New Moon (20 page)

I remember the delivery of laundry every Friday: fat bundles wrapped in crisp brown paper, heaved from the back of a rickety truck onto the center of the campus. Each bore a rude number in black crayon. We hunted among the digits for ours. They weren’t Christmas presents, but there was a merry quality to such pudgy, amorphous wads. The smaller cubes could be lugged back by a single person, but the largest took two or three of us, often busting as we carried them, leaving trails of socks and underpants. Occasional mispacked bras and girls’ underwear led to further slapstick and merriment.

Stashes of comics piled in campers’ cubbies, beatitudes beckoning a stray glance: a rocket blasting out its innards as an astronaut floats above Saturn in his space suit; a man and a woman submerged in test tubes attended to by tentacled monsters with two tiers of vertical eyes each; men beside their vehicle on the surface of a Martian moon under the giant Red Planet crisscrossed with canals; alien creatures with crinkled green heads like external brains, emerging from a spaceship while in the background flying saucers stream out of a larger saucer silhouetted against a yellow moon.

As we lay on our beds for rest period, wasps whined at screens and the scent of grass mowers perfumed the air beyond. We were in a diaspora we could hardly gauge, seamless and bottomless in all directions.

For tear-out camp money (a booklet of different-colored pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters), monitors from the O.D.’s shack sold us candy—Almond Joy, Spearmint Leaves, or Mallow Cups—from manufacturers’ boxes. We ate and read to the narrative buzz of the ballgame. Our respite ended when the bugle blared, calling us to the next activity.

On stormy nights we converged on the armory for movies. Boys and girls bustled in through separate doors in yellow or orange gear, looking alike until the girls took off their round hats and shook loose their hair. Rain-wear, moisture, and gender gave the room a plasticky sachet recalling other storms. O.D.s passed around candy bars; then the lights went out and on the screen flashed the credits
for some black-and-white spy movie or, on a number of occasions,
It Came from Outer Space
(the camp owned a recycled repertoire). Events on the screen notwithstanding, the room was a bedlam of whispers, whistles, and shouts. As the first pretty actress appeared, a bunch of girls hollered in unison, “Judy,” and broke into giggles, then “Barry and Ellen,” and, from the boys’ side, “Tom in the shower” …whistles and hoots.

Dave Hecht, the unpopular owner, was regularly evoked. A surly, plump tyrant, he invaded camp events like a cartoon mogul. A prominent attorney during the rest of the year, he seemed to enjoy firing counselors for momentary indiscretions, often with a flamboyant gesture like an umpire banishing an offending player. During the major theatrical production one year, his daughter Lynn, acknowledgedly stunning, kissed an actor on the mouth. Dave came up on stage and interrupted the play; there he reduced her to tears. The maiden appearance of the space monster always brought the same collective outcry of his name.

As campers performed skits, short plays, and vaudeville in the armory, Dave was routinely portrayed by an actor with a painted mustache and a pillow stuffed under his pajama top.

During talent shows, my bunkmate Barry put on blackface. Every muscle straining, he blew Louie Armstrong out his trumpet. Later in the program a tiny girl with a winsome voice sang a cappella:
“When you walk through a storm, / keep your head up high, / and don’t be afraid of the dark.”
The boys around me guffawed, but I felt transported.

At the end of each day’s activities we were summoned to a trademark Chipinaw ritual. In the armory (moths rattling in ceiling lamps), on an outdoor field at twilight (stars beginning to appear), a counselor would announce it was time for “Friends” followed by “Taps.” A few kids would groan, but we put our arms around each other, forming a long chain of all of us, and then swung back and forth in place, our voices in and out of unison:

“Friends, friends, friends, / we will always be.”

Ridiculous but irrefutable. No matter what we did to one another during the day, how much we razzed and tormented, how grimly we competed and fought, something about this comical,
affectionate ritual locked our hearts together.

The camp was pure blatancy, avoidance of anything inward or mysterious, denial of loneliness and sorrow. But joined in a chain against each other’s boninesses and individual weights, we were obliged to acknowledge how awkward and vulnerable our situation really was. There was no avoiding one another: boys bumping into each other’s bodies and moods. The most competitive, aggressive athletes had to give up some of their bluff and join the others in a prayer that said that none of the rest mattered … that we were all one. It may have been lip service, like good sportsmanship, but I experienced it as if we were all on a spaceship, hurtling together through the big dark:

“Whether in fair or in foul stormy weather, / Camp Chipinaw will keep us together.”

