Of 'Pantsing' And Presidents

At what point does a noun become a verb? The plural noun in question is the word 'pants,' meaning trousers and the verb is the very same, meaning to pull someone’s pants down.

   I’m sure that the ritual of 'pantsing' was not unique to Mill Valley in the late 1950s and early 60s but a ritual it was indeed. The victim of a 'pantsing' was never a six foot Clark Kent lookalike. No. It was invariably someone a bit weedy, small and physically immature. During 1960 that someone was me. This would be my thirteenth year alive but to somebody unfamiliar with me, I probably looked between nine and ten.

   Young men of this age are beginning to shave, their voices are deepening and, terribly important to their status in a locker room, they have pubic hair. On all three of these fronts, I was a serious latecomer, a fact which made me burn with self consciousness.

   In my mind I was not a microscopic wimp but rather a dashing and attractive sort of person who had beautiful women fawning over him. The gap between these two realities was the size of an ocean but one should never underestimate the human mind's ability to kid itself.

   There were a fair few young men at school who did fall into the he-man category and they tended to hold court so in this arena I became kind of a court jester. I was always an entertaining character to have around. A little guy with a loudspeaker voice and sometimes witty banter.

   I was in eighth grade and my main teacher was Miss Huguet who I liked. I was no longer a record collector, at least not of pop music, but I did hear all the Top 40 hits on the radio and through the repetition that this kind of brainwashing brings, knew them all by heart.. While Elvis had been in the army it didn't stop his recording career at all but the records he was putting out didn't excite me the way his early material had. Are You Lonesome Tonight? just didn't have the raw fire of All Shook Up or Hound Dog.

   In fact most of the popular music at this time was pretty banal. A few numbers like Save The Last Dance For Me and Poetry In Motion were okay but the majority of the hit records did not excite me.

   This was also the time of the presidential election between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon.  Kennedy's nomination at the Democratic Convention in July had caught my attention from a couple of angles. One was the daily Chronicle which I was in the habit of reading when the news interested me. The other was what I heard from my parents, Blackie and Beth. Through these two sources I gleaned that John Kennedy's father had bought him the Democratic nomination.

   My father did not hate many people but prominent amongst that small group he did actually despise was Joseph Kennedy. I never interrogated Black about Joe Kennedy but have since learned that he had been appointed to head Roosevelt's Maritime Commission in 1937 which was a time that my father was a prominent and active vice president of the radical National Maritime Union.

   I can only guess at what specifically made Blackie hate this man but hate him he did.

   So it was natural enough that Black would be more than a bit sceptical about young Jack Kennedy and as for Nixon he had utter contempt for him. Nixon had made his name politically as part of J. Parnell Thomas's House Un-American Activities Committee.

   The sight of young Dick Nixon and Robert Stripling earnestly examining microfilm allegedly found inside a pumpkin on Whitaker Chambers' farm is laughable now but in those dark days of the witch hunt, most Americans took this amateur dramatic performance seriously. They also fell for Nixon's 'Checkers' speech in which he skilfully sidestepped all the accusations which had been made against him and concentrated on irrelevant details of his personal finances building to the emotive climax of insisting that they would keep Checkers the dog. The film in which he made this speech went down so well with the American public that he was cleared to remain on the ticket as Eisenhower's V.P. 

   Nixon had been christened 'Tricky Dick' by Helen Gahagen Douglas who ran against him for the California senate seat in 1950 after Nixon had consistently smeared her as "The Pink Lady." His campagn posters all said "The man who broke the Hiss Case!" Nixon's campaugn of innuendo worked and he won the contest.

   Interestingly Jack Kennedy and Nixon both entered national politics at the same time as junior congressmen and they also both ran for the senate in 1950.

   I remember Blackie saying that there were a few good things about these two. They were both young which he said was a good thing and Kennedy, if elected, would be the first Catholic president which he also seemed to consider a good thing.

   I never saw the television debates as we were still living up on Seymour Avenue and didn't have a set but I did read all about them. I took an active interest in the election probably because of my parents whose close friends all constantly talked politics.

   The hand of Joseph P. Kennedy was all over young Jack's campaign. Joe had had presidential ambitions of his own until FDR fired him and from that point on his political focus shifted to his sons. He marketed young Jack like a packet of corn flakes and selling was something the elder Kennedy knew everything about.

