Chapter 3 – Mud Season
When dreary March was over and we moved into dreary April, and Mud Season proper, there wasn’t a lot of excitement in Essex Junction. We watched the annual flood at the power dam from the old iron bridge on Route 2A; that was a couple days of fun. But school was as dreary as the weather.
Some things were fun, of course. Mr. Ermentrout let us entertain the class with our amateur theatrics every couple of weeks, and, since we were now studying World War 1, there was ample opportunity for stylized violence and appalling bloodshed. He pleaded with us to keep it reasonable, but we knew he actually enjoyed it. He was just saying the things he was supposed to, knowing we’d do what we wanted anyway.
In Science class, we were dissecting small animals to learn some anatomy. It was mostly frogs and toads, but one time our buddy, Roy, gave us a dead chipmunk he had shot with a BB gun, and Mr. Trainor let us dissect that instead, probably because it was a mammal, rather than an amphibian, so he thought we might learn more about our own internal organs. There were a couple of teachers we would have been happy to dissect, but that never got beyond the discussion stage.
There were a lot of things to look forward to, though. First of all, we had a week off at the end of the month, before the long slog of May and June. The first weekend of vacation, the Planets had a gig, playing at a dance at the Firehouse, sponsored by the Boys and Girls Club. They had played some frat parties at St. Michael’s and UVM, but I think they were just “free beer and pass the hat” things, which was fine with them, because they needed the practice in front of people who didn’t know them. But this was an actual organized dance, and they were getting a guaranteed payment. The dance was supposed to be for High School kids, but we were determined that we would find a way to sneak in.
Speaking of Rock and Roll, Tom had found out that the Rolling Stones were going to be on Ed Sullivan on May 2nd. Their first appearance had been in October, but we had all missed it, because we had just returned from our disappearance, and we were all severely grounded. Ed Sullivan had sworn that they would never appear on his stage again, but, as Tom pointed out, record sales were apparently more important than Ed’s personal opinion of the Stones’ appearance and behavior.
A bunch of us were walking up Park Street towards the Five Corners on a Saturday in April. It was Rollo and Roy, Win’s brother Jimmy, and Win and Tom and me. We had been watching the flood down at the dam and we were all wet from the spray, but we were laughing and joking and having a great time. Jimmy nailed Rollo twice with punches to the right shoulder, yelling out “Lucky Strike” each time and laughing. If you saw an empty Lucky pack on the ground and stepped on it first, you got a free punch at whoever you chose. So, of course, we all started paying more attention to the ground in front of us, especially Rollo.
Tom was talking about the Rolling Stones as we walked, and then Rollo started humming a tune, probably to try and distract Jimmy from looking for Lucky packs, and it took a minute for us to realize what he was singing. Win turned on Rollo and shouted at him.
“Jesus, will you stop with that stupid song?! I hate that crap!”
The thing is, there were a lot of shit songs in the charts at the time, stuff from Freddie and the Dreamers and three songs from Herman’s Hermits, while there was really good stuff being ignored. They would play “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” at least once an hour, and it would drive Win into a rage. Something about that song just set him off.
“Come on, Win,” Rollo whined, “It’s just a song.”
“It’s crap, and I’m sick of hearing it all the goddamned time!”
“Okay, okay. I won’t sing it.”
Unfortunately for Rollo, while he was apologizing, Roy stepped on a Lucky pack and nailed him on the left shoulder. He couldn’t win for losing.
As we approached the Jackson Inn, which was right at the Five Corners, a bright red Mustang convertible drove past us and turned in to the parking lot just ahead of us. Some of the guys “oohed and aahed” at the sleek little sports car that had taken the country by storm the summer before. I wasn’t as much of a car enthusiast as most of them were, but I was still impressed, and we all wanted to see who the lucky guy was who was driving it.
He parked by the side door of the Inn, which was the entrance to the bar, and got out of the driver’s seat with a big, self-satisfied smile on his face, obviously aware that we were watching him. The guy was of medium height, a little pudgy, with dark hair and a round face, and dressed to impress. He looked kind of familiar, and it became obvious why when the door to the bar opened and Stefan stepped out. Stefan said something to the Mustang driver in Greek, I guess, and when he saw us, his face broke into a big grin and he called out to us.
“Hey, you guys! What you doing today? You hiding in the woods? Ha-ha!”
We all laughed. “Not today, Stefan,” I replied, “We’ve been watching the flood down at the dam.”
“Oh, yeah. It’s a big one this year.” He gestured to the other guy and said, “This is my cousin, Chris.” Then he said something in rapid Greek to Chris, who laughed heartily.
