New Moon (28 page)

I loved the nearness of the starry vault, the whisper of rain on cloth. I considered it one of the all-time highlights of Chipinaw when we were visited by three skunks in the middle of the night. Everyone in the tent froze while the creatures poked about, raising themselves on front paws to look into garbage cans and trunks, knocking over bottles, disappearing into piles of clothes and under beds. On the whispered count of three we rolled across our blankets and scattered into the night. Then we ran around yelping and giggling, waking our neighbors.

That was the summer of 1958 when kids first began to talk about girls and “making out.” But we were fourteen years old, and it mostly rumor and hearsay. I experienced my incipient sexuality only in fantasies and allusions.

Bearing an especial aura of seductiveness was a rock ’n’ roll tune (single guitar plinks in the background) that went,
“Don’t go home, my little darling, / please don’t leave the party yet…. ”
I would picture a girl in a slinky dress, wrapping her arms around me, keeping me there…. That had an allure like nothing else, or at least since the spell cast by Annie Welch.

I had never heard the term “getting laid” before the summer, so it conjured all sorts of beguilingly intimate (and impossible) acts around the topology and logistics of an egg before I learned that it simply meant sex, as in fucking.

Horace Mann kids on the subway would report on girls who had made out with them, swapping lurid details. Trying to picture the deeds boasted of, whether hyperbolic or real—though always presented as real—was excruciating: chimeras as succulent and irresistible as they were beyond imagination. Surrogate sensations wafted over me, and then the song….
“Can’t you see I came to the party, / ’cause I knew that you’d be here…. ”

But who was she? I tried to picture her; she was a different girl each time, waiting at the party that never happened for the boy who never came, who dared not even kiss make-believe Annie Welch on another world. It was a wave that would not break, that was made out of everything that was me becoming everything that was not me—and it was suddenly what I wanted more than anything.

Chipinaw Seniors had regular socials with the girls’ camp. Trooping with Jay and Barry to the first one, I hoped that Viola Wolfe’s lessons might be of some use, but as soon as we arrived at the armory older kids were dancing with all the girls and we were left standing along the benches trading wisecracks. Only one guy in our tent had any success—a red-haired sweet-talker named Alan who was new that summer. A clumsy athlete with an affected air, he took up with a tall dirty blonde named Joan Snyder, pert face, friendly eyes. I didn’t remember when I became infatuated with her, but soon her image filled my life. I would sit by the side watching her dance with Alan, daydreaming as if I were back at P.S. 6.

In my main fantasy Joan was being persecuted by her counselor, so I snuck over to her bunk at night and called to her. She heard me and climbed out the window. “Who are you?” she wondered, but she was glad for the chance to escape.

We dashed for the woods. Angry counselors close behind us, we scrambled into the brush and lost them in a series of thickets and briars. Then we found our way through grottos and glens, alternately running and hiding. Through various twists of plot (including a return of my spaceship) I transported us to the jungle where we made our way past waterfalls, along canyons, and over mountains to the Amazon. There we built an
“African Queen”
and fled down a tributary.

Every detail of this fantasy was luminous to me, a trance made real by the meticulousness with which I evoked and fed its reverie. As I reenacted it each night, the grass became damp again, pools glowed in moonlight. Our flight through the brush became ever more serpentine, full of swerves and narrow escapes. The more vividly I rendered each object and event, the more spellbinding its effect until I was drawn into an enchantment more palpable and ecstatic than life.

Later in the summer, seniors went on a co-ed field trip to Ausable Chasm. At the souvenir shop after the boat tour, daring myself to do it, I bought a stuffed terrier and walked right up to Joan outside the bus where she was standing with other girls, Alan having left her to board the boys’ bus. I silently handed it to her. It was brash
and foolish. We had never spoken a word, but I had recreated her from effigy so often I couldn’t believe I didn’t know her. She took it in surprise, thanked me, and hurried onto the bus in a cluster of yakkity friends.

