New Moon

by Richard Grossinger

  We watched the afternoon’s ice show together … and then she was gone, off to dinner and the nightclub with her family. I trudged back to the house.

  “What’s up, Richard?” asked Jerry.

  “Girls,” I said, shaking my head. “Don’t even ask.”

  “I know. Don’t I ever know!”

  In the morning Karen was magically transformed, a coquette again: aloof, preening, red lipstick, slinking as she walked. I was instantly hooked, thrown back into salacious desire (“Don’t go home, my little darling; / please don’t leave the party yet …,” always the song for these moments). Her pose seemed so obviously intentional. Had she changed her mien or was it my wild imagination? I had lost all bearings. I couldn’t read her demeanor and didn’t begin to understand our yo-yo.

  “Richie, I missed you last night after dinner. We had such a good time in the Terrace Room!” What was she saying? What did she mean? She told me she wanted to try swimming in the indoor pool. “Don’t you think I’d look wiggly through the window?”

  I said I’d go with her. (“I have waited long for the party, / ’cause I knew we’d finally meet …” The tune drifted in my mind like a striptease: Dun, Dun-Dun-Na / Dun, Dun-Dun-Na…. ”)

  “Good. I was hoping we could have some time alone together. I have to go upstairs and get my bathing suit. Come.” She turned and glided toward the elevator, sashaying two fingers my way.

  “This is it,” I told myself, and the phrase echoed in my mind: “… is it … is it … is it”—like Mel Allen’s description of a home run, building in tension to something beyond imagination, wordless and final. I paced dutifully behind her, Pip again, all fated long ago. I had been in that lobby a thousand times, but now it was astonishingly luminous and immaterial … I felt it all might float away. I was weak; I had nothing left at core. In her tight pants she swung back and forth. She was too old for me. I wanted to hold her for even a second.

  In the upper lobby Nat Fleischer was conducting his hypnotism show and it caught her attention: people in farcical stupors, the audience erupting in laughter. “Oh, look at that!” she cried out, stopping. I felt my tension snap and snag. I stood by her side in bored frustration, watching a person pretend to row a boat in the air, another take bites of a pretend apple. Why had I never noticed how dumb it was, the same gags and stunts, year after year? Nat, do something different; help me! As he held a match under a woman’s hand I tried to think up a way to get Karen propelled toward her room.

  Mine was such an unlikely scenario anyway—it had too many moving parts, needed too many fanciful things to go right—but I had locked onto its design and was committed beyond rationality or abjuration. Suddenly her cousin appeared and asked if she wanted to watch a beauty show that was just beginning in the lower lobby. Part of me assumed that Karen was playing out my seduction fantasy; after all, she was Rodney’s alter ego. That part expected her to say no, but she looked at me almost routinely as she shrugged, “I guess we can go swimming later.”

  The letdown was worse than any embarrassment. Desperation was leading me nowhere as I somehow induced her to a corner of the lobby. I had not the slightest idea what I would say. She looked at me curiously.

  “Can I kiss you … sometime?” I couldn’t believe the thing I had just spoken, that those words had come out me, that my flustered brain had landed on that petition, the summation of all the hope I had invested in her.

  She seemed dumbfounded, unable to answer. I left my words there for a second, maybe another, but her face was still a mask, an inkling of confusion, maybe. Then I said, “I’ve never kissed a girl.”

  “Ask Rodney. I can’t explain it. I’m a girl.” I didn’t get what she meant, but I knew it was checkmate.

  She smiled and turned, leaving the troubling inappropriateness of her response in my mind. I ran full-speed back to the house, tearing my nails into the back of my hand so that there were four red bleeding lines when I arrived. Even with that gesture I couldn’t reach deep enough inside or relieve the tension.

