The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy

Hi! It’s Candi Lee Manning, Eric Kraft’s irrepressible publicist! I’ve been given the thankless task of informing you that there is no episode for you to read today. The Krafts are moving, and they’re taking with them the entire population of Babbington, every character in The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, and yours truly, along with Mr. Candi Lee (Alec “...

“MR. SUMMERS,” I asked, after the meeting ended, “what happened to Robby? Did he do something wrong?”     “Yes, Peter, he did,” said Mr. Summers, in a voice with the timbre that I’ve long recognized as exactly right for grave pronouncements, one that I’ve often wished I could produce when a situation warrants it, as more and more situations have since I’ve assumed the responsibilities of an adult...

15 ON MY HONOR as a former Tar, I swear that I will not shirk from shouldering whatever share of the responsibility for the downfall of the Tars I should shoulder. A Tar stands tall, after all, and doesn’t pass the buck. However, I’m not going to be reticent about Mr. Summers’s part in the collapse, either. After all, a Tar is nobody’s patsy and doesn’t get stuck holding the bag.     Pledged as I...

14 I GREW DEPRESSED. I lost the will to work. I wanted to grab that moving finger and say, “Hold it a minute. Don’t be in such a hurry. There are some messes to be cleaned up before you go rushing on,” but it seemed to be impossible. What was the sense of working on the manual if it would never be what I wanted it to be, would never be perfect, would never reach a point where I could say, “Okay, t...

13 “PETER,” called my father from the foot of the stairs. “What are you working on? Homework?”     “No,” I said. “I finished my homework.”     “Are you working on the Tars Manual?”     “No,” I said. “I’ve got that finished too. I’m working on the log.”     “The log? What do you mean?”     “Well,” I said, aware that what I was doing could be considered ridiculous, was likely to be considered ridicu...

11 AT THE NEXT MEETING, I began to see a pattern, a structure, developing. A Tars meeting had three parts: a rehearsal, the meeting itself, and free time.     The rehearsal was, all things considered, my favorite part of the meeting. One might contend that the rehearsal wasn’t really part of the meeting at all, but I would disagree. I think that the rehearsal period stood in relation to the meetin...

10 ANOTHER ASIDE. I was surprised and, I must admit, annoyed, to discover, as I described my guilty feelings about working on the “Tales for Tars,” deceiving my father by disguising work I wanted to do as work I had to do, how little my attitude toward work that brings pleasure has changed. I still feel guilty when I’m doing such work, still feel that if I’m having a good time I must not be workin...

9 “PETER!” my father called from the foot of the stairs. “What are you doing up there?”     His voice startled me, and I reacted like a guilty party. I pushed aside the paper I was writing on, covered it with my science book, grabbed some other pages of the Tars Manual, and spread them in front of me.     Then I recovered. I reminded myself that I had, at least technically, been doing something of...

I SPENT A WHILE teaching the remaining Tars the salute that I had worked out in the evenings, in my room, in front of my mirror, late at night.     When I had first tried saluting, what I saw in the mirror disappointed me, even after an hour of practice, even though I could deliver a crisp salute that seemed to me nearly as good as those I saw delivered by drill teams in the parades for Memorial D...

WHEN the Tars began arriving, quite a few of the parents who had driven them to the school came into the gym and took seats in the bleachers. Apparently they had decided that if the meeting was only going to last for thirteen minutes they might as well wait until it was over instead of going home and coming back.     “Attention!” I called out. “I want to talk to all the Tars before the meeting beg...

Hi! It’s Candi Lee Manning, Eric Kraft’s irrepressible publicist! I’ve been given the thankless task of informing you that there is no episode for you to read today. The Krafts are moving, and they’re taking with them the entire population of Babbington, every character in The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, and yours truly, along with Mr. Candi Lee (Alec “...

TODAY, nearly thirty years later, I know just how right Porky was. I am a perfectionist, and my quest for perfection has been the source of some of my happiest productions, some of my worst headaches, and a certain gurgling racket in my stomach that is, I suppose, the flourish announcing an incipient ulcer.     Perfectionism is, according to my old friend Mark Dorset, a characteristic of one of th...

