The day I entered The Pingry School for Boys, formerly of Hillside, New Jersey, I got to know Emanuel F. Tramontana, "Manny." He was my math teacher and it was not pretty. Manny was also one of two junior varsity soccer coaches. The other was the late Frank Romano. He was a nice man with a winning smile. He could fashion a withering gaze and could be scary as he ambled the halls, so he was known as "The Shark" by many students. The Shark was big and broad chested. Manny was a rail. They weren't funny like Jackie Gleason and Art Carney.
I hesitate to address the role of Manny Tramontana in my life because he is still alive and probably capable of filing suit for libel. So I'll attempt to stick to my feelings without going to such inflammatory terms as "abuse." However, I will say that Manny Tramontana nearly ruined my high school years single-handedly. In my mind's eye, his face greets me as if it were yesterday, though he started teaching me thirty five years ago in 1973. I should put "teaching" in quotation marks, because for me, his class was the Spanish Inquisition and he, Torquemada. Fortunately, I was his second fiddle in the humiliation business. The first was Stanley Mantel, a pitiable thin broken kid with bug eyes. Still, I can hear Manny yelling "Browwwwwwn! as loud as screeching tires. It seemed I couldn't do anything without being run down by that car. Thirty five years of psychotherapy have not erased those wounds.
Manny Tramontana is tall and wiry, intimidating, and, in retrospect, he had the most contemptuous, hateful sneer I have ever seen on the face of a human being. I never saw him smile, except in joke sessions with his academic colleagues. I still thank God for Stanley Mantel, a gumby-like sad sack. Stanley got it far worse than me. Still, it seems that without Stanley and me to pick on, Manny would have no way to survive the world, which probably had dealt him a bad hand. We all heard things but were never sure. One thing is for sure, he needed me; he needed someone to taunt and bully in order to exorcise his own terror--literally to rip it from his gut and paint it on our faces.
The worst was on the soccer field. This was the epoch in which teachers, with few exceptions, coached the teams. So the hand I was dealt on the field consisted of Manny and the Shark. They owned the Junior Varsity, along with their pet players. Miller Bugliari owned the Varsity, and they took no prisoners.
The first day of practice in September 1973 was cold. Manny, The Shark, and their minions stood in a circle near the sidelines. I lofted a good one and, like a mortar, it landed right in the middle of that circle, destroying in one nice explosion all of their coffee and doughnuts. "Browwwwwwn!" reverberated throughout much of Central Jersey and I spent the next two years on the bench except for the last four minutes of rainy games we were either winning by 100 or losing by a 100. My parents came to every game and spent a lot of time looking at the back of my jersey.
It was sad. I was a good soccer player in seventh, eighth, and ninth grade--"Junior High School"--under coach Barracaro. I scored goals like water from the faucet when I played every spring in Edison intramural soccer. So "playing" at Pingry was like watching the sport on television or looking at the dioramas in the Museum of Natural History, from the outside-in. But watch I did, and I learned that game in my head like a good hand of cards.
The only time I got to play was during practice scrimmages. I wasn't Ronaldinho but I was always first when we ran laps around the field. I had a pretty good foot, and did my job as right fullback alright. The thing was, what with all the splinters in my butt and "Browwwwwn!" in my ear I never felt good on the field and math class. I was an outsider.
Still, I can't blame feeling bad about myself all on Manny. That had a lot to do with being beaten up everyday from first grade in 1963 through eighth grade in 1972 by the neighborhood kids on Clive Hills Road in Edison. I was the last to get picked in all of our team sports, often left alone in the middle of some dirt field as teams formed on either side of me. Occasionally a sympathetic voice would ring out: "O.K., we'll take him. He only sucks at sports because he never went to Greylock summer camp. Of course, the physical beatings were outmatched by the verbal brutality of mean kids' mouths. I knew myself as "four-eyes," "brillo-head," "metal-mouth," and "class-A cock:: Ah, music to the ears; we lived on a street of poets. The only time I didn't get beaten up was when I was with Tommy Taylor, who was big, tough, and the son of carpenter who lived on the next street. We were all upper-middle class and all the kids were scared of working class folks, Italians, and Blacks back then.
Still, Manny was to me like the gratuitous but heavy gravy on an inedible roast. Just insult to injury. But how could anyone be so mean? He must have had some license from a Pingry secret society to destroy at least two kids a year and get away with it. Every day after school he must have logged his successes in tormenting those two poor kids in a little notebook, just in case one day he couldn't come up with something original; so he would consult his book for what had worked before. "Brown loved this before so he's going to love it again."
At the end of my sophmore year at Pingry, just about everyone but me went on to the varsity for their junior year. Apparently, Manny loved me so much that he kept me on the JV my junior year. Otherwise he'd have to find some other young mark to pick on. Imagine my humiliation when I had to sit on the bench junior year also and watch sophmores start and play the game I loved. My only redoubt was Mr. Weyler, the gentleman swim coach, who was able to coax me out of my post traumatic stress syndrome from fall soccer and put me in the 100 breaststroke in the winter. So when my mother came to watch every swim meet she actually got to see me compete. I excelled at breaststroke and freestyle, and even swam 200 yard medleys. Individual activities would dominate my attention up through the present: swimming, martial arts, cycling, and Yoga.
I remember feeling a bit sad that Frank Romano The Shark had died and feeling pretty amazed to hear that Manny Tramontana had been promoted to the head of the Mathematics Department. I didn't know what to do. Anyway, I was already well enough through Oberlin College and Yale Graduate school that I could hide the Manny syndrome under the tattered rug of my much enhanced self-worth. The funny thing is that in those thirty five years of therapy I could never talk about Manny Tramontana because I would get this choking feeling in my throat and nothing would come out. I'm now 57 and, here, in this blog, is the first time I'm able to do it. I hope Manny Tramonatana doesn't go out bitter, lonely, and broke.
Look for a succeeding chapter entitled, "Soccer and The Two Mannys: Enmanuel Padron."
