New Moon (17 page)

I remember a Monopoly match in which I was beating Jon so badly he was on the verge of tears. I had most of the red, green, and blue properties, and they were packed with hotels. I had thousands and five hundreds in abundance. With only a few hundred dollars
and no houses on his properties he fought on, occasionally biting his lip. It was as though no prior game counted, no future game would ever be played. In a moment of inspiration (that stands out over our whole childhood together) I invited him over to my side of the board to play against that bum Borrig. We slaughtered him. We took all his money. We forced him to mortgage his properties. We jumped up and down with excitement calling him names.

When our family rented its cottage in Long Beach, Jon and I transposed sockball to the front yard, the farthest bushes serving as home runs, sections of grass as singles and doubles, the ornamental bucket a triple. We also invented a beach game called Ocean Ball, based on home run derbies on TV. We swung with a broomstick at a Spaldeen from a “batting box” line of seaweed. Home runs were shots that landed in water of any depth, even retreating surf.

As defenders we guarded the shifting boundary-line of wetness trying to nab long drives while running through tide. Making or missing circus catches, we tumbled gloriously into waves. Our Philco sat on a blanket in the sand, awaiting the jingle that inaugurated the day—
“Oh that Ballantine! / ale with brewer’s gold…. ”
After the rousing bars, Mel Allen announced the Yankees’ starting line-up. Exhausted salt-and-sand outfielders, we strode along the beach mimicking the lines. “Make the three-ring sign!” I shouted.

“Purity, body, and flavor”: Jon’s well-rehearsed response.

Baseball provided much of the glue between us, a ritual beyond our ramshackle lives. The Yanks were the one clan in which we could be true brothers. Dale Mitchell, Don Bollweg, Bill Renna, Phil Rizzuto, Ewell Blackwell, Johnny Sain were our uncles, Casey Stengel our grandfather. Many an afternoon we sat in our room with our radio, rooting together, filling time.

How it fanned our imagination (and bedroom chatter) that November when the Yankees and Orioles traded eighteen players, and both Don Larsen and Bob Turley came to our team!

To my chagrin my brother became the warrior-hero of P.S. 6, elected first-grade president, recipient of the highest marks in the
class. He was king of the punchball court too, regularly swatting the Spaldeen over the fence with his fist. Cultivating a tough-guy swagger, he dared the toughest yard bullies to fight him. Surrounded by cheering supporters, he won a number of after-school brawls in the alley, though I never viewed them (except at a distance once and quickly looked away). To have to do with him was unthinkable, so I kept a wary eye out for where he was, shifting accordingly to be somewhere else. At home he was a relentless, sweaty chunk that I could, at best, wrestle to a standstill, then hold onto for dear life.

There was a secret rite too. In lost watches of the night I would see him standing in the center of our room, punching the darkness, spitting out curse words, mouthing unintelligible rasps. When I asked him what he was doing, he told me he was fighting ghosts. I looked for shapes, Casper-like figures, but I saw nothing. It was chilling to watch, a wake-up call from my deepest dreams. I don’t know how often it happened, but he made the matter plain: “Every night.” The schoolyard champion never stopped fighting, even in sleep.

The ghosts were guises of his adversaries, notably a bully named Roy or Harry Pin. Jon knew that he had to fight him or be declared a coward forever. I never figured out if Harry Pin was a real kid or a made-up witch who stabbed him with a pin and then became a sorcerer who held him in thrall. There was no Harry Pin at P.S. 6 or Bill-Dave, and Jon did once tell me of such a dream.

“He’s not real,” I offered in my best psychiatric tone. “He’s a symbol for something else inside you.”

“You don’t understand. He
is
real; he’s not from P.S. 6, you don’t know him. He comes to Central Park. He challenges me. He calls me names. He won’t stop baiting me until I come after him. I can’t stand having him mock me like that, thinking he’s better than me, that he can get away with anything he wants.”

A dull clank or thud would wake me. Half-asleep, I would recognize him swinging at the air, dropping into a boxer’s stance, bobbing, jabbing, tossing a sudden overhand haymaker. It usually ended with him dropping to the ground and sobbing. It wasn’t because Harry hit back; it was, Jon said, because he had vanished; he evaporated before the matter could be resolved.

