New Moon (49 page)

I tried to set him right: “I don’t think any of that is going to happen.”

He wasn’t listening. He recounted how many different girls
he
had screwed in college. Then he added abruptly: “I think you need to get laid. I know some models, real high-class Rheingold girls.” His mouth vacillated between a smirk and a leer as he referred to the playgirl hostesses for a brand of beer popular then. “You tell me when you’re ready, and I’ll make the arrangements.”

“How could you think I’d want that?”

“What are you—different from everyone else?”

We stood there in mutual intransigence. He wasn’t that far removed from the guys who locked me in my room. When I was a child I could look up to him and enjoy his bounty and company. Now, although he wouldn’t have put it that way, he wanted my soul.

My rejection set a wall between us. His routine glances became disapproving. I wondered if he knew about my truancy from the mailroom.

Perhaps, years ago in their warnings about him, my mother and Bob had not been so wrong! Once again, I was an enemy in the native household.

In past vacations I made friends with Gene Kaye, a disc jockey at WHOL in Allentown, Pennsylvania, who hosted Grossinger’s events. When he arrived to deejay a summer dance, I told him about Helene.

“So the kid wants an audition, right?”

I nodded.

“No big deal. Out of friendship for you, my man, and out of respect for your family who has done so many fine things for me, say no more.”

The following weekend I sat in the back of the Terrace Room with Gene and his “buddy from the business” while Helene went through her set with a makeshift band. The guy thought she was fantastic and arranged for her to go to New York to cut a demo; he even gave her a new name: Aileen Frances. “You found me my own Catherine Carver,” she declared. Then she hugged me with
unabashed delight.

Late one afternoon that week I got a phone call from the highway outside the Hotel. Jay and Barry were passing through. I tore down the hill to greet them. They pummelled me in delight as I slid into the back of their car. Proud of his recent license, Jay drove us on dirt roads past Chipinaw and around Silver Lake. “You realize this is it,” he warned. “Our families are at war. We probably won’t see each other for a while. But I want you to know you’re still my cousin and I love you.”

I shifted awkwardly and said, with what dubious sincerity I could marshal, that I loved him too.

“It’s terrible to have to tell you this, but your grandparents and your father and aunt are schmucks and common crooks. Do you think it’s fair that they make all the decisions when we own shares?”

“No. They imagine they built the place and that your family is just taking advantage of the way the will was written.”

“Do you agree?”

I shook my head.

“My grandparents were their partners; they put up the money; they always acted in good faith.” After a pause, he moderated his tone, “I feel sorry for you. Your grandparents are stupid and greedy. My mother and father want to preserve the fortune; they care about their kids. And your parents, if you don’t mind the expression”—he looked at me with a probing grin—“are idiots.” We all burst out laughing, though mine was a contact high. They left me back at the bottom of the hill. The next time I saw Jay was fourteen years later, surrounded by “gofers” and secretaries, huddled over a Wall Street screen.

On the evening of Betsy’s birthday, Helene and I dialed her on my father’s speaker phone. “Hello, guess who? I’m at Grossinger’s. You know me, still trying to become a star. And guess who got me the big audition?” Before Betsy could answer I said hello.

“It’s so nice to hear your voice after all those great letters,” she replied. Whatever else she was or wasn’t, she was a paragon of
empathic grace.

I told her I had decided to stay at Amherst, and she thought that was the right decision. Then she said excitedly that she had pledged a sorority at Boulder before entering. I didn’t have any reference point to comment, so I told her I was sorry to hear about Bob. She said, yes, she was terribly sad and hoped someday they would get back together because they had something special. My sentiments were duplicitous, but our exchange wasn’t.

Afterwards Helene, full of excitement, was telling dumb stories about Miami Beach, ostensibly because they involved Betsy in some manner. I was preoccupied and dour, which bothered her. We climbed the stairs to my room. I set myself against the backboard of the bed, and she surprised me by getting on the bed too, then leaning against me.