  Then one night that spring in the New York apartment I lay in the bathtub imagining the moment in the lobby again, that she had said, “Well, come upstairs to my room, and I’ll show you.” And then…. And then…. I had this hard penis in my hand. I had a slidey bar of soap that I rubbed it against, back and forth. I was thinking … and then the thoughts took over, casting an episode. There were three girls walking toward me … Phyllis and Harriet too. They were shimmying toward me, in fact singing the song Shimmy shimmy coco bop / shimmy shimmy bop … now silently, diagonally, then straight, with terrible and terrific motion, in precise rhythm, oddly expressionless, two steps, then one, two steps, then one, putting me in a trance…. “Don’t go home….” Then there was only Phyllis and her full body and breasts against me… and then she reached me … but she didn’t stop.

  PART THREE

  TEENAGER IN LOVE

  1960–1962

  1

  WITNESSING

  The next summer I went back to the tents at Chipinaw. I was fifteen. Jay and Barry had graduated to being waiters, not a job I aspired to, so I signed up to live with the camper-counselors who ran the O.D. shack, taking shifts with them—sorting mail, depositing laundry, answering the phone. Now I was the one carting candy bars to bunks, playing the recording of the bugle for activity changes, enforcing Taps.

  I had a new fervor for the Yankees. I listened to every game and, during my shifts, posted Major League ball scores on the O.D. shack (along with homers and winning and losing pitchers). Back when girls had dominated, baseball didn’t seem as real. Now I found it where I had left it, bright and innocent, an alternate version of life itself.

  The 1959 team that I had pretty much jilted was the Yankees’ worst since I had been following them; they didn’t even compete for the pennant. After the disastrous season, a changing of the guard was underway. Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, and Yogi Berra were still in their primes but approaching what PG called “the back nine,” while Gil McDougald delivered an unlikely spate of early-July home runs, a portent that marked my return from the Underworld. It was as if he had been saving this singular display of power for late in his career, to reclaim me from the scourge of female infatuation. New arrivals right fielder Roger Maris, shortstop Tony Kubek, and Luis Arroyo, a National Leaguer revived by a dazzling screwball, played major roles in a revival, and Jerry’s friend Bill Stafford was called up mid-summer. Just six years ago, they had been playing semi-pro together on Quebec diamonds where they got scouted by the Yankees, so it was as though Jerry himself were now on the team. Baseball was in place and special again, though something was asunder that had no fix.

  I became Chipinaw’s pied piper of truant and homesick kids. I arranged croquet matches with a forsaken set of mallets and balls from the equipment shed, set up treasure hunts with folded paper clues, and oversaw hide-and-seek among the trees and bushes. I rough-housed with them, made up stories with heroic characters, and played Fabian to their fears. On some O.D. shifts I had a whole troupe of Midgets with me. They helped me put mail in slots, placed the needle on the fast-spinning 78 of bugle calls (not without an occasional campus-startling screech), and slid the eyelets of painted wood activity tags over the hooks on the bulletin board. Passing our hubbub one day, Abbey flashed a rare smile, then patted me on the back.

  It was a quiet, aimless summer. I wasn’t alienated; I wasn’t homesick; I wasn’t overly yearning. I just had no place else to go. My tent-mates cultivated a style akin to Rodney and his Wakonda crew, though in a lighter, more self-satirical vein. They talked cars, beer, pranks, and sex ad nauseam. These topics trailed back and forth through each other in a ritual of swearing, jibes, and put-downs (called “ranking,” as in “Oh did I rank you!”). We were like a troop of randy chimps in pecking order, almost nothing else in play. It was jokes, sexual fantasies, boasts, and ranks.

  In one popular activity, a few guys, with much banter, would select a centerfold, form an impromptu circ
le, and compete to masturbate onto her, all the time shouting taunts like “Man, your dick’s got the pick-up of Pat Brady’s jeep!” I was far too bashful to join, my own fantasies private and dear. It was the only time in my life (never before and never after) when I could intrude upon three guys with their pants open racing one another to splatter a pin-up. I had gone from the evanescence of Dr. Friend’s proposition to full-out blatancy.

