Growing up with Clinton Douglas Pollen I

It was recess at Menlo Park Elementary School in Edison, New Jersey. Clinton Douglas Pollen and I were hanging out, as much as one could really hang out on the black top in second grade in 1963. I kept kneeling down and polishing his jet black "featherweights," those pointed leather shoes worn only by the coolest of the cool. Clinton kept reminding me that I would inherit them from him, so I was doing my best to keep them We had sleep-overs a lot, mostly at his house.  I was Jewish, short and slight, with thick black hair and thick black glasses, I was already a follower and had no illusions about leading, or being other than vicariously cool. And that was pretty cool for me until I got on the bus and got my daily beating from the neighborhood kids, a ritual I was pretty much used to. In the 1960s they used to call that "just growing up." It didn't become "ritual abuse" until about thirty years later. This is my earliest memory of my friendship with Clinton.

He was always "Clinton Douglas" to his mother, Bobby Pollen, a rough daughter of the South who could swear like a farm boy. Bobby was a handsome woman who never stopped moving around and waving her arms. I think she loved me because I was such a good kid, perhaps a moderating influence on her son. In her eyes, I think, Clinton always seemed to get it wrong. For Clinton's part, I think he valued me as a friend not only because he needed a loyal acolyte. Despite the his high jinks and borderline delinquency, he was actually a pretty sweet kid somewhere inside. There was always a little sadness in him and somehow Mr. and Mrs. Brown, my parents, offered him a glimpse of belonging to a normal family where people would tell him what to do and he would gladly follow.

We had lots of sleep overs, but it was essential that I went there. My first memory is pretending we were rabbits, robbing a whole head of iceberg lettuce from the Fridge, and devouring it in his room. That same night, Mrs. Pollen had prepared the freshly killed pheasant his father had just dressed and brought home. It tasted delicious, except that I had never picked so many tiny lead balls out of my mouth. Besides the bones, we all had greasy piles of buckshot on our plates.

For me, it was paradise. No rules. No bedtime. No supervision. Virtually no parents at all. I have several memories of that first place of excitement, mystery, and complete freedom. One evening, Bobby was cooking up a huge pork roast. We raided the kitchen in our pajamas, loaded up our arms with that greasy trayf deliciousness, which was forbidden in my kosher home, and dumped it in his underwear drawer to feast on all night long.

Clinton dazzled me with all sorts of stories. Deep down in the their dark basement, where I would never dare to venture, his father kept a jar with John Dillinger's testicles in formaldehyde. Dr. Pollen a successful orthopedist who worked in Perth Amboy, did all kinds of things like that. So that night, because we were both afraid that John Dillinger was going to come up from the basement and kill us, we securely locked the basement door. The next morning Clinton got the beating of his life because we had locked his parents down there all night.

After second grade, the Pollens moved to Colonia, one town over, for a couple of years. Dr. Pollen was, apparently, doing very well, because they bought a nice house with its own lake surrounded by Weeping Willow trees. We climbed the Weeping Willows over the river. We ordered tons of Chicken Delight and pizza, stayed up nearly all night, drifting off to sleep in the wee hours. In the morning, breakfast picked up with the leftover chicken and pizza from the night before. We played endlessly with our battalion of GI Joes in the little creeks all around the house. Muddy from head to toe, we got right into the bathtub and the GI Joes went in the sink. Some of them were black soldiers. Mrs. Pollen came in and yelled at Clinton to "get the niggers out of the sink."

The greatest thing ever was when they moved to Colt's Neck, about 40 minutes southwest in what then was all farmland. The huge ranch sat on Five Points Road just off of Rt. 537 on twelve acres of tall grassland. Beyond that were just woods and more woods that stretched all the way down south, until Route 18 was plowed through in the early 1970s. Colt's Neck made Colonia look like prison. They had faux cow skin living room sofas and cool curvy 1970s cocktail tables, a bar, a pool, and motorcycles.

All the kids had their own rooms. Valerie, the oldest, painted her room black and had a pet monkey in a cage. She'd spend all day in bed, so there were half-filled cereal bowls within the covers and you had to tiptoe around because Rontoo, the perpetually abused dog, left poop on her floor. She left the monkey in its cage for so long that its legs atrophied and it never walked again.