I didn’t realize at the time how my brother’s phantom combat was an exquisite representation of our plight. It was far too close to my life for me to recognize either its pathos or brilliance. It had nothing to do with me even as it had
everything
to do with me—it was his personal stamp on our shared terror, the only way he could admit it.

He knew that I was afraid because he was
just as afraid,
but he had turned the matter inside-out and, in so doing, thought to win, not just our make-believe games but the real one. It wasn’t a gimmick; he truly believed the answer was to take it to the enemy, to retaliate like a champion. He was saying, not all at once and not in these exact words, “Don’t cower before demons; don’t tell on them to some stupid adult, a faggot psychiatrist. Have some pride. Fight your own battles in the schoolyard. Confront them the way a soldier would. Be the Cisco Kid and smash them before they turn you into a bum.”

If he had heard the dungeon voice, he would not have become a passive dupe like me. He wouldn’t have keened in terror or given the phantom an edge, allowed it to suspect it could scare him. He would have socked his way to the source of its illusion, given it human form, and pounded till it pleaded for mercy. He would have tried to pulverize those stone stairs with the hardest punches and kicks he could muster, to prove his superiority—his invulnerability.

He loved to serenade at full volume,
“From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli,”
a catchy tune I shunned because the last thing I was was a Marine. But
Jon
was. Or he aspired to it so assiduously, to being Roy Rogers, Mickey Mantle, Sugar Ray Robinson, that he
felt
like them to me, grown men who didn’t even know him. Whenever I saw one of them on television, I noticed his uncanny resemblance to Jon.

I couldn’t escape Jonny-ness. By contrast, I was a yellow-bellied chicken.

When I told my parents about my brother’s nocturnal fisticuffs, they were furious.

“Look who’s talking!” scoffed my mother, “Mr. Know-It-All.”

“You spend too much time,” chimed in Daddy, “with that mouse Fabian. So now you’re a psychiatrist too! Well, you can
look forward to a lucrative life, you lazy
gonif.”

They thought I—rogue Richard—was trying to slander my brother, either making it all up or exaggerating wildly. How could anyone who threw touchdown passes and owned the Honor Roll punch at figments in the middle of the night? That would mean he was demented. Yet everyone knew he was sane, I was the crazy one. Case closed.

So vehemently did they accuse me of bad faith that I lost any sense of why I was bearing the news. I thought that I was trying to be helpful, but did I secretly relish his obligation in the dark? Was I unconsciously gloating by reporting it?

At heart I stood guilty before them. When I made a stand, it was not as a good guy unjustly accused but with steeled tenacity of an outlaw. That’s what I knew they saw, but that’s also what it felt like inside me. They didn’t see Jon as a swaggering ruffian, a brawling street rat; they saw young King David, the first Jewish president in the making. They saw me as a hooligan in cahoots with outsiders. All Richard’s victories were at the charity of their altriusm: inroads of a quisling.

It was never clear what my real crime was. They tried repeatedly to pass it off as connivance with Dr. Fabian, treachery and sedition at Grossinger’s, yet their judgment long preceded the psychiatrist or the conversion of Uncle Paul into my father. It was more like a Superman comic, as if I were the born adversary of my mother and Jon back on Krypton and now we lived on Earth.

One afternoon when I was about 11, Jonny 8, and Debby 4, we were walking with our mother down 96th toward the Park. Jon must have asked about his virtues because she was reciting them aloud: “You’re handsome … brave … courteous … strong … intelligent … and you have this special quality of leadership.”

Debby immediately chirped, “What am I?”

She was “beautiful, loving, and have a stage presence many actresses on Broadway would kill for. You’re another Shirley Temple.”

I refused to be part of this charade, but Jon was curious, as no doubt was I. “What about Richard?” he asked.

“Richard is…. ” She paused for a moment and then offered,
with a curious smile, “Richard is loyal.”

We continued walking, past the playground to the reservoir. I didn’t ask for elaboration nor did they.

It was such a strange answer, given that I was famously disloyal. Was she being sarcastic? Or did she mean that I was loyal to Grossinger’s and even in the service of the enemy it was an admirable trait?

Why was it my only virtue?

Looking back I wonder if maybe she knew who would be telling this tale today.

