New Moon (42 page)

In sixth grade, I was the only one old enough to read who didn’t walk to school, so on the Bill-Dave wagon I rendered the street signs aloud to the younger kids, making them laugh with my inflections: “Stellllaaa Doooro!” and “Prexy’s … the ed-uuu-cated hamburger!”

Some days at P.S. 6 the rain would drip from the top of the window to the sill, the schoolyard damp, the benches soaked. We walked in gloomy halls, mud footprints.

Each item returned to be acknowledged and counted … an Oh Henry! candy bar … a Superman comic … a red plastic water rocket … a blue and yellow metal truck … Tarzan rescued by the animals at the Trans-Lux theater … my mother’s hand patting Vick’s Vaporub on my chest. Time itself was cascading in all directions. Then I stepped into the elevator and pressed Dr. Friend’s number: I had come to termination at last.

The final hour became a half hour, and then there were only fifteen minutes left. Still I lay there cold and untouched, aware that the seconds were ticking off the end of this too. I waited without sorrow or regret.

“What do you feel now?” he asked.

“I feel nothing.”

“Do you feel numb?”

“No, nothing.”

“Think of it,” he said. “After five years this is the end and you lie there emotionless. Is that possible?”

“I don’t like to admit it, but it’s true.” I tried inside me to feel something, to cry, but there was nothing, only an irritation and a wish to leave. “I don’t even know how I was ever afraid, how I ever panicked. I remember waiting day after day for our next session just so I could tell you something important. But now it’s all gone.”

“Then just talk.”

“About what?”

“The rules are the same, even in the last session. Talk about what you’re thinking.”

I thought back to when Dr. Fabian died and how I had come to Dr. Friend for the first time. Now he seemed so real, Dr. Fabian phantom and far away. Yet it was Fabian who had found and saved me and taught me like his own child. He was already a saint, but he had become a remote legend, no longer applicable. I began to say something, but I stopped. My throat hurt so much I couldn’t talk. “How about that! My throat is too sore.”

“Does it feel sore?”

“Can’t speak.”

“Describe the feeling.”

“I can’t.”

“Where is it sore?”

I pointed. “Way back in there.”

“Do you feel sick in any other way?”

“Yeah, sort of. My side feels weak, as though I’m out of breath. It’s the old Saturday feeling.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“I’m not thinking about it anymore.” Then I realized I had to pee real badly. I told him that and began to squirm.

“You’re not on a hot seat, you know.”

“Isn’t it sort of obvious why I’m restless? It’s kind of natural when you have to go.” We had become two teenagers “ranking” each other.

“You’re stalling for time.”

“That’s not true. I have to go so badly. Can’t I just go to the bathroom and then come back and finish?”

“You can end the session if you want.”

“That’s all?”

“Richard, don’t you see? You confronted Mr. Clinton; you had a disagreement with Mr. Baruth and had to make up a test. You practically failed math. You wasted hours and hours trying to get to a skating rink that was already rented. Why? Because that was the only way you could express any feeling. Now school’s over, and you’re about to leave me. You want to cry, but you’re unable to.”

I searched inside me for the sorrow he was describing, but I didn’t find it. I didn’t find anything except the urge to pee. It was burning so fiercely I could barely think. The paradox of the situation fascinated me. This was a Nat Fleischer hypnotism show.

“You mean I don’t have to go?”

“Nor do you have a sore throat or a pain in your side. They’re created for the moment.”

“How can that be true? I feel them. They’re real.”

“Do you think I don’t remember? Your head hurt; you were dying. You had cancer. Again and again you have come here seeking relief, imagining that if this or that feeling went away, you’d be happy forever.”

“I still believe that, you know.”

“So, you’re not perfect. No one is. Maybe you’d like to convince me that you’re so sick you can’t possibly leave. But you’ve already made that decision. Something in you wants to go on. I imagine you’ll have your problems, perhaps terrible ones, but you’ll make it. And I’ll always be here, thinking of you, rooting for you, here for you to come back to if it gets too hard.”

I knew that I would never come back. This office, with its rich smoky aura, was the past. It was no longer me. The tarot cards were the future; the writing was the future; some girl I had yet to meet was the future. I could sense the movie camera panning away. “Feel scared,” I told myself. “Feel scared that this is it. You’re on your own.” But I didn’t get scared when Dr. Fabian died, and all I could
feel now was the lingering soreness in my throat and the agony of having to pee. I began visualizing the blocks along Central Park West, imagining how fast I’d run to get home in time.