“I want you to hug me the way Spike does,” she announced, arranging herself at an angle so that her head fell back against my chin, my arm around her belly. We sat there quietly like that for a long time. I kissed her neck and moved my arm, but she stilled me.

“I saw the way you lit up when you talked to Betsy. I’m jealous even though you’re not my boyfriend. I’m used to thinking I’m the one boys chase, certainly not Betsy. But I don’t want to go any further with you because of Spike.”

Still from that evening our relationship was closer, almost boyfriend and girlfriend. We danced in the nightclub and kissed on her doorstep, as I shifted more into daily camaraderie. After my father noticed me dancing with her one evening, he called me into his room past midnight and asked if I had gotten anywhere.

“We’re still just friends.”

“You’re not the only one.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s double-dating you.” I had never heard the term. “Don’t you know? She’s slipping out at night with other guys after you take her home.” I shook my head defiantly. “Richard, don’t be naïve. What she’s not giving you she’s giving to someone else. She’s not the innocent you think.”

The next morning I arranged a ride for Helene to cut her demo
in New York in the Hotel car. Back in the evening she was still flying from the rush of it, but she indicated she had to talk to me. We moved out of anyone else’s earshot. “Your father was in the car, and he said, ‘Give my son a break.’ What did he mean?”

“Goddamn it!”

“What?”

“It’s not you. It’s him. He meant what it sounds like.”

“To sleep with you? Who does he think I am?”

“He’s a jerk. Just forget him.”

But one night that week I sneaked back to the Hotel in dungarees and a T-shirt—tie and jacket the required evening attire—to pick up milkshakes for Emma and me from the canteen as the Mets went into extra innings. As I shortcut through the back of the Terrace Room, I spotted Helene dancing with an older guy from the athletic staff. After that I avoided her until she came looking for me.

“I went dancing with a friend,” she retorted. “No big deal, huh?”

That’s right; no big deal. Betsy was the issue, not Helene. My friend Sandy, the portrait artist in the lobby, was creating a lifelike pastel of her from a photograph I took in New Orleans, and I went every day to check on his progress, which was sluggish because he preferred paying guests. Yet I remembered the feel of Helene’s body against mine, the charge of her presence, and I was trapped. I surely couldn’t wait for Betsy, but I also couldn’t imagine pursuing Helene. Go an inch more one way and I saw my grotesque father grinning at me; an inch the other, and I had this abstract love for a girl I might never see again.

When Aunt Bunny returned in mid-August I meant only to tell her about my dilemma, but our conversations were never constrained. Soon the incorrigible story-teller in me was recreating the entire string of events since she left. She evinced surprisingly little concern about Paul’s “escort.”

“What’s one more tramp with him,” she sniffed. “It’s my kids I care about. I won’t permit him to destroy my children. What was he going to do when he took you to the whorehouse anyway, wait outside or go in with you? No, don’t tell me, I already know. Well,
sex with him is a crock of shit.”

Spike arrived the next morning—a surprisingly timid, gawky chap—to retrieve his girl. They packed his car with her suitcases and drove off together, back to Miami Beach.

Then one afternoon, just before Labor Day, I walked into my father’s room as he was emerging from his cavernous clothes closet. Out of nowhere he slapped me across the face, knocking me to the floor. Then he took a belt and began lashing me with it. I lay there, my head cradled in my arms. The pain was incredible, but the shock of it frightened me more. I couldn’t believe this was happening—not Uncle Paul from the Penny Arcade, Dr. Fabian’s ally! Only when he stopped did I get up. He stood there, breathing heavily, glaring at me with venom, a stranger. He was a brute of a man, barely in control. “You don’t ever go to Aunt Bunny again with stories of me.”

As I left the room he shouted after me: “I won’t make that offer again, you fag.”

Michael and James were just home from camp, and at dinner that night my father was telling silly jokes and playing riddle games with us. We were guessing fruits. He had picked an egg—no wonder no one got it. When we protested it was unfair he said, “Richard should know that one. An egg is the fruit of a hen.” Then he gave me a hug as he headed for the living room. “Come watch the Mets try to win one,” he said.