In another version of the daydream we fled the girls’ camp in a motorboat and then outraced pursuers to a raft camouflaged by my allies on the far side of the lake. There we followed tributaries of a previously unknown stream until we made it all the way to Grossinger Lake, a mere seven miles. I saw the Hotel’s buildings through her eyes as if for the first time.

I would lie in bed after Taps in a rapture of dramaturgy, cozy in pajamas, a wind in the forest matching internal sound effects, Mars red-tinged among glittering whites, the portentous notes of Taps fading, voices of counselors passing in the dark, the rescue about to get underway … as fresh and new as if it had never happened.

After I gave her the dog I arrived apprehensively at the next social. She danced with Alan as usual. Then suddenly she was heading my way. I was dumbstruck. I tried to look elsewhere, but her eyes were directly on me. She came right up and coolly asked, “You want to dance?”

I nodded. It was awkward putting my hands on her actual shoulder and waist as the record began, struggling to remember steps. None of the dancing at Chipinaw was particularly intimate, for Dave Hecht came around periodically with a tape measure and checked the distances of partners. Six inches was the minimum.

She didn’t evaporate; she was there and smiling at me, not the girl from my fantasies, but a girl. She told me that I was very nice but she was going with Alan, so she wouldn’t dance with me again after this time. I returned to my seat in a daze.

And in my mind Johnny Cash sang:
“I don’t like it, / but I guess things happen that way.”

At midweek movies I’d spot Joan Snyder across the armory, her presence transforming me, the adventure untold. A titillating aroma of Chipinaw girls in the room, I’d forget the film and sink into my fairy tale, leaving camp, starting again from the beginning … that
very night, racing through the woods, an owl whistling, moths fluttering at her screen.

And, yes, Phil Everly:
“Only trouble is, gee whiz, / I’m dreaming my life away.”

Two nights later some guys in the next tent claimed to have made it to the girls’ camp on what they called a “raid,” returning with lewd tales and a girl’s panties as proof. Their testimony beckoned vicariously, even if it was apocryphal. It was quite a poke through those woods, after all, and the girls’ bunks had monitors at night. But to go on even an imaginary raid you needed a girlfriend, so I stuck to my make-believe escapades.

Toward the end of the summer was an evening carnival at the girls’ camp. I was holding my camera with its fancy Honeywell strobe, and Joan Snyder came up to me as if out of nowhere, laughing, and said, “Goodbye,” and, “Guess what, I’m leaving early and going to Grossinger’s.” And then “Aren’t you going to take my picture?”

Yes … and that snapshot, utter blackness behind her, was all I ever saw again. She never came back to Chipinaw … and by the time I got to Grossinger’s she was gone. I had that picture of her—head thrown back, wide-eyed, quixotic, laughing then forever—until I left for college and my mother threw my scrapbooks away. Now I have only a memory of the picture.

In later years, though, I had a recurring dream of returning to New York City and looking through old phone books for “Joan Snyder.” She lived in a strange part of town. I finally had a date with her if I could find her. Depending on which version I dreamed, I would get off the subway at some deserted station uptown … buildings crumbling, their numbers missing. I wandered through parks with small chapels, crawled over rock piles, and walked up stairs of abandoned apartments to see only hag women cackling at me. I slunk invisibly through skid-row streets packed with hoodlums, armed gangs everywhere. It was like every place in the City I had been warned never to go, and had never gone; now their latencies were in full bloom, aroused and truculent.

I was in grave danger if a gang member spotted me, but before that happened I flagged the last bus out.

Even in my dreams about Joan Snyder, she never appeared.

In Third Form, the first year of high school, our classes moved to the gray edifice opposite the gym, Tillinghast Hall. I was placed in almost all Honors sections, my competence no longer a question. Horace Mann was my life—its classrooms where I earned my grades, its corridors where I met my friends, its auditorium where we sang hymns and heard senior speeches, its cafeteria where we gathered in groups to talk sports, philosophy, and politics over the daily fare, its teachers (“Sir!”) now familiar elders to petition and charm.

