New Moon

by Richard Grossinger

  I usually took the yellow, him the red—blue and green went unplayed. We so identified with yellow or red that their draws and strategies swept our minds clean of everything except completing the circuit and tucking all four pawns into the safety zone. I knew his red so well I was reminded of it when I saw a bright red toy or picture. I flinched a bit inside: red was the enemy, a show-off’s color. I felt sordid pleasure in knocking off a red token with an assassin Sorry! card just short of it gaining immunity, likewise in bringing home two delicious canary yellows with a seven.

  I responded just as exigently to an icon of a rope or candlestick, a golden $500 Monopoly bill, the ten of diamonds in Casino, or a yellow Marvin Gardens card. I lived for the bliss of Park Place and Boardwalk under my ownership, a red hotel on either awaiting Jonny’s next toss of the dice. These moments, and the strategies generating them, temporarily replaced reality, as they explicated our brotherhood—telling us who this Jonathan, this Richard were. Without them we were in free fall, for there were no other safe boundaries or wayposts in the Towers realm, no fallback life-jackets or life-jacket-like roles.

  Baseball variants were our favorites, and our mainstay was sockball. With a tennis racquet as our bat, socks tightly wound as our ball, one of us lobbed in a pitch. The batter did not so much whack as aim for spots in our room—a bid at finesse.

  Singles were drives that bounced uncaught off a hollow canopy around the ceiling. They had to be smacked hard and aimed well or they’d be caught in the small room. Doubles landed on Jon’s or my bed. Almost always rebounds off walls, they came to a state of rest on either coverlet.

  A catch, even a rebound, resulted in a double play, though a catch off the high canopy simply negated a single into an out.

  A waste-paper can placed before the radiator was a triple. One never aimed for triples. They were accidents. To see a sock bounce off the wall delicately into the can was as exhilarating as a golfer getting a hole-in-one. Likewise, a sock rolling on a chair, about to rest there or topple, was spellbinding, as was any rolling orb between outcomes, where it would stop: fair or foul, a score or nothing.

  Positioning on a grid was a way of seeing the world, an innate phenomenology of weights, shapes, and objects. Jonny and I could play from any angle at any scale, whether tiddly-winks in the hall, shuffleboard on a Nevele court, or flipping cards. When there wasn’t a game in progress, we set instantaneous measures anyway. Watching a stray ball roll from a game of other kids across a sidewalk in the Park, a spiny horse chestnut plunk from a tree, we knew instinctively the boundary, the odds, and when to cheer for a placement and score, like the time a falling acorn bounced once before landing in a park water fountain. “Triple!” we called out spontaneously.

  The bedroom left field window at 6B had a glass guard set against it at a forty-five-degree angle. Inside it was a home run, either on a soft lob or a carom off a wall. A lob might be defended by a leap, with the sock sometimes accidentally batted down into a double for the opponent. However, there was a perfect arc, just over the pitcher, gentle enough so it didn’t bounce off the window back past the guard. A home run was the most delicate shot of all.

  Our mother detested sockball and came to recognize its sounds from afar. Even when we played in a disciplined hush, we couldn’t hide the game’s cadence. She charged in, grabbing the racquet away. She thought baseball belonged outdoors, but, more notably, she believed socks were for wearing, not batting, and she was convinced ours went out the window, even though it was shut tight.

  Hers, though, was a self-fulfilling prophecy because, after she suggested the idea to us, we opened the window a little bit behind the guard to add drama to home runs. There was a garbage can on 96th Street and, if one of us put it in that, you got credit for winning ten games. Needless to say, it never happened, though my friend Phil took up the challenge and landed one so close we were astonished. It was thrilling anyway to run to the window and watch a home run sail out of sight and then spot it down on the street below. Sometimes a pedestrian looked up in astonishment—a sock from the sky! We would interrupt the inning and take the elevator to the street to collect it.

  Ramon the elevator man was not amused by the extra summonses and trips, but contrary to our mother’s belief, no one wanted our socks, and we never lost a single one at sockball. They disappeared for other reasons, an issue of general cosmology not resolved to this day.