I had thought the ending would be so different, something like my glorious speech at Horace Mann, but here I was, squirming on the couch, unable to get up and go to the bathroom because I didn’t want that to be the last thing. I lay there watching the second hand. It was too late to recoup anything. It was done.

“Good-bye, Rich.”

I got up and turned around. “I don’t know what happened to all the great things I was going to say now.”

“Well, have a good summer and remember not to fall into a rut in college.”

“Good-bye,” I said with a short nod.

I was in suspended animation, then freefall in the elevator. I marched down the long chandeliered lobby, silently and melodramatically chanting my farewell. I was prepared to dash, but when I hit the street I realized I didn’t have to pee.

Months earlier a travel agency offering a cross-country tour for teens had made reservations for the group at the Fontainebleau, and my mother impulsively signed me up. I insisted I wouldn’t go, but she held the slot and, with my attention on finishing Horace Mann and getting ready for college, I made no other summer plans. My father refused to allow me at Grossinger’s for that long, and I had outgrown camp.

By early June the tour began to take on fresh appeal, crazy as it was to imagine myself on a marathon of buses, trains, and boats with strange kids and chaperones. The transition occurred in my unconscious. I dreamed of being on an ocean liner, giant fish swimming around glaciers, Chipinaw’s dale transported to Italy and France with torqued and Eiffel towers, boys and girls at a forest festival that fused a Robin Hood movie with my grade-school daydreams of other worlds. So on the first of July, Bob escorted me and my suitcase downtown in a cab. We were a bit late and I was nervous.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “These things never get started on time.”

“Maybe it will be a mirage and I can go home.”

“C’mon, Richard. This is a chance to see some of the great venues in the world: Niagara, Banff, San Francisco, New Orleans. I don’t understand you kids. If someone had offered me such a trip at your age…. ”

Not having had breakfast yet, he requested a stop at the Automat. I answered by staring at a clock through a shop window. “Ten minutes,” he argued. “Give a man ten minutes.”

We pumped coins from his pockets into slots, opened little doors, and took out released plates of food. I quit on my slab of ham halfway through, but he seemed to dawdle forever with coffee and eggs. Finally he closed the
Times
, and we walked across the street into Grand Central Station.

We found the meeting-place at once—a spiraling cluster of teenagers. The tour leaders introduced themselves: they were a music professor from Rutgers named Simmons and his wife.

“My husband’s very interested in this line of work,” offered Mrs. Simmons, “because he’s as fascinated by trains as most youngsters are by spaceships these days.”

“Looks like a nice bunch this year,” he called out, approaching with his head half turned. He had square clumps of hair on either side of a bald pate.

“Yes, Sherman; it does.”

“Excuse me,” Bob interjected, commandeering Sherm’s attention by name, “but your wife told me you were the expert on trains—”

“I am.”

“Then could you tell me how soon this group will be departing?”

“We hope to get started in—” He paused to look at his watch. “About an hour.”

“See, I told you,” Bob said. “You lousy so-and-so wouldn’t even let me finish my scrambled eggs.” He gave me a friendly swat.

“Sorry. You were right.”

“This looks like a young girl’s nightmare,” he commented as he scanned the group. “Any guy would give his right arm to be on this tour.” In fact, when we finally all collected, it was twenty-eight girls and ten boys boarding a train to Buffalo (the 2.8 ratio, as tour members came to refer to it). “It shows how little some parents think of their kids,” my stepfather concluded. “I would never send your sister on an unbalanced trip like this. She’d wind up with an inferiority complex.”

With New York receding behind us, Mr. Simmons stood at the front of the car and struggled through a speech about not getting separated from the group, how to receive our food money, proper
behavior with the opposite sex; then he concluded by promising us that the good experiences would outnumber the bad by two to one.

“Oh, you can give them a better prospect than that, Sherman,” his wife coaxed.

“Okay. At least five to one. But only if you know how to be a good sport.”

On the train to Buffalo a group of guys—total party boys—gathered with a cluster of girls from Florida and Georgia in the back of the car. They shouted and laughed, breaking into slapstick and group cheers. I heard so many choruses of
“Mi-a-mi Beach; / our boys are brave and bold and true …”
that it seemed as though I had known the song my whole life.

