New Moon (33 page)

“The greatest prank ever at Horace Mann!” shouted Stricker, our class bookie, but I had no certainty that Kroner wasn’t playing
us
instead.

Strick had made a fortune on his daily pool for how many times Doc half-lisped, half-belched during class, a disruptive spectator sport. I was sure that our teacher never caught on to
that one,
as the class went wild during the last pass of the second hand—would he belch again before it hit the twelve?—thirty dollars or more at stake!

At the start of the term my English teacher and advisor, Mr. McCardell, spoke to me about being one of the enrollees in a new creative writing program. Since the course was not for credit and there was so much graded schoolwork, few students had volunteered; now he was recruiting in earnest.

“But I don’t write,” I protested.

“You don’t have to. That’s what the class is for, to teach you.”

“I have too many courses already.”

“It’s not a time-consuming subject, and you have a study hall when it meets. You’re one of the few people here who has done any creative writing. You put out a whole camp newspaper, plus you’re a science-fiction addict like me.”

Persuaded by magisterial flattery, I agreed at least to try the seminar, which turned out to be composed of mostly highly skilled seniors with one foot already in college. It was taught by Kingsley Ervin, a tall, thin Harvard newcomer considered the best English master in the school. He met us relaxedly once a week at the end of the school day, weather permitting under reddening maples. The mood was more coffeehouse than Horace Mann, as classmates read from recent work aloud. I looked forward to literary aspirants offering the next installments from their binders, Mr. Ervin commenting insightfully like Dr. Friend.

What I heard was truly dazzling: a science-fiction tale about Armageddon as seen by an absent-minded God, a description of a circus and a whorehouse through the mind of a midget, a Civil War veteran recalling old battles on his deathbed. I was back in the stone forts of Central Park, spellbound by Ranger and the Bully.

Chuck Stein, my one fellow Fifth Former in the class, read elliptical, complicated poems I didn’t fully understand but adored:
“August
came / and September / through the grass / her / blondness was / unapproachable in / the sand boxes / I / remember her because / she had a sandy / name.”
He could have been Andrew Marvell, or e e cummings!

By the end of the first month everyone else had read from their own work twice and I hadn’t presented a thing. I seemed to have forgotten I was there on the same basis as the rest and owed a story or a poem. Since the course was ungraded, I hoped that I could coast as a spectator. But Mr. Ervin scheduled me for a conference. There he prodded me with friendly enthusiasm. He told me to write anything at all, to take a chance on my own words.

When I couldn’t provide apt ideas on my own, he assigned me an exercise, to do an imitation of Tennyson’s poem “The Eagle.” At the next class, feeling rather foolish, I recited my effort aloud:

No one had any comment except, “Glad you at least put your toes in the water.” They were being gentle.

I felt the ancient call of narrative. It was an old blend of longing and awe—an echo of Willa Cather and John Keats, the mood of walking to Dr. Friend’s at twilight. But I was skittish and shy. I told myself I needed a fairyland setting to convey the strangeness and presentiment I felt. After trying out numerous landscapes I decided to set my account in a family of moles (I was only vaguely aware that a classic such tale already existed). I spent hours that weekend laying its groundwork, describing the exotic scenery around the moles’ village: the fields in which they hunted, their outlying crocodile swamp, the serpentine stream bubbling past their hut. I even drew a map of the habitat. By then I had lost my original impetus and was involved in laborious depiction of a shrew village, adjective by adjective. At its conclusion I added, as little more than an afterthought, some passages of dialogue among the moles to show where my story might lead. I planned to work my mother and other family members (as moles, of course) into the next installment.

On Tuesday I raised my hand and was called upon at once. I began with gusto but within two sentences was mortified and wanted to
stop—I had produced mud. Words I had chosen so painstakingly from the thesaurus had lost even their ordinary meanings because no art or logic held them together. It was not a story; it was a crossword puzzle. Everyone agreed that the mole dialogue was promising but a dead end. “Contrived” was the consensus word for my effort.

“You all share Mr. Grossinger’s fault to a degree,” Mr. Ervin said. “You are trying too hard to be sophisticated or cute and are not writing from your own experiences.”

