making a living on the oldies circuit, in Vegas and releasing records that are so far below par that they fail to register.
One day I was on my way to class in the campus school and one of the teachers, Gerry Chemilesky, upper twenties, skinny, thinning hair, wore glasses, always had a smile and was the science teacher, had heard me singing to myself "Life Is A Rock (But The Radio Rolled Me)" by REUNION, a one hit wonder. As I was walking down the hallway he invited me to come and sing with his band, this invitation thrilled me to the bone and may be the key moment that changed my life. Up until then I just sang for myself and did not think that I could do it in a real situation, but I was game. A few days later he asked me to come to the classroom and he had set up a microphone a small P.A. and had his band there, he was on guitar. He asked me what I could sing and I suggested "I'm A Believer", Thank god he knew it and I sang my ass off. From that moment on I considered myself Donny Osmond's hardest competition and the die was cast. So now I'm a singer and all of a sudden the sky was the limit and the benefits were staggering, finally I had a way to make myself stand out from the pack and get myself noticed by the girls. I had my edge and I was going to play it to the hilt, and boy did it work, this music thing served me well into my life and to some degree is still serving me today.
There was another teacher that encouraged my desire to write and journalism, Carl Fox, English teacher. He was a pretty good guy, short in stature, bearded, short hair and smart. He helped me get the school newspaper started, The Elmcrest Explorer, which I wrote, illustrated, printed and distributed by myself until he forced me into letting someone else participate, someone who I will talk about later. This newspaper basically only contained stuff that was of interest to me, mostly music and Science Fiction. I even wrote a story loosely based on Star Trek but my own characters. I had my own office, my own desk and it was in a building that was not being used and hadn't been used for a long time. So now I had a place on campus that only I could access and where, if I want to, I could be alone and do anything I wanted, they extended trust to me and I took full advantage of that but I never betrayed it either.
A lot of the other boys in my cottage were basically good kids in bad situations and for many reasons they wound up here. A couple of them were real psycho's and needed to be in an institution but sorting them out took some time and we had to deal with them until the shrinks found more appropriate location for them. One of the first kids I befriended was Donald Degan, he was a tall, lanky, blonde kid who was a little hyper, funny and impulsive and was just like Kelso from "That 70's Show". We used to go up to the roof of our cottage, third floor, where there was a tree right up against the building and between two branches there was a hole that he filled with dirt and he was growing a pot plant, how ingenious. We would sit up there where no one could see us and smoke pot and just bullshit and talk; we got close and used to hang all the time. Then there was Ritchie Westcott who was a wild child, good looking, and long blonde hair like Gregg Allman from The Allman Brothers. He was a little older and was popular with the off campus girls who were always coming around and they had friends so I was able to meet girls even though we were at an all boys school. He was the stand out leader among us, sort of a "Fonzie", he knew how to stroke the adults and play the system and eventually he became a group leader but he was just as much a pot head and as spirited as any of us, in fact we got our weed from him and his buddy Greg Scabelli. Greg was a short Italian guy with brown curly hair, also popular with the girls, and the two of them were the main kids among us and we looked up to them because they were getting laid in the basement and were the epicenter of all our adventures while we were here.
We had weirdoes in house as well. There was Brian Bluing who was sent here from Savannah Georgia and he was troll like, short, no style, nondescript and nothing to make him stand out. He was a real outsider and was subjected to pear pressure from all of us, mostly just exclusion, he never participated in our hyjinx and I can't think of anything further to add except that there was a sadness about him.
Then there was Greg Wilkinson who was a small mouse-like little bitch who dressed like Charlie Brown and would rat us out all the time even though some of us, me, would kick his ass. He was a smarmy little suck up who thought he was just so smart. I knew I was smarter than him and I set about keeping him nervous all the time, I changed his name among us all to Wilki-Doodle or Wilki-Poodle and really challenged his manhood by harassing him over the fact that he was not shaving yet and most of us had started.
And then there was Daniel Kerpial, the fag, He moved in several month after I moved in and by that time I had secured the private room. They decided to put him in with me, biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig mistake! I was not going to share my space with anyone much less this guy. He was 18 and almost infantile in every way possible. He never showered, his cloths were never washed and his teeth were brown. I don't even know how he got into a place that was clearly for 13 through 16 year olds, I was 14. I dominated this bitch to no end. I assaulted him, harassed him, stole his shit, and made him do stuff like a trained dog.
Now I don't know for sure if he was gay but he used to masturbate all the time and I labeled him a fag with the guys and it stuck. I'm sure we all masturbated but no one ever saw it and we certainly did not do it in front of others, when you were a young boy in those days you found a way and you did it and that was it. We all had our own collection of Playboys and I read very few of the articles in fact my walls were covered with centerfolds. Anyway the counselors made a wise decision and moved him into the other private room because by then he would be in danger in any other room with any of us and all the other geeks, dweebs and psycho's wound up segregated into a dorm room by themselves with no more beds available. This guy would cry and scream in a high-pitched voice, stomp around in a manic way and wring his hands whenever we harassed him. When he did fight back it was like a retard, flailing about spastically and you were in danger of being hit but not accurately or painfully. To stop him you just hit him in the stomach and he fell like a sack of potatoes.