  At other times we staged epic rubber-band fights, ducking behind furniture and firing with our favorite weapons. Mine was a porcelain statue of a stalking tiger I won at Skee-ball. I strung my “bullets” around its mouth and aimed usually at Jon’s butt. It was a great pajamas sport, rolling on the rug, pulling our bottoms back up amid hurried attempts to zing bare bohunkus. When our stockpiles ran out, we collected shots from all over the room, different colors and sizes of rubber bands that had come to rest on, under, and behind objects, and returned them to our ammunition bags.

  Though we didn’t keep a cumulative score, Jonny and I had an unerring feel for who had won more life-to-date. I held an edge at age nine, but as he got older and bigger, he gained the upper hand, and the all-time tally fell into doubt, so it needed to be adjudicated again and again. We certainly knew who was winning lately, and it mattered a great deal; it determined the mood between us, our relative prestige and power in the apartment. And though we played countless rounds with varying outcomes, we seemed to know that only one of us would finally win.

  I tried to disguise my pleasure in victories, but I didn’t fool Jon. He liked to lord his successes over me. If I lost, I’d often bargain at once for a new game, all the while trying to maintain an older sibling’s air of superiority. He preferred to savor his triumphs. It often took teasing or a bribe to get him to play again. “If you win this next one,” I’d say, “it counts double,” as if I could sell such a blatant ploy.

  “I don’t care,” he’d retort. “I’m champion.” That would sting despite my determination to stay above such fatuous boastfulness.

  We spent so much time together that our competition blended almost indiscernibly into camaraderie. Our antipathy would soften, reconcile, and become its antithesis: fellowship, intimacy, something resembling love. The shifts were obscure, unaccountable, and disconcerting—and usually begrudging. Because we were uncomfortable with each other, we were less embarrassed by stalemates of inured hostility than lapses of affection. We didn’t acknowledge good will as readily as mutual hatred. I couldn’t stand having such a hoodlum get a close-up look at me or witness my gaffes and fears, my wet sheets. His condescending smirk needed no words and took no holidays.

  He couldn’t bear me watching him either but, whereas I flinched with shame, he lashed out in wounded pride and defiance.

  Roommates and companions of necessity, we lay in bed at night watching the Knickerbocker Beer sign blink on and off in the northern distance over Harlem, pretending it was a signal to Martian ships or smugglers on the Hudson. Whispering across the room, we filled the interval before sleepiness with games—Animal-Vegetable-Mineral, Initials, Geography—hushed undertones so as not to arouse the Cyclops.

  For numberless hours we would perch beside our record-player, laying our favorite disks on the rubber wheel and setting the needle down, using pins from Mommy’s pin cushion when we ran out: “There’s a little white duck sitting on the water,” and “… among the leaves so green-o.” Blending with buttered toast and vegetable soup, these tunes spun webs of afternoons, a symphony of lives played by pipers in an upholstered box. When a narrator signaled us, we turned pages to follow Bozo the Clown on his travels through Europe and Asia, from the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Eiffel Tower to the lair of the Wild Man of Borneo with the ring on his nose. In Bozo Under the Sea the clown in diving gear visited sea horses, fish with lights, even a great whale. We stuck our faces in a sink of water and mimicked his bubble-filled voice exclaiming, “What could that creature be?” (It was an octopus.)

  Mr. Borrig, the super, was
Jon’s and my chief nemesis, continually coming to the front door with complaints from the apartment beneath. That would lead to prompt punishments—a confiscation of the tennis racquet, an early bedtime, sometimes a whipping. Overly exuberant tumbling catches and dives to block the socks from landing on a bed were often followed by a ringing doorbell. Once, in revenge, we lowered a red water-balloon on the end of a string slowly down six storeys and, as Borrig sat on his customary stool by the service entrance on 96th Street, set it softly on his bald pate before ducking back inside. I don’t know how we got away with that one—who else would have done it?—but there were no repercussions.

  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 r
uffian, 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?