New Moon (21 page)

And love it was. When Bob Kuzava got those two Dodgers to pop out in the seventh game of the 1952 World Series, that was a talisman I kept alive long enough to put at the beginning of a poem to my college girlfriend!

So I continued to sign up for hardball at optional period and, when left field lost its luster, I became a submarine pitcher like Ewell Blackwell.

Just past the mid-point of every summer Chipinaw was divided into Red and Gray teams that competed against each other for points during a one-week competition called Color War. Athletic contests were only part of this festival. All of waking life, and to some degree sleep, were coopted by it. The moment war was declared, the Reds and Grays—those assigned to either team—became mandatory enemies. Despite prior friendships opponents barely spoke to one another for the week. Bunks were rearranged, with the beds of teammates grouped together, the mess hall divided into team tables. We were expected to eat silently, any spoken word charged against the team on whose side it was uttered.

I dreaded Color War, for I knew its precise plunge of despondency. We now might be judged for points at any moment. The incompetence of my bed-making and state of my cubby could lower my team’s score. Every clean-up job at inspection, every line-up held a potential for demerits. Even legendary slobs like Jay and Barry scrubbed and swept like fiends.

All summer I could be an eccentric nonentity, as I strolled in and out of venues with my books and radio. During Color War my acts of rebellion fell under a microscope. A Yankee game on the radio cost points, as did Roofball or Armory Ball. In wartime these were acts of desertion approaching treason. My bedwetting became a public nuisance, team members unhappily having to help me with my sheets in order to prepare for inspection.

Not only were campers all distributed to either the Red or the Gray, counselors were too. The sole noncombatants were the nurse and the doctor, the owners and administrators, and the elderly maintenance men who lived in tents between the armory and the woods and were dubbed “the zombies.” The five head counselors served as judges, Abbey the commissioner. He sat at the center table in the mess hall with Nurse Mary, the doctor, and the judges and, if I went to his house for solace or conversation, Dorey turned me
away so no one would think she was favoring one side.

In Bunk 9 at the beginning of July, I went around announcing that I was going to be neutral this year. I made sure every potential captain and judge heard me. But no one took me seriously, and for good reason. One August night the team rosters were on our dinner tables, and right away we were instructed to find new places. Where could I go? My name was on the Red team list. There were no neutral tables. Likewise back at the bunk, symmetry required that my bed be moved into the Red zone.

One never knew when War would “break.” In theory it could come at any time, though it never occurred during the early weeks of summer. As we approached the July-August cusp, campers were on pins and needles, in continuous expectation and speculation.

A dramatic event always heralded Color War’s launching. A bunch of costumed figures would burst onto the campus and throw around fliers listing the Red and Gray teams. Or the bugle would suddenly blast out a jagged fire call or mid-day reveille and everyone would run to the O.D. shack to find team lists tacked on the bulletin board. The most spectacular inaugural was a crop-dusting plane flying low over the camp dropping parachutes with the team lists. Back and forth it rumbled, filling the air with them: birds materializing into mandates, a spectacle both magnificent and ominous.

With the peremptory division into teams the prior schedule of activities was terminated. We were summoned by our captains to solidarity meetings and strategy sessions.

In the first days following the onset of War the captains and counselors of Red and Gray stayed up late and wrote songs: marches, alma maters, and novelty verses. Then the rest of us had to memorize their words and melodies and render them in chorus:
“The trees that wreathe our Chip’naw, / the bunks along the hill, / Abbey and Nurse Mary / the games our hearts do fill …”
and then
“The old gray mare / she ain’t what she used to be…,”
a Red-team rag refreshed each year by a new set of lyrics.

Whoever wasn’t engaged in matches was rounded up into the armory or mess hall for rehearsals—top secret. If I was playing Roofball or reading, someone found me and dragged me to our
team’s drill. I remember a bossy senior smashing me across the face with his megaphone every few seconds because he said I wasn’t mouthing the words, and then putting his ear next to my lips, giving me a knuckle sandwich to the shoulder whenever he thought my voice had gotten too faint.

Red and Gray captains carried around the unofficial tally on clipboards and, receiving messengers from far-flung fields and courts, added in estimated points and came up with the informal standings, but their tallies were guesswork. The official score, the sum points for each side, was read by the judges to hushed silence at the end of each dinner: “The Red team: three hundred and … sixty-five; the Gray team … three hundred and … sixty … NINE!” The Grays went crazy. Paraphrasing football coach Vince Lombardi—this wasn’t life and death, it was
more
important.

