New Moon (23 page)

For weeks we strove to produce unachievable numbers of barbell lifts, sit-ups, and push-ups. Then we sparred with gloves and grappled on a mat. Our ensigns used each of these vocations to expose our bodies and attack our isolation, barking and calling us girlies or queers if we were timid or klutzy. Ducking behind more massive
classmates, I prayed not to be noticed, not to have to wrestle, not to have my ragged sit-ups evaluated. But everyone took his turn and suffered an appraisal and unforgiving score.

I quavered through appearances in the spotlight, straining and kicking my legs to pull my frame up on jungle bars, warding off punches, jabbing out a glove in return, trying to get my arms around the surreal neck and legs of a huskier kid as we rolled in embrace on the mat, amazed I came out the other end of each gauntlet without some major breakdown or shame.

I showered, bought a snack from the subway cluster at the foot of the hill, and rode homeward on the El with my new friends.

After a month our P.E. group moved on to soccer, charging down an immense slope into Van Cortlandt Park where we squared off—vestiges of Bill-Dave in the autumn air as I dribbled and then kicked at the goal, volleys of oranged and reddened leaves gusting amid whistles from games near and far. My discarded past and unknown future balanced on a razor’s edge as Jeff Jones hit me in the clear, a brilliant pass across the field. “Go!” he shouted. “Go!” One of the two black kids in the class and a super athlete, he had inexplicably adopted me.

Nights and weekends were packed with homework. In terms of study habits I was crossing light years in months. I routinely started math and English in study hall or on the subway, getting basic stuff out of the way, building up a margin for protracted readings in history and General Language. Most nights I didn’t quit working until just before I dropped into bed.

I handed in assignments and weathered spot quizzes and tests. When Uncle Paul sent tickets for Daddy to take me to the two weekend games of the 1956 World Series it was a revisitation of a childhood abandoned long ago, but I went with him and Uncle Moe and we saw Whitey Ford and Tom Sturdivant pitch the Yankees back to even after they had lost the first two games at Ebbets Field. The next day while I was in class, my Chipinaw buddy Don Larsen tossed a perfect game. To miss such an event would have been unthinkable once, but now Yankee interdiction was as mandatory
as discarding my spaceship. Horace Mann superseded everything that preceded it.

To my mind I did okay. I got plenty of things wrong, but I didn’t daydream and I basically understood the material. When the first report card came, however, it showed all C’s, except for a D in math accompanied by a probation report.

My mother was frantic; she thought I was close to expulsion and blamed herself for not paying enough attention to my study habits. She began scrutinizing me like a hawk. Her injunction to study merged with and gradually replaced her general outrage at me and gave her fresh ammunition for reprimanding me continually.

She had no idea of the actual scope of the homework or my progress. Yet she was sure that I was way behind and that the situation could be handled only by tight reins and constant threats. Becoming a caricature of an oblivious martinet, she judged me by one standard alone. As long as she saw me at my desk she was appeased. For years I was fixed in her brain as the single command to “get back to work”—no matter the time of day or circumstance. Horace Mann became my single identity to her. She forgot P.S. 6 and Bill-Dave as though they never existed. Even my apostasy at Grossinger’s and Dr. Fabian’s became peripheral matters.

I remember the famished rush from the last morning class to the cafeteria line; I can still taste those mushy piles of spaghetti in meat sauce (yummier than any version before or since), the filet of sole with a lemon slice on Friday, crisp, tangy, and delicious; a block of ice cream or scoop of jello for dessert—we were starving! After lunch we gathered at the bookstore to buy marshmallow bars kept in ice-cream lockers—so hard that chunks of them fractured like stone in our teeth, blends of chocolate frost and whipped mallow melting in my mouth together.

Before afternoon classes that late October a bunch of us stood in the path between buildings, trying to catch leaves off maples. Frigid squalls issuing from the sky dropped our prizes, singly and in swarms. Clad in requisite jackets and ties, we twisted and grabbed at fluttering golden and rouge figments, colliding with one another, stumbling
and giggling as our apparel flew open and shirts got untucked. I played with a vengeance and, like a knuckleball catcher, was making one darting catch after another when a group of upperclassmen stopped to look.

I heard a whisper of “Fags!” A super-cool-looking guy, thin as a rail with pomaded wavy hair and lots of cologne, grabbed the arm of the kid next to me and pronounced through curled lips, “I just
hate
little queers.” No one played again.

