Arnold Hasselstrom

Arnold Hasselstrom is a troubled boy.

Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943–1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright (1972).

Arnold (though not the Arnold of this passage) reminds me of a kid from my Brooklyn elementary school days. I knew him only by his name and reputation. He stuck out his leg and tripped me one day when I was running home from school for lunch, excited about something. “Don’t run,” he said. I went flying. On some other day, he climbed the exterior walls of the school to the narrow pitched roof of the long multi-story corridor that joined the two large parts of the school building. He was four very tall stories up. The fire department had to come to get him down.

You can see the corridor in this Google Maps photograph.

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All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)