Decorum never held up. People would pull too hard and parts of the line collapsed in heaps—or someone stopped swaying and we’d crunch and fall into each other’s laps. I was yanked to one side and, with no return tug from the other, toppled back clownishly.

Then we stood and sang the other song that made me think of a planet in space:

“Day is done. / Gone the sun, / from the earth, from the sky…”

We marched back to our bunks, got undressed, into PJs, and lay in bed telling stories across the room; “Taps”—the bugle—would sound, from camp to camp across Silver Lake. Mothwings flapped around bulbs until counselors doused the lights and hushed us.

“All is well. / Safely rest. God is nigh.”

Cozy in bed I broadcast my position to the gods and warned them—you sent me here, now watch over me. This playful blasphemy (in place of the rabbi’s prayer) eased my body and tucked me in.

In my third summer Jonny began as a Midget. Homesick, he sought me out during free play and I taught him Rafterball and my armory game. It was strange that he should suddenly be so close to Grossinger’s—a place that had everything to do with me and nothing with him—but my mother and stepfather identified with its world as much as they vilified it. They never considered another camp for
Jon. He joined me for the dispensation of Grossinger’s food, an assumption of privilege that made me furious because he refused to acknowledge their source. I meanwhile pretended to be generous, but he saw through my magnanimity, that I was rubbing his nose in how posh my other family was. Soon he was rebuffing “your rotten illegal food.” That was okay with me. Jon was a stuck-up goody-goody, and any connection between him and Grossinger’s weirded me out. Let him remain a Nevele acolyte—I was a scion of the Big G, pinnacle of the Catskills.

Its prestige was corroborated one day when I got a call from Uncle Paul. He told me he had a big surprise in store. I knew what it was because it was All-Star break, but I pretended not to be able to guess. Then he said he was going to visit with two New York Yankees.

Word of this event turned Chipinaw upside-down, making me an instant celebrity. Kids put on facetious shows of friendship: “I was always Richie’s buddy, right? Remember when …” and then they’d invent something.

On the anticipated afternoon, activities were cancelled; all Chipinaw mobilized on the hill. I ran past the camp’s boundary, an act strictly verboten at a less mythic time, and stared down the road in the direction of Grossinger’s. It seemed so unreal that I was worried it couldn’t happen.

They were forty-five minutes late, an hour and a half late, when finally a black limo came crashing out of the horizon, suspending time. Uncle Paul emerged with an ear-to-ear smile; behind him were pitchers Mickey McDermott and Don Larsen.

“Are you in charge here?” Larsen teased as I paraded around, announcing the arrival through a megaphone.

They stood by the flagpole where they demonstrated plays and answered campers’ questions.

Jonny was astonished. It was proof of the power of villains, that they had access even to the Yankees. I had told him about Whitey Ford and he had seen Yogi Berra’s postcard, but Uncle Paul standing there in public with me, McDermott, and Larsen was a reversal of fortune he found hard to swallow. Then Uncle Paul invited him
to join us. No one but me saw his glare, cavalier swagger, and look of wounded pride and resignation.

Unexamined modes of discipline and competition permeated Chipinaw. It was as though we were on a forced march under commanding officers, no particular reason, just a state of reality. Many of my preceptors were a type I encountered nowhere else during my childhood. They blended Park Avenue Synagogue’s piety with a drill-sergeant obduracy as if we were all in boot camp—a style likely borrowed from TV sitcoms and war movies since none of them had been in the service. They spouted regular disdain for Arabs, fags, and “colored people,” a faux hysterical patter of taunts, imitation dialects, and unabashed bigotry.

When almost four decades later a Jewish settler gunned down Palestinian parishioners in a mosque, I imagined that I had served under the guy in the summers of my youth—not the same zealot, of course, but his forerunners, boasting about turning rifles on Arabs (or niggers) while aiming their imaginary weapons at us. I can’t begin to do justice to the blend of sanctimony and sadism. Yet no one could express disapproval or rebel for risk of reprisal, i.e., getting smashed.

