New Moon (62 page)

Fred heard about a community of black Jews called the Gheez living in the woods by Callicoon. He thought it might be too dangerous to investigate, but then he shouldn’t have mentioned it. I edged the Lincoln to the end of the last dirt road and walked a quarter mile to their encampment. They were delighted by a press visit and took me on tour of their huts and temple, all the time spieling gospel and Biblical history. They had a gigantic queen whom they carried on a litter, but I saw only pictures of her and the throne. Fred published most of my account, removing my exotica about Egypt.

Next I picked another remotely situated institution, a boarding school called Summer Lane modelled after the radical Summer Hill schools of England. The director, a towering young minister, met me at the gate, then escorted me past clusters of suspiciously staring boys. Reverend George von Hillshimer was a Civil Rights activist who had been on the recent Freedom marches in the South. From his collar up he was a priest, but otherwise he was a charismatic gang leader, officiating over teens in leather jackets and bracelets, clusters of them dragging on cigarettes around low sheds. In the hour that followed, George proved capable of spontaneous oratory as well as bursts of startling ferocity, especially when something more untoward than tobacco caught his eye. He seemed more dangerous than the kids.

For the remainder of July and August I left the newspaper office once a week at noon and drove back roads to Summer Lane to share sandwiches with Reverend George in his grove. We talked Lawrence
and James Baldwin, and he read to me from his own political and philosophical writings. “It is crucial,” he admonished, “not to live a typical American adolescence, which is self-indulgent and conscienceless. Go through life as a hero. James Baldwin dreamed of ‘another country’ without prejudice and human-inflicted pain. Well, he knew—and we all know—it doesn’t exist. Your generation has to make it from scratch.”

My clippings delighted Lindy. “I am of course jealous you get to range through far-out and meaningful territory. And they support you? I’m astonished.”

Well, not always. I sent her my typewritten editorial about the presidential candidates in which I compared Lyndon Johnson to a man driven by a malign unconscious force, as the tides by the moon—the moon being Barry Goldwater, whose war-mongering had purportedly stampeded LBJ into sending troops to Vietnam. I closed: “It is nightfall in America!” Fred had refused to publish it.

“You’re too damn radical for me, boy,” he said. “This stuff is downright depressing.”

To the amusement of the staff, Fred and I engaged in ongoing ideological debates. Head of the county Civil Defense agency, he insisted that atomic bombs were no big deal. “It’s just one more weapon,” he informed me. “It’s been the same since the caveman. You invent a weapon; then someone finds the defense for it—so you build a bigger weapon. You can’t halt that parade. Atomic bomb’s just a big bomb, but it’s not
more
than a bomb.”

I was glad it was only the Civil Defense (and the
Democrat
) that Fred oversaw; still his rhetoric frightened me. I feared instant holocaust if Goldwater were elected, and the fact that a union guy like Fred could support his position on armaments was disconcerting. Leo Marx had tried to convince us that the liberal tradition of Thomas Jefferson and Adlai Stevenson
was
America, its ascendance inevitable, but outside of Amherst and New York City I never seemed to encounter it.

Driving country roads back and forth to Callicoon and newspaper assignments I visited sleepy antique shops and, on my salary,
bought old jugs and lamps, which I used, along with props left over from Hotel banquets (including a plastic potted tree), to decorate my room. I created an informal shrine in which I hung Klee and Miró prints. I lay in my arbor, reading Olson and Nabokov and enjoying the sounds of Phi Psi: Bob Dylan, Jim Kweskin, Dave Van Ronk.

“Change or lose me,” Lindy had warned. Since she had gone back to Steve I did not feel disloyal noticing a pretty waitress at a station near the family section. She was a heavy-boned girl with an Eastern European face. Casting subterfuge glances her way, I tried to discern if she was really as attractive as I thought she was. She
was
—her appeal gave no ground. A riveting actress with rolling hips and a pouty stare, she lugged trays more fully loaded than most of the men, delivering fancy chow from her platters with a sulky, imperial demeanor. She was charismatic, impossible not to look at.

We seemed to catch each other’s eye more than I was willing to admit, telling myself those self-conscious smiles were part of her routine act, not for my benefit. Then one night in early July after the dining room had closed and she was cleaning her station, I approached cautiously until she looked up, a twinge (perhaps) of “Finally!” in her moue.

My role at Grossinger’s had become totally ambivalent to me. Whereas once I took my identity from being the owner’s son, now I was embarrassed by ruling-family privilege and tried to downplay my affiliation. Yet it was part of the courage I drew on in approaching her—that, plus pure beguilement and the reckoning in Lindy’s letter.

Her name was Jean, nickname Smokey. Polish Catholic, from Pennsylvania, she was working for her college tuition and despised the Hotel and its guests (as was evident to anyone with half a brain).

“Yes,” she said, she’d love to go out to dinner, “off the grounds presumably.”

Through July, Smokey and I saw each other regularly, supping at local inns, going to movies, exploring backroads, listening to records in my room. After two such dates I kissed her while dancing and she kissed me back. Then we stopped dancing and lay on the bed
making out.

We hiked to a meadow on the edge of the woods and wound together in the grass. Her dress was shiny over her large butt and hips, her perfume pepperminty. I was encouraged by her sighs and rough hugs, but she broke off, jumped to her feet with a hearty laugh, and brushed away the weeds.

Schuy had gone with his family to their summer home on Martha’s Vineyard to race his sailboat. He was working with his Psi U buddy Larry in a restaurant as a dishwasher:

Coaxing a few days off from the
Democrat,
I drove the Thruway north past Albany to the Mass Pike, then veered south of Boston. Beach towns to my left, I caught sudden quaffs of salt air, found the Terminal, parked, and caught a ferry.

