Stories I'd Tell My Children (But Maybe Not Until They're Adults). Michael N. Marcus
An unauthorized elevator operator
He could build anything, fix anything, and seemed to have X-ray vision. Artie could look at a wall or a building and instantly sense the path of least resistance for slithering a wire through it from point A to point B. Some of Artie’s admirers, especially me, called him the “Super Snake.”
In the 1980s, Artie frequently helped me to install phone systems in Manhattan. One night we had a rendezvous in a parking lot on East 30th Street that gained valuable space by using individual mini-elevators to raise cars up in the air, so other cars could park beneath them.
We left our vehicles around 8 p.m., and went into a nearby building to do our work. We came out around 2 a.m. and learned to our horror that the office had closed at midnight. Our keys were locked in the office, our transportation was eight feet up in the air, and no one answered the emergency phone number shown on the sign in the office window.
Artie was not one to panic, and there was some good news: in his wallet, he had a spare key to his van.
All we had to do was drive his van off the elevator, or build a ramp up to the van, and then drive to my house, get my spare key, and come back and rescue my car. Unfortunately, the chance of Artie’s aging van’s surviving an eight-foot drop was not very good, and we could not find any suitable ramp-building supplies.
Artie had been a “Seabee” in the Navy. The term comes from the abbreviation for “Construction Battalion.” Their motto is “We Build, We Fight,” and a mere lack of lumber would not stop Artie from defeating the parking lot.
Artie was unable to pick the lock, and smashing the window would have been noisy and messy. Lots of people were walking nearby. Some of those people were cops.
Artie analyzed more, and spotted an electrical panel on the outside back wall of the office. He opened his tool bag, opened the panel, traced the circuits, bypassed the master switch, and soon a motor hummed and lights came on.
He went to “his” elevator and brought down and liberated the van, and then he put the elevator back up. Next we drove to my house in Westchester, got my spare key, went back to Manhattan, rescued my car, restored the second elevator, and closed up the electrical panel.
While closing the panel, Artie was wounded in battle.
He got a bad cut on his finger, and closed the wound with black electrical tape. Then we went for hotdogs at Gray’s Papaya at 72nd and Broadway, and drove home.
I would have loved to have been at the parking lot at 7 a.m. when the manager came in, and opened the office, and saw two sets of keys hanging on the wall and two empty elevators up in the air.
Chapter 11
Health can be unhealthy
Leone preferred that his name be pronounced as a two-syllable anglicized “Lee-On,” and he was obviously shaken if anyone acknowledged his Italian ancestry and pronounced the final vowel.
This seemed strange, because New Haven was a very Italian city and there were many Italian-American teachers and students in the schools. Another Italian-American teacher would deliberately piss him off by calling him “Pasquale” or “Patsy Lay-o-nay.”
Leone would squirm and blush.
Unfortunately, Leone had lower standards for his own verbalizations than for others, pronouncing health as “helt” and science as “sines.”
His speech defect was complemented by a persistent memory problem. Every time my class entered his room—three times a week for ten months—he’d look at us plaintively and ask, “Division Eight, helt or sines?”
He didn’t know which subject he was supposed to teach us; and even when we confirmed that we were in his classroom to learn about helt, he sometimes tried to teach us sines.
Leone sure knew a lot about sines. He once told a class that “Det (death) kills instantly.”
Unlike our friends who had other teachers for helt, or health, we had no textbooks. Leone blamed the problem on the “Board of Ett,” and for months he assured us that the texts would be arriving soon.
Leone gave no lectures. There were no discussions and few quizzes. Most of our class time consisted of laboriously copying into our notebooks the words that he had laboriously written onto the blackboard.
Sometimes one of us would notice an error on the board, such as a “to” that should have been a “too.” Usually Leone would blame “juvenile delinquents” who’d sneak into his room during lunch period and change his words. Other times he’d try to justify his writing and deliver a long dissertation on grammar with parts of speech we never heard of in our English classes (“subdulated abominative”). A few times he blamed defective chalk that twisted in his hand.
Leone was a frustrated performer/producer/director, and parents’ visiting day was SHOWTIME.
Parents would be welcomed by the class singing the Brusha Brusha Brusha song from the Ipana toothpaste commercial (starring Bucky Beaver), and then Leone sailed an embalmed bat around the room like a balsawood model airplane. For his grand finale, he squirted the children with water from a hypodermic syringe.
I was not the only Michael in our seventh-grade health class. The other Michael, whose last name Leone always mispronounced, got sick early in the school year and was out for several months. Leone confused the two Michaels, and frequently reported me for skipping class.
Throughout the year, there was a mysterious stack of cardboard boxes gathering dust in a corner of the classroom.
In June, with summer approaching, the kids were feeling frisky, and one of them dared to sneak into the unoccupied classroom during lunch period. He cut open the cartons and found our missing textbooks, which had been in the room since September and had not been delayed by the inefficient bureaucrats downtown.
The burglar noticed that one carton had been opened previously. And after flipping through some pages of one of the texts, the familiar words soon made it obvious that Leone had removed one of our books for personal use.
Each week, he secretly copied a chapter onto the blackboard, and then we’d spend three days copying those same words from the blackboard into our notebooks.
The kids in our class had assumed that Leone, and not some wise medical authority hired by Houghton Mifflin or Prentice Hall, was the author of those words we were ordered to copy each day, while Leone sat and stared out the window and hummed for 45 minutes.
We were never allowed to see “our” books because Patsy Leone found it much easier to copy and have us copy, than to learn and to teach.
He was not a helty man.
Chapter 12
Medical care makes me sick