Page 191 - WhyAsInY

We’ll err (But) Be true
owner with his brother Greg of the Old Homestead Steakhouse in Manhattan), who was a very funny and likeable senior and who just hap- pened to be on the Sioux team, dubbed me “Harvey Cheatin’baum,” a name that he steadfastly applied to me over the next three years. At some point I will finally attempt to get a reservation (no pun intended) in that name at the Old Homestead. (A nickname far more to my liking was “Savvy Yavy.” Unfortunately, it was hung on me by my very personable former partner, Marc Dreier, who is now serving a twenty-year sentence in a federal penitentiary for committing investment fraud in connection with his sale of between $400 and $700 million in forged notes.)
They say that no good deed goes unpunished, and my service in Tribe War easily proves that rule. Sometime in the seventh week of camp that summer, George Greenfield, a counselor in the Senior group (I was in the Plebe group) who was a friend and somewhat of a drinking buddy, joined me in doing what we had done on numerous occasions before. We “busted curfew” by, first, signing in at curfew, which I believe to have been eleven o’clock, and, next, getting into my car and proceed- ing to the Spa, a bar in Glen Spey, where we shared pizza, beer, and good conversation. This was a bit of a mistake.
Within about ten minutes after we returned to campus and sneaked back into our bunks, we were both roused by Allen Kotimsky, whose last name you should recall. Kotimsky then took each of us, put us in his car, said nothing of substance, and drove us around to the back of the social hall, where we then entered a room that I had not known existed. Two other counselors were already there, both seated at a round table upon which sat a lighted candle. Kotimsky motioned George and me to sit in two of the vacant chairs at the table, and then he sat down in the third.
I had expected some form of dressing down for being in breach of camp rules, and that’s what Kotimsky started with, but his emphasis swiftly turned to the inconvenience that we had caused him. He had wanted and expected to find George and me in our bunks at curfew, and we had frustrated that purpose for a substantial and very irritating period of time. After telling us the foregoing, he donned a fairly ridicu- lous, presumably ceremonial, old hat with a B on it, took a large coin out
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