New Moon (36 page)

“Where were you?”

“Running around the hall trying to escape from them.” There was no reply. Then the overhead light clicked on, signaling the end of the hour.

I heard him getting up. I turned and looked right at him. “I’m having fantasies about Keith. I’m thinking about him as a girl … and the fantasies are
so strong.”
I was pleading with him now. He was expressionless. I dropped my head and smiled at the wooden soldier on his desk. “I’m afraid I’m…. ”

“You’re afraid of what, that you’re a homosexual? Nonsense. Everyone who’s ever lived has had those fantasies. A boy, a girl, what does it matter in the mind? You’re reaching out to something unknown, something you want and don’t yet understand. And you miss the obvious—that thought and action are two separate things. You can think whatever you want, and it doesn’t mean you are likely to do it or that if you did, it would be the same thing.” He paused and considered. “It’s really that you are so guilty—guilty of what you are, guilty of what you aren’t. What you want you hate yourself for wanting. You obsess, and then there’s no way out. Perhaps that’s the reason for Keith. He’s not real, you know. No doubt you have created him in order to share the burden of your guilt.”

I froze in sheer wonder. After weeks of sterile, boring sessions the face of the master shone again, reminding me of the power of insight to heal and transform. In recent months I had become such a wise guy, a big shot—Richard the star writer, Richard the psychiatric pro, Richard the speed demon. Now I bowed to the inevitability of the unconscious, the power of the unknown.

A realization born once of a chemistry set spilled in a dream had come again. A long, entangled mystery unravelled, exposing Keith for what he was—another semblance, cast against a lifetime of mystery visitors. He was a feeling I had always had, a vagrant figure encompassing the allure in the world. No wonder I had chosen a magnificent child playing the flute to represent him. The Keith who bounded through Horace Mann and sang with the voice of the forest was my blond and wild twin in whose seductive grip, dark sparkly “I” became beautiful too. In my hunger
to encompass him—and girls through him—he had become the captive side of desire, yet always driving me toward who I was.

I couldn’t say that then, so I said, “There’s nothing bad about these thoughts? I’m not doomed?”

“Of course not,” he smiled back. As I went through the door he added, “Why do we always accuse ourselves of the worst?”

“Because we’re crazy or something,” I laughed.

He looked up startled, then gave out his deepest-ever sustained guffaw. “See you Friday, you funny kid.”

It became spring. I wore light cloth suits to Horace Mann and awaited the new baseball season with the ardor of childhood. It was the year of American League expansion—there were two new teams, the Los Angeles Angels and a second Washington Senators (the first one now in Minnesota), which gave the pennant race an air of magic. Since the number of teams had always been fixed, it was as if two new planets had just been discovered in the Solar System. How would they play and look in the standings?

From the first exhibition game I was clipping Yankee box scores from papers and pasting them in a datebook with clear Magic Mending Tape, the piny smell of which still reminds me of spring 1961.

Soon after the regular season started I stumbled on a gold mine: Grossinger’s shared a box at Yankee Stadium with Eddie Fisher’s company, Ramrod Productions. Not only was it rarely used, but the strips of tickets were kept in a binder in the Hotel’s New York office, currency for the taking. From then on, every Friday that the Yankees were home, I would ride the subway straight to 57th Street and then call a number of friends depending on how many seats I had. A lanky sports fanatic from history class named Jake had become my fungo partner and Yankee pal; he was always my first choice.

In our cubicle behind the visitors’ dugout we were surrounded by hardcore season ticket-holders with their spiral-bound scoresheets and pages of stats. They would debate strategy as the game unfolded.
If I inserted an opinion they might pause in curiosity, hear me out, and, to a one, dismiss it. But they had short memories and would invite me back into their colloquium. It was a burlesque routine: they would argue, bicker, yell at each other, then turn to me for a verdict. Whatever I offered they opposed in chorus: “No! No!” “How could you…?” “What are you, crazy?”

One afternoon that spring, I predicted that Johnny Blanchard, who hadn’t batted all year, would get a key pinch hit. Joe Glazer, the resident expert, was furious at the time that Ralph Houk had sent him up with the game on the line. He said, “Aw, c’mon, kid. Whadda you know?”

“Third-string catchers love third-string catchers,” I jived.

When I proved right he gave me an irritated swat, not able to conceal half a smile.

My mother did not interfere with my schoolwork anymore, but junior year from either a misunderstanding on her part or hyperbolic rhetoric by Mr. McCardell on parents’ visiting day, she got it into her head that my entire academic career hung on my junior “Profile.”

The “Profile” was meant to be the most challenging English assignment of our tenure—a biography in the style of
New Yorker
pieces. From the get-go she and I had a disagreement about my topic. I figured that it didn’t matter whom I chose, as long as I wrote well; she was adamant that I select a prominent figure. She quickly rejected my more modest ideas—pitcher Billy Stafford and adman David Ogilvy—and, through a newspaper friend of Bob’s, lined up an interview with Dag Hammarskjöld. I fell months behind starting on my draft while waiting for the fabled appointment. A week beforehand, he cancelled, and I was relieved. I couldn’t imagine why the secretary general of the United Nations should take time out from trying to prevent nuclear war to talk to a high-school kid, and I was glad I didn’t have to be that kid.

