Вуди Аллен - Apropos of Nothing

So I loved being sick and luxuriating in my bed, radio, comic books, and chicken soup. Here I should note part of the serendipitous delight of coming down with a hundred-and-one fever was something I mentioned before; I hated, loathed, and despised school. There was nothing about P.S. 99, with its dumb, prejudiced, backward teachers, to commend it. I’m talking about the early 1940s. After the war, it got some teachers who were better. Let me put this delicately. The staff were blue-haired Irish women like what a casting director would think of for strict, abusive nuns. I was dragged up a flight of stairs by my ear by Miss Reid, the assistant principal, may she rot in the “serl.” That’s how she pronounced it while I cringed—“The worm is good for the serl.” It’s soil , fatso, I wanted to say and then shovel her under it.

The few male teachers were more relaxed liberal Jews. One of the best was fired because his ideas were too liberal. At something called Sing, where each class would choose a song, sing it, and stage it in the assembly hall, he chose a turn-of-the-century number called “Boops-a-Daisy,” which went, “hands” (dancers touch hands), “knees” (dancers slap their knees) and “Boops-a-Daisy” (couples turn away from each other and bump their backsides together). Well, the biddies stood there aghast as if he had staged a gangbang in the auditorium. This was not the usual antiseptic rendition of “You’re a Grand Old Flag” or “Bicycle Built for Two.” To these frigid anti-Semites it reeked of lewdness. Today it would be called “inappropriate” by the Appropriate Police. Needless to say, this errant Hebrew pedagogue was out on his rear end at the soonest possible moment. The fact that he had pronounced leftist leanings politically didn’t endear him to Miss Fletcher, the principal, and her grubby minions.

But it was not just the coven of teachers, it was the whole regulated routine, designed to see that no one ever learned anything. You had to get there on time and line up in the basement or in the yard if weather permitted. You lined up and couldn’t talk—what the hell was that? You marched to class. You sat “feet flat on the floor, eyes straight ahead,” and there was no talking, joking, note passing, nothing that made the grim business of human existence bearable. You learned by rote, except you never learned. Once a week there was an assembly period. First the Pledge of Allegiance, hand over your heart. They wanted to be sure we weren’t siding with the Axis. Then a bullshit prayer. Never answered, none of them. Not even, I’ll get back to you on that. God is silent, I used to say, now if we can only get the teachers to shut up.

Then came the music. Could they have picked anything duller? All that Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart on the radio; there were so many beautiful Gershwin tunes. Songs with pretty melodies and exciting rhythm. “Anything Goes,” “Lady Be Good,” “Mountain Greenery”; so many to have a nice time with, to learn to really enjoy music. But no, first our class recites “In Flanders fields where poppies blow…” I guess to put us in an up mood. Then we get to sing “Recessional.” Or “Abide with Me.” At that point, I thought maybe if I faked an epileptic fit they’d send me home. I just wanted out. Let me hold the thermometer over the radiator or let me play hooky and ride to Manhattan, knock off some clams at McGinnis’s and go watch Esther Williams do the backstroke south of the border. I still cringe thinking back on the school lines in the basement, indoors because it was raining or snowing; the stink of wet wool from our sweaters that got soaked, and getting caught doing something innocuous like whispering to a friend or stealing a kiss in the wardrobe closet and having your mother sent for.

“He’s always flirting with the girls,” one of the sterile drones said to my mother. Yes, I liked the girls. What am I supposed to like, the multiplication tables? Should I like your soul-deadening spiel on the first Thanksgiving? Should I like clapping the erasers together to beat the chalk dust out of them? A privilege some of the more sluggish kids vied for. No, I liked the girls. From kindergarten on, I was not interested in “Do You Know the Muffin Man” or playing musical chairs. I wanted to get on the subway with Barbara Westlake, ride into Manhattan, take her up to my penthouse on Fifth, drink dry martinis (whatever dry meant), go out on the terrace and kiss her in the moonlight. You can imagine this idea was not appreciated by the teaching staff at P.S. 99, my mother, or even Barbara Westlake, who was six, not into dry martinis, and sobbed hysterically when Bambi’s mother got whacked. Hence, no matter how often I proposed the Astor Bar, I could not get faded. Please note, I was only talking the talk. While I knew the score, I could not have traveled to Manhattan by myself, found the Astor Bar, been admitted or served anything stronger than an egg cream. Not to mention I would have had trouble raising the nickel subway fare, much less a dime to take a dame.

My mother was called to see the teacher so many times, she became a familiar face. All the kids said hello to her on the street long after they were grown up and married. They knew her from that dreadful ritual when the class would be learning some useless thing like “the correct word for the numeral zero is aught .” (I’m fine with zero .) Meanwhile the door opens and it’s my mother. Class is halted for five minutes while the azure-haired crone chats with my mother in the hall telling her how incorrigible a son she has and how I floated a billet-doux to Judy Dors suggesting we have cocktails. “There’s something wrong with him,” my mother says, instantly taking the side of anyone who hates me. Yes, there was something wrong with me. I liked girls. I liked everything about girls. I enjoyed their company, I liked the sound of their laughter, I liked their anatomy and I wanted to be at the Stork Club with them and not in the shop class with the local male troglodytes making a lopsided tie rack.

Some of the teachers would keep kids after school as punishment but it was always the Jewish kids. Why? Because we’re shifty little usurers and in keeping us after school, we’d be late or couldn’t attend Hebrew school. Now unbeknownst to them, this punishment to me, if I may use a Yiddish word, was a mitzvah. I hated Hebrew school as much as public school and now I’m going to tell you why. First of all, I never bought into the whole religious thing. I thought it was all a big hustle. Didn’t ever think there was a God; didn’t think he’d conveniently favor the Jews if there was one. Loved pork. Hated beards. The Hebrew language was too guttural for my taste. Plus it was written backwards. Who needed that? I had enough trouble in school where things were written left to right. And why should I fast for my sins? What were my sins? Kissing Barbara Westlake when I should’ve been hanging up my coat? Fobbing a plug nickel off on my grandpa? I say live with it, God, there’s much worse. The Nazis are putting us in ovens. First attend to that. But as I said, I didn’t believe in God. And why did the women have to sit upstairs in the synagogue? They were prettier and smarter than the men. Those hirsute zealots who wrapped themselves in prayer shawls on the premier level, nodding up and down like bobbleheads and kissing a string up to some imaginary power who, if he did exist, despite all their begging and flattery, rewarded them with diabetes and acid reflux.

Not worth my time, and my time was the great rub here. I couldn’t wait till the three o’clock bell rang and I was freed from public school so I could hit the streets and the schoolyard and play ball but oh no, to have to pack that in and go sit in a Hebrew class reading words, the meaning of which were never taught to us, and learning how the Jews had made a special covenant with God, but unfortunately failed to get anything in writing. But I went. Parental pressure, my allowance, the threat of no radio, not to mention I’d get hit. My mother hit me every day at least once. Hitting was very de rigueur in those days, though my father only did once, when I told him to fuck off and he made his displeasure known with a gentle tap across my face that gave me an unimpeded view of the Aurora Borealis. But mom whacked me every day and it was the old Sam Levenson joke—“Maybe I don’t know what you did to deserve it, but you do.” And so it came to pass that I was eventually bar mitzvahed and so had to take special bar mitzvah lessons and sing in Hebrew—and let me tell you, as they say in the Old Testament, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.