Page 184 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
There are only two things remotely of note that I recall from that summer: First, I went out with the guys, learned about tequila and boil- ermakers, and got drunker than I ever had gotten before or have ever gotten since. Thus, there was a memorable lesson learned, one full year prior to my going off to college.
Second, I developed a serious antipathy toward Cadillacs, which I identified with a large number of obnoxious parents who sent their kids to Kee-Wah. As rude as they were in the dining room, those parents outdid themselves in counter-unproductive activities at the canteen, treating canteen boys as servants—and worse. It got so bad that every- thing that I came to identify with them, and this obviously included their flashy, impress-your-neighbor style of dress, jewelry, hairdos, and, most of all, their cars, became a symbol to me of their obnoxious behavior.
(One family came to be the leading representative of the obnoxious parents. They were Mr. and Mrs. Kasenetz, who were said to be in real estate and to live in the wealthiest part of Great Neck, Kings Point, in a huge home that featured solid gold plumbing fixtures. They had four children in camp, one of whom, the oldest, served in some kind of made- up capacity and was thought on campus to be a kleptomaniac who specialized in very expensive sweaters. When I was a co-op, I had briefly dated his sister, a teen girl, as to whom he leeringly asked me if I was “getting much.” About twenty years later, the senior Kasenetz sued my then father-in-law to begin a trust litigation that seemed to go on for more than an additional twenty years.)
When visiting day came and the camp gates were opened, a long line of autos, the flashiest of which were Cadillacs, started slowly snak- ing into camp past the canteen, as Miller and the other canteen boy who had a driver’s license did the valet parking near the ball fields. Virtually all of those cars arrived on very hot days with their windows closed, even though, in 1961, air-conditioned cars were not yet the norm. Miller told me what he had learned while he was doing the parking: A high percentage of cars were not in fact air-conditioned. He believed that many kept their windows up only to lead other parents to believe that the (nonexistent) AC was on. Thus, the Cadillac, virtually unknown in
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