CHAPTER 5: TO FRESH WOODS AND PASTURES
NEW
Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.
—John Milton To fully acknowledge John Milton, this chapter title
would begin with “Tomorrow.” For me it was yesterday. During the three
years I spent in New Jersey at the Lawrenceville School (although the
thought did occur to me it was a way to simply eliminate me as an
encumbrance to my parent’s travels), I did miss home. Having gone
through the first year of high school in Ithaca, I missed my friends and my
female counterparts at Ithaca High School, since Lawrenceville was not
coeducational at the time.
The school did have a number of proms and other get-togethers, to
which I invited some of my former Ithaca girlfriends. My Raymond
housemates and I also watched the predecessor of MTV, American
Bandstand, and since the high school girls who appeared on the show
lived in nearby Trenton, New Jersey, we had a regular pen-pal party
going. A number of them were invited to the Lawrenceville proms.
During this time, I lost track of what my parents were up to, but my
mother and father kept close track of me. I had read J.D. Salinger’s The
Catcher in the Rye, which was published around the time I was in prep
school, and I managed to prevail on my father to let me and two of my
classmates spend a weekend in New York City. We stayed at the New
York Athletic Club, which had for the first time decided to allow women
in the dining room, but still not the rest of the areas in the club. My
classmates saw the New York trip as an opportunity to smuggle any
receptive woman they met on the street into the club, alas without success.
So we took this as an opportunity to kick off our drinking career. I
remember the night after our healthy indulgence attending a first-run
movie. Back then a “first-run” movie was equivalent to a Broadway show.
It was a full house, and we had seats in the front row of the balcony. I was,
unfortunately, more sick than drunk, and I finally lost my dinner over the
side. The recipient below was smart enough to track me to the men’s room
after he found the seat empty directly above him, and went there to clean
off the results of my evening. I have seen this in many movies since, and
I’m sure I was not the first to close the stall door and stand on top of the
toilet to avoid being spotted when he looked under each stall. That is
