Sometimes when he couldn’t sleep, lying on his back in his cell (by the early nineties he had a single, complete with a shelf of well-thumbed books), Morris would soothe himself by remembering his discovery of Jimmy Gold. That had been a shaft of bright sunlight in the confused and angry darkness of his adolescence.
By then his parents had been fighting all the time, and although he had grown to heartily dislike both of them, his mother had the better armor against the world, and so he adopted her sarcastic curl of a smile and the superior, debunking attitude that went with it. Except for English, where he got As (when he wanted to), he was a straight-C student. This drove Anita Bellamy into report-card-waving frenzies. He had no friends but plenty of enemies. Three times he suffered beatings. Two were administered by boys who just didn’t like his general attitude, but one boy had a more specific issue. This was a hulking senior football player named Pete Womack, who didn’t care for the way Morris was checking out his girlfriend one lunch period in the cafeteria.
‘What are you looking at, rat-face?’ Womack enquired, as the tables around Morris’s solitary position grew silent.
‘Her,’ Morris said. He was frightened, and when clearheaded, fright usually imposed at least a modicum of restraint on his behavior, but he had never been able to resist an audience.
‘Well, you want to quit it,’ Womack said, rather lamely. Giving him a chance. Perhaps Pete Womack was aware that he was six-two and two-twenty, while the skinny, red-lipped piece of freshman shit sitting by himself was five-seven and maybe a hundred and forty soaking wet. He might also have been aware that those watching – including his clearly embarrassed girlfriend – would take note of this disparity.
‘If she doesn’t want to be looked at,’ Morris said, ‘why does she dress like that?’
Morris considered this a compliment (of the left-handed variety, granted), but Womack felt differently. He ran around the table, fists raised. Morris got in a single punch, but it was a good one, blacking Womack’s eye. Of course after that he got his shit handed to him, and most righteously, but that one punch was a revelation. He would fight. It was good to know.
Both boys were suspended, and that night Morris got a twenty-minute lecture on passive resistance from his mother, along with the acid observation that fighting in cafeteria was generally not the sort of extracurricular activity the finer colleges looked for on the applications of prospective enrollees.
Behind her, his father raised his martini glass and dropped him a wink. It suggested that, even though George Bellamy mostly resided beneath his wife’s thumb and thin smile, he would also fight under certain circumstances. But running was still dear old dad’s default position, and during the second semester of Morris’s freshman year at Northfield, Georgie-Porgie ran right out of the marriage, pausing only to clean out what was left in the Bellamy bank account. The investments of which he had boasted either didn’t exist or had gone tits-up. Anita Bellamy was left with a stack of bills and a rebellious fourteen-year-old son.
Only two assets remained following her husband’s departure to parts unknown. One was the framed Pulitzer nomination for that book of hers. The other was the house where Morris had grown up, situated in the nicer section of the North Side. It was mortgage-free because she had steadfastly refused to co-sign the bank papers her husband brought home, for once immune to his rhapsodizing about an investment opportunity that was absolutely not to be missed. She sold it after he was gone, and they moved to Sycamore Street.
‘A comedown,’ she admitted to Morris during the summer between his freshman and sophomore years, ‘but the financial reservoir will refill. And at least the neighborhood is white.’ She paused, replaying that remark, and added, ‘Not that I’m prejudiced.’
‘No, Ma,’ Morris said. ‘Who’d ever believe that?’
Ordinarily she hated being called Ma, and said so, but on that day she kept still, which made it a good day. It was always a good day when he got in a poke at her. There were so few opportunities.
During the early seventies, book reports were still a requirement in sophomore English at Northfield. The students were given a mimeographed list of approved books to choose from. Most looked like dreck to Morris, and, as usual, he wasn’t shy about saying so. ‘Look!’ he cried from his spot in the back row. ‘Forty flavors of American oatmeal!’