At six I was just another skinny, olive-skinned kid in the Big Apple, one of eight million stories in a sprawling mega-city, outgoing, carefree and basically secure — for a while. Then grandpa Bruno had a heart attack and died unexpectedly, and Harriet, whom mom called my “governess” and was responsible for my daily life, decided to retire — just as my baby sister was on the way.
It was confusing. The world I had taken for granted was changing fast and I didn't understand.
A year later, I became seriously ill. It was mysterious, maybe a heart murmur, rheumatic fever or some other inflammation, never precisely diagnosed. Our family doctor nevertheless prescribed daily doses of penicillin for the next ten years. Home visits may have been overrated.
Whatever the actual problem, getting sick changed my life. Mostly alone for months in my room, drawing and reading, discovering how to nurture myself in isolation, I became more introverted. The experience reinforced a sense of difference, but also helped me to develop inner strength in the face of loss, pain and alienation. I emerged with confidence, less needy, more self-sufficient, but also more separate from other kids.
Feeling like an outsider, my “philosophy” became the naive assertion that whatever most people did or liked couldn’t be much good. If all the kids drank Coke and chewed gum, I was damned if I was going to follow along. I declined to join the "in crowd," even though they seemed willing to accept me. Instead, I gravitated to other outsiders, weird kids with special gifts and unusual ideas.
Deep into psycho-dramas filled with heroic deeds and supernatural feats, I spent much of my time on the planet of unlimited possibilities, a benign "twilight zone" in which a child could fly and anything was possible. I dreamed of Arabian nights and journeys on the high seas, sailing into the sunset, convinced that I could accomplish amazing things, even remake myself as I wished to be.
But harsh realities couldn’t be avoided forever, and as I approached 13 they closed in with a vengeance. Yet the outsider feeling stuck, along with visions and vivid dreams set down in cartoon recollections, fantasies of travel to other worlds, and the sense of their power to transform others and myself.
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| Bill, Olga, Andrea and Gregory Guma in the mid-1950s. |
On a gray, threatening morning in September 1960 I took the bus for my first day with the Brothers of the Holy Cross. Along the route, up tree-lined Bayside Avenue, I passed the junior high where I'd spent the past two years, learning how to question everything and put my fantasies on paper in short stories, illustrations, and school plays. Friends were returning for their third and last year at one of the city's best public schools. But, as my parents ominously put it, I was off to spend four years “with my own kind.”
The upperclassmen had been in this thing, Catholic education, for years already. Even most of the freshmen knew each other from previous incarceration at parochial elementary schools around the county. They shared a common understanding of the experience. I had no idea what it was about.
But that first day I learned several lessons about how it would be. In English class, the teacher quickly announced that this year, "You're going to learn how to read, or you're going to learn how to bleed." It wasn't just a figure of speech. He split his time between parsing sentences and coaching sports, and used the same techniques to handle both assignments.
If you couldn't handle a question, the penalty was public humiliation. If you spoke out of turn or didn't pay attention, he’d sit on your desk and punch you in the forehead. He called that The Thumper.
In history class, the Irish orator behind the desk taught mainly by delivering monotone readings from an out-of-date textbook. About halfway through the first class I got confused about a point and raised my hand. He stared as if I'd questioned whether the Pope is Catholic.
"What's that?" he asked, nodding at my up-raised palm.
"My hand," I said, "I have a question."
He smiled and patiently explained. "No, you don't ask questions here. I ask the questions, and sometimes I call on you."
There was also Latin, math, physical education, plus the daily dose of religion. Mercifully, by early afternoon the gray sky opened up full blast and poured down enough rain to flood the streets and knock out the electricity. I considered it an "act of God," a reprieve from the repression and tedium ahead.
Herding us into the auditorium, the brothers announced that we would be transported home as soon as they figured out how to do it. Something about wind and blocked roadways. But the longer we waited, the more difficult the kids became. These teenagers, so disciplined in class, suddenly sensed their power as a mob. I imagined them overrunning their keepers and declaring a pointless rebellion. On the other hand, I thought the Irish and Italians cliques were just as likely to declare war on each other. But this was projection, and I also wondered whether I was the only one hoping for a massive bolt of lightning to torch the place.
When they finally let us leave it was well after 3 p.m. The storm had scuttled classes but kept us late. It was almost dark when I reached home – exhausted, angry, and acquainted with "my own kind." That night I prayed, a bit skeptically, that I'd never have to see them again.
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| Party time in the basement with Eddie Hodges, Jack DeMasi and our GBS crew. Our friendship began with alphabetical class seating: G came right before H. He’d played Huckleberry Finn on film and was about to be a pop star. |
Even before high school I was a bit offbeat for a New Yorker. No team spirit, not much urban bluster. Fun for me was role playing, exploring ideas and making art. I largely ignored what was popular and gravitated toward the unusual. But the sense of being different was mild before the alienation I experienced in Catholic high school.
