Now PZ was laughing too. “He found out you were working in the office, so he decided to surprise you.”
I was astonished. Grandpa Harry, while generous, had never been interested in anything I did or said; he was a cartoon figure, acting out a benignly irascible role. Now I saw him in a new light: a cagey old coyote not missing a beat, not letting on—and he had chosen to sponsor my photography!
I spent half of my cash on a light meter and then hurried home with my treasures, testing the viewfinder on lights in the subway tunnel, people walking dogs along the park, silhouettes of water towers, cherry blossoms, an altocumulus sky … the whole superb world.
A week later, Grandpa’s new driver, Ray, picked me up for the summer, first Grossinger’s, then Chipinaw. But instead of going directly to the Mountains, he stopped in the Bronx because he had tickets from Ingemar Johansson for his second heavyweight bout with Floyd Patterson. Johansson had trained at the Hotel, and Ray had become pals with him in the course of ferrying him back and forth to the City.
I wanted to get out of the nuclear target zone, so attending this fight was just one more obstacle. What if the attack came while we were dallying at a needless affair? But I was also involved in wanting the Grossinger’s fighter to smash my brother’s ballyhooed guy. I knew he rooted for Patterson only because I had befriended Johansson at the Hotel. He wanted to see me lose.
In Spanish Harlem on our way to Yankee Stadium, the Caddy broke down and, while I stood in the street alongside the open hood—Ray working feverishly underneath—an old man approached me and offered to start our vehicle by pouring liquor into its gas tank. He reached for the cap before Ray dissuaded him. A crowd began to gather.
I wasn’t afraid. World War III was scary; the judge in his wig was scary. This was an interlude in a strange place about which I was curious. What did it feel like to stand in streets beyond the El, breathe their soot, their pizza-popcorn air, be among their ripples of activity, gaze at the habitants up close? Twilight fell.
Suddenly Ray got the engine running. He was dripping sweat as we gunned out of there. I was laughing to myself at what a great story this would be. “Liquor for the engine!” Michael would roar. And then he’d dance about, making it into a song.
I missed all the political nuances. I was too young and credulous; everything noteworthy or odd was either a tall tale or a prank.
PZ occupied the seat next to us. We had barely settled when he shouted, “No!” Patterson had sent the Swedish champion sprawling across the canvass. I was shocked. Jonny had won. But we found our way to the car and headed north to the Catskills. I was alive, en route back to paradise. Time would go on, a while more.
At lunch the next day a pleasant man at the family tables introduced himself as Steve Lawrence; he said that he was singing that night in the Terrace Room. When I realized who he was, I told him how much I liked his version of “The Banana Boat Song.” He was pleased that I had heard of him. “I never turn down praise,” he added, “but don’t you think Harry Bellafonte has the real claim on that one?”
“I like yours too. You make it a different song.”
“Well, I did my homework. I researched the roots. ‘Hill and gully rider’ is my own touch. Gonna come and hear me tonight?”
“Yep!”
Then he began humming, “Comes the light / And I wanna go home.”
We were in a discussion about the song’s meaning and symbols in general when he cut me off, “Gotta go do a sound check, but let’s continue tomorrow, same time, same station, buddy. Breakfast?” And so we did.
That summer at Chipinaw, Jay, Barry, and I graduated to the tents; we were Seniors. Our habitats were large wooden decks on which beds were set. Flaps of canvas arranged on ropes and supported by poles formed a pyramidal canopy above each provisional floor. When I was younger I was relieved to be in a safe and spacious bunk, but a tent was a box kite of shifting breezes, sunlight, and flaps, a vagabond perk for recently admitted adults—we had earned our flaps like a sea captain his sails.
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, dar
ing 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.
4
ADOLESCENCE
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.
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