New Moon

by Richard Grossinger

  As Hares we crossed the park in haste, racing through tunnels and playgrounds, creating labyrinths, dispatching scouts—“Let me! Let me!”—to lead the Hounds to dead ends, waiting till they returned with proud tales of dupery: multidirectional arrows, spoors down remote paths.

  As Hounds we followed the Hares’ markings on pavement, dispatching our own scouts to check out forks and see if one was actually the main trail, hurrying to make up ground.

  Our counselors took these hunts seriously and discussed strategy with the older kids. They were concerned never to be done in by fellow counselors who had tricked them before. “Remember the time those pricks crossed that meadow with no arrows?” counselor Freddie said to counselor Wally.

  “Remember? I’m going to put those jackasses in a corral and throw away the key. They break the fartin’ rules every time.”

  Once we spent a whole day looking for the Hares while our counselor cursed and kicked the dust. Every trail, it seemed, was false, the most promising one ending in taunting crisscrosses pointing every which way.

  They had hidden in the weather castle on the lake, a path we had discounted as an obvious false trail. The custodian, not realizing they were Hares, invited them in for a tour of the facility. We were hunted down later by howling Hares.

  “Not fair!” we shouted when they led us to their hiding place. “The rules say you can’t go indoors.”

  But we visited the necromancers’ chamber together. With its spinning globes and glowing dials, in my imagination this castle made the winds; its keepers, standing over maps and drums, decided when to send rain and snow through the City.

  In late afternoons counselors acted out stories about “the olden days.” Bill-Dave Group was supposedly founded by a hero named Ranger, but almost from the beginning he was sabotaged and duped by the Bully. Throughout each episode, as Ranger turned the tables and got revenge, we shouted and cheered his feats. The Bully sniggered away, but he’d be back.

  These were lazy, priceless times, as I lay with the others in our make-believe fort of rock outcroppings, eyes on horizons of buildings. Raptly following the action, we laughed at imitation voices and clapped or moaned at each turn of fate.

  On the way back to the wagon on Fifth, we stopped at the drinking fountain, lining up for our chances. A spout was initiated and cobblestones moistened by pushing in a hard metal knob. I eagerly awaited my time at the oasis, to lean and put lips and palate and tongue into the flow, take cold greedy sips and quench thirst forever.

  At the end of the day a short, round counselor named Bert drove people home in a familiar order while teasing and heckling us and giving disgusting accounts of war mutilations: severed arms and penises and other deformities. “You want to talk blood and guts,” he serenaded. “I’ll give ya blood and guts.” He described Japanese and Korean torturers, how they drove stakes through victims’ eyes, cut off hands, and held noses under dripping faucets.

  Other times we convinced him to turn the radio to “Tom Corbett: Space Cadet” and “Planet Man.” As our vehicle swerved through traffic, eerie sounds sent rockets zooming to other worlds. One by one, to hoots and distortions of our names, we hopped out at our apartment buildings.

  Before dinner I watched television. For the puppet show Kukla, Fran, and Ollie Jonny and I sat alongside each other, charmed by the squawky rumpus of marionettes. Daddy knew Fran, so he brought home a rubber Ollie-dragon glove and Kukla finger-clown after which my brother and I staged our own performances from behind a living-room table.

  Although Flash Gordon terrified me, I never missed a show. Night after night I followed his escapades, as his rocket took him to covens of regal and rhinoceroid creatures. One time Flash got imprisoned on an enemy world in an acid shower and was pounding on the door, screaming to get out. I turned the TV off. I didn’t want to watch.

  In a similar story on The Cisco Kid Indians wrapped his sidekick in poisoned blankets. The coverlets were killing him, as he shook spasmodically.

  My blankets could be doused too. How would I know? Some nights I kicked them clear down the sheets, unable to get the squirming man out of my mind.

  Other times as I lay in bed before sleep, my hands changed shape and size on their own, my feet dwindling to beyond my torso. As fingers and lips swelled into fat trees, my legs shot out in the distance, so far beyond that my toes were as remote as a city seen from clouds. Inside my lips and up my arms I felt thick water pulled by a magnet.

  I was frightened but curious, so tried staying there long enough to fill with electricity. In ensuing paralysis I struggled to move even a finger. Finally I willed myself to wiggle my left pinky, and the spell snapped as if it had never happened.

  Nanny and Mommy didn’t know about these matters and, though I have no idea what they were, I think of them now as migranoid/hypnagogic trances. But they could have been anything. In the mystery that gives us a mind and a body, there are countless unknowns.