Larry met me at the dock, and we went straight to the fabled restaurant. When I saw Dona I fell in love with her too. She was a brown-haired, sun-tanned Jersey girl with a 1920s style reminiscent of a co-ed strutting the Charleston, Schuy poked his head out of the kitchen in his dishwasher’s costume and greeted me clownishly.

After closing, the four of us went to hear Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band. It was a small club, the performers breathtakingly close—thimbles on washboards, honking jugs:
“Washing-ton at Valley Forge, / Freezing cold and up spoke George…. ”
Between sets I edged over to Kweskin and mentioned Phi Psi, where he had played before my time. “Hangin’ out with Mr. Tripp!” he proclaimed with several nods. “Well, give him my best. Maybe you guys can come up with some bread and get us back to Amherst.” Then he sidled away.

The next afternoon while Schuy raced, Dona and I sat on the beach trying to spot his sails. She knew I was a writer and had brought along her binder of poems. She read from it—clean lucid lines, playful and insolent—one piece of free verse suggesting to a lover that they spend their lives together scraping off the insides of Oreo cookies with their teeth. She invoked landscapes of bygone summers, toy boats, shiny pebbles.

I had only the cards with me, so I laid them in the sand and read her fortune: felicity, strife, unexpected bounty.

All the next day Schuy ignored both of us. When he wasn’t washing dishes he worked on his boat. So Dona and I used his car to drive the single road to the cliffs at the end of the island. We talked Freud, Lawrence, and Sartre, as she pointed out the sights. Rapport established, she questioned me about Schuy, why he had to act like
a tough guy. I tried to cast his motives in the most favorable light. “It’s really quite silly,” she remarked.

Yet I hardly understood my buddy anymore. He was growing a mustache and had declared that his name was now Scotty. That evening at work he pretended not to notice Dona except to snap commands her way. Later he explained: “I have to break her, like a horse.”

He smashed the two 45s I brought him as a gift—Richie Valens’ “Donna” and Paul Anka’s “Diana,” saying, “That’s exactly the kind of mushiness that destroys relationships.” He was not amused by my suggestion that Anka’s words could be flipped from
“You’re so young, and I’m so old”
to
“I’m so young …”
Then he berated Larry for his performance on the boat, blaming it on his reading Yogananda’s
Autobiography of a Yogi,
“I need sailors, not candy-ass Hindus.”

“This is all bullshit, man!” Larry snapped. “Who do you think you are, Axis or something? You have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re running off at the mouth, acting like some spoiled cretin. Try treating your girlfriend like a human being for a start.”

Then Schuy ordered him out of their shared domicile (his mother owned it, so he held that card): “Take your belongings! Go find another place to live!” When I tried to mediate, he cut me off, “Just fucking leave too. I don’t want you around here either. You’re both children. I’ve got
enough
problems.”

I asked Larry if he could run me to the dock. It was perilously close to the last ferry, and I had no fallback position. I caught it by a minute. Driving the Mass Pike barely awake, I woke once with a start, the car drifting toward the guardrail. I pulled into a rest stop and fell asleep on the front seat. In the morning I covered the remainder of the 300 miles.

It had only been three days, but Grossinger’s felt like somewhere I had never been. My room was someone else’s too, though I welcomed its guise; I had no better offer. The Hotel always wooed me back, perhaps for its luxuries and prerogatives but mostly for the sheer spaciousness and optimism of the place. It no longer felt the way it had in childhood, but it still touched something deep and dormant in me. I had a daffier, more rhapsodic self there, one
that floated up and met cumulus parades that stretched far beyond Grossinger’s. I touched a calm and peace inside me and imagined endless possibilities. Of course it wasn’t Grossinger’s. It was creation, but I couldn’t get into it any other way. Grossinger’s was where I first felt it and where I had to be for it to happen.

With one day left before work I headed into New York City, the first time driving there myself: rock ’n’ roll on good old “Double-U A B C,” hitting the George Washington Bridge and rattling across. I shot down the Henry Hudson Parkway like the Towers Mercury of yore, crossed over at 96th Street, and parked in the basement of 300 Central Park West. Without advance notice, I stood at 8C and rang the bell. I hadn’t been back since fleeing eight months ago. After my family got over the shock (and I finished distributing pastries and lox), I was welcomed by everyone, even Martha.

“How about some old times together,” Bob said, finishing off the last of the salmon with an appreciative smile. “Feel like the reservoir?”

“Of course.”

As we took our commemorative stroll—Debby tossing crusts over the fence to ducks, now as then—my mother unexpectedly clutched my arm and slowed her stride, causing us to straggle behind the rest. She told me how difficult my brother had become. “I can’t control him anymore. You were impossible, but at least I could reach you.”

“Right. I was the loyal one.”

She nodded, missing the irony. “He’s beyond me.”

I feigned surprise, but I had always known. My duplicitous attempt at sympathy she brushed off like a fly.

In the afternoon I drove uptown to Chuck Stein’s apartment near Columbia. It was our first meeting in person since Horace Mann. He had changed dramatically in two years, having become a full magus with a bushy beard and a pipe. In the hour before sunset he led me to his favorite bench along the Hudson. There I quizzed him on Olson poems. After he deciphered a few lines, he reminded me that it didn’t matter whether one got all the references or not. “Like Brakhage films,” he said, “the meaning
is not in the literal presentation. It’s in the mode of consciousness the words represent.”