Detention, Probation, Study Hall

My marks were terrible. I had the strange idea that in class, even if I were daydreaming of something else, my brain was still absorbing all the material like a kind of specialized sponge, and the next day at the exam I could scratch around in the appropriate corner, in the detritus, and there would be the appropriate answers. Of course it didn't work that way, and my marks, the C's, the D's, the occasional E-the latter always in math-showed it.

These elicited letters from my father-the only letters I ever got, with his familiar, dreaded handwriting-and they were stiff with reprimand. He was Exeter, his brother was Exeter, his father was Exeter: George Arthur Plimpton, class of 1873, gave the playing fields, raised funds for Phillips Church. Though my father never actually said as much, I was truly letting down the side. Genetically speaking, I was supposed to soar through Exeter. Wasn't the family tree full of outrageous successes? There were generals, senators, tycoons, empire builders, college presidents, lawyers, poets-including the first American poet, Edward Taylor (unreadable, I might add). And now, at the end of the line, like a caboose with two wheels missing, dragging along the ground, shooting up sparks and igniting forest fires, this. My father wrote a weekly letter in which the operative word was "apply," as in "you really must apply yourself." All of this must have also worried my mother-even though she knew perfectly well that there hadn't been an indiscretion that would have resulted in this infant manqué. At the end of vacation, I would assure her and father: "I will apply myself." Then I would march north immediately into detention, probation, study hall, where you went if your marks were too low.

I was confined a lot, like a caged mink. As I sat there in study hall, I would think up titles to the books I would write: The Blue Locomotive. The Riders of the Purple Hills. The Dead Man of Deadman's Gulch. I had been hooked on Zane Grey ever since reading Riders of the Purple Sage. From the public library on Front Street, as I recall, I took out dozens of such volumes, when I should have been reading the books I'd been assigned for class. Why wasn't there an exam on Riders of the Purple Sage? Instead it was Tacitus, the Roman historian. What were his views on Vespasian? "Get out your pencils, please. Potter, pass out the blue books." Sometimes I thought I was in the wrong classroom.

I used to sit in study hall and curse my brain. I used to imagine taking it out of the top of my head and beating it sharply with a pencil. Why had it let me down? True, I hadn't studied, but why hadn't my brain compensated properly out of thin air? Somewhere in Melville's Moby Dick is the line "my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded." Which is apt, thinking back on it, because my head, when I was at Exeter, was ever off somewhere else, funning it up with the heads of the few others who were having difficulty. We beheaded few, we band of brothers.

At nightfall, I went down to the Plimpton Playing Fields and drop-kicked field goals with Buzz Merritt, just the two of us in the gloaming, often with a thin moon shining above the pines, above the river. No one drop-kicks footballs now, or did then either. Why did I do this when I should have been studying Tacitus for the exam I knew was coming up the next day? Buzz got away with it somehow, but I didn't. Sometimes, to escape the exams, I went to the infirmary. There was a secret way, which I've now forgotten, to drive up the temperature on a thermometer. If you were careless, you could drive it up to 110 degrees. I always thought Dr. Fox somehow knew, perhaps by the panicky face he was looking at, what the true trouble was, and he would put you in the infirmary for the day.

When I wasn't on detention, or probation, or sitting in study hall, I spent, at least in my final years, a great deal of time in an institution one can hardly believe existed-the butt rooms, where one learned to smoke. There was more smoke in one of those rooms than there is in the funnel of an old-fashioned locomotive. We sat in there and we were suave. I'm surprised we didn't wear green eyeshades and hats. At night I would lie in bed and, in the moonlight streaming through the window, practice blowing smoke rings. As they oozed thickly up toward the ceiling, I'd say to myself, "Wow! If only Susie Mills"-the girl who had a driver's license and drove her father's Plymouth with the top down-"could see me now!"

I spent a lot of time in study hall, where you went if your marks were too low. I was confined a lot, like a caged mink. I used to sit there and curse my brain. I used to imagine taking it out of the top of my head and beating it sharply with a pencil. Why had it let me down?

But what really got me into trouble were the little things I thought were funny-like sneaking in at night and turning all the benches around in the Assembly Hall because I thought it would be funny to have my classmates sitting backwards when they came in for assembly.

In Phillips Hall, there was a large room with a collection of stuffed animal heads hanging on the wall. The Zoo, it was called then, although the animal heads are no longer there, I've been told, because of political correctness problems. For reasons that seem unfathomable to me now, I thought it would be amusing to remove the rhino head and put it somewhere else-say, the stage of the Assembly Hall, where it would look out on the student body gathered for assembly.

I was, of course, caught with the rhino head. Mortification. What do you say if you're caught with such a thing? Afterwards, but too late, the thought occurred to me that I should have said, "I'm bringing it back."

I had a friend when I was at Cambridge University who stole a tiny Modigliani statue from the Tate Gallery, because, as he said, he liked it a lot and wanted to spend some time with it. After a while, he went to London and returned it. Modigliani wasn't very well known at the time, so there wasn't much of a fuss. He told me about this my second year there, and I said, "Well, that's all very well, but I took a rhino head off the wall and tried to put it in the Assembly Hall." I'm not sure he believed me, and I'm not sure I believed him, but he became a great newspaper editor afterwards and very distinguished.

When I was at Exeter, a friend of mine at Groton turned all the pipes around in the organ loft as a prank, so that when the organist sat down to play a good, fervid, high-Episcopal hymn such as "Nearer My God to Thee" or "Onward, Christian Soldiers," out came a bar or two of Schoenberg. If I had heard of this at the time, I would have hastened off to Phillips Church, wrench in hand, and tried to do the same.

I would have been caught. I was caught all the time. It was as if I were attached to an invisible leash at the other end of which was an authority of some kind. I'd be called in to see Dean Kerr in his offices. Shuffling in and asked to explain myself, I would open my mouth-and nothing would emerge. Sometimes in answer to a probing question of his ("Why did you think to move that stuffed rhino head?"), I would murmur, head down, "Yessir." I never looked at Dean Kerr. I didn't dare. Out of sight, out of mind. I didn't know what he looked like. "Oh, look," someone would say, "there's Dean Kerr." "Who?" I would reply. "Where?"

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