Athletic overachievers, the more militant counselors their enablers, had free rein to keep everyone else in line, the accusation being, “You prick, those points you’re losin’ I sweated for on the playin’ field.”

Chipinaw was
supposed to
be competitive, in fact hardcore; that was its publicized merit, preparing
nouveau riche
princes for the rat race. Behind the scenes we were inventing lives and foreshadowing iconoclastic careers. The camp was filled with incipient Jewish power brokers: my cousins Jay and Siggy were en route to becoming Wall Street financiers, partners with arbitrageurs Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken; our bunk-mate Barry was a world-class hematologist in the making; other Chipinaw brats were nascent surgeons, judges, politicians, orchestra conductors and, of course, corporate attorneys (a few judges and Civil Rights lawyers too). Such embryonic prodigies were barely held in check by the authorities, though I was the only one skedaddling. Most would-be insurgents managed to get themselves out of Chipinaw altogether—paroled or dishonorably discharged—but they had more amenable parents than mine.

During a packed week of competition, intensity climbed to a frenzy as campers not engaged in a match gathered in throngs to watch and cheer for their team. It was meant to be Major League, but
it felt more like Alice in the court of playing cards. Nights were spectral and mute, as the moon became a spy in the enemy camp. Then the sun met reveille with a combat-zone hue.

One of Color War’s main contests was a several-hour tag-team relay around the entire campus, requiring 100-percent camper participation—a hefty chunk of points at stake. Older kids and waiters sprinted the longest distances, for instance, from the O.D. shack to the lake; younger kids like us ran from bunk to bunk or from the armory to the flagpole. A baton was passed from runner to runner, as the course of the race wound back and forth across the campus, building to a crescendo near the finish line at the mess hall almost an hour later.

Those who had completed their laps paced along, urging others to go faster, to receive the baton while in motion. The race periodically disappeared into the woods and reappeared from different spots, sometimes with dramatic lead changes, single runners making up ground somewhere in the forest, even taking the lead to a startled burst of cheers as they emerged. Fat kids strained at every muscle while seniors and waiters shadowed them, shouting for them to move their asses. Sprinters of the final laps were often hard to spot, as waves of spectators surrounded single points of energy travelling with batons. As the last carrier crossed the line, the victorious team danced, hugged, and slapped palms.

Despite myself, I felt elation when my team won the relay, for I had run a lap somewhere in that maze, a small but essential patch of our victory. I could not deny the power of a campus-wide race inducting everyone, fast and slow. It was Lewis and Clark … the Louisiana Purchase … a voyage to Saturn.

At age eleven, Bunk 12, I was openly defiant. I didn’t show up at any of my activities, and I didn’t clean my area. Some of the judges were quite gung-ho about their roles and, to force the matter, points were deducted from the Reds in unprecedented clumps. This created a furor. Seniors and waiters made pilgrimages to my bunk to coax and pester me, but I held firm: I wasn’t for either side, I hoped they had a good War.

They confiscated my radio. They woke me up in the middle of the night, marched me to the lake, and dunked me in my pajamas. They put me in wrestling holds. But I wouldn’t give in. I experienced in myself a stubbornness so firm and invulnerable it was astonishing even to me. I felt that I was right and, though the entire camp stood against me, I wasn’t going to back down. “Kill me!” I screamed, as they shook me awake in bed a third night in a row.

The morning after the dunking I borrowed Sunday’s sports pages from a counselor’s bed, grabbed comics from various cubbies along with my current book, then pocketed some bread at breakfast, and took an unfamiliar path into the woods. I spent the morning in a clearing, sitting on a log reading. I was bored and a bit scared, but my obstinacy sustained me, along with the small dramas of nature: anthills, crows, butterflies, garter snakes.

That afternoon Dave Hecht, leading hounds on leashes, found me. He stood at leash length, staring with utmost disapproval. “Dickie,” he said, which almost no one called me, “you have violated the basic rule of camping. In my twenty years in this business you’re the first person I’ve had to go looking for.”

Crying, I stood up. I offered to come back if I didn’t have to be in Color War.

“I’m not asking you,” he pontificated, “I’m telling you. We’re making no deals. Campers don’t just walk off.”

I was hungry anyway, and I wasn’t going to argue with a two-hundred-fifty pound lawyer with three dogs. I had to go through the motions for the rest of Color War, and even won a tennis match and was half of a victorious duo in a rowboat race. I was also a throw-in (to even up the numbers) in a contest involving mess-hall plates and bowls tossed into the deep water. Each team tried to fetch more than the other in three minutes. The captain knew I was unskilled at going underwater, but our team had a star diver so they could afford a concession, as opposed to gambling on me in the breast-stroke or butterfly competitions.