As we sat there silently, they did.

I made a copy of my revised
Salty and Sandy
and mailed it off to Catherine Carver. Then, my bike in the trunk, Sandy’s portrait of Betsy mounted in non-glare glass on the back seat, Ray and I headed out in the Hotel car—Route 52, the Taconic, the Mass Pike, back to Amherst for sophomore year.

In the spring, when I was intending to transfer, I went through Amherst’s rushing ritual anyway. Every freshman visited and was shown around each of the thirteen fraternities; it was how the system worked, was made fair and egalitarian, at least to appearances. Amherst 1963 provided no social dorms for upperclassmen—no living quarters in which women were permitted after curfew. Sophomores, juniors, and seniors who did not live in fraternities got spartan rooms in North and South Hall under the same parietals as freshmen—and there weren’t even enough of those cubicles to go around. Although independent national organizations, the fraternities served as necessary housing for much of the student body.

Construction had already begun on so-called social dorms that would transform Amherst forever but, before that, most guys disappeared into the fraternity system, essentially not to be seen again in civilian life except for classrooms and, occasionally, the dining hall—a central grouse of Leo Marx and his colleagues.

The fraternities at Amherst were ranked by status, at least in the minds of students. The top two or three had most of the campus leaders: those who were to become congressmen, astronauts, chairs of academic departments, doctors, corporate executives. Two of the fraternities were nominally “animal houses” (some of the guys from my wing of James ended up in them). The others were individualized by temperament and styles of social life.

One was different. Kicked out of its national for admitting a black in the fifties (as unlikely as that sounds today), Phi Alpha Psi
had abandoned rushing. It didn’t engage in pledging—selective admittance to forge a collective identity—only a voluntary sign-up sheet left on a living room table until its quota was reached. More by fortuity than design, Phi Psi became the safety valve of the system, siphoning off Amherst’s rebels, progressives, and outcasts. The membership was a potpourri of rock musicians, poets, political activists, motorcyclists, early conceptual artists, and theatrical improvisers as it ran the gamut from Phi Beta Kappa physicists to the first druggies and hippies of the sixties.

A three-storey Georgian mansion directly across College Street (Route 9) from Valentine dining hall, Phi Psi included a large field along the road and a parking lot in back. Down behind the lot was “The Glen,” a small patch of remaining forest in a ravine with a stream running through.

At the time Amherst was a small rural town, so there were no extra-collegiate avant-garde institutions or watering holes. Phi Psi served as a hostel, a hangout for artists, including college dropouts in the area and eccentric recent alums like Eric the Rat, a fabled renegade who lived in the woods near Belchertown. In this guise, the house appeared in short stories in
The New Yorker
and
Playboy.

Since Phi Psi was well under its quota I joined despite my application to Berkeley. During the remainder of the spring term I spent many an evening in the manor’s parlor rooms where activities ranged from discussions of Wittgensteinian philosophy and campus politics to poetry readings, string quartets, and a touring jug band and skiffle trio—their pianist and songwriter had attended Amherst as a recent member of Phi Psi. Another alumnus-led piece of performance art consisted solely of improvisations around the word “striations.”

The downstairs featured two large living rooms, a library, and two student domiciles. The windowless basement was a social room with a ping-pong table and makeshift bar, complete with a Budweiser sign that was plugged in on Saturday nights concomitant with the treasurer ordering a keg (not necessarily Bud). Its darker rear had tables, chairs, and open space for dancing. A permanent stale-beer odor prevailed.

Most student billets were on the second floor, including two singles and a coveted triple with a balcony—luxury quarters compared to the dorms (after all, the building was modelled on a New England estate house). The third-floor attic had two student flats, but most of it was gigantic unfinished, unheated sleeping rooms. It was the custom to keep beds out of social space downstairs so that there would be more public territory. Each of these bed quarters was an end-to-end unfinished, unheated section of attic with rows of beds. Each bunk was covered by an electric blanket. Their tiny reddish lights dotted the nights—Massachusetts was pure Arctic by early November.