I went to Grossinger’s every major holiday and for the week before and after Chipinaw. My clearest memory is of the arrival, Richard Towers converted to his alter ego on the spot. I bounded from the car and raced down the road. Every tree and sign, even the dust I kicked up was special—it was Grossinger’s! My sneakers tore along the dirt twice as fast as anywhere else. I looked for Aunt Bunny at the house. If she wasn’t there, I sought her at the pool and beauty salon. When I glimpsed her, I felt waves of hope and well-being. The mere fact of her existence comforted me. She had such good spirit and an instinct for fun while, at the same time, she was the most serious and insightful adult I knew.

She liked to tell me silly things that happened when I was away, like a commotion she caused at a dinner party: “I shouted, ‘Throw Mr. Cats in the basement, or he’ll fight with the dog.’”

That was our cat’s name but, unknown to her, she had a guest that evening named Katz.

“He was standing there holding his drink. He said, ‘Please, don’t send me to the basement. I won’t fight with the dog.’” She did an imitation of him cringing, hands on her hips.

I remember once she came into a gathering with an aerosol can and I thought she was after bugs, but she began spraying pine air-freshener directly at Uncle Paul’s butt because he was farting silently. “I might as well,” she told her startled guests, “go to the source.”

I loved to monopolize her for conversations as she moved across her busy life. I kept her company in the kitchen, at the hairdresser,
in the garden, even at the bar while she drank gin-and-tonics. She listened to whatever I had to say: Hardy Boys plots, my dreams, Dr. Fabian’s comments, my fears, stuff from school and camp. She not only heard it all but shared her life with an intimacy that would have been unthinkable from my mother. She was more than a parent; she was my best friend.

I continued my exploration of the Hotel’s lobbies and underground passageways, every bungalow, office, plaza, tunnel, and path, until I knew the entire iconography. It was more than being impressed by famous scenery. I
was
Grossinger’s.

One evening Aunt Bunny invited Yankee pitchers Johnny Kucks and Tom Sturdivant and their wives to sit with us at our table in the Terrace Room. At the show’s conclusion a crowd was blocking the door. The players were in a hurry to get back to their baby-sitter, so I led us out a fire exit, up onto the roof, and across buildings on platform steps.

“Great route, kid,” Kucks said.

“I live here,” Aunt Bunny remarked, “and I didn’t even know these stairs existed.”

An ordinary day began in the dining room with waiter Jack Gallagher, the old Marine vet with the Popeye face who, in season, would go over each last Yankee game, adding his complaints about managerial strategy (as if Casey Stengel were a madman or in cahoots with crooks and gamblers). He also growled good-naturedly about the mess left by any of us kids from the last meal, usually deposited after he had cleaned up and retired to his room for siesta.

On the way to Jack’s station I would pick up all four morning papers. Usually I arrived so early that they were tied in steel bands by the service desk:
Daily News, Daily Mirror, New York Times, Herald Tribune.
I turned the bundles over in the lobby in high suspense to trace line scores as far as the innings went in rural editions, extracting single copies by a series of tugs. If there was a leftover
New York Post, World Telegram,
or
Journal American
, I grabbed that too. Hard to believe, but there were seven New York dailies then, four morning,
three evening. When necessary, Jack provided the final score with a recap. He would be in street clothes and suspenders, enjoying his own breakfast, so I’d wait on myself.

In the walk-in pantry refrigerator I’d mix boysenberries, raspberries, blueberries, peaches—whatever was available in the serving vats—and put them on Rice Krispies, Corn Kix, All Bran, or Cheerios. Dozens of each brand were stacked in single-serving boxes in the far corner of the dairy section, waiters converging there at hit-and-run speeds. Sometimes a new kind appeared like Frosted Flakes or Special K.

Then I’d petition waffles at the grill and occasionally sample a lunch dessert while waving hi to the bakers. My sense of entitlement was implicit, but I tried not to be a brat; I was diligently courteous and respectful. In summer I’d cut a giant slab of watermelon and, after the meal, walk alongside pansy-and-geranium beds, spraying seeds and smelling the scented air. This was my territory! A voice inside continually reminded me how incredible it all was, to get to be Richie Grossinger, blasting it at evocations from Bill-Dave and P.S. 6 who knew me as Richie Towers: “Look at this, Freddie Meyers, Andy Pfeiffer, Phil Wohlstetter!”