   The formula for JFK's campaign was built around image. Jack Kennedy was a good looking guy who spoke well and was the product of the best education that money could buy. In the debates he looked good while Nixon came across as sweaty and unshaven. JFK was also skilled at sounding confident while promising nothing and his example has been replicated ever since by politicians all over the world. In fact when Nixon ran successfully for president in 1968 he had learned all of his old rival's tricks.

   Perhaps it was the dishonesty in the political arena which fascinated me so but my interest in politics was not something I shared with my friends at school. At Edna Maguire my over riding ambition was to be liked.

   There were a few exceptions like the time that Caryl Chessman was executed at San Quentin. I followed this story closely and became a passionate advocate of clemency for this man. I joined in a class debate on capital punishment and, as I recall, we won.

   At some point during my eighth grade year I was part of the school team debating Red China's admission to the UN. John Elder, David Einstein and I won this debate on the side of China's admission even though one of the judges, Miss Huguet, disagreed with practically every political position I ever took, but had to concede that we put our case more effectively.

   I had Miss Huguet for social studies and liked her enormously but we used to have very colourful arguments. She was an unquestioning conservative politically. I remember taking exception to her telling the class that Castro was "just a jerk." One time I arrived late in the morning for some reason to find her prattling on and as I entered, the entire class groaned because they knew I'd argue with what she was saying.

   The reality was that nobody was interested in politics which, I have found, is a pretty universal state of affairs. What my friends were interested in was sex, smoking cigarettes, rock and roll records and cars.

   I longed to be cool but being thirteen and looking nine was a considerable handicap. I was friendly with several of the hard guys at Edna Maguire. Jimmy Tamburini seemed to be top banana amongst them. Jim was tall, very good looking and tough. He and his colleagues all wore a kind of uniform which consisted of jeans, black shoes, a black collarless sweater which was worn over a white tab collared shirt. The shirt was buttoned up and snapped. The crowning effect was the pompador hairstyle kept aloft by much Brylcreem.

   One sign of being cool was to wear horseshoe taps on the heels of your shoes but Edna Maguire had a rule that these could not be worn to school as they would scratch the floors. It was a very distinctive noise made by horseshoe taps unlike the small ones which would go on the corner of the heel.

   Jimmy Tamburini's uniform was worn by a gaggle of guys. Mike Chirco, the Cleland brothers, Wayne and Mike, Garret Testes and Johnny Lem. Whether they were a gang or not I didn't know but they could always be found in a group and usually walked home from school along the railroad tracks at Alto.

   My brother Jim and I usually found ourselves tagging along as we had to go the same way and we were used to walking to school with Garret in the mornings.

   There was never any doubt that we were separate from these guys but for some reason our presence always seemed welcome. My guess is that we were a good audience for the stories these characters would come out with, the veracity of which was always questionable. I know that Jim, in particular, could fall about laughing each time he'd repeat something funny one of the hard guys had said.

   One lazy afternoon brother Jim and I walked down Lomita Drive from the school along with Garret Testes and a few other hard guys. I almost certainly would have pulled my pack of Chesterfields out of my shirt pocket and lit a cigarette. Jim never smoked at this time. Down where Lomita turned left we joined the railroad track and carried on towards the Purity at the junction of Camino Alto and East Blithedale.

   The hard guys were rather thick on the ground this day. Among their number was Craig Bird, Jimmy Tamburini and probably about another seven or so, all dressed in the uniform collarless black sweaters.

   I have no memory of who was boasting but there had to be an entertaining yarn or two being spun to keep this crowd entertained as it moved up Blithedale turning left on Locust and down to Sycamore where another left was taken.

   There was a small wooden house on the right hand side of Sycamore which must have belonged to one of these guys and the crowd, including Jimmy and I ascended the steps and entered. As we walked into the living room somebody said: "Get Myers!" I was grabbed from behind while someone else pulled my trousers and underpants down.

   As I lay, partially naked, on this living room floor I could see the faces of all these guys staring quietly at me. It didn't last long but long enough. I guess they wanted to satisfy their curiosity that I hadn't yet reached puberty.

   As they turned away I pulled my trousers back up and Jimmy and I left. I never heard a single word about this incident from any of the participants or anyone else. It hadn't happened in a public place so if it became public knowledge I certainly never heard about it.

   One of the reasons that I was of interest at school was that I had a talent for drawing. I was also a confident performer of sorts in spite of my size but all of this counted for nothing when it came time to 'pants' me in that little house on Sycamore.

   I was little and they were big and the law of the jungle prevailed. I suspect, though, that their pantsing of me was not something which made them feel proud.