  Insensible to the displacement and irony of their performances, my bunkmates bought the era’s mirage hook, line, and sinker; they searched no further. Five tortuous years remained before the Stones would break the daze with “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” would see a red door and want it painted black. People would start to realize that the appearance wasn’t the reality, that they were in a trance.

  My O. D. crew thought that they could get satisfaction from their kodacolor incubi and aphrodisiac fantasies. They viewed themselves as suave hedonists confirmed by their can’t-miss colognes, collections of Playboy, wardrobes bunched on hangers along our tent’s center pole—their personae of Jewish wise guys pretending to be Italian hoods.

  A tall F. Scott Fitzgerald–looking kid named Bud, whose hair was impeccably parted at all hours, put us under his spell that July and August by relating his sexual encounters with almost eerie detachment, like how the kids at his school had paid a girl to beat them off, describing the satiny feel of her hand on his cock, the smell of the lubricant she had used. In the background Johnny Mathis sang “Chances Are,” then “The Twelfth of Never.”

  “Unadulterated pleasure,” Bud said, lolling on his blanket in a small patch of sun. But I think that he was referring to the song.

  Then there was the night an older girl from Camp Ge-Wa-Na slipped through the barbed wire and, in a flouncy chemise dress, was looking for a Chipinaw counselor she knew, a planned assignation no doubt. That kind of incursion never happened—Ge-Wa-Na was effectively as quarantined as Mars—so it had a strange-love Twilight Zone quality, like the aftermath of a UFO landing. We watched from a distance as the alien stopped Kenny in his PJs en route back from the latrine, toothbrush and tin cup in hand. She seemed to hold him next to her as she whispered in his ear, then was gone. “She was looking for Davey Kaplan,” he explained, with a far-off wistful look, “so I told her the way. She was so scared she was shaking. Man, she gave me a hard-on.”

  He was still talking about it a month later, ever more longingly—her perfume, the fabric of her light, loose blouse, the graze of her touch—so that we all felt, or wished, that we had been the one returning from the latrine and, far-fetched as it might have been, that she hadn’t been looking for someone else.

  One afternoon I lifted the main flap and ducked into our tent. There was Elliot with his watch off; he was clocking a contest. The target was a Betty and Veronica comic. “It’s Kenny, Joe, and Bud,” he told me, “and all of them are going for Archie’s record.”

  “You guys are sick,” I said. “Betty and Veronica aren’t even real.”

  “Not real?” Elliot screamed, as they all turned to glare at me. “Did you ever look at Betty? That long yellow hair. That pair of boobs. How’d you like to feel that red lipstick coming off on your dick?”

  “I’m a Veronica man myself,” added Kenny. “Elliot and I have different targets. I’m taking that white sweater right over the tits. Oooh, man!”

  I looked at their inspiration. There was Archie with his combed pompadour, Betty wearing a red, busty sweater, Veronica trying to entice him away with Bambi eyes, Reggie lurking in the background in a sports car. On the adjacent page both girls lolled in bikinis at the beach, and Jughead, with his “X” eyes, overdressed (including his dumb crown), was carrying their lunch basket.

  “What do you think Jughead’s going to do when he gets home?” Elliot asked me.

  “I can’t guess.”

  “He’s gonna beat the meat because neither Betty nor Veronica got the hots for crowns.”

  Suddenly Bud scored. Splat, a dark spot.

  In a blast of warped exuberance Kenny exclaimed, “The hairy wazoo! The big schlong!”

  “No way,” Elliott shouted. “Wrong target.” He had splotched the “geiger counter for girls” in another comic.

  It was all perfect. Archie and Jughead were who they—the ones who drew the comics—thought we were, or perhaps who they thought we thought we were. It was like an alien woman passing in the dark. We didn’t know that we could feel sex any other way.

