Two lessons learned from being caught white-handed on my first day of 6^th grade at Pleasant Avenue Elementary, 1960.

When we became the big kids at Pleasant Avenue Elementary, entering the sixth grade — we figured we knew the ropes. For example, we knew never to stray anywhere near Hank Riley and Walter Munson, especially in the cafeteria.

Hank was a sadistic fireplug of a kid with strawberry blonde hair and freckles. He held the school record for the softball toss. Then Walter Munson arrived at Pleasant Ave by way of reform school and smashed Hank’s record by forty feet. Walter’s advantage may have been hormonal; he was the only kid in the sixth grade sporting a goatee.

On our first day of school, we sat together at lunchtime making juicy noises by sucking up Jell-O through our straws. Malcolm laughed so hard milk ran out of his nose — the highest score on our humor barometer. I watched a nervous fourth-grader an aisle over, scanning the cafeteria for a friendly face. Hank Riley smiled up at the kid as he walked by. “Have a nice trip,” Hank said.

“Huh?” the kid asked, quickening his pace, just as Hank stuck out his leg. As Walter Munson shoved the kid he called after him, “See you next fall.”

Like the delay between the puff of smoke shooting out of the starter’s pistol at Knox Field and the crack of sound, I pointed and then the plates and silverware crashed across the linoleum. The place exploded with cheers and whistles — mostly expressions of relief it wasn’t one of us sprawled on the floor all covered with Sloppy Joe sauce.

Some kids took advantage of the mayhem by catapulting spoonfuls of Jell-O across the room. Our principal, Mr. Jewell, grabbed the big, silver microphone parked next to the stage. “Settle down,” he boomed over the PA system. The noise level fell as Mr. Jewell watched and waited. An errant spoon sailed end over end from the far side of the cafeteria and pinged across the floor. Mr. Jewell intoned into the microphone in a deathly monotone, “I am now taking names.” His threat sucked all the noise out of the cafeteria, except for the ticking of the big clock on the wall.

I counted seventeen ticks before Mr. Jewell finally announced, “Homeroom B-4 can now line up for recess.”

The girls huddled together on the playground, mainly for protection from the packs of howling boys darting everywhere like wolves on the hunt. Dondi, Malcolm, Woody, and I clung to a sliver of shade along the edge of the cool brick school building, rehashing the recent melee in the cafeteria.

“That kid flew in perfect Superman pose, with his lunch tray straight out in front of him,” Malcolm said.

“If he was Superman, then Walter Munson is Lex Luthor,” I said, referring to Superman’s evil archenemy.

“I heard Walter got sent up the river for knifing some guy,” Dondi said.

“His stepfather,” Woody corrected him.

“Say, do you think Superman needs to have his arms out in front of him to fly?” Malcolm asked, extending his arms overhead to demonstrate.

“That’s just for less wind resistance,” Dondi said, sounding exasperated for having to point out something so obvious.

“So could he fly in a sitting position if he wanted to?” Malcolm asked.

“Yeah, but that would just look stupid,” Woody said.

Bowing out of the discussion, I leaned back against the big plate glass classroom window behind me and my elbows sank deeply into something very soft and sticky. Startled, I turned around and discovered a thick line of fresh putty.

I scooped out a small handful of the pliable, white material, and passed it around to my friends. Its earthy smell and oily consistency must have cast a spell over us, because we were soon racing from one set of classroom windows to the next, mining out virgin strips. Within minutes, each of us held shot put sized putty balls.

By the time the warning bell rang, signaling three minutes until the end of recess, every window along the entire length of the school had inch-deep gouges scooped out of the frames. We couldn’t bring the evidence back into school. So we sprinted across the playground to heave it out into the neighboring field.

Walter Munson and Hank Riley appeared out of nowhere, blocking our path.

“What’ve you peckerheads got there?” Walter asked, raising his head and pointing his wispy-haired chin at us.

We held out our merchandise for him and Hank to see. “We’re going to see who can throw them the farthest,” I said.