Phi Psi had space for forty residents, so when I realized I was coming back I wrote ahead and was amazed to be offered an accommodation on the second floor because someone had just dropped out. I was told I would have the room to myself and, upon arrival, I arranged it after my taste from local shops and antique stalls: a cheap coffee table, a butter churn to keep papers in, Sandy’s portrait of Betsy centered on the wall above ears of decorative maize.

Then, just before classes began, a transfer student named Greg showed up out of the blue and joined the House. The verdict of the Phi Psi council was that I share my room with him. A short, husky, Shakespearean actor with a booming voice, he was appalled by my lack of taste and was in the process of relocating my belongings in the closet when I first laid eyes on him.

“What’s going on here?” I demanded.

“Just accommodating my stuff, that’s all. You can’t take up the whole room anymore.”

After we chose halves, he countered my Betsy/butter churn sector with a busty Renoir in a gilt frame over a straw hamper containing three artfully triangulated bottles of French wine. As he stood there admiring it, I pondered the incongruity of our forced domicile—we couldn’t have been more opposite in style or spirit. Jointly, though, we bought used desks and a faded green couch, likely in its twelfth or fifteenth student room.

Those last days before classes I spent as many hours per day as I could bear alternating between
Salty and Sandy
and
The Moon
on
my electric Smith Corona, as Greg stormed in and out in obvious irritation. “This is absurd,” he finally erupted. “You think you can monopolize the space like a private studio.”

“I’m finishing a book.”

“I’m finishing the great American novel,” he mocked in singsong. Then he proposed that we negotiate for private hours, in particular Saturday-night use of the room, because, as he put it, “I need to get my social life going.”

Since I wasn’t dating I conceded that option, a munificence I soon regretted, for he arrived early each Saturday with a different lady and locked me out for the remainder of the evening. I sensed the event was usually a failure, for he was in a permanent foul mood.

Next door was Phil, the president of Phi Psi, a physics major with one of the highest grade-point averages in the school. He was elegant and handsome, with a bit of the Kennedy look, engaged to a pretty senior from Smith.

Further down the hall was an intimidating character: a very tall Rasputin-looking junior with fierce eyes, bushy brows, and a long beard, one the few at Amherst. Jeff Tripp played the guitar continually, as he matched notes plunk for plunk with records of Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk. His favorite song was “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” which he performed so often and with such studied care that for a long time I thought he was in the process of composing it. I tried to avoid him because he was contentious, but I had a reputation from my freshman-year antics and Greg was the younger brother of a friend of his, so he became an early inspector of our room.

At first he lampooned my “decadent” reading tastes—Robert Penn Warren; T. H. White,
The Once and Future King;
Hamilton Basso,
The View from Pompey’s Head.
Though daunted by his presence, I was eager to learn adult stuff—so I didn’t defend myself.

One of his amusements was to prod me to confess my escapades in pop America. As he heard about Arista Teen Tours, he wickedly satirized “the rich kids on safari.” He admired my talent with tarot (bumming fortunes for himself and a train of girlfriends) and laughed aloud over my story of meeting Paddy Chayefsky. “The cat wrote one good line,” he said. Then he
performed it theatrically: “‘I don’t hate your father; your father is a
prince
of a man!’”

When, on request, I tried to summarize
The Moon,
I ended up saying it was about a town in Florida, using cosmic and unconscious forces to explore inner worlds. Tripp couldn’t stop laughing.

“This is the twentieth century, man. Next time someone asks you what your book is about, say it’s about sex and death, because those are the only things it could be about and the only things worth writing about. If it’s not about them, then it’s about avoiding them.”

Within a few weeks he had me reading Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov, as he tried to teach me the difference between sappy melodrama and more radical modes of perception. “They’re advertising men you’re glorifying, not artists; they don’t know anything about the mysteries.” He intoned the word dramatically—“the missss-teries.” Committed to the droll absurdities of
Molloy
and
Malone Dies,
he loved to burst into my room at odd moments quoting Beckett lines that turned the universe upside-down:

As Tripp’s soliloquies rattled the walls, I stood in admiration. Nihilistic irony and stark minimalism were faces of the universe that I had missed entirely: the bare existential fact of our existence, without overlay or metaphor. These texts broke with my prior aesthetics and gave me a blunt, tough, philosophically charged target to shoot for in place of the metaphysical aphorisms and sentimental lyricisms I had been adulating. Beckett was wry and casual, street-wise and fierce.