Though I didn’t plunge headfirst, I sank beneath the surface. The scattered porcelain on the lake bottom, spotted through fluctuations of light and mass, cast an alabaster glitter like gold doubloons. I
captured a cereal bowl with my feet, transferred it to my hands, and added it to our pile.

When I visited Abbey the following week, he tried to explain: Color War couldn’t be optional or it wouldn’t happen. It was a big part of the camp, and many parents felt it was the single most important event in their children’s lives.

After Color War ended, summer drew to a close. I put a handmade calendar over my bed beginning with fifteen days left and crossed them off until eventually everyone got the spirit:

Cubbies were emptied, trunks were packed, and finally Joe came for me. Jay, Barry, and I met next at the lunch buffet amid platters of roast beef, melons filled with fruit salad, and trays of chocolate cakes and fruit tarts. It was rapture, just to walk by the sparkle of the pool among the chattering crowds, to look up into the sky and watch the white cumulus exploding forever.

In 1955 I started sixth grade with Mrs. Lewis, a zealous old-timer near the end of her career. She was notorious throughout P.S. 6 for a flask of strong-smelling liquid masquerading on her desk as a water jug (the student who refilled her glass from it was known to us as the “whiskey monitor”). She was an activist, though we barely understood the concept. Her specialty, labor unions, was not in the curriculum, but that didn’t stop her from diagramming their history for two whole weeks, as she let us in on the historic merger between the AF of L and CIO. She reminded us—every day in fact—that it was a privilege for eleven-year-olds to get such a close-up view of a current event. A skilled storyteller, she made the rivalry of industrial versus craft shops as cloak-and-dagger as any adult fairy tale could be. We had no idea that, if the bureaucracy found out, she would have been fired.

My mother set her heart on my going to Horace Mann or Riverdale, difficult prep schools in the upper Bronx near Westchester County. She had especially admired kids in maroon Horace Mann jackets. In her mind despite indications to the contrary, her sons were scholars, intellectuals in the French tradition, like her brother Lionel who had run away from home during World War II as a teenager and become a renowned professor of history in Pittsburgh. However, the outlook for my going to either academy was dim to nil. Not only were my grades poor, but Uncle Paul was opposed to private school. He said it was a waste of money because it didn’t prepare you for the real world.

But I could tell that he and my mother were hatching some sort of deal because at World Series time he brought me to Grossinger’s for the weekend as a treat. There Milty and I sat with Al Rosen and a bunch of other Cleveland Indians beside the canteen watching the Dodgers play the Yankees in the 1955 World Series. The Indians had overtaken New York the previous year, winning 111 games, the most by a team ever, but the winter’s eighteen-player trade had revived the Yanks, and Casey’s upgraded crew finished with a three-game edge over Cleveland, albeit losing thirteen of twenty-two meetings head-to-head. Rosen did not let Milty or me forget: “Early Wynn, Herb Score, Bob Lemon, Mike Garcia, Larry Doby, Al Smith, we won 111 games last year and would have crushed the Dodgers. The Yankees can barely handle them.”

I was back in New York by the time Johnny Podres shut out my team to bring a championship to Brooklyn. In the sixth inning Sandy Amoros made a game-saving catch on an opposite-field drive by Yogi Berra; it was headed for the corner with two runners aboard. Not only did the Yankees lose, but Gil McDougald, who got three of their eight hits that day, was doubled off first on the play, a pretext for weeks of ribbing by my friends. I so identified with my favorite player that everyone acted as though
I
had been the base-runner who miscalculated.

Then one evening at dinner my mother startled us all by announcing, “Richard’s father agrees to send him to Horace Mann or Riverdale in the unlikely event he gets accepted.”

“What’s the catch, Martha?” asked Bob.

She smiled conspiratorially. “Just that his name be changed to Grossinger.”

“What, Towers isn’t good enough for him!”

“Well, Turetsky wasn’t good enough for you.”

“You needler,” he retorted. “I’ll be Turetsky again when I make enough money to afford it.”

As a first step toward putting me into prep school she made a rare phone call to Phil’s mother and ended up hiring the young woman from Riverdale who had tutored him. Elisabeth Youmans showed up two days later, a hoity-toity marm in a dark blue dress,
primping and distracted at our front door as if under duress. She told my mother right away that Phil was the smartest child she ever met. Then she sat me down for an hour of tests, assessed my results, and informed my parents I wasn’t “Riverdale material.” Handing back her advance payment, she would not be my tutor.

