Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

In December of 1612, Giorgio Coresio, Professor of Greek at Pisa University, “proved” that in falling objects “in proportion as the weight increases, so does the velocity.” This confirmed Aristotle, who wrote in the first book of De Caelo , “A mass of gold or lead, or of any other body endowed with weight is quicker in proportion to its size.” Galileo claimed not to remember ever having performed the famous experiment attributed to him, of dropping a cannonball and a musket ball off the tower of Pisa, to prove that the lighter musket ball reached the same velocity as the cannonball; but he did insist that he performed a mind experiment considering the velocity of falling objects, and with this experiment he clearly refuted Aristotle’s claim.

I am two years old or maybe two and a half, and I’m setting out to reaffirm Galileo’s refutation of Aristotle. We live in The Bronx near Bathgate Avenue on the fifth floor of a walk-up tenement building. I’m about to commit criminal acts. I accomplished most of my criminal activity before the age of five. My mother is busy making pot roast in the kitchen and I’m wandering around loose on a mischief mission. I waddle in my diaper between shit and shinola, and find my way into the parents’ bedroom. It’s a sunny space, two big windows, one onto a fire escape, the other open to whatever moves in the street below. I slide my mother’s green velveteen upholstered vanity bench to the open window and climb up to look out across the endless Bronx. I could fly away into the spaciousness without regret. In your terrible twos there are no regrets, and whether I can fly or not for me is still a matter of speculation since I haven’t tried it yet. I decide to go back to my mother’s vanity where I find her most private drawer unlocked. I open the precious jewelry box where all her most valuable stuff sits nestled in blue velvet. Here’s a bracelet, gold, pretty. I carry this to the bench, climb up, lean out the window, and drop it to the street. It pleases me to watch shiny fall. I scoop tiny fistfuls of stuff to drop one piece at a time. My mother doesn’t have much that’s valuable. Here’s a pair of earrings with small diamonds, but probably rhinestones, that I drop one at a time, watching how nicely they follow the bracelet. Everything falls, I notice. I don’t time any of the drops, but I definitely observe that the direction of gravity is down. One obvious conclusion is that shiny will always go down when it is dropped from a tenement window in the Bronx. I grab a brooch, one I see my mother wear frequently, and climb with it up the bench. This will be one glittering drop, and I drool with anticipation, but my mother suddenly appears in the doorway, and interrupts the experiment. She grabs me and pulls the brooch from my pudgy fist. “Buzzy no, no Stevie, it’s bad, it’s dangerous. You’ll fall out the window.” She examines her jewelry box and starts to cry. Some of the stuff was family heirlooms, from the old country. With me in her arms she rushes down the stairs and scours the street under the window. Nothing is left, not a chip of gold, not a piece of a glitter. She doesn’t scold me, but pressed against her body I can feel her sob. I know I’ve been bad. How sweet to be bad.

This memory sticks because it was one of my first thrills, the thrill of the shiny drop. It was against rules that no one had ever thought to write. At the time I didn’t know how important it was, my attempt to support Galileo and refute Aristotle. I had no doubt (a two year old is too small to register doubt) that if I had fallen from the window both tot and brooch would hit the sidewalk in the same instant. One toddler one brooch one thud.

Pole climbing was optional. The instruction from Brendan, the ranger, or from Milosz, who had a slight accent and might have sprung into Idaho from the forests of Slovakia, was excellent and thorough. The spikes, the harness, the belt were all top of the line. They didn’t want to lose anyone climbing. You climbed carrying a small chainsaw that you tied to a branch part way up, so if it slipped out of your hand it didn’t cut anyone on the ground. Someone had to be able to climb so we could take the crowns off trees we were going to fell. You wrapped the belt around the pole or tree, and leaned back on it for support, then sank the spikes strapped to your ankles and went higher, lifting the belt as you went up. You let yourself down by reversing the process. Some guys developed a beautiful rhythm going up and down. I never got the hang of it. The practice pole was thirty or forty feet high. The first time I tried to go up I strapped the spikes onto the outside of my ankles. It bent them unnaturally, and could have broken them. Perhaps it was part of the instruction that Mi-losz didn’t warn me. The second, and last time I tried, I put the spikes on right, and felt them dig into the pole, and went almost to the top, but I lost control of the belt coming down and slid too fast, too close to the pole. A bellyful of splinters.

Robert Lee Boudreau, on the other hand, lived to climb. He was from Louisiana bayou country and had spent most of his childhood in the swamps.

“Some people like to go down,” he proclaimed once at lunch. He was sitting across from Paul and me. “I’m one who likes to go up.” He practically shouted this, rising from the table. He was a little strange. The outburst brought Pinkie’s ladle down on his hard hat like a hammer. I didn’t even see her coming.

“Less talking, more eating.”

Boudreau never ate much. He had a wiry, lithe, strong body, and didn’t need to feed it much. It was the kind of body I always envied, thought I would prefer it to my own chunkiness. I had my strengths, but not the effortless mobility of Robert Lee Boudreau. He was nimble and quick, a graceful athlete, like Willie Mays, or Dom DiMaggio catching up to a fly ball, or Sugar Ray or Joe Louis in the ring.

Boudreau was a fanatic. He practiced climbing at the expense of all his other training. All the rangers said he was the fastest man on pole or tree that they had ever seen. He practiced on all the trees around the camp, and if you woke up at two or three A.M. you’d probably see him at the pole, working on his technique.

On that strange day, the day Paul was shrunk by lightning, we were about to go out for fire line training. Brendan called Boudreau down from the pole to join us.

“I think I’ll stay up here,” I remember Boudreau saying.

Brendan was a mellow, peace-loving, outdoors man, but I could see that something about Boudreau got under his skin. “You’ll come down to train with us,” he insisted. I couldn’t imagine a fight.

Boudreau hesitated. He looked very comfortable at the top of the pole, but then, like a flash of lightning, he dropped down. He and Brendan got into a staring match. Milosz came over, “Take off the spikes and harness,” Brendan said. Milosz held out his arms to receive them.

“Just once more up. One more time,” he said. There was something about his voice I’ll never forget, like a whine out of his swampy adolescence. Brendan tried to grab the smoke chaser recruit, but missed him as he flew back up the pole, as if he accepted no difference between earth and sky. I could feel what was going on in Brendan’s mind, that this was someone who would be very useful if only he would cooperate. At the top of the pole he didn’t hesitate, but kept on going. Everyone watched. I was totally jealous of Robert Lee Boudreau, who rose against the blue sky, beyond the gossiping ravens, above the clouds, and disappeared.

“We don’t usually encourage that,” Milosz said.

You could practically see steam coming out of Brendan’s ears. “Our best climbing spikes,” he muttered, as we marched off to practice building a fire line.