Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Lest auld acquaintance be forgot…





Part I
(The post is too long, so I've broken it up into three parts, which I'll post over the next couple days)

I’ve always been the kind of person who likes to keep up with old friends and acquaintances.

I remember this group of pals I had in fifth and sixth grade at City Honors Middle School. The middle and high school were actually one building, but the big kids took classes on the 2nd and 3rd floors while the young kids were consigned mostly to the 1st floor. In the basement were the lockers and cafeteria and I recall sitting at a table with three guys, Martin Krebs, a friendly kid with a wide grin; Nick Leuer, a red haired kid with a peaked nose, who always had that nose in a book during lunch; and this large black kid named Eddie, I think, though I don’t remember his last name.

That’s because he got kicked out of school, he said, for riding up and down the elevator. The elevator was one of those old-fashioned things, built for room for just one or two people, with a cage, if I remember correctly. It went all the way up to the attic, which I never saw and was off limits. The old hulking building had been used as several types of schools, and even had once had a pool between the 3rd and 4th floors, over the auditorium, if you can believe it, which was filled in after a girl drowned. That was the legend anyways.

So the elevator was off limits, but Eddie wasn’t one to do what people said, unless what they said generated some kind of fuss. That’s why we liked him, of course. He was strong and when we discovered he could smash an apple with his fist, it was apple smashing time thereafter. One he smacked on the edge and it took off in an arc and dropped straight down in Nick’s cup of chili. Once, we said, “Do this one, Eddie!”, but he was sitting at the end of the table by the wall and when his fist came down on that apple, there was suddenly applesauce all over the wall. And a teacher standing nearby.

So, one way or another, Eddie got himself kicked out of school, and now he’s only a cool memory in my mind. Nick and I went on to graduate from City Honors High School, meaning we just never left -- same building and all. It’s an acclaimed school, but I don’t know if that’s happened since I left, meaning I’d never get in if I was a kid now, or if it was that good back then. I’m no dummy, but I never did apply myself, but there was no test or waiting list for the high school if you had graduated the middle school.

Martin left too, I can’t remember why exactly, except I know he moved to a little town called Springfield (or was it Springville?), about 30 minutes south of Buffalo. I must have had his address, and years later I found it and sent him a post card and we got together once or twice to catch up. He’d become a photographer for the local newspaper and always kept an ear open for sounds of a fire engine or ambulance siren, which he’d follow to its location (like I said, it was a small town). He said once he followed it all the way back to his own street, to find a car had driven into his family’s front porch.

It’s been awhile since I tried to get up with him again. The same goes for other old friends such as Chris "Juice" Jerzewski, whom I used to hang out with in late high school. He built model rockets and we’d go to the park to launch them, some never to return to the earth again -- that we could find anyways. He went to Case Western, which is an army school, or something. It’s been a long time since I tried to call him. Nick Leuer I have no idea what happened to. If I still lived in Buffalo, I’d probably run into him or mutual friends every once in a while -- the town has that big-little city type of atmosphere, where it’s easy to bump into old friends, acquaintances (and enemies). According to Google, there’s a Nicholas Leuer who was to marry a Jill Coppola (a good Italian name) in May 2004. I don’t recognize the church name, but then again, there’s like 600 churches in the Buffalo area.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yippee!