New Moon

by Richard Grossinger

  There was an ambrosial sensation to tossing a ball up, swatting it, then seeing where its flight landed it, in what patch or rough, near and far, as I narrated the play silently (à la Mel Allen). I took my time, savoring the sun’s warmth and occasional breezes over my sweaty brow, stopping to watch the flights of bugs, to blow dandelion heads.

  Reaching the hedge on a fly was an epiphany—a soaring bird, a squirrel hiding its farthest nut, a spaceship dropping an Easter egg—and the memory of those rare synchronies of bat and ball, the torque of my swing, is ineradicable.

  After each round or inning (the number of batters dependent on how many balls I had) I would retrieve my shots from all over the field as I continued to announce the game. I filled the home-team line-up with Yankee subs and farmhands whom I wanted in the major leagues and played people in odd or former positions (Don Bollweg at first, Pedro Gonzalez at second, Mickey Mantle at short, Kal Segrist at third). That alone made it special. “Gil McDougald leading off. Early Wynn winds and fires. It’s a drive down the left field line. He turns at first and holds. Now catcher Gus Triandos.” In the distance I could hear the echoes of camp events, remote like a half-forgotten dream.

  After completing five innings, batter by batter, I’d collapse beneath a pine and review the action like a sportswriter, cozily AWOL. Eventually a counselor would come to fetch me back to whatever activity I had deserted.

  At nap-time after lunch we got to stay in the bunk and play games, write postcards, get mail delivery, and follow baseball on the radio. Eager for the Yankee score, I galloped downhill from the mess hall, almost outpacing my own legs, thinking of how, in just another moment, I would crash onto those coarse green blankets, warmed by the sun, turn on the game in the second or third inning, and lie there listening.

  This was a time of boundless nostalgia, reading letters from Mommy and Daddy, aunts and uncles, leisure in which to send them each back a Chipinaw postcard and tell them what I was doing. As I narrated my life, I imagined myself a character in a story, a forerunner of this text.

  Radios were strictly forbidden in the mess hall or at any of our activities, but I began setting the Yankees in the outfield of softball games and beyond the fence of the tennis court, racing from activities to pick up a pitch or two and hopefully the score.

  At Sunday evening barbecues, which were held on blankets hauled from our bunks, radios were allowed. Beside a plate of hamburger, beans, and potato chips, a slice of watermelon, I sank into the luxury of the second game of a doubleheader with its assortment of utility players. That was heaven.

  On game nights I maintained my Yankee vigil in bed as stations crossed and interfered, the radio on softly so that O.D.s couldn’t hear. Mel Allen’s voice waned and came back through the darkness, and I pieced together missing action until I clicked the knob just before sleep. In the morning I turned to WINS 1010 for the final score.

  Chipinaw was the liquored scent of its infirmary, the cracked paint of its bathrooms, the smell of old pipes and cleansers. It was rabbits that appeared at twilight and darted away at my approach. They had no intent to be part of the kingdom, but they dwelled in its environs.

  I remember our bodies crammed together—in the bath-house at the lake, the bunk latrine while we brushed our teeth, along the armory wall in games of charades, on the floor in rough-housing and pillow fights—our clammy, clabbery aroma, childlike and dank.

  Mealtimes at Chipinaw were loathsome but sensuous. The mess hall was a clatter of trays passing through swinging doors on waiters’ shoulders, cheers when one was dropped, giant ladle-bearing platters and basins of saltpeter- and MSG-spiced pottage (this intelligence awaited our more mature tenures), jugs of purple and orange Kool-Aid for our thirst. No one removed the live and dead flies that lodged above sugar level in the large shakers. A prank that never grew old was surreptitiously to pour sugar into the salt-shaker or, better yet, salt into the sugar urn. The dessert that brought the loudest cheers was single-serving ice-cream cups, vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, and chocolate chip, off the lids of which a thin paper layer could be peeled revealing a round baseball card with the face of a player.

  The intricately eroded resin of table surfaces were like maps of other planets. In tedium before and between courses, we played a game across their width with salt and pepper, propelling the small glass shakers back and forth between contestants on opposite sides in an attempt to land part—even a fraction of the glass rim—over the edge so that a flat hand pressed against the table lip and then raised would jiggle or dislodge it. We sprinkled salt on the mottled maroon for better sliding and mastered a quick upward swipe (with an attendant grimace of “drats” or smirk of “no cigar,” depending on whether the shaker moved even a feather’s breadth). Usually the shaker stopped far short or went flying off the end and had to be caught by the facing player.

  They fed us noodles and cheese onto which we poured a warm fruit-salad sauce; tasteless chow mein on soggy, cracker-like noodles; and egg and egg-salad gunks, vittles from which I willingly went hungry, awaiting rations from Grossinger’s or town.

  In exchange for passes to the Hotel, we bribed counselors to drive into Monticello after Taps and bring back roast-beef sandwiches and potato knishes. Awakened past 1 a.m. for goodies wrapped in paper, sleepily we munched away, hearing our mentors rhapsodize about movie stars and babes in swimsuits by the G. pool. The smell of warm dough with its spud filling, the resilience of soft rye through its wrapper, harboring pickles and sliced pink meat, were dream-like assuagements of hunger.

  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, plu
mp 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, cou
nselors 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.