"Back to New York"

My sister Liz's relationship with my mother had been explosive since Liz quit the ballet and now that my father was no longer there most of the time to mediate, it became an ongoing battle. Liz was in open rebellion and would ditch school to hang out at a juke joint called the Beehive. A habitual truant, she would be dropped off at the front door of the school and walk straight out the back door. She quit ACHS at sixteen and never went back. (Years later, she got her GED and teaching certificate.)

My two years at Atlantic City High School were far happier. Stage Crew was great fun, working with my friends Steve and Gary, and my experience working on my mother's dance recitals gave me an insight into stage production that few others had. Another member of Stage Crew was Frank Ward, who had always seemed strangely familiar. It was only when he mentioned that he had lived in Jackson Heights (some 140 miles away) when he was younger that it clicked. Looking through some old photos, there was Frank at my fourth birthday party.

Journalism Club was another kind of fun. Steve Berger was the photographer for the school newspaper and I slipped into the semi-official job of cartoonist. But it also allowed me to travel to Philadelphia for the Temple University Press Tournament, surprising everyone (especially me) by taking third place in Radio News Editing, the only ACHS student to do better than 'honorable mention'.

I also discovered I had a natural talent for playing drums. Drums came easily, guitar did not. (I was better at posing with it in the mirror than actually playing it.) I joined a band called "The SurfRockers" who lived in neighboring Brigantine. We played dates at clubs in Ocean City and Somers Point and were regulars at the Brigantine Country Club. I don't think any of us, Mike Lange, Barbara Ogram or James Duffield, considered careers in music, but we had a lot of fun and made a bit of money. But the footnote to my brief musical career was a chance recording, laying down a single drum track (uncredited) for a band that would become famous as The Ventures.

My schedule had become fairly busy which was a relief since things at home were not going at all well. My mother was becoming increasingly delusional, at one point believing that she was being controlled by a distant star. We would sometimes find her standing on the roof outside her bedroom window, easily thirty feet above the sidewalk, pointing at some faraway object in the night sky. This situation was not at all helped by the night that all of us saw a UFO. *

Her first 'suicide attempt' was comical, walking dramatically into the surf, then coming up sputtering when she got hit in the face by a wave. The next time was much more serious and directed at my sister Liz. Their long-simmering feud took a very dark turn, my mother apparently blaming Liz for all the disappointments in her life, including the recent failure of her attempt to open a new dance studio in Ventnor.

My mother waited until she and Liz were alone in the house when she slashed her wrists. She filled her bathroom sink with blood and trailed it back to her bed, reclining grandly and calling out to Liz, "Mommy has something to show you!" We could hear Liz's screams from the beach. An ambulance arrived in the nick of time or she might have actually done herself in. But this time there were consequences. She was confined to Ancora State Mental Hospital for a month or so where, as luck would have it, I saw her while on a school field trip.

I graduated from Atlantic City High School in 1962 on my eighteenth birthday. My grades were good senior year but, overall, my four years of high school looked pretty bad. I'd won a prize at Temple University but couldn't get accepted there, or at Penn State, or anywhere else I wanted to go. I spent one miserable semester at Union (Junior) College in Cranford, New Jersey. When I went home for the Christmas holiday, I found that my mother had sold my drum set for booze money. From that point on, all I could think about was getting back to New York.


* We heard voices from the beach and realized that a crowd had gathered there, unusual in the middle of the night. They were looking up at a huge, glowing orange ball directly overhead. It was silent and seemed to pulsate slightly. We watched it for at least ten minutes until it suddenly flew straight up at an astonishing speed and disappeared. No explanation was ever offered and we rarely discussed it.



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