I advanced to Caesar in Latin, Tennyson and Sinclair Lewis, Geometry, and Biology with its white formaldehyde rats. We each had to slice open a wet furry body and pull out and identify its intestines, liver, kidney, heart, and vaguer organs. This was far more tangible a demonstration of reality than I was ready for, plus I didn’t like to think about how we came by so many rats.

During respites in the day a group of us took to heaving a baseball back and forth across the central campus. My main partner was a classmate named Steve, a flippant kid with a childlike face and freckles, one of the wise-guy jocks. I knew him mainly from Latin where he was struggling, his butchered translations earning Mr. Metcalf’s taunts and antics. Our teacher regularly slammed a paperweight on his desk to keep us alert and occasionally threw chalk or hardballs at the unprepared—he had a drawer of different-sized baseballs for this purpose and laggards had to duck whenever a side-armed toss went careening across a desk. Steve was his favorite target.

One afternoon, my classmate trailed me from the field and, out of the blue, invited me to his house in Scarsdale overnight for a party. It was the first such offer I had ever gotten—the risk of bedwetting a long-time deterrent—so the whole rest of that week seemed charged and buoyant.

On Saturday morning I took the train from Grand Central, past Harlem, into the countryside. Steve and his mother met me with a station wagon and drove us back to their house. From there he and I trekked to a neighborhood field and joined local kids in skying a hardball across the meadow.

Everyone was jiving, launching shots, making plays, hitting the cut-off man. I was in perfect rhythm, attentive to the moment, its impermanence making its auspiciousness more dear. I gave the ball everything I had that day, racing to intercept its pellet flight, rolling as I trapped it, jumping up and flinging it back in, acting as if I belonged. My life was somehow on the line in that ragtag game, if only I could time my breath, the arc of flight, the infinity of blue…. As usual I felt hopelessly complicated and obscure—Pinocchio’s dilemma: “I want to be a real boy!”

Dr. Friend would lecture on about alienation, trying to get me to acknowledge feelings of depression and anger as if these were now the clue in the embers. One day while I was talking about Joan Snyder, he startled me by asking if I had masturbated. I knew the word, but I didn’t know what it meant. He explained.

I couldn’t imagine more than my penis getting hard. He said that semen could spurt out too.

“Fantasies are imaginary,” I responded. “They’re not real enough to make something like that happen.”

“Oh yes they are,” he rejoined. “And you, of all people, should know that.”

He didn’t pursue it.

He wanted to wake me up, melt Pinocchio’s numbness and turn him into a real boy, and I wanted that too. But something was missing, some basic fact of life.

“Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”
That was it in a nutshell, clear as day, one unlikely afternoon
in Alfred Baruth’s English room, sending a chill down my spine. It needed no scholarly exposition, no psychiatric unravelling. Could Wordsworth have known something that Dr. Friend didn’t, born as he was more than a century before Freud?

Anyway, I would be dispatched at day’s end, back to the Towers apartment, and I sensed that it would take me half a lifetime to return to this dandelion field.

After dinner Steve led me upstairs to his room and we took places, me on the couch, him slouched on his bed, as we rehearsed translations for next week’s test. I knew he was failing the class, so I adopted the role of enthusiastic tutor, throwing my ballfield rhythm into Caesar’s Gallic campaigns, line by line, mimicking Metcalf’s renditions of onomatopoeia and the uses of the dative and ablative, hamming it up with the master’s husky metronome-like intonations. I was quite willing to give my friend everything I could in exchange for the gift of this day. Suddenly I noticed it was getting dark, “Hey what time is the party?”

“I forgot to tell you. It was cancelled.”

It meant nothing to him, but my heart sank at those words.

A moment later, with a mischievous smile he pulled a tape recorder from under the bed. He had made a copy of my performance and was going to use it for his homework. For the rest of our time at Horace Mann he thought that’s why he lost me as a friend.

Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” was my baptism, the awakening bell. Throughout the autumn of ’58 I made kinship with an autonomous literary voice, a timeless hit parade with compass to inspire across centuries beyond life and death. Its chart-toppers included John Donne’s blood-mingling flea, Walter de la Mare’s
“silver fruit on silver trees,”
Matthew Arnold’s
“naked shingles of the world,”
the wolf dog of Jack London’s
Call of the Wild,
the suicidal sleigh ride on which Edith Wharton sent Ethan Frome. It resonated in Willa Cather’s “precious, incommunicable past” and Emily Dickinson’s
“blue and gold mistake”
—a sixth sense for recovering cardinal runes and dissolving surface mirages. Such was the power of art to grant a fourteen-year-old safe passage, anywhere.

I was reading not just for graded study now but catharsis, for I intuited in myself the same mystery that drove Baruth’s authors to eloquences of revelation. Freud’s symbolic universe loomed large, but it was a façade. A more abstruse reality seeped from every courtyard light, Indian-summer tree and rooftop water tower, from flocks of birds crossing the last luminations of urban twilight. There was a realm of untapped wonderment, as big as the sky, and it conjured me through my turbulence and gloom.

I spent hours in the Museum of Natural History, passing from mural to mural, gazing at animals in dioramas of the Rockies … Africa … Alaska … the South American forest, the pygmy drawing his bow by a broken ostrich egg. Their stark, magnificent specificity reflected my mood. The Siberian tiger in his golden striped flesh against violet-dimmed winter was a force, though stuffed and mounted in artificial scenery, a force I acknowledged but could not name. His majesty—and that of mountain sheep and antelopes and snow leopard—held the key to the trance I was in.

“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves”
said it all by saying nothing. Alice in Nonsense-land, the world
did “gyre and gimble in the wabe.”
My vernacular Top Twenty was full of it’s inscrutable rapture. It was the Platters,
“tears I cannot hide,”
Ricky Nelson,
“and the only price you pay,”
Little Anthony,
“I’d gladly take you back / and tempt the hands of fate.”
What else was there but those hands of fate, that stranger across a crowded room?
“Who can explain it, who can tell you why? / Fools give you reasons, wise men never try.”

I opened most weekends with a Friday night concert before our parents got home. Alone with my Magnavox I put on one 45 after another and lay there suffused in the worlds of feeling they invoked. It was not so much their lyrics—although those uncannily paralleled my sentiments. No, it was that each tune-word combination was idiomatic and complete, a trace of something ineffable.

My song for those months was Cathy Carr’s “First Anniversary.” Her happy/sad tomboy voice spoke for Joan Snyder and my unlived self:

Though such sweet, perky simplicity seemed beyond me, it was everything I worshipped and wanted to be, wanted to find in the world. I would sprawl on the floor against my bed, in touch with a reverence, an incipient joy that, though not as familiar to me as languor or fear, seemed equally to lie at my core. It was, as Bobby Darin proposed, “
Every night I hope and pray”
—a prayer—and:
“Dream lover, until then, / I’ll go to sleep and dream again…. ”

Then those Photo Fair, gee-whiz-dreaming Everly Brothers; Paul Anka summoning three syllables of a teen goddess
“Di-an-a”;
Neil Sedaka, “Happy Birthday, Sweet Sixteen”
(“It’s just that you’ve grown up / before my very eyes);
Dion & the Belmonts:
“Now if you want to make me cry, / that won’t be so hard to do.
But the promise always, from Wordsworth to “Dover Beach” to Thornton Wilder: “ … the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning”; so Dion on cue:
“And if you should say goodbye / I’ll still go on loving you….”

How could lyrics be any more exquisite, more perfect? I melted my heart and voice into theirs, participating in a spontaneous force that supported and carried me along, as if melody were rich enough to hold Creation. Even the uncued silences between words resonated with undisclosed meanings.

