New Moon (44 page)

I nodded.

“I’ll bet.”

Then she peeled and lit a second pair. I was silent. “You and I are going to have a regular orgy tonight.”

I flushed, part thrill, part shame.

She asked me about what the boys and girls did on raids at my summer camp. I tried to be cute and evasive, but she would have none of it. “Did they do this?” she asked, raising her eyebrows and puckering her lips, “or that?” raising them even higher. “How about some of this?” She rolled her tongue, as the whole table laughed.

Later in the meal she examined my jello and, pretending to find a contaminant in it, suggested I wash the cubes in my water glass. To please her I dropped a few lime squares in. Everyone was giggling as the jello floated about.

“Don’t try to make me look stupid,” I pleaded softly.

“Oh, don’t mind the others,” she retorted louder. “We can have fun and they don’t even have to notice.”

After the meal I made a beeline away from her, but she trailed
close behind. We passed a stand with a sign above it: PO’ BOY SANDWICHES. “Boy sandwich,” she called out to me. “Is that another way to have boy?”

She was taunting me with my interest in her, so I said nothing and increased my pace. I passed Lucy and Barry, Harve and Laurie. The sky turned dark. Shelby and the teen tour were gone. I kept walking. I came to a fountain and saw the harbor lights of Vancouver beyond, as the Platters alone might have sung them.

The port shimmered, rough vessels of human commerce at anchor, yawing with the clank of sea-weary metal. Once again I had been called to witness a miracle, a world limitless and inscrutable, bathed in tarot light.

Tony, Greg, and Charlie with their female sidekicks had been into creative disruptions and spontaneous theater from the first day, and the Simmonses did little to bring them under control. Their delinquency came to a head in San Francisco at the famous hungry i nightclub where they tried heckling and disrupting the evening’s performer, stand-up comedian “Professor” Irwin Corey, master of topic-shifting double-talk.

Professor Corey abruptly stopped his routine and asked the stage-light technician to put his spot on our group. What followed was a straight-talk scold from the hobo savant, his bushy hair sprouting in all directions. The Professor somehow turned it into a lecture on the Solar System, how to make ice cream, and cockroach biology before returning to his sermon on audience decorum by making a distinction between
funny
heckling and boorish brain-dead disrespect “of which the three morons before me are as fine a specimen as you will ever see.” It was not only a performance for the ages, it was vindication of my sense that our tour had run amok.

In L.A. I was able to escape again, this time with permission. Grossinger’s old P.R. guru, Milton Blackstone, picked me up in the hotel lobby and drove to Eddie Fisher’s house.

The evening was high comedy. The three of us got lost trying to find Dodger Stadium and, after wandering among freeways, caught only the last inning of the Angels game. “It’s more exciting
this way,” Eddie said. He was amused that I had seen him and Elizabeth Taylor out in a rowboat together on Grossinger Lake when he was having an affair with the actress while still married to songstress Debby Reynolds. “The press would like to have been a little birdie on your shoulder,” he mused. “Well, they crucified me soon enough.”

The next morning I floated on an air raft in Eddie’s pool while he read some business ledgers with Milton. After corned-beef sandwiches, the singer sent his regards to the Grossinger family and then took a fifty-dollar bill from his wallet and handed it to me “to entertain the girls.”

That was the most impressive adventure anyone had to report. In Hollywood, where everyone had been celebrity sighting, I alone had hung out with a real star. Lucy kept asking to shake my hand, “whichever one Eddie last touched.” I stood in the lobby embellishing my account with every last detail I could think of.

In the group was a girl named Betsy, one of the identityless cheerleaders in the Florida chorus. Standing there, she suddenly seemed substantial and sprightly, like someone I had never seen. Gravitating to her, I struck up a conversation and then sat next to her on the train to San Diego and again on the bus into Mexico.

Her life, as she presented it, was beach parties, sports cars, varsity sports, and motorboats. Its key figure was her boyfriend Bob, All-City end who made the winning catch in the homecoming game. As information, it was stock and corny and should not have held my interest, but she had an odd probity, was appealingly guileless and tender.