The norm was absolute obedience and orthodox piety. Gone were the public junior high art classes and supportive teachers who had nurtured my creativity. The attractive closet socialist who opened my eyes to politics and encouraged my urge to write was replaced by an English teacher who thought sensitivity was an illness.
If it was a film, my early childhood would be like the opening moments of The Godfather, that idyllic scene when the Italian extended family celebrates a marriage. Children frolic and parents dote, comfortable in their insulated world. But in my family the facade is eventually shattered by divorce, nervous breakdowns, drug addiction, and premature deaths.
Still, even an outsider could feel safe for a while. It was like a colorful garden party just before a storm.
High school was a very different scenario. Now I felt like a prisoner, struggling to stay sane and undamaged inside a monastery or fortress. A righteous alcatraz. In movie terms, I imagined myself as the Birdman of Bayside, an inmate clinging to hope and looking for escape from a brutal world.
After a few months, I discovered a doorway to relative safety. The school’s points of pride were the accomplishments of its athletic teams and forensic society. I wasn’t sporty but knew how to handle myself with an audience. I’d been doing it since my first TV appearance, followed by dance and piano lessons. Forensics included several forms of public speaking, from dramatic interpretation to debate. My plan was to develop some performance abilities through Catholic competition. But even that took a while.
Dramatic presentations were a privilege; the dues included serving the school as a form of cannon fodder in extemporaneous speaking contests. It worked like this: boys from various schools would gather in a library around a fishbowl filled with slips of paper. Each slip listed a topic, most of them about current political events. Each of us would draw three slips, then choose one as the subject for a five minute presentation. We had about 30 minutes to prepare and then deliver an articulate analysis with only an index card as reference. Scores were based on organization, diction, posture, quality of the arguments, and remaining within the time limit. Beyond winning, the school’s goal was to find out who could handle the pressure.
I never enjoyed the experience, but did have a knack for it. Apparently, I knew how to quickly organize my thoughts and present them effectively. In time I became a strong competitor and the Brothers of the Holy Cross took note. I graduated to the debate team, Unlike “extemp,” this involved extensive preparation on a limited number of topics chosen at the beginning of each school year. Teams would collect information and construct arguments over a period of months.
My usual position was second negative, the last to speak in the first half of a debate. After the affirmatives presented and defended their “resolve,” I would review everything and try to demolish their case. Practice taught me how to undermine almost any argument. Eventually, it became part of my world view. Rip down, tear and destroy, as I put it with a smile.
“But what do you put in its place?” Asked a friend. “That’s not my problem,” I replied. Short-sighted but it was meant to be ironic.
Debate also challenged the idea that there was something called truth. In some debates, that was reinforced by the practice of switching sides from one round to another. The negatives would take the affirmative role, defending the position they had just derided. For me, an underlying message was that winning the argument was more important than intellectual honesty. It took years to overcome the cynicism that debate performance implicitly encouraged.
By age 16 I was a dangerous opponent who could sense the weak spot in most arguments, a skill that would later undermine some relationships. It was a struggle to overcome this impulse, to actively listen and empathize rather than rushing to make my own point. In time I developed a distrust of pure logic and appreciation of heartfelt emotion.
As a prisoner in Holy Cross, however, my ability was used as a weapon, at times to protect my soul. They had my body but my mind was still my own, and I decided to use it to expose the hypocrisy of my captors. In a sense, Catholic high school encouraged a subversive streak. It may have been dormant already, but institutional repression brought it to the surface.
If my keepers provided the tools, I would wreak havoc in their world of blind faith and paper-thin reason.
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| With Dad and my sister Andrea in 1963 |
In the summer of 1962 I met my first “serious” girlfriend on a beach in what was then called rural Huntington on Long Island. There was Leta speeding across the water in a motorboat, long hair flying in the wind. Her parents relaxing at their summer house with mine. I was wandering, upset that I’d been forced to accompany them on the trip from Queens.
When she finally came ashore I was immediately impressed by her defiance. She showed little respect for her parents’ rules or conventional behavior. I jumped aboard for a ride and we had a lively conversation about the pleasure of doing what you wanted. That evening, as our folks talked politics, we strolled along the beach until it became obvious where this was heading.
Plopping down behind a dune we gazed at the stars. Leta smiled and waited. I wasn’t sure what to do. I’d been on a few dates, but had little sexual experience. Desperate to make something happen, I eventually resorted to a joke.
“Kiss me, you fool.”
“No,” she replied. “You kiss me.”
I leaned over and took her in my arms, beginning a long embrace that slowly moved us down into the shelter of the dunes. It was a passion I had never experienced before. The night sky, the warm air, the sound of the surf, everything felt romantic. One kiss led to more and time seemed to stop.
It was a moment I never forgot. For years I struggled to recreate the feeling. Long after we broke up, we reunited one evening and returned to the same beach. By then I had more experience and hoped to mix that with my memory. But we had both changed. We kissed again, but it was impossible to improve on the original.