Curtis, the middle child, was a fast talking, fast-driving teenage hipster who wore wide bell-bottoms. He had long hair, played guitar in a band, and had a blond girlfriend. He had a big closet in his paneled room plastered with Playboy centerfolds. Best of all he drove 100 miles an hour at all times in his souped up GTX. At night, we went out with Curtis. Clinton and I wouldn't get in the back seat without putting on crash helmets. On the sleepy one-lane local roads in pitch blackness, Curtis would rev the GTX right up to the rear bumper of some old geezer in a Rambler. When the opposite lane was apparently clear, he'd hit the gas, power shift, and and shoot around the old guy, careening back into our lane just in time to miss an oncoming car and then slow down to 90.

Clinton's room was cool. He had toys on top of toys, and a gun rack. But we didn't spent too much time in there. There was too much to do. With twelve acres and untold more to play in you could stay out there all day and forget about what time it was.

Occasionally, we'd see his parents. His father had a brand new silver Maserati supposedly so he could commute easily back and forth to Perth Amboy. It could do way over 140 when, according to Clinton, the state police closed down the Garden State Parkway for the Doctor so he could test it out. I had an idea why his father was never home. Days would go by and we wouldn't see his mother.

But I do remember big breakfasts at the long wood table by the glass doors looking out onto the pool. She was a great cook. The kitchen table was a pharmacy. You had to have one if your father was a doctor. There were diet pills, uppers, downers, muscle relaxers; I didn't know what else. I just can't shake the image of pill bottles and table ware.

Clinton had a red Honda 100 dirt bike. Being older and more experienced, Curtis had a green Kawasaki 250. He was much better at jumping and fishtailing out. Late one night we rode together on Curtis' 250 out to the huge haunted factory. We couldn't see anything when we arrived and I was a little scared out there in the middle of nowhere at night. Clinton assured me that I shouldn't worry and proved it to me when he pulled his blue steel automatic pistol from his jeans. I got a little queasy, but it was all part of the adventure.


We loved the twelve acres, but, for some reason, Clinton liked the road better. He could get places and it was much more rebellious to ride out into traffic at 13 years old without a license than just turn up a bunch of dirt in the back yard. Clinton was a kind of embryonic Jack Kerouac, evil doctor, and criminal mind all rolled into one. I think he was a genius. He just kept getting into trouble. One day, with me hanging onto the back for dear life, we shot out onto 537, passing in front of the police station like nothing mattered. We were just on our way over to see his friends whose family owned the Andirons bar on Route 79. They were always doing something cool. The bike whined so loudly that I couldn't hear a thing. Clinton could see in the rear view mirrors that a police car was coming up on us all lighted up and sirens blaring. He turned his head and yelled something to me but I had no idea what was going on. Suddenly, we were in midair and then bumping and rocking as he shot us across a nearly full-grown cornfield. I think I thought that what he had said to me was that we were just going to take a little short cut. After climbing a hill, we were careening around in circles in the enclosed back yard of some rural one-story factory. I still had no idea what was going on but rudely woke up when we came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the grass. Everything was quiet except that lots of police were yelling at us to freeze. They were all hunkered down behind their open cruiser doors with their guns pointed at us.

The next thing I knew, we were handcuffed in the back of a police car. The officer turned around and said, "I pulled out behind you because I was going to stop you for not wearing eye protection. But then I saw you had no license plates." We pleaded with him that we didn't do anything, but he said, "boys, you could have just robbed a store and when you didn't stop for us, we really went after you."

Back at the police station on Route 537, a tow truck that had picked up Clinton's new Honda 100 pulled up with the bike strapped to the back. The gas tank was all dented and we were indignant. Inside the station it was green cinder block, florescent lights, gray metal desks, and brown wood chairs. All I could think of was my one phone call, really. I closed my eyes and fantasized about calling information and asking for the Wilentz, Goldman and Spitzer law firm where my father worked. That would get us out of this because the cops would be scared.

Time seemed stopped until Bobby Pollen and Valerie pulled up in the biggest station wagon you ever saw. Mrs. Pollen was cursing at Clinton in her endearing southern accent and apologizing profusely to the police about her worthless son. Valerie let loose on him such a string of profanity that I didn't understand a word she said. When we pulled into their giant garage on the twelve acres, there was a torn out piece of notebook paper taped to the garage door to the house. The lines on the paper were bars and there were two stick figures behind them. That was us, except the face of one of them was colored in. Clinton was the "nigger," his mother said.

To be continued...