“Oh, Grossinger, you’re so goddamn young,” Jeff sighed. “You know nothing; I have to teach you everything.”

I wondered why he thought I was worth it.

Much of what Jeff taught me was social information: don’t chatter; don’t tell dumb stories; speak with style … just the right amount of irony. When I participated in house meetings he accosted me afterwards with his critique, telling me what I did that was good and what was horseshit. “Jive, man! Don’t whimper. When you jive you’re as good as anyone here. When you whimper you’re fucking Elmer the Cow.” He mocked my excitement over Grossinger’s, my offhand acceptance of its aristocracy, celebrity fuss, and corny uses of fun, and he especially despised the portrait of Betsy hanging in my room. “You’ve got this two-bit American cheerleader hanging in a virtual shrine!”

Tripp drove a black Porsche, which was a sacred car in the house lot. He brought back splashy actresses and dancers from Smith, Mount Holyoke, even Radcliffe. So far as I knew no one else had ever ridden in the vehicle. When Greg asked him for a lift to Mount Holyoke, Jeff stared him down hard: “Look here, man; this buggy is to tote cunt. Got it?” The beginnings of a smile froze on Greg’s lips. Then as he felt the full rush of shame, he slinked away.

One night a bunch of us from the House gathered at a table in Valentine where a senior named Dave, who was short on money for the weekend, mused about selling his post-mortem body to a medical school for a couple of hundred dollars. When Tripp challenged him, Dave kept saying, “What’s wrong with it? Just tell me what’s wrong with it, Jeff.”

I waited anxiously for his answer, but he turned to me and intoned: “My student will respond.”

I gulped, my mind raced for a second, and then I said, “Because it’s making too big a separation between life and death.”

He broke into a big smile and, putting his arm around my back, said, “Exactly!”

Across the hall from Jeff, in the big triple with the balcony, was a senior named Paul Stern. He was no older than me but had gained two years by accelerating through public schools on New York’s Lower East Side. A tall, ungainly, stork-like kid with glasses, Paul had
no
social poise or sense of irony; he was artless and endearing, and he grew into my best buddy.

Unlike me, Paul came of age in a politically articulate family. His parents were union folks who worked for the City and subscribed to the
Socialist Worker;
he was reading its columns back when I was learning about symbols in dreams. Once he realized I was unsophisticated on global issues, he took to selecting articles for my education. I learned about how the U.S. looted Third World nations while oppressing its own lower classes. From high-school friends like Bob Alpert I had leftward instincts, but they were vague and uninformed; I had never seen the facts so convincingly put forth. Communist propaganda had always seemed to me brutally simplistic, like a “B” movie; capitalist propaganda I had overlooked. I now realized it was even more insidious with its bribes and hoaxes, for capitalism
itself
was propaganda as it camouflaged the plunder of its underclass in deceptively benign idioms adulating “The Free World.” I had not understood any of that during the Cuban crisis or beneath rote denigrations of the Soviet Union validated by Khrushchev’s crude bellicosity.

“Of course the Russians fight us differently,” Paul explained. “They’re poor; they have a less developed social system. The proof is in the results: how many fascist dictators do we support? How much of the resources of other nations do we consume through the sham of a laissez-faire marketplace? People say, ‘Well, they have only one party and no real elections,’ but we have only one party too: the capitalist party. We run two candidates and offer a supposed choice, but it’s smoke and mirrors, a pretext to keep folks tranquilized, imagining they are in charge of things. Communism may use thugs and armies to enforce its power, but capitalism uses
the marketplace; it’s far cleverer: it enslaves us in our fabricated desires.” He paused for effect. “We are much shrewder propagandists than they are.”