When I was a teenager, I was “introverted.” Today, I’d be diagnosed with Social Anxiety Disorder. But in Far Rockaway High School, I made friends. I didn’t exactly go to parties, but I linked up with Lew and Rick and Lenny.

Lew was a serious, roly-poly guy who belonged to the Future Doctors of America, Rick was height-impaired, brilliant at science, and sardonic. Lenny was a gaunt, asthmatic man of the arts. We were - well, we were the Goonies, only without girls.

Lew and I played handball; Rick and Lenny didn’t even try. Lenny would shudder the length of his emaciated frame. “This is silly,” he cried. “I don’t need to be roasted in the sun.” But Lew and I played, in the school yard of P.S. 104, with a spaldeen. Until the mean kids came and said, “Challenge for the court.” We tried hard, but it was slaughter. The kids whipped the ball against the wall, and we waddled around like anteaters.

After we were booted from the court, we’d walk down the sloping block past dark summer trees, perspiration dripping down our backs. We’d go to the candy store and I’d have a cof­fee ice cream soda and a Drake’s coffee cake (never spoiled my appetite for dinner).

Drakes Coffee Cake

We were “eggheads.” We wore glasses (does anybody say “four–eyes” any more?) and carried “fag bags.” A “fag bag” was a briefcase, the kind attorneys carry—though ours weren’t expensive. Putting books into a briefcase was sensible, therefore uncool. Back then, a boy was required to hold all of his books against his ribs with an outstretched arm (no straps permitted). A girl cradled her books in both arms, against her chest.

While other teens were making out in knotty pine basements, Lenny and I wrote an operetta about gypsies; I wrote the libretto in longhand, on yellow lined paper. We met on the boardwalk to work on the score. It was a bright day in March, with a stiff wind. Lenny stalked into view, glasses glinting, coat flapping in the wind. He carried armfuls of music paper. We stood by the railing and Lenny looked intensely at the music, trying to find an aria. “It goes from the bottom of the bass up to the top of the treble in one phrase,” he said, and screeched it. “Nobody can sing this,” I said. “So what?” he answered.

After our conference, Lenny and I went to Rick’s pink stucco bungalow. There was a yard alongside the house, with brown grass, a swing set caked with rust, and a tree snapped by a hurricane. We knocked on the side door and Rick opened it, his Dalmatian rearing up. Rick and Lew were having lunch— borscht made pink by sour cream, and thick slices of pumpernickel. I was in awe of Rick because his uncle edited Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine.

In Rick’s room there was a bulky machine with dials and toggle switches and an oscilloscope. It was a digital computer Rick had built for a science project, and it earned him a Westinghouse science scholarship. In the master bedroom was a stereo setup, with a Rek-o-Cut turntable, reel to reel tape deck and speakers. Using that equipment, the four of us had recorded a satire of Stravinsky’s “Noah’s Flood,” a dreadful ballet the composer had written for TV. We listened to Beethoven’s Seventh and argued about which was better, tape or records. Lew got serious when he argued, scowling so his chin folded up. Understand that this was NOT the way normal teenage boys in the early 1960s spent their free time!

A year later, on a snowy December night, I was visiting Lew when the bell rang. Lenny came in from the snow, and it melted from his gray coat. His pants billowed over his boots. Sadly, he told us he was going to work the next day. It didn’t fit. Lenny was a gaunt composer who burned lobster red in the sun. He’d gotten a holiday job in a stationery store. His mother was sick and his father had ordered him to bring money into the house.

When Lenny left, Lew put on the last side of Wagner’s Das Rheingold and turned it up so the sound blasted. He sang Donner’s call to the thunder. We talked about Shaw’s Man And Superman, which we took as a manifesto. We talked about Nietzsche, and how it was our duty to strive to become the Overman. Lew got intense about it; his eyes glowed with belief.

There was a muffled thump under the floor. “That’s the people downstairs banging up,” Lew said. He turned up the sound on the portable phonograph. The banging got louder. After the music Lew took down a can of ravioli and slopped it into a pot (no microwaves yet). We heated it and poured yellow garlic powder over it and ate it, until our mouths burned.

Best Served With Garlic Powder

And so it went. Summers were best because we rode our bikes on the boardwalk, or walked there at night, eating frozen custard with butterscotch syrup then walking away from the lights of the concessions, down the ramp and among the Wavecrest Gardens apartment buildings where we declaimed from “Manfred” and sang bits from HMS Pinafore.

The summer after my first year of college, I drove over to Lew’s. We walked up to the boardwalk and watched the ocean shimmer in the heat. The benches were filled with old people, men with green sun visors and women with purplish hair. Lew was working on a scraggly beard and wore Ben Franklin glasses. “Listen,” he said. “Lise’s home today so you want to come up with me?”

Lew was the betrayer of our clan. He liked rock music and had a girl friend. He and Lise would sit on a wall at Brooklyn College with the other radical kids, and carried signs in demonstrations. Lew had decided not to be a doctor. He wanted to write poetry. Rick, meanwhile, left Columbia. He didn’t want to build computers. He wanted to compose and he was working on his second symphony. He also had a long beard and was going out with an older woman. Nobody had heard from Lenny.

A couple of decades later I met Rick for lunch at a Long Island mall. He was teaching. In 2000, Lew found me on the Internet. We met in Manhattan and he and his wife and my wife and I clicked and remain friends. Lew retired from a distinguished career as a school librarian, and Rick retired from a successful teaching career. Both are into photography. I found Lenny via Google. The gaunt specter we assumed would perish of consumption had enjoyed a career teaching Asian Religions, Sanskrit and Tibetan, and was working on an English translation of Desideri’s Notizie Istoriche del Tibet. A true champion of Nerd-dom!

Lew, Rick, & Len Now

I remained introverted throughout high school, but those friendships got me out of my room, and let me know that my oddball mind was not alone in the universe. Maybe it was this connection that gave me the courage to take the next step.