At 14, I thought I’d found the secret of life. By the end of the encounter we were completely infatuated. Without removing one item of clothing, we’d tasted real desire.
We only saw each other one more time over the summer months, a brief covert rendezvous arranged by a friend. But we wrote letters almost every day. And when summer ended, we continued a secret romance that took my mind away from debate and added a new word to my vocabulary — hedonism. I wasn’t clear about the definition but it seems to fit my mood. School days flew by, mere prologue to stolen moments under the wooden bridge near the bay. Concealed in our secret sanctuary, we would talk about a shared future between lingering kisses.
Our lives revolved around any form of contact. Forbidden by our parents to “go steady,” Leta urged us on. In the middle of the night we would creep into empty rooms and whisper over the phone. Sleep seemed unnecessary. In order to actually see each other, we enlisted friends as co-conspirators in elaborate schemes.
“You want your life to be like a novel,” my friend Jack teased.
“Or at least a good dust jacket blurb,” I replied.
My gang, my compadres — the guys I trusted in high school, the ones who watched my back and kept me in line — were Jack, Paul, John and Jim. In our hearts sometimes we were the Jets, a teenage posse strutting down Bell Boulevard in Bayside, rapping out lines from the opening song in West Side Story. We were also members of our own fraternity, Gamma Beta Sigma, otherwise known as GBS or Guinea Ballbusters Society, complete with initiations and an oath.
Not that we were tough. Our crib was a basement rec room, and Mrs. George Bernard Shaw — another GBS — was our mascot. An inside literary joke. Other than that, we were just normal, relatively innocent boys who went to confession on Saturday night (before going out to party), early Baby Boomers, and mostly Italian.
Just before Christmas in 1963 our solidarity was tested in what became known as the necklace affair. By then I had been meeting secretly with Leta and talking with her late at night for months. One night we were finally discovered. The kitchen lights flashed on as I huddled on the floor, deep in conversation. My father burst in and grabbed the phone. Mon was right behind him, holding a necklace she had found in my room. The inscription read, “For my love.”
“Who’s on the phone?” Dad demanded as I hung up.
“Paul,” I lied.
“And what’s this?” Mom followed, brandishing the evidence. She’d been through my drawers!
“I’m holding it for him.” It was all I could muster. They immediately called his house.
Awakened by his parents, Paul backed me up the best he could while half asleep. Our parents knew it was baloney, but there was no way to break us. We’d all seen The Great Escape, one of our favorite movies, and understood what it meant to be part of a team. Solidarity 101.
Later I learned that mom had been tailing me for weeks.
Unable to keep us apart, our parents reluctantly consented to our relationship. We could bring our romance out into the open — as long as it didn’t get “out of hand,” whatever that meant. But the infatuation couldn’t bear the light of day. We continued to date for months but the thrill was gone. By junior prom it was over. We attended together, but agreed that we’d reached the end. We said goodbye in rented clothes.
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| Graduation Day at Holy Cross in 1964; I’m the one looking back. |
In my senior year, the student musical was The King and I. Desperate to play a role, a public, creative alternative to making obscure arguments in front of a few judges, I auditioned and won a supporting role as the king’s son. It included a song, some dialogue and death in Act Three. I was ecstatic.
However, the debate team coach and the advisor for the school newspaper I edited, felt I was overextending myself and met at home with my parents. I had won the part in the play, but they wanted to veto that. Swayed by their warnings, mom and dad agreed. The struggle between my artistic urges and the plans of others had reached a new stage. My future was apparently being managed by a committee and I wasn’t on it. My performance in debates and as editor overruled what I wanted to do.
My response was gradual but defiant. I began to act out in classes, taunting teachers to punish me with weekend detention. Or a slap on the face. My response to that was to spur my classmates into childish rebellion. I openly mocked Catholicism's obscure canon laws and sought ways to puncture the system’s brittle facade. “If you can’t eat solid food before communion,” I would ask, “does a milk shake count?” I figured that my irreverence and transgressions would be overlooked whenever there were debates to be won. And I was often right. They could threaten, but hesitated to enforce.
Afterward I would point out the unfairness to those who weren’t so lucky.
Around the same time I began planning my escape. From Catholics, my family, New York. A total break. They would try to hold me back, but I concealed my intentions until it was time to make the move. I would find a college far away and begin a personal reinvention.
Did not know you are a Cat'lick school survivor. My mom went to Cardinal Spellman in The Bronx. Hearing her stories of how the nuns there treated her made her decision to send me to St. Therese of Lisieux, "Little Flower School" a bit odd. It was a teeny tiny school. I had two younger nuns that I found to be sweet and loving one minute and flailing, screaming, eye bulging mad the next. Then two others who were older and hardened, one of whom told my mother she thought I was gay because I spent all my time with the girls. That was my ticket out to public school.
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