  Mean kids and bullies at group enforced their authority with sticks and fists, stings from rubber bands and pea-shooters. The only alternative to a fight was being harassed and goaded, called a spastic—“you spazz!”—or worse. My wet pants qualified me as a full-fledged schmendrick, so I was shoved against the side of the wagon or someone stuck gum on my shirt. A kid elbowed me and then turned away, pretending not to notice: “Geez, who would have done that!”

  Amused by such antics as if watching chimps at the zoo, our counselors rarely intervened.

  My mother presumed that I provoked other kids, but bullies didn’t need provocation.

  A wish to retaliate smoldered in me. One time I did swing back. “Oh, the baby wants to fight!” my tormentor goaded as others went, “Woo-woo, nincompoop.” He put up his boxing stance and socked my chest hard, stunning me. They laughed, made faces, and sang:

  Richie is a friend of mine.

  He resembles Frankenstein.

  “You think that’s funny!” I spat, delirious with rage. I punched back.

  “Harty-har-har!” he countered, slapping my fist away and knocking me in the face as they finished their rhyme:

  When he does the Irish jig,

  he resembles Porky Pig.

  During winter, dusk came early, and Bill-Dave kids were beans in sweaters and overcoats. Our wagon skidded on snowy streets as we squealed and threw our bodies into one another.

  On sunny days we stayed outdoors, sledding, building forts, staging snowball wars that seemed to last a lifetime. I felt like a soldier in an ancient battle of ice. We had to fight our way sector by sector around the rear of an opposing army, gain high ground on boulders and rock ledges, store enough ammunition (piles of hard snowballs), and charge their positions, heaving bullets down on them as they scattered.

  We were sometimes surprised from another flank. Snow was stuffed down our collars and backs. We sought shelter behind any bush or tree.

  Finally the glow of evening ended the battle. We trooped through the Park, our mittens caked with ice, our bodies throbbing, frost in our pants … past the Museum, past the chestnut man, into the wagons, then home.

  On rainy afternoons, Bill-Dave went indoors to a variety of places: a drafty downtown gym where we heaved a basketball at hanging chains; the Metropolitan Museum of Art with its suits of armor, mummies, and stone tombs; the Planetarium where we could read our weights on the Moon (light as a sparrow) or Jupiter (heavier than a whale); the Penny Arcade (handed $2 each in a package of dimes); and a roller rink. I remember working my way around the circle of the dreary ballroom, dodging other skaters, going fast then slow, fast then slow, lumbering toward openings, passing through hot and cold drafts, collecting unexplained ball bearings from the hardwood as piped music played yet another same polka … waiting for the endless day to end.

  At the Museum we chased through catacombs, making werewolf faces and moans, while long-dead kings, queens, and their runes watched impassively.

  Next door at Hayden Planetarium we took seats in a round theater, a
huge legless robot mounted in its center. Celestial music sounded as the ceiling darkened into the New York skyline followed by a starry night at which we let out a collective “oooo.” Soaring into the heavens, we landed on a Martian desert, as the narrator described the world’s bitter cold and tiny red sun; then we watched the planet’s two tiny moons rising and setting. After taking off, we shot farther out as the sun dwindled rapidly in the ceiling. Suddenly we plunged through Saturn’s rings to frigid Mimas. After a tour of its snowy crags we levitated out of our galaxy into violet-tinged nebulae, birthplaces of stars and the whole universe.

  We spent many inclement afternoons at the 92nd Street Y. Rows of nuts and nougats sat in windows by magazines in the foyer, their indescribable smells cascading into the room…. Mounds, Oh Henry!, Spearmint Leaves, Butterfinger, Mallow Cup, Clark Bar, Hershey’s Krackle, Goobers, Cherry and Grape gums, Jujyfruits, Chunky, Snickers. These arrays were replicas of eternal events. Each bore some essence of hunger and was capable of filling me with its gist. All afternoon I longed to bite into morsels of their confection, but my allowance, a dime raised gradually to fifteen cents and then a quarter, was long ago spent.

  Mallow Cups had a sweet, sticky vanilla cream in hard rippled chocolate. Mounds were pulpy with sugary coconut. Almond Joys were Mounds with nuts imbedded in their chocolate glaze. Butterfingers were a crunchy nougat of chocolate-covered caramel. Mars Bars had a mocha nutty goo. Chunkies were raisins and roasted peanuts in a hard cube of chocolate. Three Musketeers ensconced a whipped fluff, moist and porous to the bite.

  Mommy told me to buy only raisins, never candy. That’s what I said I did, but she was uncanny at guessing the truth. She announced one night at dinner that I was destroying my insides with junk.

  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 pa
ck 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.