I joined a promising quartet up front. Harve was an immense, placid blob who had to be intelligent because he was headed to Yale. Barry was a tall, stiff, prep-school guy with dark-rimmed glasses and a gamut from diffident to snarly. Stan was a prototype of The Bug from Orenda—brusque, sarcastic, combative. He paraded his street smarts, openly contemptuous of Harve’s and my Ivy League ambitions. Those were pure New Yorkers, while Alan from Baltimore was tall and handsome with a rugged face; he was amiable but with an edge, acting suaver and more worldly than the rest of us, as if the sole adult.

Lucy, Laurie, Carol, and Dorothy sat across from us. Dorothy and Carol were from Atlanta and called each other “Bean.” They kept busy playing a childlike game—“I See a Barr” (meaning “Bear”).

I thought Lucy was especially lively and cute with long hair, a pointed peg nose, and a wide-open doll’s face. When we finally got around to telling the names of our schools, she announced dramatically, “Oh, what a school of cheaters. I go to Adelphi, and we played your school in soccer. Your coach ‘reffed’ and practically handed the game to them.”

It seemed irrelevant, so I tried to make light of the matter, but she kept coming back to it. Each time her eyes met mine she snapped, “Remember, your school cheated.” Yet I was still imagining her as a girlfriend on the trip.

After lunch Mr. Simmons stood and addressed us again, but he was continually interrupted.

“Hiya, Sherm,” called out one of the party guys named Greg.

“I’ll make the jokes,” retorted Mr. Simmons. “You, I hope, will laugh at them. Now, first, you are Arista Co-ed Frontier Number One and will remain such throughout the summer.”

“Bar mishap,” inserted Mrs. Simmons, getting a laugh of her own.

He went on to describe schedules and events over the next several days, including a “Maid of the Mist Boat Ride” and “the earliest departure time of the summer—sorry—three in the morning. The operator will ring you.”

“What if we refuse to get up?” Greg’s friend Tony yelled back.

“Well,” Mrs. Simmons interjected, “all I can say is: we’d hate to leave you at Niagara Falls, but it would be easier to lose you there before we get to like you.”

Midway to Buffalo, Greg approached Harvey and me in the aisle and asked if we’d like to contribute to the ICF.

“What is it?” Harve asked.

“Never mind. Just contribute. It’s a good and timely cause.” Tony and Charlie stood behind him, stifling giggles, three wise guys from central casting. Tony was dark, Italian, and stringy; Greg was a dapper pudgeball; Charlie looked like the guy who called us fags for chasing leaves in First Form. They all had the same shit-eating grins, but Harve actually seemed concerned.

“Forget it,” I told him. “It’s a joke.”

Greg turned quickly to me. “Can’t you picture all those poor, sad illegitimate children you’d be leaving unfed by not contributing to their fund. You two should be ashamed of yourselves. Plus, if you don’t contribute, you don’t get—” he rolled his eyes—“any of the benefits.”

Later in the afternoon Harve and Laurie paired up, so I sat alone talking to Lucy. She was an avowed baseball fan, Mickey Mantle her favorite player. She had even written him letters (no responses yet). I kept a conversation going, fielding her questions about Grossinger’s,
finally taking out my tarot and reading her fortune.

The train pulled into Buffalo at twilight. Noticing Harve carrying Laurie’s suitcase with his own, I took Lucy’s from her hand, saying, “Let me.”

I was trudging along, balancing hers and mine, at turtle’s pace when Barry came swooping in from behind and, with a clutch of a hand, ripped the bag from my grasp. “It’s okay,” I grumbled; “I have it.”

“No, that’s my job.”

I let go.

“Well, at least,” she declared, “you showed him how to be a gentleman.”

When did he lay claim to her? They had barely spoken on the train.

At the motel in Niagara Falls I was assigned to a room with Alan, Barry, and Stan. Dropping off our luggage, we surveyed the accommodations—three beds and a cot. I agreed to take the cot, saving us having to do the odd finger out. Then we headed downstairs for dinner.

Over decades most of the tour’s events have been erased or truncated in my memory. When I first read an old draft of this book, forgotten people sprang from dormancy, entire events returned. I was surprised by how faithfully I recorded our adventures, as if to exclude a single incident would be a forfeit of something precious. I had anointed myself keeper of our grail, a young Willa Cather. After all, I had been describing Wordsworthian meadows and Melvillian storms long before I got put on that runaway train.

I am struck mainly by how my journal was flooded with teen clichés and notions of romance common to the era, spun into tapestries by loneliness and the deep-rootedness of my compulsions. I seemed to return to the oracle again and again with the same question, yet never to hear its answer.

