New Moon (6 page)

I sat there, imagining my guts rotting away, plus a twinge of
regret at her picturing innocent raisins while I was betraying her.

Yet I went on devouring these chemical bricks as if they were manna, the epitome of culinary pleasure as well as a true resolution to my hunger. Years later I realized that each bar not only had a distinctive flavor but a vibration which activated subtle energies percolating through its congealed sucrose and corn syrup like a stream through a sweet aquifer. The bars may have been dietary frauds, mirages to fill the coffers of sugar pushers, but I was
thinking
their nourishment too and that made them healthier in the imagination than ingested molecularly.

Large vending machines flanked the Y’s atrium, some with candy bars, some with apples, some with ice-cream cups, some with sandwiches. The alcove was scented with chlorine from a pool we never saw, though we heard distant splashes.

From the atrium we trooped upstairs to our assigned room and piled coats on a table—tight quarters for hyperactive lads. With shouted commands, our counselors ended freelance melees and organized us into games highlighted by Telephone and Snatch the Club.

Turkish carpets decorated the walls; pigeons cooed against a rain-streaked, dust-soiled window, soot dripping and blowing about the alley. We sniggered as nonsense syllables and curse words came out the end of our whispered chains. Then we were divided into teams, bunched at opposite ends, and an Indian club was set in the middle for rounds of pluck and tag.

Light of chandeliers, clatter of play, and gloomy vapors kerned an endemic spell, as I fantasized chocolate-covered peanuts, coated marshmallow bars, black-cherry popsicles. Hunger and sadness ran in a stream together because hunger was so deep it could never be filled and sadness was so vast I could never envelop it.

One snowy day we went for a tour of the Tastee Bread factory. At its end everyone was given a silken white package of bread, warm from the vats of dough. By the time we got home I had consumed the entire loaf, amazed that it fit in me.

Fear remained my close companion. It was the dungeon stairs,
poisoned blankets, Dr. Hitzig—and something else: the color of light, the persistence of morning, afternoon, and dusk; the same streets, shop windows, rooms, scenery, day after day, hour by hour, relentless, inexhaustible—these people, this family, their carpets and furniture, plates and cups, meal after meal, the sound of Nanny pushing the carpet sweeper back and forth. No single thing was particularly disturbing, but all these things together, unbroken and unending, were like a death march. I stood alone in the watchtower.

I woke in the dark, terrified and shivering, usually wet, and staggered into their room, willing to ask even them for help. Their husks heaped in murk, Daddy was snoring. As I hovered there whimpering, Mommy separated, jumped out of bed, put on a bathrobe, and herded me down the hall, turning on lights as we went.

She opened a wooden cabinet. Out of a bottle she poured a shot glass of brandy. I didn’t want adult liquor inside me, but she moved my hand and the warm bitter gave such a buzz that I stopped shaking and sat down. The spook was gone; the medicine had worked.

She was so relieved she began laughing. She laughed so hard tears ran down her face.

I wanted to stay with her there in the light forever.

There was another evening when I turned the handle for my bath and watched water surge out of the faucet against the luster of the tub.

Suddenly it came.

Not the gush—its force, if anything, was elating. It was the sheer fact of being there at all, naked, in relief against white stone.

I couldn’t bear it, so I let out a wail.

Mommy and Nanny came running. They looked about in bewilderment. I felt filaments of ice expanding from my throat and belly as if I was about to be blown apart.

“What happened?” my mother shouted.

“I don’t know! I don’t know!” A word commanded my mind. It was the only one strong enough. “I have cancer,” I said. I didn’t want any association with the name, but I needed them to know how bad it was.

I had broken her most inviolable taboo.

“Stoppit!” she screamed. “Stoppit this instant and tell me what’s wrong! If you think I’m going to tolerate this nonsense any longer you’ve got another thing coming.”

They put me in my bed and … slowly it faded.

Mommy surveyed me lying there. I said I would never be okay again.

“Did you ever hear such nonsense?” she asked, turning to Daddy.

“Talk some sense into him,” he insisted.

“If you were poor,” she said, “you’d have something to be scared of. If you didn’t know where your next meal was coming from, if you didn’t know where you were going to live the next day…. You do a million and one things any child would give his right arm for and you’re too selfish to appreciate it. How can anyone be so self-centered?”