The paper was due on the Monday after Easter. Now, with three weeks to go I didn’t even have a subject. When Easter vacation came, my mother tried to keep me home to work on it. Not only was she certain I would never find someone suitable at Grossinger’s,
but she remembered how embarrassed she was when I wrote my practice Profile a year earlier on Lou Goldstein. “Can you imagine it, Bob,” she said. “He writes about that idiot and hands it in at … Horace Mann.” She said the name as though she still had a greater claim on the school than I did.

Against her remonstrances I went to the Hotel as planned and, with Aunt Bunny’s help found a quick accomplice—Freddie Rosenberg, an insurance agent in Liberty who was the husband of her close friend Marcia and looked like Paul Newman. He wasn’t secretary general even of his own office, but he was available.

During the next two weeks I doggedly hung around Freddie, transcribing his story in his own words, from personal interviews in his office to off-the-cuff remarks to secretaries and clients on the phone. One Sunday he took me ice-fishing “with the guys,” boasting all the way that he was the only one with a biographer. I stood on the lake, barely able to grip the pen and pad in the wind to take down his jokes and off-color comments about his wife. Then I claimed one of the Hotel’s office IBMs and sat among the secretaries, typing my notes into the “Freddie Rosenberg Profile.” On Monday I handed in the longest paper in the class by far, over fifty pages. Freddie had written it for me.

My mother was appalled. “His classmates are doing the Mayor of New York, the Editor of the
New York Times,
and who does he come up with: Freddie Rosenberg, insurance agent from Liberty!”

Mr. McCardell all but agreed, declaring, when returning my venture with the rest, that he knew my subject better than any other profilee—far better, in fact, than he wanted to know him. Nothing else sounded quite like Freddie Rosenberg saying, “Fuck them royally and fuck them all”—that from a section he read aloud to the class. He then became the first magister to give me the grade that was to typify my subsequent academic career: A or F, inked as such, on top of the first page. Luckily it was the former that he averaged into my final grade.

Later that spring, while taking a Fontainebleau reservation on the phone, my mother got into an extended conversation with a camp
owner who, upon hearing she had eligible kids, so impressed her with a song and dance about his facilities that she invited him to our apartment to show his slides. We gathered in the living room for the pitch. I was only a peripheral observer, but our visitor had been coached. After Jonny and Debby were signed up and I was headed back to my study, he said, “Wait a second, son,” and made me an unexpected offer: I could live with the waiters and be paid $500 to edit Kenmont’s newspaper, the
Clarion.

I had nothing left at Chipinaw, so I said okay.

Kenmont turned out to be the spiffy “country club”–style camp that Wakonda aspired to. There were no scheduled activities for teenagers, so most of the guys spent their days at the golf course and tennis courts or on the lake in rowboats and canoes with girls. The two campuses—Kenmont and Kenwood—were contiguous without parietals. A coffee shop was open for socializing till 9 p.m.

I read my bunkmates at once as self-important jerks. Ranking each other out was their main relational activity. Even by low Chipinaw standards, I found little empathy or intimacy; that was all repressed lest we be thought homos. Life was a perpetual contest to see who could put a peer down the hardest, then how wittily the person would come back. They repeatedly said lines like, “You stupid iriot!” (imitating the comedian Buddy Hackett) and “How’re they hanging?”

On the initial morning of camp we were given instructions by a short man about thirty. “Now look here, you guys. I’m kind of with you the first week to make sure you obey the rules. I don’t give a damn if you smoke, drink, or fuck around, but wait till after the first week. You see, the head counselor’s new and—”

“What’s his name?” interrupted a fat, curly haired kid named Love, who carried an umbrella, though the sky was clear. He waved it in the air.

“His first name is Bob. He’s from the U. of Florida and majoring in recreation. His second name sounds like a sweet-smelling flower, and I couldn’t spell it if you gave me all the letters.”

“Oh swell. Sounds like a real winner, doesn’t he?” Love said,
smiling at the group. “Let’s give him three big cheers.” And each time he yelled, “Hip, hip!” and waved his umbrella in the air, he was followed by a chorus of “Hurray!” Then he nodded sharply and sat down with a grin of satisfaction. The meeting dispersed without conclusion of the lecture.

Two of us were outsiders—campers who had never been to Kenmont. My fellow newcomer was immediately dubbed Spartacus because he acted dumb and automatically did everything Love asked of him. Love named me Lightning after the sluggish character on the
Amos ’n’ Andy Show
because I was slow to respond to goads and put-downs.

I had brought along a tape of super-realistic sound-effects and, before my bunkmates knew I had a recorder, I turned it on under my bed toward midnight. One jet followed another, each one louder and closer to a sonic boom.

“Jeez, I didn’t know there was an airfield around here,” Asher exclaimed.

“Must be since last summer,” remarked Eric.

