Page 207 - WhyAsInY

you Can taKe tHe Boy out of BrooKlyn
nevertheless connected, and, as Dick told me recently, they thought highly of each other. Dick was the third baseman on the Mama- roneck team, and I believe that Joe ran with the intellectual crowd and—sad to say, based on evidence learned later—the drug crowd. Dick, who I believe had also lived in Thailand and Lebanon, talked me into trying out for the freshman baseball squad as a pitcher (that damned good outfield arm again). He would catch for me for hours, and he not only taught me a curve to go with my natural screwball, he taught me the proper way in which to wear the baseball socks and stirrups that were then in fashion. While I’d like to think that the pitching would have permitted me to get on the team, it never got far enough for me to test that theory. For obvious reasons (too many Marlboros), I could not handle the wind sprints. Dick could, and did make the team. He was good to me; I liked him a lot.
I won’t go into any real detail about Dwight Eastman, who wore wire-rimmed glasses; Steve Rosenheck, who somehow knew Laurie Phillips, fellow camper from Starlight; and Andy Lawrence, known as “Gander.” They all lived downstairs. Dwight was a bright preppie and a WASP. Steve was a bright preppie (Riverdale) and not a WASP. Gander was a preppie, a WASP, and not as bright, but he was extremely nice and quite a sprinter. The three were close friends and pledged AD. I am sorry that I never got to really know them.
Hard as it is to believe, the words WASP and preppie, along with some others that will be referred to below, were unknown to me when I arrived at Amherst. Not knowing someone, especially in the earlier years of college, often led to imposing a construct on him, which can sometimes be of some use, but generalizations are more often more divisive than helpful. Nevertheless, it is plain to me that when I entered college, I was entering an entirely new culture, and I was more aware of differences than similarities. (I was not the only one who thought that going off to college was the beginning of a major transition to a new culture; the book that was assigned reading in advance of orientation week was E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India.)
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