As we passed neighborhoods of lumber scraps and Coca-Cola crates, she observed the procession with shocked concern. Mainly guys, but girls too, on this tour acted as though everything was a comedy for their benefit, an opening to trot out wit and bravado (like Shelby handing me the funeral sign); nothing was
really
real. Now everyone else was cracking up, making jokes about whose mother came from here and who was going to major in Tijuana architecture next year.

As for Betsy, her solicitude was spontaneous and heart-felt; it was
as if she had never considered income distribution or deprivation. Of course, she had; she wasn’t puerile or a dummy. It was more that she looked at the world with open eyes and empathy, qualities lacking in our 1962 teen milieu.

She listened my own tales of childhood with disbelief: “I can’t imagine why you had such a hard time.” She shook her head. “Well, that’s at an end. You’ll only meet friendly people now, like me.”

Lightly tanned, her hair gently flipped up in back, she had tiny black berries of eyes and a bit of an Eskimo feel about her. Plus a funny mouth, pointed out slightly at the top.

I read her tarot beneath a tree in Anaheim—telling fortunes was my most reliable means of courtship. I chose the Queen of Pentacles as her Significator—kindness and prosperity. Then I set her shuffle on the grass. She picked up the cards one by one as I offered my interpretations—the Wheel, the Hierophant, the Lovers. “Yes, these are special, quite special,” she declared. “I could never understand them like you. What do I know? I’m a cheerleader wondering which of these pictures is her boyfriend. Is he a Knight? Is he a King?”

“He could also be a Queen,” I said. “Men and women are combined in all the cards.”

“No, that he isn’t.”

At Disneyland she returned to her Florida friends and, though I looked all day, I never spotted her in the crowds. I took a banana-boat through Africa, a paddle-craft down the Mississippi, then played baseball on old-fashioned pinball machines in an arcade, late afternoon into evening. As I put each silver ball-bearing in play with a lever, the goal was to push the flipper with the right timing and send it beyond the outfield into grooves for hits. Each of nine fielders guarded holes that gobbled up outs.

Suddenly fireworks erupted over Disneyland Castle. Dangling at the end of a long, thin cord, Tinkerbell soared across the sky past gingerbread peaks—one hour to curfew. I fell in with a group from our tour at Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride; in fact, I found myself standing next to Shelby, half-expecting to go through it with her, our status still ambiguous. Smooching couples on line confirmed, as if we didn’t know, that this was a tunnel of love.

“Are you going to protect me from the monsters?” she asked, sidling up to me.

I nodded. I knew this wasn’t happening, but my heart thumped anyway as we came to the front of the queue.

“See you later, ’gator,” she snapped with a naughty grin—and was off.

I looked for an escape, but the attendant was holding open the next empty cart. I took the seat. Immediately I was swung down a track into blackness, drawn by the machinery of the ride.

A glow appeared in the far sky, dark blue from the exhibit’s sun having just set. Then things got crazy. My car crashed through a wall. I careened wildly off the road. I was on a highway screeching past other cars, going the wrong way. I rammed a detour; barrels came tumbling down, about to pulverize me, but froze in midair. I burst through an old warehouse. Suddenly I was in court; a judge jabbed his finger and cried out GUILTY! Shrill, screeching cartoon characters danced and pointed my way.

Next stop for my vehicle, Hell: devils roasting people, orange-red flames, the chief diablo laughing like the deranged automaton he was.

I had dreamed of that judge my whole life, so I couldn’t help but take the matter personally; his verdict was against me, always.

The tableau was beyond parody. I felt inklings of dungeon panic, tremors that were unequivocal. Satan chortled away. He knew I was trapped here, no way out, no way to stop the ride. Restoring harmless Disneyland animation took all my concentration.

Then I realized how much the diorama resembled the tarot Devil. I knew his alias all right: if only his prisoners could feel how loose the chains were about their necks … if only they could know that elsewhere in the deck he was a winged Angel … and they were Lovers.

I was euphoric! I had used a symbol to abate a trauma. Dr. Fabian would have been proud!

“Geez, Richard,” commented a friend years later, “can’t you just go to Disneyland? Well, okay, so Disneyland really is only packaged archetypes.”

The next morning the air was clammy, the train station rich with steam. “Hey, Betsy,” I called. She turned from ahead of me on the platform. I ran and caught up. “Let me carry that for you.”

“No, thanks. You’ve got your own bag.” I took it anyway.