This guy was the moron that Carl Fox our English teacher forced me into letting write for "MY" newspaper. If I didn't let him contribute than I couldn't publish it any more, so I let him. I knew he was just pushing this issue to piss me off and get on my nerves. He wrote like a child he gave me some shit called "Christmas On The Isthmus Of Nis-mus ", it was the dumbest thing I ever read. To get back at him I designed a graphic heading which I drew myself, it was an intricate spider web pattern in which I carefully hid the word "fag". I let all the guys on campus who were cool know about this illustration in the paper and it was a source of great enjoyment for us each week to find where and how I was going to "hide the fag" in each issue. Well after a couple of weeks doing this, like any small town, the secret was out, I was in trouble, I had to stop doing it and I lost interest in the newspaper.
He was the kind who invited you to abuse him; if you weren't paying attention to him he would do something to piss you off. He was the kind who wanted attention at any cost regardless if it was negative; it was this personality trait that made him the perfect target for our pranks. Everybody knew that he was a chronic masturbator, I made sure of that, and one night we waited until the counselors were asleep and he was well on his way to playing with himself and we burst into his room. He jumped out of bed screaming like a little girl in that high-pitched voice of his, with a his boner at attention we dumped a bag of flower on him, took pictures and spread them around the campus, he became even more of a laughing stock than he already was.
And then there was John Lenihan, a short, fat, mal-adjusted guy who had bad hygiene and would stick his hands down his pants and smell his fingers, Mrs. Doyle saw him do it once and it really sceeved her out to the point that she mentioned it to me. He was a trouble maker and I had my run-ins with him. He took my records once and broke them and hid the pieces on top of the bunks in his dorm. Now this cottage was like a small town and sooner or later you did find out who did what, so he told someone who told someone and it got back to me, I beat his ass.
And Kevin Jones who was just a quiet, neutral kid who did his own thing and almost never appeared on any of our radar. He went about his own business; never stuck his nose where it didn't belong and we didn't know a damn thing about him. I do however remember calling him Bo-Jo from the movie "Mr. And Mrs. BoJo Jones" He didn't stay long, I think he didn't belong here nor did he fit in with any of us but he had the good sense to go his own way.
Alfredo Rivera, the first Spanish kid I ever knew. I sort of liked him but he was a pain in the ass sometimes and then there was the time we got into a fight and he took a stick with a nail in the end, used for picking up paper in the yard, and speared me with it right in the side of the head, just missing my ear and not penetrating my skull. I pulled the spear out of my head and I grabbed him and beat his ass to a pulp with the stick, it took two full grown counselors to pull me off him without killing him. They took me to the hospital to get treated and get tetnus shots and they didn't punish me because I was the injured party even though he was more fucked up then me from the beating he took, they did punished him. On a side note I did eventually turn him into a friend, I guess I earned his respect as well as his fear. Years later when I moved in with my mother in Queens I looked him up but he just was not that interesting a person and I did not pursue a friendship with him.
And now the last of the freaks; Kevin McGrath. This miscreant was Dark, Charles Manson dark; he had long stringy black hair, thin, not physically threatening or scary, but you always kept one eye on him because he might come from behind. He had the slimy sort of smile that was malevolent and sinister. A few months earlier one of the female teachers who liked me and knew that I was great with cats gave me a small white kitten with two dark hair spots on his head, I named him Diablo. He was my first pet and I loved him, he wasn't even a year old. This cat had run of the cottage and most everybody loved him even the Doyle's dog George, he had no reason to fear anything in this house; or so I thought. One day the cat disappeared and for days I was looking for him as well as most everyone else, we even thought that we heard him meowing. After two weeks we gave up and then one day one of the kids runs into the bathroom while I was taking a shower to tell me that they had found the cat, dead, in an ash chute in the fire place. The cat was beaten and slightly burned from the fires that were lit at night during the winter months. This sick bastard had cracked and said that the cat was haunting him, you see two weeks earlier he was in the TV room where the fire place was and the cat was staring at him like all cats do and he killed it and hid its body in the ash chute. Now I think that the cat was not dead for a while and eventually died in that hole from his wounds and starvation. This freaked me out as well as a number of the other kids and we beat the shit out of him with sticks and fists. This incident resulted in a riot which when all was done the cottage was a wreak, the windows and furniture were all broken, this kid was removed, put in a state mental hospital and we all had to get it together and fix the place up; eventual changes of staff soon followed much to my regret but we slowly returned to normal.
Too Be Continued…
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