Email Theo		Gordy   Age-Appropriate Friends When I was at my two graduate schools, I had a playmate at each institution to, well, play with. No, not that kind of playmate. Allow me to explain myself. In my first year of graduate work at the University of South Carolina, I lived in the male graduate student housing right on the main quadrangle. In those environs, I saw nothing but male graduate students for the entire year I was there. When I wasn't studying or attending classes or practicing Beethoven, I was often 'busy' playing frisbee out on the wide brick walks under the elms with a strapping country boy (a fellow math grad student) from Georgia named Tom Milner. I have no idea why Tom and I hit it off so well. Certainly it would seem that a worldly southern country boy would have absolutely nothing in common with a callow northern suburban fellow. And there were plenty of guys there in the dorms who seemed to have a lot more in common with me than Tom did: they were from New York, they were naïve, and so forth. But none of them was ever out there on the quad to play with me. I think Tom and I must have needed each other in a symbiotic way. I needed him to introduce the South to me as only he could; and he needed me as a sounding board for his many stories as well as his folk singing. In fact, he paid me the ultimate compliment: one weekend he brought me to his home in Quitman, Georgia (a tiny town only ten miles from the Florida border) to meet his recently widowed mother. So Tom and I threw the frisbee and chatted on the broad brick walks under the stately elm trees. There I invented such now-classic throws as the Deadly Vertical, the Sawmill, and the Overarm Upsidedown. Each of these lived up to its name in terms of the violence and mayhem it could visit on an opponent. In fact [and this amounts to a sort of confession], I once threw a Deadly Vertical (tossed up very high and then allowed to descend under the tremendous force of gravity) to my brother even as I knew him to be a hemophiliac. The frisbee sliced his finger (much as the razor-disk slices the flesh of the hapless captive in Poe's 'The Pit and the Pendulum') and blood gushed forth. But bandages were quickly applied and thus was I saved from having to live with the crime of fratricide on my conscience. There at South Carolina Tom and I devised a game called Place Frisbee, where the players stand about ten paces apart and throw to (or is it 'at'?) one another. A throw dropped is a point for the thrower; but a throw beyond one's reach is a point for the would-be catcher. Of course savagery would reign in the early going, as it was easy to engage our repertoire of vicious throws with a fair amount of accuracy at that short distance. But then after every two or three throws we would each step back a step; thus did we gradually get further and further apart, and so it got harder and harder to make accurate throws. As a result, our play became more and more refined and subtle. For example, I developed a long-distance toss which would veer away from my opponent only at the last instant, thus bouncing off his eager hand as he tried to grasp it. I became adept at 'skipping' the saucer off the brick walk on its way to my adversary. Most subtle of all, I would occasionally throw a simple soft straight shot devoid of any clever shenanigans. But my adversary would often drop such a throw, the reason being that in using so many sophisticatedly loopy ones I had weaned him away from the common everyday garden-variety throw. What did we talk about while we were playing? I'm afraid that Tom did most of the talking, since he was the one who had had the rich and colorful social life in high school and college. He had all sorts of humorous anecdotes, mostly sexual ones. One concerned a fellow whom he (and apparently everyone else) had called 'Needledick the Bugfucker', for reasons that need no explanation. Tom would exclaim: "The girls all thought little Needledick was so cute! But he would be inside one of them and she wouldn't even know it!" Tom related this as a triumph for Needledick. Due to my inexperience I did not dare ask the obvious question: if one's partner does not feel anything, what is the use? Playing a game in which one main object is to hurt and even maim one's opponent is not just male, but grade-school male at that. While the sex talk, of the college fraternity sort, seems even more puerile. In short, my play with Tom consisted mainly of words and actions which could be termed 'decidedly immature' by someone who expects age-appropriate behavior from two mathematics graduate students. The next year I transferred to West Virginia University for my second year of graduate study. I recall going to the math office there to check in and meeting the department secretary Virginia Alexander. She asked me whether I'd found housing yet, and I told her I hadn't. It seemed that she had a room for rent in her house, and I said I'd come over and look at it. The house was out in the country (actually, a very sparsely populated part of suburbia), on top of one of the rolling hills above the Monongahela River. (Virginia's sister had an identical house 50 yards away, and there were only two other houses visible up there.) It was a large modern brick ranch-type house with three bedrooms and two baths on the main floor, and two more bedrooms and a full bath in the second-floor attic. The room for rent was a quaint garret running from the front of the house to the back. After five years of college dorms, the idea of living out in the country by myself appealed to me immensely. I told Virginia that I would take it. Unlike the quadrangle at South Carolina, there were no graduate students at all besides myself out there in the West Virginia countryside. (True, I supposedly had a roommate – a medical student. But as he virtually always stayed with his girlfriend in town, I seldom saw him -- thankfully: the rare times he showed up, he called me 'Roomie'. Ugh!) Not only were there no graduate students out there, there were no college students either. But if I was going to have a playmate, that person would have to be chosen from the available young people living up there on the hill. The list was very short, unfortunately. True, the Alexanders had four children: two boys (ages 16 and 14) followed by two girls (10, and 7); but there were only two other young people living around there: a girl of junior high school age across the road, and a sixth-grade boy living in a different house across the road. Below is an annotated examination of those six choices: The Alexander Brothers: For whatever reason, I have no memories of ever having much of anything to do with those two lads, except perhaps once in a game of touch football. Their main subject of 'conversation' had to do with trying to impress and/or shock me with their 'knowledge' of the lascivious. But whereas Tom Milner's sexual anecdotes came from experience and were laced with wit and irony, those of the Alexander boys seemed to be merely the adolescent fantasies of a pair of wankers. The Alexander sisters: I do not recall having much to do with these two young girls either. I remember that the older was quite precocious and protective