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

3 I RETURNED to the Larry Peters books again and again because the Peters family, Kittiwake Island, Murky Bay, and the ambience of potential adventure were so fecund a ground for the imagination. The adventures themselves became, for me, only the trellises on which each book grew. The stories were there to hold the books together, prop them up, but that function, although useful, perhaps even nece...

2 I WAS ENCHANTED by that first Larry Peters adventure, The Shapely Brunette , from the moment I opened the book. On the front endpaper was a map of the area where Larry lived, a seacoast town called Murky Bay. The town of Murky Bay was situated on the shore of the bay called Murky Bay, and in Murky Bay were hundreds of islands, among them one called Kittiwake Island, where the Peters family lived...

1 I WAS BARELY ADOLESCENT when I first encountered Larry Peters, the eponymous hero of a series of books called, collectively, The Adventures of Larry Peters. My maternal grandmother, Gumma, gave me the first book in the series, The Shapely Brunette , as a present and a consolation, when I was sick, confined to bed, on my birthday. I had one of the childhood diseases, but I can’t recall now which...

Preface Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world. James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name Are there perhaps other worlds more real than the waking world? . . . Often we have before us, in those first minutes in which we allow ourself to slip into the waking state, a truth composed of different real...

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17 THE WINNER of the name-the-school contest was announced about a week later. Since some ill feeling had developed toward the judges and the school administrators during the long time that had passed since the contest began, Mr. Simone decided that it would be a good idea to make a grand occasion out of the award ceremony. Invitations went out to all our parents to tour the completed school and t...

16 I TOLD MY PARENTS that I wasn’t feeling well, and I went up to bed right after dinner, at about the time that Jack was dropping Stretch and Veronica off at the high school parking lot. I lay in my bed and tried to form in my mind a clear image of what Veronica and Stretch were doing.     Three buses were waiting in front of the high school when they arrived. They got out of the car, and Jack dr...

15 THE SKATING PARTY was scheduled for a Friday night. During school that day, I began to exhibit signs of illness. By the end of the day, I had made all the arrangements. I told Veronica that I was coming down with a twenty-four-hour virus and I was sure that I would begin vomiting at about the time that the skating-party bus left the high school lot. She was terribly disappointed, but she accept...

     Inside, Mrs. McCall helped me lace my skates.     “All right, Peter,” she said at last. “You’re as ready as you’ll ever be.” She stood up and gave me a pat on the shoulder. “Good luck,” she said.     Jack skated to the railing in front of us, all power, skill, muscles, chin, and teeth. “Hey, good morning, Mrs. McCall,” he said. He gave an odd emphasis to the words Mrs. McCall , and he smiled...

     Veronica put her skates on and rolled out onto the floor of the rink. She looked just terrific, skating around the rink as if she were the only one on it, and to my eyes she was. I couldn’t really imagine why she was taking lessons. What could any lessons teach her beyond the things she was doing already? She wore a tiny skater’s dress that hugged her at the top but had a skirt that flew outw...

14 VERONICA’S ROLLER-SKATING LESSONS were held at a big, drafty indoor rink, a Quonset hut made of corrugated metal. The metal had rusted in spots, and from these spots brown and orange streaks ran down the corrugations. The parking lot was mostly mud, with a clamshell island here and there, and Veronica’s mother cursed under her breath as the car pitched across the lot, tossed like a boat on a da...

13 “HEY, you made the right decision,” Porky told me. “You’re going to have a great time.” I had told him that I had invited Veronica to the skating party and that I didn’t know how to skate. I had not told him that the skating party was part of a plan to swap Veronica for a model airplane. Porky punched my shoulder in the good-natured way that men do when they’re going to start talking about sex....

12 VERONICA AND STRETCH began spending some time together, but they didn’t seem to be making much progress. Veronica seemed, now that she was getting a closer look, not to see anything attractive in Stretch. I was close to giving up, letting Veronica rob me of my childhood, of my innocence, resigning myself to spending my money on dates and never being able to set enough aside for a model airplane...