I tried to say something about how it was difficult at Bill-Dave and P.S. 6. I knew that wasn’t it, but I had to stop the inquisition.

“Why don’t you run away if you hate it so much here? We pay good money for Bill-Dave.”

I said nothing.

“Well, I’ll tell you why: You want attention. You enjoy upsetting me.”

“No.”

“Don’t call me a liar.”

Later I heard it on the victrola—Eddie Fisher singing,
“Oh my Papa….”

I recognized this dirge from long ago:
“To me he was so wonderful, / To me he was so good.”

“Wonderful”? “Good”? That’s what the words said, but the melody was maudlin and bottomless.

Nanny left, just like that, without ceremony or forewarning. I heard Mommy saying that she was a traitor—she had opened our mail and spied through the keyhole. I missed her, but I felt relief too because Jonny and I no longer had to share our room with a witch.

After my return to first grade I joined a few boys from my class who were also in Bill-Dave. At lunchtime we met in the yard and hiked three blocks up Madison to “Jessie’s Jip Joint” (we knew how to spell “gyp” but we liked the triple “J’s”). There we spent our allowances on M&M’s, chocolate wafers, Hershey bars, and other candies plus occasional packs of cards.

The kids in our gang collected Flash Gordon cards, a nickel pack a day, torn open, viewed, and sorted. We kept our stashes in rubber-banded stacks. I loved to shuffle through mine and check what I had.

Inside Jessie’s disarray of commerce we goofed off axiomatically, a form of worship. We were delighted by the motley parlor of bubble gum, comics, old rubber balls, waxed syrups, tiny prizes in cellophane stapled to cardboard plaudits. Toy- and puzzle-packed shelves and cabinets erased corners at every level.

Our allowances were hardly adequate to such a cornucopia, so our gang stole from other kids in class. I took six quarters and a fifty-cent piece out of a bankbook in a girl’s desk and, with this pirate silver, bought a magical bulb that needed only a copper penny at its base to turn it on. I presented it the next day at “Show and Tell,” but it wouldn’t light, which prompted Miss Tighe to call Jessie and demand he stop cheating the children.

In the tribe at Jessie’s I attached myself to a red-haired, freckled kid named Phil Wohlstetter who was livelier and goofier than anyone else. He could dart around, stop short, and twist the other way so fast that no one could catch him. Phil didn’t fight much, but when he did, he was surprisingly effective, his quickness making up for heft and muscle. He was great at faking punches one way and then sneaking one in under an opponent’s guard. “Made you look!” was his war cry.

By hanging around with Phil, I became a member of his special clique. In fact, I was his sidekick, like Tonto on
The Lone Ranger.

Phil called us The Throw Your Lunch in the Garbage Can Club. We’d come tearing out of class at the noon bell, head for the nearest city trash container, open our metal boxes, and artfully dump their contents into the can. We each had similar combinations of white bread and cheese, or peanut butter and jelly, a raw vegetable, maybe
a few cookies worth salvaging (since my mother thought peanuts were poison, I got cream cheese and jelly). Phil took particular pleasure in smashing a ripe tomato against the container, some of it invariably splattering the concrete. Once he tossed his cheese high in the air and called out, “Velveeta!” as it burst apart on the sidewalk.

My daydreams at P.S. 6 flowed into a single complicated fantasy. It began when friendly aliens came to the bedroom window and beckoned me into the courtyard. From there, they flew me to a field where they brought down a spaceship big as city blocks. Once they taught me how to use it, they gave it to me. I pressed a button and it shot into the sky. Earth dwindled against the stars.

I zoomed to Mars. After that, I changed to longer needle-like engines and blasted out of the Solar System, rocking my desk gently to simulate acceleration.

With this ship I could go anywhere in the universe. Travelling at speeds well beyond Flash Gordon’s, I kept mental records of the landscapes and creatures I saw, along with the leagues of outer space crossed to reach them. My vehicle moved rapidly but not instantaneously. I could always imagine more territory and stars, so sometimes I would spend five minutes or more supplying the energy in my head, propelling myself, observing minute details of suns and comets as I manufactured them.

