Saturday, March 22, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
THE Jeremy Anderson concrete vandalism story is the story that will not die -- sort of like a memory of mine. It, too, will not die. That's the way they planned it. I see that now.
I was a little older than Jeremy, 12 I think. I know I was in sixth grade, because Mr. Simone, my teacher that school year of 1962, was in on the conspiracy to scare me straight.
The school was Theodore Roosevelt Elementary on the North Side of Binghamton, N.Y. I lived then near the East Side and walked the mile, mile and a half first in the morning going to school, then a round-tripper at noon when we went home for lunch, and then in the afternoon going home. Those walks are lasting memories of my childhood. Fights, floods, snow, ice, car tag (don't ask) and my best friends Billy, Mike, Patty and Connie, Terry and Margie -- those were the days. Unforgettable.
One day is more unforgettable than the others.
I was late heading back to school after lunch. I shot out of my house and ran the whole first couple of blocks, all the way to the A.V. Mincolla Co., which distributed Carling Black Label and other bottled beers. Because I was late, all the other kids were blocks ahead of me. I was alone. And there was a big, probably quart-sized, beer bottle lying near the sidewalk in front of A.V.'s driveway. On one side of the driveway was a solid brick wall. This is why I stopped running.
At 12, a bottle and a brick wall beckoned to my dark side, just as wet concrete beckoned to 9-year-old Jeremy's.
I can still see the bottle arcing toward the wall, as if it were slow motion. End over end, the bottle twirled beautifully toward its destiny as a thousand points of light all over A.V.'s driveway.
The explosion of glass set me to running again, only this time I was driven by more than being late for school. My whole being was lit with the glow of my boldness and badness, and I ran like the wind. The fear of capture spurred my shanks as never before and my run became sheer bliss as blurry sidewalk cracks passed and passed and passed, still with no pursuers in sight. I caught up with my friends and slid on time into my seat in class, with a great big adventure to distract me from the lessons Mr. Simone had planned for the afternoon.
A half-hour later, my bubble burst more violently than the bottle. I was summoned to Mr. Munson's office.
Now, Mr. Munson, the principal, was known as "the Munson burner." Many of us knew why from first-hand experience. My knowledge had come the day I had called the outgoing principal, Miss Baudendistle, "Miss Waterpistol." The Munson burner and his wooden paddle were in rare form that day.
This day, the Munson burner gravely invited me to take a seat. At his desk, he sat silently, allowing the terror to well up within me. Finally, he began speaking in slow, deliberate words. The ones I remember are:
"Cops ... your broken bottle ... tire ... $60 ... your parents will pay ... arrest ..."
The expression "jumped out of my skin" comes to mind. I could truly feel my being escape my epidermis. What the Munson burner was telling me was that he had gotten a call from the Binghamton Police Department. They were on their way to arrest me, because an A.V. Mincolla employee had driven over the glass, blowing out a $60 tire.
My mind was just swimming. In 1962, if you had a nickel, you could buy two days worth of candy. A dime was a fortune and no one, ever, had a quarter. There was a playground rumor once that the Kane twins had a quarter but they couldn't produce it. Sixty dollars was an unimaginable sum.
And my parents were going to have to pay!
Adding to the terror was Mr. Munson's demeanor. Normally bombastic, he was quiet and serious and deadpan. I'd never seen him like this. He acted genuinely sorry for me, as if what was in store was an ordeal even he wouldn't wish on me. After explaining that I would be arrested in a while, he told me I might as well wait for the cops back in class.
I couldn't hear a thing all afternoon. My classmates were merrily raising their arms and answering questions, jumping up to go to the blackboard, laughing at Mr. Simone's funny stories -- he always used to say he was really singer Vic Damone. Funny guy. Only I wasn't laughing this afternoon. I was so scared I couldn't hear, I couldn't talk. All I could think about was being led away by the cops, not going home that night, and having my parents notified their kid was in jail and they owed $60.
About a half-hour before school got out, Mr. Munson popped into the classroom. I couldn't bear to look, knowing the cops would be right behind him. They weren't. But before my terror could lessen, he said, "The cops'll be here any minute for Clayton." Mr. Simone said something like, "Yeah, I heard. Well, that's what happens when you smash bottles. It's too bad."
Even Beverly McFarland, who hated Mr. Simone because he had once made her remove a Band-Aid from her leg to confirm his suspicion that she was faking an injury -- sure enough, no cut, no scrape, no nothing -- stared at me, shifting away from me in her seat. My classmates, good friends all, just stared at me. I could just hear Jim Lalley telling me, "You're the disgrace of the class," as he had once when I got a 56 on a math test. But actually they weren't saying anything. This was 1962, after all, and kids didn't get hauled out of school by the cops. They were too awestruck to say anything.
In a fog, I filed out with the rest of the class after school. The cops hadn't come and Mr. Simone said I could go, they would catch up with me later. At home that night, I jumped every time the phone rang or the front door opened. Days went by. Nothing. Finally, the day came when I stopped worrying about being arrested.
But the day of me vandalizing anything never came again.
The cops actually did come for Jeremy. And when I saw him on the trash-TV shows, with his mom saying his destruction of 350 feet of concrete, $7,000 worth at least, was no big deal and that the cops and the school and the sidewalk maker and newspaper columnists are all wrong -- everyone's wrong except she and Jeremy -- I think back to the Munson burner.
Of course it was all a charade. But what he did wasn't wrong. He was right to scare me straight.
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