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By Root 1359 0

’t notice that black kids were black, but it was as close to not noticing as you could get. It was much the same with other ethnic groups. Some years ago when I came to apply a pseudonym to one of my boyhood friends, I chose the name Stephen Katz partly in honor of a Des Moines drugstore called Katz’s, which was something of a local institution in my childhood, and partly because I wanted a short name that was easy to type. Never did it occur to me that the name was Semitic. I never thought of anybody in Des Moines as being Jewish. I don’t believe anyone did. Even when they had names like Wasserstein and Liebowitz, it was always a surprise to learn they were Jewish. Des Moines wasn’t a very ethnic place.

Anyway, Katz wasn’t Jewish. He was Catholic. And it was at Callanan that I met him when he was recruited by Doug Willoughby to join in an organized takeover of the Audio-Visual Club—a cunning but unusual move and a lasting testament to Willoughby’s genius. Club members were put in charge of maintaining and showing the school’s enormous cache of educational films. Whenever a teacher wanted to show a movie—and some teachers did little else because it meant they didn’t have to teach or even spend much time in the classroom—a member of the elite A/V team would wheel a projector to the room in question, expertly thread and loop the film through half a dozen sprockets, and show the desired educational offering.

Historically, the A/V Club was the domain of the school’s geekiest students, as you would expect, but Willoughby at once saw the advantages the club offered to normal people. For one thing, it provided a key to the only locked space in the building to which students had access and where we could almost certainly smoke once he had cracked the ventilation problem (which he quickly did). Further, it gave access to a vast supply of movies, including all the sex-education films made between roughly 1938 and 1958. Finally, and above all, it provided a legitimate excuse to be at large in the empty hallways of Callanan during class time. If challenged by a teacher while roaming through the shiny corridors (and what a delightful, relaxing, privileged place school corridors are when empty) you could simply say: “I’m just going up to the A/V room to do some essential maintenance on a Bell and Howell 1040-Z,” which was in fact more or less true. What you didn’t say was that you would also be smoking half a pack of Chester-fields while there.

So at Willoughby’s behest, fifteen of us joined the club, and as our first order of business voted all the existing members out. Only Milton Milton was allowed to stay as a sort of token geek and because he gave us half a bottle of crème de menthe he’d stolen from his dad’s liquor cabinet and because he threatened to report us to his parents, the principal, the school board, and the county sheriff, whom he dubiously claimed as a close family friend, if we didn’t allow him to remain in the club.

The A/V room was tucked away in an obscure corner of the building, upstairs and at the back. It was like the school attic. It contained a large assortment of old stage props, costumes, scripts, yearbooks from the 1920s and 1930s, and dusty shelves of old films—hygiene movies, newsreels, sex-education films, marijuana-will-melt-your-brain films, and much else. We spent many happy hours showing the sex-education films on the walls.

Willoughby discovered a film-splicing kit and spent hours editing the films for his own amusement, putting goose-stepping Nazis into movies about the Oregon Trail and so on. His finest moment was in a sex-education film when the narrative line “Johnny had just experienced his first nocturnal emission” was immediately followed by a shot of Naval Academy cadets throwing their hats in the air.

It was in the A/V Club, as I say, that I met a transfer student from the Catholic school system named Stephen Katz. I have never come close to doing the real Stephen Katz justice on any of the occasions I have put him in my books—no mortal author could—and I’m afraid I won’t now except to