A train sound followed … first a remote whistle, far away … then closer and closer until it seemed about to crash through the bunk. “Christ almighty!” Eric bellowed, jumping to his feet and yanking on the light. When they discovered the source they fired their empty beer cans at me. Then Fred drained one on my covers, and they turned over my bed and pummeled me on the floor in the blankets.

“Lightning’s asleep,” Asher said. “Let him be.”

“What do you mean let him be!” Eric retorted, as he flipped over the mattress and jumped on top of it and me. Fred kept whacking his pillow against my head.

“It was an all-star prank,” I wrote to Jake the next day, “better than their dumb rank-outs, and not one asshole congratulated me for it.”

My passion that summer was the Southern novelist Robert Penn Warren, as his oratorical flights were touchstones for my own emergent prose. While aspiring to the same lyrical epiphanies, I ended up with clunkier, more ambivalent passages, so I memorized my favorite Penn Warren hits; for instance, about the moon borrowing
its light from the sun in
All the King’s Men
and, midway through
The Cave,
recounting the demise of a man trapped underground while giving his departing soul a radiant wellspring: “… the handsome and generally admired carnal envelope of Jasper Harrick is, even this instant, as certain chemical changes begin, entering the great anonymous economy of nature. His soul, assuming that he ever had one, has flowed back to that burning fountain whence it came.” My writing hung similarly between revelation and doubt.

Meanwhile summer became a languid puzzle through which I wandered, preoccupied with novels and baseball games on the radio. It sufficed to have a catch now and then with my brother or find a meadow in which to lie and read among Queen Anne’s lace and purple clover. During part of each day I prepared the
Kenmont Clarion,
sending young kids on assignment, editing and typing their articles, cranking the mimeo, and dispatching the sheets for campus-wide delivery.

Most nights I hung out in the coffee shop with a soda or shake and my book, lost in Kentucky towns amid sales of debt, secret lineages, and almost-passing octoroons, RPW’s nineteenth-century tales of statutory intrigue and romance. When there was a ballgame, I brought my radio shaped like a baseball (that Milty had gotten me from the Hotel’s novelty supplier that spring) and sat on the side, listening to Mel Allen and colleagues, watching other kids dance. I had no courage to “make a move,” in fact no move to make. The days of summer glided by.

Then one evening Eric announced that he was breaking up with Tina, a petite, sullen-looking blonde I had been admiring from a distance. A few nights later I left my radio and novel in the bunk and showed up at the coffee shop early. I took a seat closer to the action.

Tina came in later than usual and staked out a bench in the far back with a friend; the two huddled there, whispering. I had spent the whole day working up to this deed and I couldn’t drop it because of an unfavorable-looking break. I strode across the room with the eerie sensation of transecting polygons of a cubist painting. I stood at her bench and asked if she wanted to dance. With a look of resignation, she rose, stared at her friend, and then paced listlessly
ahead of me to dead center on the floor. She turned to face me, eyes cast downward. I set my hands on her back and waist. She was stiff and brittle. I hadn’t expected that; I had imagined her as fiery and lynx-like, the way she looked. She was cold cardboard, a cut-out of a pretty girl in a dress. It would have been presumptuous to dance close, but it wouldn’t have mattered because she wasn’t there.

To all the things I tried to say, she chirped intentional sarcasm, “Oh, isn’t that nice!” After the dance, turning on a dime, she strutted back to her friend.

The main thing I thought, standing there for all to see—and yes, everyone was staring at Lightning’s disgrace, the only handy entertainment—was that for the first time I wasn’t afraid the Russians might bomb. In fact, I hoped if they did, they would do it right away. Fred came running up to me. Ever since he had heard a song called “Paco Peco,” he ended all his big exclamations with an “o.” “Lightning, why do you have to be such a shmucko? She’s not the right type for you. She’s much too fast. You make a fool out of yourself when you do stuff like that.”

I departed the coffee shop,
“Michael, row your boat ashore …”
fading as I strode through grassy fields beyond the rec hall, toward the brief forest, headed back to the bunk, the stars (as ever) a bottomless cipher. Between daydream Tina who lived in Neverland and candy-Tina with whom I shared one dance were imaginal worlds I could neither fathom nor trespass. Though I imagined myself in exile, I felt inexplicably huge and liberated, as if sorrow, dram by dram, were magically being churned into joy.

My mishap delighted me, for the courage to act and be revealed outweighed the paltry result. In awe of the universe, I commiserated silently with habitants of distant worlds. The twinkling presentation was so durable and vast it had to be real, to them too; it had to hold the meaning behind everything that was happening.

Then I intoned (along with Dion & the Belmonts) the obvious song:
“Each night I ask the stars up above …. ”
Its denizen wasn’t mirage-girl Tina, a fleeting stand-in. It was an aggregate eidolon: Annie Welch, Joan Snyder, Harriet, Karen, girls unnamed and forgotten, a Puerto Rican teen in a yellow dress glimpsed from the El:
“… why must I be a teenager in love?”
Because that was the question,
but only in its largest sense.
Stars and melody, words and beat came together, evoking an Elizbethan elegy or
The Fairie Queene
. It may have been narcissistic melodrama, teen kitsch, but the bigness I felt was inherent and unmistakable.