Walter slowly reached out and took mine from my hand, as if daring me to pull it away from him. He raised it to his nose and sniffed. “What is this shit?”

“It’s cookie dough,” Dondi said.

Walter turned his head toward Dondi and smiled, revealing little crescents of decay between his front teeth. “What are you, some kind of wise ass, Duquette?”

I held my breath. The last hot bugs off in the distance buzzed a mournful reminder that summer vacation really was over. I wanted to be anywhere else, rather than staring down these two.

“These lunkers are probably too heavy to throw very far anyway,” Dondi said, offering his to Walter.

That was all Hank and Walter needed.

We stepped back to watch what was certain to be the world’s first putty-ball heaving contest. I figured it might even qualify for the Guinness Book of Records, right alongside the man with The World’s Longest Fingernails (they touched the ground when he was standing), or my favorite, The Metal-Eating Man who had eaten 18 bicycles.

As it turned out, Dondi was right; even the best softball throwers in school couldn’t throw fat putty balls far enough to make them disappear. They sat in the field like four lonesome snowballs that would never melt. But at least they were out of our hands and as the final bell rang we ducked back into the dark, cool halls of the school.

I forgot all about our putty episode until Mr. Jewell appeared in the doorway of my social studies classroom later that afternoon. He conferred with my teacher Mr. Robinson, who bore a disturbing, perhaps cultivated resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. Mr. Robinson strode across the classroom to my desk and solemnly stared down at me. He paused dramatically as if preparing to deliver the Gettysburg Address.

“Mr. Jewell would like to meet with you in the hall,” he said. Thirty-two sets of eyes followed me as I made my way to the door. I placed one foot mechanically in front of the other, as if relearning how to walk.

It didn’t surprise me to find Woody, Dondi, and Malcolm already out in the hallway. What surprised me was the way they were holding their hands out in front of them, as if waiting to be cuffed. Their heads were bowed prayer-like, which suddenly seemed like a good idea to me. Mr. Jewell was holding his hands behind his back.

“Lucas, show me your hands,” he said.

When I held out my hands, I noticed fine lines of whiteness packed into every crevice around my fingernails.

“Do you boys know anything about these,” asked Mr. Jewell, as he produced four filthy, weed-encrusted balls of putty from behind his back.

The four of us stood silently.

“Did you boys dig this putty out of the school’s windows and throw these into the field?”

I was surprised to hear Dondi say, “No, we didn’t, sir.”

I supposed this was technically true. We hadn’t collected the putty and thrown it away.

“Well, who did throw these out into the field at recess, then?”

Again somewhat telling the truth, Dondi replied, “Hank Riley and Walter Munson did, sir.”

“If that’s the case, then why do you boys have putty all over your hands?”

I didn’t see any way around this question. But Dondi was on a roll so I let him keep going.

“They bet us they could throw those farther than we could. But we knew we couldn’t out throw those guys, sir,” Dondi said.

I noticed that the first part of his answer was an outright lie, followed quickly by a statement with which no one in school could argue.

Mr. Jewell stared at each of us for a long time, as if waiting for a better explanation. Finally he said, “Okay then. I am going to have a talk with Mr. Riley and Mr. Munson to see what they have to say about this. You boys can go back to your classes. I will follow up with you later.”

For the next week we traveled everywhere together, carrying Woody’s BB gun pistol in a gym bag for protection from Walter and Hank. But we gave up on that idea when Woody accidentally shot Malcolm in the belly at point blank range. Malcolm immediately called out, “bagsies” — which was just his British way of claiming the right to shoot Woody to even the score. Neither of them even flinched.

In the end the whole thing just blew over and we wasted a lot of time worrying about nothing. That was my first inkling into the meaning of a Mark Twain quote that later in my life would emerge as a favorite. When he was quite old, Twain said, “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”

That episode was also the first time it occurred to me that Dondi’s ability to sidestep trouble wasn’t just beginner’s luck. It was survival skill honed from living in the same house with his father.