“Each night I ask, the stars up above …”
—my echo drawling out the “s” and “r” and “v” even more than Dion, in total agreement: that it was sad but that it was also wonderful … that someday I would get to the bottom of this.

There was one song in which the deceptively simple words had no discernible connection to their power over for me:

I’ve a-laid around / and played around / this old town too long,

Summer’s almost gone, / winter’s comin’ on.

Which winter? What town?

I saw a village out west. I heard the distant echo of “Winter Wonderland,” my mother in her black velvet overcoat, walking on new-fallen snow of Central Park in a landscape that seemed before even Lenape longhouses and canoes, a panorama of childhood in a divining jar through whose opacity crystals fell.

But it was more than that. Just the word “winter” was evocative—the feeling of cold flakes on my skin, sleigh rides with Daddy, steering around the Park’s titanic outcroppings, colored lights street after street.

Dr. Friend would review the song with me by stanza:

“It’s your brother, of course,” he noted cursorily, an obvious association for which I took his word.

Yes, Jonny it must be. So obvious. Yet it didn’t ring true. Right name, wrong tone. The “Johnny” in the song was some sort of bandit hero. He was an offshoot of
“Oh, my papa,”
Eddie Fisher singing his requiem,
“To me he was so wonderful …,”
the sword of cancer shadowing those very words … “another place/another time” (Bridey Murphy). Everything so convoluted, so inextricable!

“What about the chain gang, Richard? Do you picture your family in New York as a prison in which your brother is trapped? Your own father can call you home but not your brother who can’t leave his family.”

Maybe. Then, does that mean I feel sorry for Jon? Is there some other Jonny hidden inside my brother who would be my friend in better circumstances? Are we westerly bound bandits in another place, another time? Does the song call for him from behind its yearnful drone and jaunty cowboy voice?

Not enough! Still not enough! This was Planet Mars big, big as the ocean sending waves across itself, cosmic-ray big, big as all the cities on all the stars in the universe. Or, maybe it was just the prophecy of escape, that someday I was going to walk out of this place into my destiny. A dark November day bearing the amulet of my birth sign….

Soon after getting my Minolta, I became friends with the president of the Horace Mann camera club. His name was Billy; he was short
with a big owl-like face, and I liked him because he was kind and well-spoken as we ranged over topics on our subway route home. He didn’t talk about sports or girls and parties—a relief. As we sat in facing seats, I blabbed on about my mother and stepfather, the family at Grossinger’s, the scene at the Hotel.

The first time we got together outside of school or the IRT was a Saturday gathering of the camera club—a trek through Greenwich Village, each of us stocked with recycled canisters of bulk film from 35-millimeter rolls—less than a penny a shot. We loaded them ourselves inside black boxes we all owned—a giant reel in one compartment, a spool, tin capsule, and clip-top assembled in a tiny adjoining one after attaching the exposed leader with scotch tape to the spindle and rotating the crank.

Moving as a group, we photographed derelicts, kids at play, and generic urban landscapes, occasionally isolating car tail-lights into funny faces, racing to be the first to find and frame a qualifying vehicle. Afterwards Billy and I went to his apartment where his stepfather orchestrated a wide-ranging dinner debate on world events.

I couldn’t imagine reciprocating at my apartment, so I came up with a more audacious plan: I asked Aunt Bunny if I could invite Billy to Grossinger’s.

“Of course. I think you’re old enough to have a guest along.” While conceding that my father would probably object, she brushed it off, “He’d just be scared that Billy would trip over a rock and his parents would sue us—that’s all.”

My promise such a thing wouldn’t happen caused her to laugh out loud.

Ray picked me up after school on the Friday of spring vacation and headed downtown to collect my stepmother at her psychiatrist. As she emerged from the canopy I ran from the car to greet her. She was whistling and didn’t stop, nodding hello in lieu of words. She asked if I could guess why. I couldn’t, so she told me: Dr. Corman was leaving the building at the same moment, and she was letting him know I was her son too, a version of
“Yessir, that’s my baby.”