One morning I awoke to see snow falling in the courtyard. I opened the window and put my fingertips in feathery fluff on the windowsill. Bridey had the radio on. They were reading a list of schools closed in the New York area. The names went on and on, Catholic schools and academies and colleges in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan. I wanted a snow day, a vestige from another time. “Adelphi, Hofstra, Horace Mann …”

I cheered aloud, as Bridey gave me a funny look, part amusement, part censure.

Central Park was an ancient village, snow falling so rapidly I could barely see. As I clopped perfect footprints, I stared at figures materializing through veils. Fifth Avenue was bare of cars. A few people skied down the thoroughfare while others made snow statues and chased after the occasional lonely bus like a wooly mammoth. I wished I had a sled or companions for a fort and snowball fight, but I wasn’t that kid anymore.

The next day the sun shone on a new white world, and I rejoined my comrades on the subway, returning to Horace Mann as if from time travel to prehistoric Wales.

Naked in gym that winter we stood by the unheated pool while Mr. Mathaner demonstrated the butterfly and sidestroke. I sought radiator pipes along the wall, trying to avoid bumping into other bare bodies or scalding metal, my arms hugging my chest.

Mathaner blew his whistle, and we dove in a collective chlorine splash, thrashed to the other end, then got out, and jockeyed for positions near new radiators. “Mr. Grossinger!” Invariably he found me and re-demonstrated the stroke.

I jumped back in alone and strained to imitate his spiralling arms and muscled chest.

“Better! Now work on it.”

Through the entire period I longed for the steamy shower room … until at last I stood mesmerized in hot spray, spinning my body, letting the waterfall sweep down, cloud over my shoulders, touch every part of me. Ecstasy!

Nakedness was a rite in which we observed our own bodies changing in the mirrors of one another. Beneath the mask of our shouting and ribaldry we spied on classmates’ physiology, degrees of pubic hair and different-shaped penises. So many of them were already men, their basso voices booming, and yet I was becoming more of a man than I could admit.

In threadbare towels we raced across the stone of the locker-room, got somewhat dry (except hair), restored jackets and ties, gathered our books and papers, and headed down the hill to the ride home.

The subway bonded those of us who commuted from Manhattan—other classmates came by bus and car from Westchester and New Jersey suburbs. The train imposed a tempo and I learned its musical score. The symphony began with the harbinger of a massive metal object, a faint tremor followed by the deafening clangor of machinery wheezing to a stop. Our boarding stirred the adagio of transport: an opening clack and thump as the doors slammed shut, then the screeching sway of tracks between stations; how the snake lurched at each bend, where its drumroll quickened, where its bass ceased, where the string section whined, where the lights went out (once I caught on, I no longer got alarmed). Ultimately my group came to prefer the long express stops and breakneck speed of the older, sootier IND, which we called Renegade Insane Transit instead of Independent Subway System. We routinely switched from the IRT via the elevator at 168th Street, as some of my colleagues worked out exotic routes for evading a bus fare, including one that took us to the East Bronx where we stared down from the platform at Yankee Stadium, snow on its fallow field. From there we rode the Lexington Avenue express to midtown.

For a whole month we held a contest of “subway basketball,” shooting for the grimy vents above the windows with crumpled-up notebook paper. We got two points when the “ball” was sucked out into the tunnel. It felt a little funny making our shots in front of an incredibly tall schoolboy across the aisle because he was supposed to be a famous player. It was young Lew Alcindor in his Power Academy jacket, but I doubt he realized the game we were playing was basketball.

When I got home I consumed whatever was available. I made toast and then layered on gobs of apricot and grape jam, gnawed down half a pack of cream cheese from peeled-back aluminum, then devoured a combination of bananas, oranges, devil’s food cookies, chocolate-glazed or coconut-sprinkled Malomars, and two or three tiny boxes of Rice Krispies or Frosted Flakes. Later I got a light golden tan on slices of bread and coated them with melting butter. I alternated Arnold’s “vanilla” and Pepperidge Farm Whole Wheat. One night I ate seven bananas; another time I went through a loaf of Thomas’ raisin bread with Philadelphia cream cheese. I would sit at my desk, stuffing in vittles for my reward while I worked.