For weeks I backed off, but I was
thinking about it.
Something in me wanted to tell the story, the big one, but I didn’t know how or what exactly it was. It was exploding silently in me like rock ’n’ roll. I wanted to convert Buddy Holly and Little Anthony into Wordsworth and Faulkner. It was a tune I could almost grasp, palpable yet far away. The world was mysterious, was terrifying, was vast, beautiful, seductive, downright bizarre. How did I say these things? How did I find their theme and voice?

The Yankees met underdog Pittsburgh that year in what became an epic World Series. In game one, the Pirates eked out a win behind Vernon Law and Elroy Face; then the Bombers of yore crushed them in games two and three—only to have the Pirates pull out the following contest 3-2 behind Law again. Art Ditmar flopped a second time in game five, having to be relieved by Luis Arroyo in the second inning; meanwhile shifty Harvey Haddix kept the Yankees off-balance all day. Then Whitey Ford shut out the Pirates 12-0, leading to a decisive seventh game.

I sat in Latin, suppressing wild curiosity, my ears straining for any trace of an announcer. When I heard a roar out the window I tried to guess for which team—we were in New York, but Yankee haters abounded. Dozens of radios blared in semi-synchrony in the hallways and, as we passed between classrooms, I pleaded with anyone for a recap. Finally I raced from an exam on
Moby Dick
to the gym TV for the climax. The school had provided this outlet for upperclassmen with a study hall or their day’s activities completed.

Kids were crammed onto benches in contemplation of the screen. Forget
The Brothers K.
and “Call Me Ishmael”; forget algebra—this
was reality. The Yankees had come from 4-0 down to take a 5-4 lead, then increased it to 7-4. Former Philadelphia A’s star, tiny lefty Bobby Shantz, the best pitcher in the American League the year I began following baseball, now in the twilight of his career, was coasting along in relief like it was 1952 when a ground ball skipped off an infield pebble and hit Tony Kubek in the Adam’s apple, putting a runner on first and driving the shortstop out of the game. When Jim Coates came in to relieve, the “Damn Yankees” contingent hooted in glee. I was sure the gaunt righty, a redemptive 13 and 3 during the season, would show them, but the stringbean klutz almost collided with Bill Skowron as he failed to cover first in a timely fashion after inducing a two-strike infield chopper by speedy Roberto Clemente, an abrupt reversal of fate. What followed was shocking: a home run, two runners aboard, by unheralded catcher Hal Smith to put the Pirates ahead 9-7.

The Yankees made a valiant comeback to tie the game in their last at-bat—Bobby Richardson delivering a single and recent Pirate Dale Long following with another as a pinch-hitter. Then Mickey Mantle singled to right, making it 9-8 and sending Long to third, only one out. When Yogi Berra’s smash down the first-base line was fielded by Rocky Nelson, Mantle dove safely back into first base, preventing a season-ending double play while allowing the tying run to cross the plate, a stroke of spontaneous genius and moxie that left Nelson baffled as he held the ball. A weirdness momentum was building and it wouldn’t be stopped. Then, as simple as that, Bill Mazeroski cleared the left field wall off Ralph Terry in the bottom of the inning. I rode home on the subway stunned.

Friday afternoon of the following week was my turning point. I felt not just the hollowness of the lost Series but irretrievable seasons of yore. Indian summer tore at ocher leaves against a bottomless blue. 242nd Street was a paradise I could not barter—luminous trees, subtle breezes, a group from Manhattan College doo-wopping outside the station, a newly arrived train parked for its return downtown. I ran for it.

Forget them all, / But for goodness sake, /
For-
get me not.

I was headed home to the pit—a doleful weekend at hand. But
this time I vowed I wouldn’t let the spirit die or pass unheeded. I nursed it on the subway, kept it alive in views of the world beyond the train, a funk I wanted to capture. I reached our apartment with a spark of it inside me. It was the original feeling of my friendship with Rodney, the excitement of arriving at Grossinger’s … and, long before that, dragonflies, squirrels, toy boats, dragons, Skee-ball, cherry blossoms in Central Park, frogs in the summer lake. It was a hundred other elusive things. Now it sought a self-organizing form—I needed to claim it as my own.