Some days I would take the house bus to my father’s bowling alley in town and stay there for hours, rolling game after game, trying to beat my successive tallies. It was yummy and peaceful compared to playing against Jon. I liked the giant score-sheet pads with their rows of clean fat squares for one’s accumulating sum, codes for spares and strikes—the former (a slant) if you knocked all of them over with two shots, usually by a fortuitous ricochet; the latter (an “x”) if you got them down on one roll, that rare pin-exploding concussion.

I made individual trips to visit relatives in their separate cottages: Aunt Lottie and Uncle Louie, Jay’s grandparents; my father’s sister Aunt Elaine, her husband Uncle David, and their children, Susan and Mark; deaf Uncle Harry and Aunt Flo who ran an antique shop next door to us and shouted fitful syllables as they pantomimed a butter dish or china platter they were giving me for free to bring to my mother.

Doing my rounds of family and friends was the heart of my Grossinger’s ritual. The dour troublemaking kid from New York proved an amiable, cheerful sprite as he marched through lobbies smiling and waving. I prided myself on knowing everyone’s names—clerks in shops, veteran waiters and waitresses, bus drivers and members of the maintenance crew, Uncle Eli and his tennis pros, Uncle Abe and the athletic staff, all the lifeguards, chefs, bakers, even janitors and dishwashers. These were my people.

My main conversational buddy was Nat Fleischer, the staff hypnotist, a man who knew a great deal about symbols and dreams. In fact, he lectured on Sigmund Freud to assembled guests in the lobby. I’d watch him put volunteers into trances and instruct them to blurt out stupid remarks and kiss strangers. At meals he and I talked about psychotherapy and the strange case of Bridey Murphy who, in a hypnotic trance, had recalled a prior life in Ireland.

Nat liked to mimic Morey Bernstein’s technique. “He was an amateur, but he had the perfect cadence, the perfect style of repetition, just the right tone: ‘I will talk to you again. I will talk to you again in a little while. I will talk to you again in a little while. Meanwhile your mind will be going back, back, and back until it picks up a scene, until, oddly enough, you find yourself in some other scene, in some other place, in some other time, and when I talk to you again you will tell me about it. You will be able to talk to me about it and answer my questions. And now just rest and relax while these scenes come into your mind….’ What a routine! What a goddamn brilliant routine! The guy was an artist, a genius. No wonder something happened, but what the hell was it?”

The
Mirror
ran daily accounts of their scribe’s search through nineteenth-century Ireland for traces of the original Bridey Murphy, but they were unsuccessful, each day a fresh letdown or setback. By then I wondered if the link Dr. Fabian couldn’t find in me, the terrible thing that had happened, occurred in another place, another time too. I wanted the reporter to succeed, to prove that we had been other people once, had lived prior lifetimes that were unconscious now. It was such a spooky thing, much more
mysterious and haunting than the secret in the attic or the sign of the twisted candles.

But Dr. Fabian had laughed off Bridey Murphy, and Nat shared his view. “I didn’t expect them to find her,” he confessed one morning as he offered me some of his lox on poppyseed rolls, “but then what did she see, Richard?” While he seemed unwilling to admit it could have been a past life, at least he knew it was
something.
He agreed with me that stuff like reincarnation was more interesting than the stunts in his show, but he said the guests would revolt if he talked about it: “I’d wake them from their dazed stupors for which they are paying good money. Your father would fire me. This is a Jewish resort hotel, not CCNY or Milton Erickson’s clinic.”

The director of daytime activities was Daddy’s much-maligned successor, Lou Goldstein; he ran not only Simon Says shows but general participation comedy in the lobby. I’d try to observe him surreptitiously for, if he glimpsed me spying, he’d always embarrass me. “There goes the owner,” he’d say, and everyone would turn around and look at me. “Don’t let him fool you. He’s a midget.”

I wrestled and ran with Boy, spent hours brushing and feeding him. Then one visit during fourth grade, I arrived with Joe to hear he was lost, had been missing for over a month. I went out searching the far reaches of the grounds, even into neighboring forest. Frank Hardy and Rick Brant wouldn’t fail at this. But, in the farthest parking lot at the bottom of a hill with garbage, I found only another dead dog, and the horror of that ended my hunt.