At quarter term, Woodshop supplanted Music, so I made a rough facsimile of a stool for Bridey and a birdhouse for Aunt Bunny. Impressed that the elderly teacher was missing three fingers, I was careful not to slip as I band-sawed along my pencil markings on a piece of plywood set in a vise. After two months, Woodshop students moved on to Theater Arts where we cast and put on a play about a talking caterpillar.

Because we would be expected to type all our papers in Second Form, I was put into class where I struggled to learn QWERTY and acquire nimble enough fingers not to keep hitting “Y” for “T” and “B” for “V.” Our machines were huge manual robots that took purposeful pounding to get text. I was the only one who didn’t have access to a typewriter for practicing at night so, after I got a D on my first exam, my mother brought home a monstrosity from work.

Twice a week the whole school gathered in the auditorium for Chapel at which we sang hymns and college songs. Words on a light
tan background were projected onto a screen:
“A mighty fortress is our God”
and
“Stand and drink a toast to dear old Maine.”
Every so often Mr. Allison led us in a rousing version of
“Give me ten men who are stout-hearted men…. ”
The room resonated with male voices. I liked being in the midst of such robustness and I brought the songs home to the shower:
“We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing”
and
“To the Earth, to the stars, / to the girls who will love us someday!”

For the first time in my life I was free to come and go as I wished. No one knew where I was between the end of school and dinner, the subway having replaced the Bill-Dave wagon. Staying on the Broadway train three extra stops after school and getting off at 59th Street was a favorite alternative to going straight home. All three parental offices lay within four long blocks on 57th: the Fountainbleau at Fifth, the Grossinger’s New York agency between Avenue of the Americas and Seventh, and Robert Towers Advertising between Broadway and Eighth.

On days that homework allowed, I liked to visit PZ, a longtime Grossinger’s employee who preferred to work in the City to be near his ailing mother. PZ (never Paul Zousmer) was a short Danny Kaye lookalike, a miscast journalist and unappreciated house historian who handled details of Hotel archiving in a cubicle stuffed with piles of old photographs and yellowed newspaper clippings.

PZ’s face always lit up when I arrived. I was not only a devotee of Grossinger memorabilia; I was a Grossinger myself and appeared in dozens of glossies and press clippings from the week of November 3, 1944, as a newborn, my mother and Uncle Paul both young and wide-eyed, holding me between them—the caption: “His Majesty, The King”: proof of my authentic origin.

A fiery CCNY grad named Bob Towers was another mainstay of the 1940s lexicon, pictured with golfers, ballplayers, and stage stars, often microphone in hand, a stage smile. In one, Uncle Paul and he walked arm-in-arm.

On the next block was a store called Photographic Fair where PZ went for film, equipment, and conversation. Our buddy there was a thin, balding clerk named Charlie de Luise who handed us
expensive cameras from behind locked glass and helped me adjust their finely tuned dials for light and shutter speed. I wanted to be able to shoot close-ups and action photos, impossible with a fixed-lens box, and I particularly admired a Minolta with a two-thousandths-of-a-second shutter speed. PZ promised to hire me after school was out so I could earn the hundred dollars necessary to purchase it.

He also told me that Grossinger’s had accounts at Womrath’s (next door to Photographic Fair) and Colony Records (a few blocks southwest), so I would bring lists of desired items—science-fiction novels, astronomy and dinosaur books for the bookstore; 45s of the Kalin Twins, the Ames Brothers, and Paul Anka for the record shop—and charge them like at Milty’s canteen. Going to these stores conferred the Hotel’s aura and magic momentarily in the City, as I brought home a tangible smidgen of it in my hands.

Just before Christmas our routine at Horace Mann was halted by final exams, scheduled one or two a day in the gym. Their accrued tension was greater than a close game in late innings. All the way to 242nd Street we quizzed one another, intimidated by how much our comrades knew, trying to digest a few last facts right up to the door. Cartons were sliced open and bluebooks poured out. The basketball court was coopted by desks window to window.

Hearts thumping, we picked our tests from the correct stacks and took any seat along the sawdust-sprinkled floor. All grade levels were mixed, as students of different ages sat side by side in solitary contemplation of their quandaries. I scanned my printed pages with their finality of truth-telling runes, relieved by the familiar, chilled by inevitable surprises. Then, heart in throat, I began scribbling for dear life.