I sat beside her as we pulled out of L.A. She was wearing yellow Bermuda shorts and wondered how I could stand my black slacks.

As we worked our way through swerving doors to the dining car, the train stopped in Yuma. It remained at standstill for two hours as we lingered at our table. Betsy talked about when her brother was born: “I kept saying to my mother, ‘Whose little boy is he?’ And my mother kept answering, ‘Why, he’s my little boy just like you’re my little girl.’ ‘But who’s his mother?’ I kept asking. I couldn’t get it, that she could be both our mothers at the same time.”

Then she tried to recall how it felt when Bob kissed her for the first time, describing her moment of fear and then the rush of excitement: “‘Oh my my my my,’ I thought. And then I worried that I’m only me, and me isn’t really very much for him to love. But he knew who I was, just like my Mommy sometimes does, and that’s really great from a boy.”

Betsy was not a potential girlfriend, nor would she become one, but I loved listening to her and she grew into the heroine and muse of this book. Everything I had to say, the chasm and mystery of my past, was transfigured through my feelings for her.

She was not a classically pretty girl, a Shelby or Lucy, so it had taken me a while to notice her, but her sexuality was innocent and magnetic. When I imagined being with her at one of those parties she described, kissing her, I felt a different allure, a sort of motley charm. She was a mermaid, bottomless and salt-like and blue-green as the sea, and I was undiminished beside her.

I had wasted most of the summer. We were already headed east.

When our ice cream came she said, “Yum yum,” and I said, “Yuma,” because the train was still there. As she laughed, my mind flashed to another dusk, at 1235 Park when I was sent to the corner drugstore to get a brick of chocolate, strawberry, and
vanilla, a number-two combination, for our family dessert. I was returning with the cold package pressed against my belly when the untracked spook, the hidden familiar to my existence, caught me.

That originless throb haunted my childhood—a primal wave of terror, a sense that I wasn’t who I was, always a mournful other, there again at Disneyland. It was the worst sensation in the universe because it went so deep without motive. It must have been born with me, for its power was beyond my American kid’s body.

While I stood at the dungeon stairs, Betsy danced on Southern beaches, calling to me to remember that one day we would sit together at a train station in Yuma. At least I had found her. Before, there was nothing; now I had the whole of creation in tow. Or so I thought, as I stared out the window at the Dipper over Arizona.

The last ten days of my journal are mainly my record of adventures and talks with Betsy, on a Grand Canyon hike, at Six Flags Over Texas amusement park, on various trains. In New Orleans she knelt alongside the pool, drying off, dark wisps of hair stuck to her neck. I drifted by, my arms wrapped around a plastic beach animal, my legs curled up. “I’m just a barnacle,” I called out.

“You
are
a barnacle,” she smiled back.

After I got dressed we broke the rules by hiking downtown. We spent the afternoon wandering in New Orleans. At one point Betsy stood straight and tall on the street, doing what she called her “happy walk,” half collapsing giggling, half marionette. It was contagious, as we laughed and bumped into each other.

We visited antique neighborhoods, sprawling parks, a used bookstore. We raced each other across a lawn. There was even a goodnight kiss on her cheek.

I forgot where I was—that we were part of a tour, that we hadn’t been brother and sister our whole lives.

The next morning we boarded for Miami—end of the line for Betsy. With the other Florida girls she would leave and go home while the rest of us continued to Washington D.C. and New York.

I was train-weary, sick of the almondy steam, the queasy
stop-and-go rhythm. When the conductor came around, I spent part of Eddie Fisher’s money on a sleeping compartment.

Dusk turned to night as we rumbled east, lurching and bumping along. I watched lights passing outside, “lights of people”—I scribbled in the glow of a tiny bulb—“whom I will never know, who will live beyond me forever. And then, someday, I will pass a light in the darkness and it will belong to one of the people in this group. Everyone, including Betsy, is about to fall into the great anonymous void.”

I recalled an old trance state before sleep: visitors in the courtyard, a gift of a saucer. But from whom, really? The question dissolved before an answer, only that I existed at all—that there was this great vast density masking form without form. The saucer arrived with no precursor, yet it wasn’t a chimera or illusion; it was stable and durable enough to last all of childhood.