Miltys Stackel was my best adult friend. He was perhaps six-foot-ten and two-hundred-and-seventy-five pounds. He had come to the mountains as a barnstorming basketball star and settled at Grossinger’s as proprietor of the combination drugstore/coffee shop we called the canteen—a miniature Jessie’s Jip Joint with soda fountains, ice-cream bins, and an adjacent TV room.

Milty was a pushover—the source of candy bars, toys, games, sports magazines, comics, and sundry beguiling items. It was all free; family members just put their signature on a dollar-size charge slip that Milty tore from a pad. Michael and I used to joke that he
drank two milkshakes for every one he sold—and these were not ordinary shakes; he would fling scoops of butter pecan, vanilla, coffee, strawberry, peach, and whatever else we requested into a silver canister before locking it onto the beater. Even Bluto couldn’t have sucked that mortar through a straw.

Not only did Milty not object to our raiding his larder, he encouraged us to dig into fresh stacks of every imaginable comic while he was still unpacking them from manufacturers’ cartons. He saved dozens of
Heckle and Jeckle
for his personal stash because he adored those daffy crows, black birds with wide eyes and gigantic beaks. A flip through his archive showed them as dentist and patient, hot-dog vendor and customer, twin waiters (one holding the other up by the feet as he took the order), bookends with sombreros, golfers playing with brooms and placing an 18th-hole marker over a garbage can.

Upon petition for a half hour at a time Milty would leave his post and toss me fly balls on the lawn. Back and forth I’d go, diving on the grass, asking him to put them just over my head, to the left, to the right, high in the air. My side ached, my heart thumped, my legs were wobbly, but I kept pushing—one more catch—one more … my mind and body primed for either a fling to the side or a dash and plummet backward. I missed plenty and had to chase balls into bushes and across the road, but the great plays more than made up for those—a treasure in the tip of the webbing as I dove or jumped, then tumbled and held on. It was ecstasy, just me and that white stitched pellet, the tug of interrupted zing, proof of a perfectly timed leap or plunge on a planet of grass and sky.

“Don’t you ever quit?” he’d say.
“You’re
running and I’m beat.” Finally, I’d give myself permission to collapse into the sweet throb of my own heart, the cool shade.

After I got a box camera I badgered Milty for free film and developing. Then I trooped the Hotel grounds looking for compositions to shoot: bluish shelves of fungi, sky through leaves, reflections on puddles. For one whole roll I set coconut-covered marshmallow puffs next to hydrangeas that resembled them in color and shape—I wanted to show my stepfather I could make ads too.

In the winter, snow piled up atop wrinkled red berries on bushes, turning them into cherry ice-cream sundaes, so I shot different angles of those. Then I took pictures of dripping icicles against the blue. When a roll was done, twelve exposures, I’d tighten and glue the strip at the end so stray light didn’t get in; then I’d bring the spool to the canteen. Milty would drop it into an envelope on which he scribbled my name, then set the packet in a stack of others like it for the lab’s delivery man.

I eagerly awaited the return of the fat package with its glossy relics of my compositions. It was always a surprise—what shots came out just as I expected (or even better), which ones lost pizzazz in transposition to a flat surface, which showed an inadvertent blur or light leak. One unintentionally blurred garden view made such a nice rainbow that it was my favorite on the roll. After that, I began lying on my belly, lens up against a dandelion or buttercup so that the bloated orange or yellow transferred its flavor to a meadow of wild flowers beyond.

I even photographed big Milty from down low, aiming straight up into a distortion of his basset-hound face.

In fifth grade I made a Mars scrapbook and wanted to get my own picture of the planet, however faint and blurry, so I went out on a December night when the red dot sparked as bright as I had ever seen it. Milty came along with the longest flashlight he could find (five batteries). Although I told him it wouldn’t help, he insisted on shining it up in the sky while I held lens open on time exposure. “A little more light” he said, “couldn’t hurt.”

A couple of times a winter Irv Jaffee, a former Olympic speed skater, put on a fox costume and whizzed along the ice with dollar bills, fives, tens, and twenties pinned to his fur. Kids had to chase him around the rink and try to get near enough pull off a president as he feinted and swirled. I never nabbed a single one, as the gold medalist zigzagged and spun through our grasps, though I came tantalizingly close, fingers glancing off paper.