Hi! It’s Candi Lee Manning, Eric Kraft’s irrepressible publicist! I’ve been given the thankless task of informing you that there is no episode for you to read today. The Krafts are moving, and they’re taking with them the entire population of Babbington, every character in The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, and yours truly, along with Mr. Candi Lee (Alec “...

8 I ARRIVED at the gym well before the start of the next meeting. The doors to the school hadn’t even been opened yet. I ran around to the boiler-room door and tapped on its wire-reinforced window with a rock to wake Mr. Griswold, the janitor, a huge bear of a man whom I never saw anywhere but in the old school, usually in the basement. Now and then, if I stayed at school late for some reason, I w...

Hi! It’s Candi Lee Manning, Eric Kraft’s irrepressible publicist! I’ve been given the thankless task of informing you that there is no episode for you to read today. The Krafts are moving, and they’re taking with them the entire population of Babbington, every character in The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, and yours truly, along with Mr. Candi Lee (Alec “...

7 DURING THE NEXT WEEK, I spent all of my spare time and much of the time that I should have spent on homework working on the manual. The source of our problems had become clear during the first meeting. Mr. Summers had many ideas about things that he wanted a Tar to do and be, and he had many ideas about things that he wanted to have happen during a Tars meeting, but his thinking on most of these...

Hi! It’s Candi Lee Manning, Eric Kraft’s irrepressible publicist! I’ve been given the thankless task of informing you that there is no episode for you to read today. The Krafts are moving, and they’re taking with them the entire population of Babbington, every character in The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, and yours truly, along with Mr. Candi Lee (Alec “...

     At that moment I understood for the first time that in any organization, whether there are two members or a thousand, there is more to the distribution of power than meets the eye, even the eye of a member. The outward and visible system of ranks may offer no clue to the invisible system of power. I was right about that in general, I think, but I was wrong in supposing that I understood the s...

Hi! It’s Candi Lee Manning, Eric Kraft’s irrepressible publicist! I’ve been given the thankless task of informing you that there is no episode for you to read today. The Krafts are moving, and they’re taking with them the entire population of Babbington, every character in The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy, and yours truly, along with Mr. Candi Lee (Alec “...

     Robby brought me a brown paper bag filled with more scraps of paper on which Mr. Summers had written notes for things that he wanted added to the manual. I looked into the bag and pulled out and read one or two of the pieces of paper.     “Mr. Summers,” I said, “some of these are notes about things that are already in the manual. Here. Here’s one about the Tars Traits. I already typed the tra...

6 I DID MANAGE to get the manual organized before the next meeting, and with my mother’s help I even managed to get it typed. After I eliminated all the repetitions and notes that seemed too sketchy to include it didn’t amount to much: six-and-a-half pages.     “Maybe we should have used wider margins,” said my mother. “I’ll type up a cover for it, and we’ll add a back cover too. That should thick...

     So, I stopped writing Larry Peters stories, but I didn’t stop thinking about writing them, and as a result the time I spent in bed before I fell asleep became, for me even more than for most adolescents, a time of guilty pleasures, when my thoughts would turn both to girls and to stories. Since I was already developing the tastes that are today so broad that there is almost no girl or woman i...

5 “PETER,” called my mother from the bottom of the stairs, “are you still up?”     “Yes,” I called back to her. “What time is it?”     “Why, it’s after midnight,” she said. I heard her begin climbing the stairs. I stood and stretched and looked at the clock beside my bed. The face was a blur. I rubbed my eyes. They stung.     My mother appeared in the doorway. She too was a blur. The door frame wo...

4 PRODUCING the notebook earned me my second job, a job within the structure of the Tars this time.     “Now there’s an example for the rest of you,” boomed Mr. Summers. “Commodore Leroy has already got his notebook! Good for you, Commodore Leroy!”     Mr. Summers paused a moment, and I could see that he was thinking.     “You know,” he said, “I think you deserve something special for being so wel...

3 AN ASIDE. From the time I became a Tar, I think I knew, without understanding it, that from a Tar’s point of view the real reason for being a Tar was not to perform the services to the school that the Tars were supposed to perform, not to provide the model of comportment and achievement that the Tars were supposed to provide, not to learn the ways of seafaring men, but to gain a position in a hi...