My annals of other worlds were comforting and compelling in a way that nothing else was, so I continued to expand and extend their chronicle. That way I had a storyline to return to whenever necessary—during a lesson, in the school wagon, or lying in bed at night waiting to fall asleep.

I took along imagined cohorts, though never Phil and my actual friends. That would have felt ridiculous. I picked other chums to fill out my crew: Joyce who drew a perfect Donald Duck with eyelashes, Andy Pfeiffer because he had a cute smile and I liked his name, Joey because I found myself wishing he was my friend during a game at his birthday party when we chose papers from a hat and, from their instructions, ran each other through gauntlets. My attachment to him was instantaneously erotic, as he slapped my
behind on drawing such a lot.

In fact, all my shipmates were kids to whom I was attracted but never turned into real-life friends. Instead, I invented their characters and our relationships.

After escaping atomic war we searched for another habitable planet. We visited worlds with green and blue rain, quadruple and quintuple moons: spiderweb villages, dragon-filled cocoons, yellow oceans, forests of talking birds and hedgehogs, underground tunnels and caves. I tried to drag out each phase of exploration as long as possible, returning to former venues to fill in missing details. We finally chose a home planet, built houses there, and befriended local animals and made up rules for our society. This activity spawned a continuous virgin papyrus for me to emboss and then commit to memory—just keeping track of the names of make-believe animals: Snellems, Hop-Hogs, Mugwums, and the like.

As life on our new world lapsed into squeamish intimacy, I created interlopers with their own plots and machines. I always stayed a step ahead of the story with predicaments for which I had no solutions. Dreaming up perils kept the daydream urgent and pure and gave my mind crises to solve. Just when our plight seemed most hopeless we would discover new regions of our world—deeper forests, further tunnels, abandoned forts—or sometimes fresh powers in our vehicle. Eventually we were forced to flee and go deeper into the universe, so I had to create a new home planet.

The “tale” was with me for all the years of my childhood. In some part of my mind I held the up-to-the-minute situation and map of our universe with a backlog of worlds we had visited and lived on. At any time I could either pick up where I had left off or replenish an old episode.

I especially liked to revert to the setting in which the visitors contacted me and made a gift of their ship. To refine it reinforced its authenticity and essential nature. I never had my benefactors return. I didn’t want that option. They were almighty and inchoate.
I
needed to be the driving force behind my fantasy, to generate adventures and resolve them from my own deeds. To have gods rescuing us would have obviated the whole basis of the story.

I regularly reenacted our last-minute escape from Earth, mushroom clouds spreading, parts of buildings flying apart, maneuvering the spaceship to get to and save each member of my would-be crew—then our fiery blast-off … tearing through the atmosphere toward the stars—each iteration as suspenseful and gratifying as the original.

The story touched something in me that admitted no other form. It was my chance to fight back against terror, to become a likable boy at last, to make friends with kids whose allure intimidated me. But there was another element, a mystery hard to diagnose.

Rain whipped through a valley of phosphorescent trees. Hedgehogs bounced alongside our gang—they were our telepathic allies. I called to Andy and Jill to help. They brought wood from the ribbony forest. Joey had taken the ship and gone back to rescue Jimmy. The Snellems were searching for us on the other side of the great ocean and soon their warships would be drawing near. A music-like theme built in my mind, a sense of fascination like trance. I was checking star-maps in case we had to escape.

It was heady to look around the classroom and see unaware people accompanying me across the stars.

At night I dug deep into the covers as I kindled my universe into being. Daddy had taught me to say,
“Baruch atah Adonai elohaynu melech ha’olam,”
so I obediently mimicked the jingle each night as my head dropped onto the pillow. And, though he told me the words meant “Blessed Art Thou, O Lord and God, King of the Universe,” I didn’t know what
that
meant except someone like my ethereal benefactors. The story bridged the gap between
melech ha’olam
and sleep. It made there be a King and a Universe and placed me in it too. My spaceship couldn’t be as sacred and important as
“Baruch atah Adonai …,”
but it was.

At a hint of warm weather in March, Phil brought out a Spaldeen rubber ball and tossed it toward me down 92nd Street. I stabbed at his throw, but it hit my hands and bounced off; I picked it up and heaved it back as best I could. We repeated this ritual wordlessly, as he raced ahead, making leaping grabs.