Undeterred, my mother called Columbia and got an older graduate student of history named Abraham Hilowitz. He arrived one night in a brown raincoat, handed his hat to Bob who put it in the closet, and then shook my hand.

“Educate this lad,” my stepfather announced as we headed down the hallway.

“Your father has a sense of humor,” Mr. Hilowitz remarked once we were in my room.

After an exploratory session he took a deep breath and said, “You’ve missed a lot of basics, so let’s go back to the beginning.”

From then on we spent two hours together three nights a week, redoing my education. It was all dimly familiar because I had watched it through a veil. Now I wanted to see how it actually worked: numbers carried over, parts of speech becoming grammatical units. He was a charming teacher and, under his aegis, I swept away encumbrances that had stymied me for years. As long as I got it he kept speeding up the pace. In a matter of months I had reached sixth grade again. Nobody quite knew what happened—not the astonished Mrs. Lewis, not my mother, not even me. I had been so involved in daydreaming that I didn’t realize how accessible the real world was.

I honor Mr. Hilowitz most for the day I had a panic. I was setting up a Sorry! game with Jon. As I stared at the yellow and red tokens at Start, I felt the disease. “I have it! I have it!” I screamed. Ice formed along my spine and neck and seeped into my chest. I was too wobbly to stand. My mother tucked me into bed, filled my nose with bitter drops, and smeared Vick’s Vaporub over my chest. An hour later my tutor arrived.

I lay there, staring at the window, ashamed to be so revealed, trying to keep grim thoughts at bay. It was obvious I would do no work tonight. But he sat on the edge of the covers and told stories
for the whole two hours, creating voices for historical figures as he went—Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, Roanoke and the mystery of Virginia Dare, Marquette and Joliet along the Mississippi, the French and Indian War, the Spaniards’ unsuccessful search for gold. He lured me back into the world of things and made existence normal again.

That was my last full-fledged panic for almost ten years.

The admissions interviews were intimidating and I clammed up, answering only as I was asked. At Horace Mann the teacher read from a list of questions that included: “What are your hobbies?” None came to mind.

“Then what do you do in your spare time?”

“Watch TV, listen to ballgames.”

“Couldn’t you at least have told him you have a scrapbook on Mars?” my mother asked in the cab home.

“I forgot.” It would have been a gold-star answer, but I didn’t begin to know how to distinguish my virtues from my vices.

I failed the exam for Riverdale but got into Horace Mann. Phil was unimpressed. “That’s mostly for Jews and colored kids,” he said, “and even worse, it’s only boys. You won’t find Nancy Drew or Annie Welch there.”

We all considered blonde tomboy Annie the cutest girl in Mrs. Lewis’ class.

“I’m glad
I’m
not going,” he finally scoffed.

I stopped talking to Phil after that. In fact, I interacted with him only one more time in childhood. During the fall of our first year at our new schools he called me to procure three out-of-print Tom Quest books I had bought at a used bookstore near Grossinger’s; he couldn’t find them anywhere and wanted to complete his set. I had stopped collecting the series by then, so we met on the east side of Park Avenue halfway between our 1235 and 1175 awnings where I sold him the copies. We didn’t even bother to catch up on each other’s lives at the new schools.

All that time I was doing something different with the sinister signpost and hooded hawk. Now I was done with the mystery story
forever. In fact, I was done with Richard Towers.

I didn’t buy
The Clue in the Embers,
the Hardy Boys volume that appeared my last month of sixth grade. Because I never read the real version, the title came to stand for all emergent signs and mysteries. I had found the melted coins, opened the secret panel, learned the identity of the figure in hiding. The “lost tunnel,” “hidden harbor,” “green flame,” “whispering box,” et al., each had settled into latency, but they were indispensable, for they gave shape to my inner life and would appear over the years in other guises. “The clue in the embers,” though, remained my ultimate sphinx—beyond Fabian, beyond Freud. Unread, it couldn’t be known, so it made all other knowledge possible.

Near the end of sixth grade I felt wild and unbounded. I wanted to bust out of the boy whose name I was surrendering for good.

I had been collecting a cumulative set of Yankee cards but was missing three rare ones. A kid showed up on my next-to-last day of Bill-Dave with the coveted trio but would flip only if I put my precious Yankees at stake. There would never be another chance to acquire them, so I agreed to match his cards with prized ones of my own. He landed three tails and cheered aloud, pumping his fist. My heart in my throat, I flipped a second, then a third tail!