The head counselor and ultimate authority of Chipinaw boy’s camp, Abbey West, was a model of rectitude and decorum. A high-school principal and semi-pro basketball referee from New Jersey, he was a stern, towering foreman with a smattering of gray hair. Older than the rest of the counselors, Abbey lived beyond the infirmary in a four-room cabin with his wife Dorey and son and daughter. On my father’s urging, he extended an open invitation to me back in my Midget days, and I continued to call at his dwelling, year after year, even after it was clear that it was the lair of the lion.
No one
ventured there unless summoned for interrogation.

Yet Abbey’s cabin was Chipinaw’s secret treasure. It provided sanctuary in the midst of hazing—plus, the best way to deflect the lion’s ire was to confess openly and entertain him with my truancies. I would periodically stop by the hut and show him and Dorey my current book or explain the rules of an invented pastime, trying to
earn tacit consent, even praise for my devotion. I found him usually (but not always) receptive and willing to overlook my absence from wherever I was supposed to be. He might be astonished, but I could tell not only that was he fond of me but amused by the creativity of my rebellion. Though he never explicitly condoned my actions, counselors seeing me drop by the court and leave unscathed were loath to interfere further.

As Dorey poured lemonade and offered cookies, I recounted local happenings and offered interpretations. Dr. Fabian’s apprentice gabbed precociously with adults in ways that other kids and counselors didn’t—it wasn’t exactly an era of inner probing or naming projections.

By mirroring the psychoanalyst, I touched a compassionate chord in men who otherwise practiced rigorous stringency, so I occasionally turned the most unlikely tyrants into allies. A stern magistrate to most, to me Abbey was a salvagable despot, albeit one unimpressed by my reports of hectoring and bigotry, offering only a “what else is new?” shrug.

Chipinaw rules set off a couple of hours after lunch and nap each weekday for “Optional Period.” We could pick anything we wanted but were permitted no more than three consecutive days for any one activity. Choices ranged from swimming and archery to theater, arts and crafts, nature cabin, etc.—pretty much anything under adult supervision. I took to filling out my morning’s card for “baseball” every time. Counselors told me that a third repeat wasn’t allowed, but they couldn’t figure out how to stop me. Even when our group leader crossed out my entry and wrote in an alternative, I showed up at baseball anyway—and the guy in charge always included me in the game.

The perplexity was: I didn’t like baseball that much. The long innings of batters and fielders turned monotonous and banal: players shouting, running the bases and chasing balls as if the outcome mattered after so many iterations. I hankered for the relief of arts and crafts or nature, even volleyball and tennis. But as a practice beyond pleasure, baseball chaperoned me through Chipinaw (and
Bill-Dave) like a magical cloak.

I seemed to have to be both special and in peril to be anything and, though baseball wasn’t really dangerous, my involvement in it reflected the degree of jeopardy I felt.

The beauty of the situation—and my smokescreen—was that baseball’s rituals were so commonplace and legitimate in fifties America that it was the perfect subterfuge. I could conduct another ceremony in their guise and be totally screened, to would-be authorities and enforcers, to naysayers of all ilks, to myself as well. My mother had declared I was loyal and so I was.

But my compliance was mutiny, my dedication blasphemy. My version of baseball was an unconscious parody of their own lukewarm commitment to
everything:
everything they espoused, baseball included.

We weren’t allowed to follow our infatuations to their conclusion, cultivate real courage, seek actual initiations. We never got close. Everything then was a joke or a contest; incipient mantras, visions, and divine riddles were ignored or mocked. If someone had managed to smuggle yoga or
t’ai chi ch’uan
into Chipinaw circa 1955, we would have laughed, goofed off, and turned it into the heebie-jeebies.

Until I could recognize sacraments in other forms, baseball was my compass—and even after I developed more refined skills and asanas, it was in my blood too deeply to purge. With its daily gematria, devotional precepts, and metaphysical subtexts, it kept my mind occupied and provided prayer beads against obsessive thoughts. Baseball was just as obsessive,
but that made it the antidote.

My mother mocked me by saying I “loved” baseball, implying (as I approached teen years) that I loved it more than girls, hence was some kind of nebbish. But it wasn’t that at all. Baseball was the cachet through which an innocence of love was preserved, transposed to beyond her intervention.