10 I MAY SPEND a good deal of time in confused indecision about what I ought to do next, but when I have at last seen which way is the right way, I run right along it. The next day, in the cafeteria, when Stretch Mitgang passed Veronica and me, I asked her, “Why does he wink at you like that?”     “Did he wink at me?” she asked. She smiled and looked in Stretch’s direction; then she turned quickly...

     I began giving outstanding service, or the illusion of outstanding service, every payday and on any other day when an opportunity presented itself. On rainy days, I rolled the newspapers in wax paper. I learned to ask about customers’ children, grandchildren, pets, arthritis, or whatever else interested them. I often apologized for the paper itself, anticipating the complaints of the customer...

9 IF I WAS GOING TO START buying Veronica flowers and candy and taking her out on dates, I was going to need money. I received a small allowance from my parents, quite a small allowance: twenty-five cents a week. Of course in those days—and the days that I’m recalling were those days—a quarter was worth something. Something, but not enough. I was going to have to get a job, and the first thing tha...

     One of my regular duties as a member of the Young Tars was monitoring the boarding of the school buses at the end of the school day. This responsibility meant that I spent some time each afternoon with Porky White, who was at that time driving a bus for the town of Babbington. I remember well the first afternoon that I spent talking with, or listening to, Porky, while we sat in the bus he dro...

8 MORALE in the new school sank daily. The continuing construction made things difficult for everyone. Whenever the site of construction shifted, groups of students would be shifted to clear the area. When the cafeteria floor was being laid, we had to eat lunch in the gym, and the gym classes were held in the corridors. Teachers taped paper over the glass in the classroom doors, but still the thun...

     Of adult nudity I knew nothing at first hand. At my grandparents’ house, I had studied, very carefully, the nude photographs of May Castle that I had found in a desk drawer in the bedroom that had once been my father’s. I had seen, briefly, usually looking over another boy’s shoulder, in a book that sometimes materialized in the boys’ room, photographs of nude men and women with black rectang...

     “Come on,” she said, noiselessly, just moving her lips and beckoning with a finger. She led me from the kitchen into the dining room. She started up the carpeted stairs, tiptoeing with great care, keeping to the edge of the stairs nearest the wall. I followed her, my heart pounding, fear gathering in my throat like a cat’s fur ball. Whatever was going on up there, it was, I was certain, none...

7 ON THAT AFTERNOON late in September, Veronica and I were walking home together after school. It was a Wednesday, and Veronica ordinarily had a piano lesson after school on Wednesdays, but Veronica’s piano lesson had been canceled. Mr. Getchel, the music teacher, had not come to school because he had cracked a tooth while using his teeth, as my mother had told me never to use them, in an attempt...

5 AS MR. SIMONE divided us into groups that morning in the auditorium, I began to guess what the groups meant. I couldn’t have guessed then all the implications of the division, but I guessed that the boys and girls in a group would be in the same classroom. Other rumors about the meaning of the groupings circulated through the auditorium, including the idea that one group would be sent to a refor...

4 ANOTHER ASIDE. It is, I think, quite possible that during the next several years, the most important part of our education came from learning to follow Mr. Simone’s schedules, with their complex branchings: All those who have music on Tuesdays and Thursdays skip ahead to page six for your Monday and Wednesday afternoon schedule. Those with music on Mondays and Wednesdays turn back to page two fo...

3 AN ASIDE. So much depends on chance. The coincidence of our having last names that began with the same letter of the alphabet, or at least with letters that were close in the alphabet, meant that certain of us would remain in each other’s company throughout most of every day for the next couple of years. The population of Babbington continued to grow rapidly during that time, and school building...

     Mr. Simon led us all in a spirited round of Simon Says. The workmen joined in too, making their scaffolding shake, and inspiring rippling laughter among all of us on the floor. A boy named Stretch, a sixth-grader, won. He was a tall boy, dark and muscular, with wavy black hair and thick black eyebrows.     Mr. Simone came to the lectern and stood there for a while, waiting for quiet. After mu...