Arista Co-ed Frontier Tour camped at nightfall on the Canadian side—some of our group queuing into couples and making out
in plain sight. Barry rolled in the grass with Lucy. From hidden floodlights hues faded and reappeared, a light green so subtle I tried to taste it like a wafer against my palate, a lake-top blue, a daffodil yellow…. It was as though the Falls were diluting a primal rainbow.

“Color,” I wrote in the faint light of a souvenir stand, “is what the Magician spills to make the world for the Hierophant and the Hermit. Without color this is all a simmering void, realm of the Fool.”

The next morning we donned black-hooded raincoats and boarded the
Maid of the Mist.
The Simmonses stood in the prow, twin George Washingtons. Soon, fine droplets tinged my face. A loudspeaker blared: “… and numerous men have tried the much-publicized feat of going over the Falls with a wooden barrel as their mere protection from its mighty waters.” I felt a layer of mist over my face. As we got nearer, the spume grew thicker, and the Simmonses summoned everyone back. Lucy shrieked as Barry forced her into the spray. They were like a cigarette commercial, “the breath of springtime,” slightly out of control.

I stepped forward, threw off my hood, and let the Falls blow across me in sheets until my hair and face were doused. I thought of Coleridge and his ode to dejection; I wanted to feel something too, to fend off
“… viper thoughts …”
and
“Reality’s dark dream….”
The Lake poet had nailed my mood from another century:
“Oh! that even now the gust were swelling, / And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast … ! / Might startle this dull pain, and make it move and live!”

On the way back to our room I bought the current
Sporting News
and, as we straggled along the street, I scanned International League stats, checking out Met and Yankee minor leaguers. Afterwards, as most kids gathered at the motel pool, I claimed the empty chaise next to Lucy. Putting on the Yankee-K.C. game, available through a Buffalo affiliate, I began writing a letter to Jake. “I wish I could send Mickey a postcard,” Lucy interjected, “and tell him what a wonderful time I’m having.” The line between ingenuousness and self-parody was hard to gauge. “Do you think he’ll ever come to Grossinger’s?”

“Maybe this winter,” I lied. She was so irritating but so pretty, sitting there in four different colored squares of a bathing suit, each covering one quarter of her torso.

“You’ll get me his autograph? Oh, please!”

“I’ll try.”

“And then maybe I’ll forget your school cheated.”

I slid into the pool and swam laps, game in earshot. Maris hit a homer with two on in the eighth to tie the score and spur a mood shift that became an anticlimactic letdown. “What’s Mickey doing?” Lucy called as I headed back to the room. I didn’t answer.

Changing into slacks and a sports shirt, I was planning to devour the
Sporting News
while tracking the tie game. There was no way I could have foreseen what happened next.

I felt a stab of disquiet, a forerunner of panic. It registered as a kind of numbness, an eerie abyss. I had no clear sense of my own being. I couldn’t settle down because the sensations inside me were too restive. The mood had no premise, gave no indication of what to do, even how to address a next moment. If Lucy had miraculously knocked on the door just then and offered to be my girlfriend for the entire trip, it wouldn’t have extricated me. I was too deep in a vacuum, and my ambivalence about her only added to my mounting terror and dissociation.

I never really wanted to go on this tour; now I was in big trouble. I needed to act fast because I was far from anything familiar.
Giant fish were swimming around that glacier for real.

I clicked off the Yankees and froze all movement and thought. I stood looking at myself there. Who was this guy? What was he doing in Buffalo? I took a breath, hoping the warp would pass, into some more explicable state like homesickness. In a moment of elation that went as quickly as it came, I considered withdrawing from the tour and asking for a refund for my father. But something in me balked at the logistics: where and how to begin such a process and what its long-term consequences might be.

My mood turned precipitously. Panic and disorientation evaporated and were replaced by a demonic prankishness. First I short-sheeted the beds; then I partially unscrewed the light bulbs. I set a glass of
water on top of the bathroom door, propped a chair against the front door, dribbled after-shave on the pillows, and placed a note on the bathroom sink: “Regards from the Unholy Four.” I felt relief as long as I acted. My mind filled hyperactively with schemes faster than I could dispatch them. They surged ahead, substituting pranks for terror
at the identical pitch.
That was the mechanism of relief: antidoting an undifferentiated anxiety with activities that engendered a parallel maniacal glee.

It was human, of course, but it felt like insect kinesis, a mindless response to a blind stimulus. Desperate not to get caught, I installed booby traps in frenetic succession, sure that each next was one too many but setting it nonetheless.