Johnny, I Hardly Knew You
On a beautiful late summer, weekend day, in 1961, my good friend tried to kill me. It wasn’t just a game; it had all the intention and purpose of a repressed rage gone wild. For a few minutes time stood still, there was no tomorrow, only a desperate energy to survive for today.
It was the last weekend of the summer at the beach, the fond farewell to another year, and to the thoughts of the labor that was in front of me to survive my family and school.
It would normally be a rather reflective peaceful time for me, as the summer was over with a few more glorious moments of nothingness in front of me. Life was unwinding, Cousin Brucie was on the radio, America was preeminent, Cadillac’s had more fins and lights than a submarine, and all the girls were off shopping for Fall wardrobes.
Young women still wore white gloves to go to the city, and the weekly rituals of ballroom dancing was about to commence; pretending to care about the foxtrot when all I could think about was holding Elizabeth Meyer in my arms.
The beach, like American society was a social strata in and of itself. There were private clubs adjacent to each other, each outdoing the other in membership and prestige. They all fronted the ocean, and although private, could easily be entered from the ocean side. Each club had its own peculiarities.
In some you could almost feel the late summer heat of money with all these men and long cigars, sitting around card tables, trying to make up for the losses of the summer. By now all these men were so bronzed that only their wives or girlfriends would ever see any part of their body that showed their true color. Florida was now calling and they were prepared.
So on this glorious, leisurely afternoon my friend suggested that we go to the club a few paces down the beach to swim in their salt-water pool. I easily agreed and off we went. Johnny and I were friends, although we did not go to the same school. We did live near each other and often would flip baseball cards together, and would on occasion hang out at each other’s houses. His mother was one of my mother’s closest and best friends.
As we started to swim in the pool and I dove deeper in the water, I felt this weight on top of me. It was Johnny’s hands holding me down, not letting me come up for air.
Often boys will play rough games, and I was not immune to this behavior, having been picked on my whole life, but immediately I knew this was different.
There was intensity, an unforgiving determination to hold me down to prevent me from arising.
With all my might and effort, we fought until finally I broke through and barely escaped, gasping for air. I ran out of the pool back to our club.
Something quite unusual happened that day, beside the obvious. First, I knew immediately he was trying to severely hurt me or kill me. But somehow I knew it was not Johnny. I never felt anger towards him and to this day I do not know why. All my life I have felt that people were jealous of me and I have tried to atone these feelings and others. I don’t know if I forgave him or whether I needed to, but we never mentioned this incident again. To this day I only feel sadness about it.
Some years later Johnny was hospitalized for severe mental problems. His father (not knowing about this event in the pool) asked me to write a letter of recommendation to the judge asking for leniency for John. I had no problems doing this. John was a great and kind boy who had terrible demons that filled his soul with rage on that calm, gentle, Labor Day in 1961.