My illusion had been that my intellect alone could craft literary text, that I needed moles as foils. I still didn’t take the mystery, the epiphany or the terror, seriously, as actual things, as currency for other than psychoanalysis. I tended to view my alienation and afflictions as flaws in me, mistakes: symptoms of a disease that needed a cure. I had overlooked their sheer texture. They were the cloth from which art was cut. What I once thought I needed to escape I now needed to go toward, to meet head-on.

I recalled my day of baseball at Steve’s, my betrayal of Billy, my crush on Joan Snyder, my first dance with Phyllis, taking my oracle of a “kiss” to Karen. I perceived an emergent shape in my childhood melancholy. It wasn’t unequivocal or boundaryless or even unhappy. If seen from another angle, it was rich and fissury. I had
always
known that.

I had finally come to where Wordsworth and John Donne, Willa Cather and Emily Dickinson, shared a playing field with Bobby Darin and Dion & the Belmonts. I didn’t need to pitch to Ted Williams. I didn’t need Dr. Fabian to interpret my dreams. All I needed was to put the ball in play, the one I had been carrying since the jinni initiated me.

All those years Dr. Fabian and Dr. Friend had said only obvious things. They had talked about sorrow and fear, anger and guilt, depression and arousal, as if these were commissions in and of themselves, as if my life was solely a clinical objectification. What about the fields of snow to the horizon across which Michael, James, and I pulled our sleds at dusk, the vastness of other worlds I looked at in the night sky…? What was all that saying?

It had a whiff of Jimmie Rodgers singing not exactly “Honeycomb,” but yes
“the lord made the bee / and the bee made the honey,”
but more, much more; it was the Louisiana Territory, the
Pequod
in the whale nursery, a colony on Mars, and “
Oh Shenando’h, you rolling river…. ”

More mysterious than life itself.

I sat at my desk and without drafting began to write.

“One Friday about the middle of last March I arrived home in such a happy frame of mind it was apparent I was feeling more than the natural relief the weekend offers at the end of five long days…. ” I was describing the first time Billy and I got together on the subway. I retold our entire friendship right through the trip to Grossinger’s, sleigh rides with Michael and James, rotifers, my friend’s arrival with his old-fashioned suitcase …my disgust at his presence, my shameful turnabout.

It was well past midnight, as Bob stayed up watching
The Late Show.
I had summoned myself into a storytelling spell, and I kept going even after he turned out the lights. In the morning my mother complimented me on my long stint of homework. I barely heard her. I was onto something.

All through Saturday I scorched memory into narrative. I scrawled with a pen till I couldn’t bear it, took a break, sat at the window, ate a snack, then came back, my capacity not only unabated but enhanced. At intervals I rewrote my draft and typed it into an accumulating stack I hid at the bottom of a desk drawer. I had no idea what I was making, but I was addicted to it. I recreated my daydreams of Joan Snyder, my fantasies of Harriet. I took the story of Karen right to our encounter and denouement at Grossinger’s. I described her as a clipper ship on the Nile, trailing Egyptian scents. I thought, “I can’t believe I’m doing this. I’ll never be able to read it in class.”

But the deed had its own giddy momentum. By Sunday I was recalling Nanny, my first sessions with Dr. Fabian, my tussles with my brother, the bus to Chipinaw, Judy on her bike. Where was all this suddenly coming from?

I arrived at Mr. Ervin’s on Monday with a sheath of thirty-five typed pages. There was no possibility of presenting this material in public, no chance at all. Right up to the last moment I was reassuring myself: “I will show him the amount of work so he knows what I did, but I won’t read it.”

“Mr. Grossinger, look at that. I never would have thought!” Mr. Ervin was so delighted that he halted my protests with “Tsk, tsk” and summoned me to begin without delay. The class seconded him.

I balked. I had promised myself, under no circumstances…. “It isn’t really writing. It’s just about myself.”

“Go on. It’s your true maiden voyage.”

“I’m not sure—”

“Read!” I pretended to be aghast, but something had changed. In my heart I had already made the leap.

I read it as one might a fairy tale to children—slowly and in wonder. This was not Dr. Friend’s office. I was making a confession of a far different order, infinitely more dangerous and more powerful. And
real
—finally, finally not Pinocchio. I dropped my concern for how intimate and shocking it was, how it was stuff I would tell no one. In my reading it aloud, it seemed not to matter.