“So, you are the guys!” he said to us, “I heard about you. You guys made fools of them all, didn’t you? And you got away with it!”
Chris looked very much like his cousin, but was obviously younger, and stouter, and was dressed like one of the Kingston Trio, with a striped, button-down shirt and casual slacks and shoes. We would later realize that, as Chris was always looking to pick up girls, he would always tailor his outfit to appeal to whatever group of girls he thought he was likely to meet that day, or that night.
The next time I saw Sergeant Smithers at the library, I asked him if he knew Chris.
“Yes, I’ve met him,” he said, “He’s Stefan’s cousin, from Cyprus. A lot of the Greeks around here are Cypriots, and they’re mostly related. They call him Chris, but it’s really Chrisostomos. He’s about twenty-three or four; been in the states about four years, I think.”
“They look a lot alike.”
“Yes, they do. They’re very different, though, and I’m not sure it’s good for Stefan to be hanging around with him so much.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Stefan’s in his early thirties; has a wife and three kids. He’s got a good job, and he could end up managing the whole restaurant some day, not just the bar. But Chris, he’s young and ambitious. Now, I could be wrong about him, but, from the things I hear, he’s the kind who wants everything, but doesn’t want to work for it. People like that get in trouble, and he could get Stefan in trouble, too.”
“But Stefan’s smart enough to stay out of trouble, isn’t he?”
“He’s smart enough. Trouble is, the way the Greeks seem to feel about family, it’s like an obligation to help anyone in the family, brother or cousin or whatever, who asks for help, even if it’s something you wouldn’t otherwise do.”
I understood that, although that was actually more the way I felt about my friends, not my brothers or cousins.
Anyway, that afternoon we met Chris Poulos for the first time, but we would see him again, in very different circumstances, a week later.
That last week before spring vacation was a busy one, and one that ended with some very good news, and some crushingly bad news. My term paper business had been really picking up, and we were headed into the busiest time of the year. Almost all of the major term papers in High School were due in May or early June, so Amy had picked up a lot of business for me in a short period of time. She was telling everyone that they had to get their bids in before vacation started or I wouldn’t be able to do them, so there was a rush, especially in the last two days. By Friday night, I had fourteen term papers to do, as well as some shorter essays.
It was going to be a lot of work, but Amy and I had planned it out pretty well. She was amazing; she wasn’t really smart, like my friend Kate, but she was incredibly well-organized, and she could plan and schedule things like no one else. The two of us had anticipated the major difficulties we would have to deal with, and we had a plan for it. I had done a lot of writing – some at home, but mostly at the library – and she had done a lot of typing at home, but, in crunch time, we were going to have to come up with another place to work. My parents could not watch me write fourteen ten-to-twenty page term papers and not realize something was up. Amy could just say she had a lot of typing work lined up, but it would be a lot better if we could work at the same place. It was Jane to the rescue.
Jane’s apartment was right across the street from the shopping center, and she was glad to have us work at her place some evenings, and even during the day while we were on break from school. She had an IBM Selectric typewriter, which Amy was ecstatic about, and plenty of resources for a writer: dictionary, thesaurus, a writer’s guide with all of the proper citation forms, and lots of paper, both legal pads and typewriter paper. We did a couple of evening sessions that week. Jane was “between boyfriends” at the moment, as she put it, so we weren’t interfering with her social life. We had a lot of laughs and got some work done, but vacation week was going to be really busy for us, so Amy wrote up a schedule, working around her shifts at the bakery, and Jane and I looked it over and nodded our approval.
The bad news came on Friday. Leave it to Pratt to wait until the day before our vacation started. A letter arrived at my house that day, and identical letters at Tom’s and Win’s houses. Mrs. Pratt had determined that it was impossible for the three of us to adequately complete seventh grade French, so our choices (rather, our parents’ choices) were to take remedial French in Summer School, starting the first week in July, or repeat the whole course in eighth grade, which would mean we couldn’t go into French II in High School.
My parents were pretty upset about it, but not as much as I was. I would have gladly taken the second option and be done with French for the rest of my life. I tried to convince them that this was the way to go, and that they should try to persuade the Principal that we shouldn’t have to take French at all, either in the summer or next year in eighth grade. Why bother? But, of course, I got nowhere with that. It looked like I was ticketed for Summer School no matter what.
I talked to Tom and Win on the phone that evening and they were equally distraught and depressed. What a way to start our week-long vacation. But we were determined that this was going to be an awesome weekend, regardless. Tomorrow night, The Planets were playing at the Boys and Girls Club, which was on the second floor over the Firehouse.