of the younger one. I also recall a walk the three of us took together down towards the river. I was enjoying this informal ramble quite a bit (no doubt as a prelude to having my own two daughters) when the older girl suddenly said in all innocence, "My mother told us not to be alone with you too much." Luckily, I was able to see this from the mother's perspective and so I was not offended; after all, how well did she really know me? I took care that there were no more walks out of sight of the parents. The junior high school girl across the way: For reasons that should be quite clear, this 23-year-old bachelor was not going to be 'playing' with a girl that age -- at least not on a regular basis. As a matter of fact, I remember only one encounter with her. It was a lovely summer evening, the Alexanders were on vacation, and I was washing my car out on the driveway, when the girl suddenly appeared with a friend. They were laughing and flirting and one thing led to another so that finally, in order to dampen their enthusiasm, I was forced to give them each a good squirt with the hose. By the end of the encounter, there were some pretty wet T-shirts. And that, as they say, was that! The sixth-grade boy across the road: his name was Gordy (I have no recollection of his last name), he was a sturdy little fellow with a short blond crew-cut, and, unlike the much older Alexander boys, he was serious and grown up in his demeanor. For whatever reasons, he and I hit it off right away. What did we do together, Gordy and I? Strangely, I do not remember ever throwing the frisbee with him (I think I had become addicted to playing that sport exclusively on spacious brick walkways under ancient elms.) I remember doing the sorts of things that my brother and I did when we were Gordy's age: throw the football in the fall, and play catch with a baseball in the spring. And when summer came, I made us a nine-hole chip-and-putt golf course (there was plenty of room up there on the hill beside and between the two houses) of the sort I had designed for my father up at our summer cottage. An acquaintance of mine told me that he got married at 23. When I was that august age, my best friend was 11 years old. With him I could do what few adults are able to do: reproduce a part of their childhood. And so I would be up in my room studying the likes of 'Analytic Function Theory' next to the window, when I would hear a high-pitched voice at the front door below ask one of the Alexanders, "Can Ted come out and play?" I don't recall ever refusing any of his entreaties, even though I might be wrestling with the likes of 'subjective onto mappings'. In fact, such invitations were a welcome relief from those sorts of intellectual rigours. What did we talk about, Gordy and I? After more than forty years, I cannot recall. Certainly he must have talked about his sixth-grade class -- his teacher and his fellow classmates, and the things he was learning there. Perhaps he even brought me some of the math problems they were working on, though I never sat down with him to help him with his homework. No doubt we also talked about major league baseball -- specifically his favorite team (since it was the most proximate) the Pittsburgh Pirates. I can state with absolute assurance the subject we never talked about: sex. Never once did Gordy mention the name of any girl, or bring up the topic of girls in general, leading me to conclude that he was utterly indifferent to the very existence of the opposite sex. And of course I would never have brought up the subject myself. (But I must have, at least once. After all, the subject of girls was something that was dear to my own heart. And so it is not unreasonable to assume that I asked once in a jocular way whether he was 'interested in' any girls. What I most certainly must have gotten back was a look of such disdain and a verbal expression of such outright disgust that I never dared raise the subject again.) Did I ever throw the baseball extra hard, so as to make him acquainted with my superior physical powers as an adult or to train him to become a Man, as Karl Malden does to his 'son' Anthony Perkins in Fear Strikes Out? Never. I think that by instinct I threw to him with a strength exactly commensurate with his own, the one possible exception being the high fly ball. But that sort of thing trained him in the most positive way: to be better able to catch such balls when they were hit to him are out in the field. ('Never'? As with the talk about sex, this seems highly unlikely. For, as most women know, men will be men, and it is never easy to remake them into something else. So, much as I would love to rewrite my history with Gordy in such a way that it makes me look like the perfect mentor, it probably just wasn't the case. Did I, in order to show him what 'a real man can do' (and perhaps out of jealousy of his innocence as well), throw the ball extra hard to him at least once so as to sting his poor little hand? I have little doubt that I must have; for I have an image in my mind of my little friend in tears of rage and betrayal screaming at me to 'stop doing that'. Is this a product of my fevered brain as well? I really have no idea; but it makes more sense than the description of perfection did.) Another big difference (and irony) from South Carolina and Tom Milner: Gordy never took me across the road to meet his parents. Indeed, I had no idea what they even looked like. The question is, what was I doing out there in the country to begin with? Yes, I know, the ostensible reason was that I wanted to get away from living in the dorms. But were there deeper reasons? Remember when I stated above that I thought Tom Milner used me as 'a sounding board' for all his colorful stories and songs? The next year it would seem logical that, emulating Tom, I would seek out my own sounding board. But where would I find such a person who was even more weak and naïve and malleable than myself? The answer was, out in the middle of nowhere, where the age of my one possible friend was less than half my own. Of course, the big irony here is that Gordy's and my relationship would seem to have been far more mature, more appropriate to my own age, than the one I had with Tom Milner. But was it really? What is 'age-appropriate' behavior for a single male math graduate student who wants to be a teacher? One facile -- perhaps glib -- answer, of course, is 'the kind of behavior that he needs and wants to engage in at the time.' So I suppose that, by that definition, I engaged in age-appropriate behavior both years. It is interesting, though, that I remember so much from my year with Tom Milner, and so little from the one with Gordy! I stayed on at West Virginia over the summer in order to finish up the course work I needed for my masters degree. Gordy went on vacation with his family for a couple of weeks. When he came back, for some reason he was not the same person. He seemed more distant, reserved. I wondered whether his parents had given him the same sort of talk that Virginia had given to her daughters. When I asked him what the matter was, he wouldn't tell me. Maybe he had been invaded by some body snatchers. (24 August 2008) Back to top