But something else was happening, exploding from a place unknown into something I adored, had always adored but couldn’t get at.
I was somehow being absolved.
Dr. Fabian hadn’t found the link, but there had only been symbols to work with, symbols to lead the way. Now there were only actions—life itself.

The next day I brought my cherished collection of cartoon, Flash Gordon, and other non-baseball cards to school and tossed them in the air, free for all takers. They blew about the P.S. 6 yard, causing a commotion.

“The kid’s a madman!”

“Totally nutso!”

I loved it.

And it was spring and cherry blossoms in Central Park, and something still bigger, bigger than even that, was called for. On the last
day of group I brought my box of baseball cards and dispersed them too, an unexplained trail through the Park with the entirety of Bill-Dave following and fighting for possession a few hundred yards behind me as I ducked in and out of bushes—an anonymous Robin Hood—saving my Yankees for last, and finally at a kid’s request, a gag he didn’t expect me to take seriously, dropping those too, picture after picture, just days after winning the final three, even my years of every hard-earned card of Gil McDougald. I had no idea why. I had planned to keep those talismans forever. I only knew that I watched gleefully from a million miles away. “It’s Towers again,” they shouted, for the pictures gave away the identity of a person who no longer existed.

I was free.

One afternoon Mrs. Lewis asked me to stay after school for a conference. As I approached her desk, she congratulated me on my improved work and admission to Horace Mann. “You’re going to have to work even harder there. I want to get you off to a good start, so try to be more alert in class.” Then she extolled my new last name, which had been added to her records. “You must be related to Jennie Grossinger.”

I nodded.

“What a marvelous woman. She does so much for charity.”

When Mrs. Lewis taught us about apples a few weeks later, she asked for extra-credit papers on one or another variety, so I raised the ante by writing on all three of them: the pippin, the winesap, and the MacIntosh, the separate colors and tastes of which still have a sort of runic depth for me—they mark the moment of transition.

In the last weeks of school a few boys and girls began to go out with each other. A kid named Jimmy McCracken gave a studded dog collar to Annie Welch. She wore it around her calf above her ankle. That Annie Welch had travelled with me to other worlds was something I would tell no one, not even Dr. Fabian, as much as he might have wanted to know. Though Phil had proclaimed his intention to find a girlfriend like her, it was mainly boasting.
He wasn’t any more ready than me.

Then one night I dreamed that I had been hoodwinked in my pajamas, the very sheets and blankets still wrapped around me, back to the classroom. Only the girls were there, and three of them took my clothes off. They moved in a circle about me, silently, in a dance of animals. The room was thick with perfume and flowers.

And then it became … walking in a forest, emerald moss beneath my feet. Long, light vines hung from the branches, exuding musty dew. I could actually feel their moisture and smell them.
This dream was real!

I came to a log shack—the true one, the prototype of the place that Joey, Andy, and I had built on another planet.

Annie Welch was sitting there with two other girls. It was as though
she was waiting for me.
“I’m not Jimmy,” I tried to warn her, but she didn’t seem to care. She stood and approached me, set her hands on my shoulders and sat me down on a rock. Then she put a blindfold on me. One by one they kissed me on the face. I felt their lips in intoxicating sequence. Girls, that’s what they were! They could as easily have been a circle of wolves.

I began spinning. Then the whole world around me was tumbling. I awoke in great joy with my penis hard. I lay in bed in a kind of ecstasy. I did not understand what was happening to me, and yet I had experienced such a complicated texture once before, in Westport when I was playing in the attic and
the same hypnotic waves
came over me from the aroma of an old leathery trunk.

My dream now bore the resolution of this childhood experience, not so much the intimation of sexuality as the power of being enfolded within a sensuous and opulent space. It was not just an image or landscape; it was everything I was before Richard Towers and everything I would be after.

Against that sensation my outer-space daydreams were faded postcards. It was one thing to fantasize settling on other worlds and another
actually to be there.

The memory of that dream gave me solace for years—the fact that someone kissed me, the richness of the green, the scented moisture, the way I merged with everything as it spun instead of becoming
dizzy and separate, how the throbbing filled me from inside out.

I couldn’t believe this had been there all along and neither I nor Dr. Fabian had noticed it.
I
was that forest. Its familiarity was the sweet caverns of my own being. I didn’t know it yet, but I had discovered that I was intact, that my body and spirit could still be recovered whole.