  When I returned to Grossinger’s at the end of summer, the fantasy bacchanal continued. I was surrounded by teenagers in bikinis and shorts—younger than me, older than me. The Hotel had become a palestra of forbidden acts and prurient desires. Glances and gestures bred throwaway nuances, equivocal arabesques, innuendos of allure exuding from tinctures of Chanel and other fragrances, designs of swimwear, even motions of shadows in cabana dressing rooms. It was a bottomless labyrinth of glamor, no satisfaction anywhere.

  My own body felt gawky and exposed as I wandered through sun-worshipping crowds in my bathing suit. I was no longer a child, but was far from ready to be a man, let alone one of them. I didn’t know the way into their lair. I felt its ambient power and call, but its objects were forever someone else’s property. My sense of lust remained solitary and furtive, perverse and licentious too, I was sure.

  The “dames” from my father’s mystery novels lurked in the cabana where he had left them. I sat in a tin toilet stall, summoning my erection with visualization, spit, and soap. A mood grew: trancelike, sorrowing, hungering, blending rapacity with tenderness, compulsion and regret, always indescribably profound. I was lured by the teaser on a back cover: “Wearing nothing but too much perfume, she threw her arms around me … and I acquiesced…. ”

  Behind my closed eyes the image dilated, intensified, became palpable, and then, from within a musky rose-iris whiff of Dove soap, flooded me into a strange, irresistible montage. I too acquiesced, despite my wish to remain stolid and immune.

  I would go to the Nightwatch, the new teen room overlooking the indoor pool, and hang out there. I thought maybe being a celebrity would help, but it never made any difference. There were unlimited Rodneys and Buds cruising about, older and sleeker. It was all a light-speed stream of jive and double-entendre, guys and girls coming and going, gathering in groups, plotting strategy. The teen world was insouciant, vain, defiant.

  Girls would be amazed when they heard my last name: “No, really? You’re kidding. Wow, I’m going to tell my parents. Would you sign an autograph?” But that didn’t make me desirable. Autograph? What about … ? I could barely name it even to myself. And I didn’t know what it was for them. It came, to my best comprehension, solely from inside me.

  I would see many of them again throughout the Hotel and attach myself to their periphery, but I was at best a novelty—Pinocchio again, not one of the real boys. Then they checked out, and others replaced them. I would have taken Betty or Veronica in an instant.

  In their stead I relished the Yankees’ battle with Milt Pappas, Chuck Estrada, and the upstart Orioles, the so-called Kiddie Corps. A lemonade with a porcelain-lemon-tipped glass straw, sun streaming in the window … I stretched on the couch and floated in the residue of innings. We were being transported into a new era: Eli Grba, Ryne Duren, Kent Hadley, Johnny Blanchard, Clete Boyer, Jesse Gonder. Bill Stafford pitching to Ted Williams felt like me facing Joe DiMaggio in a time machine, as Jerry called out, “How you chuck, Billy boy, how you chuck!”—echoes of Canadian infields. Billy was our alter ego, so each called strike or foul was miraculous, as if we had somehow popped up the Kid, the Splendid Splinter, The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived. I had never identified so closely with a pitcher or the projectiles he threw; they had always been preternatural events. Now as if by sympathetic magic Billy had become my baseball alias.

  After taking a pair of pivotal contests, the Yankees pulled away even as the Orioles claimed veterans Del Rice and Dave Philley from the National League, too late
. Yankee killer Bill Hoeft was past his prime, though Gus Triandos, the slugging catcher, remained a thorn in the Yanks’ side, my Armory Ball farmhand sent packing six years earlier in the eighteen-player trade.

  Existence was a tumult of nostalgia and obscure qualms. I didn’t know what I felt. I was tragic and buoyant both, certain that I could not survive the wave and yet riding it in wonder. The Hotel was still a paradise of cherry-tart and chocolate-tree desserts, gardens filled with every color of pansy into whose aromas I poked my Minolta, lobbies buzzing in excitement, a cloud of cigars and cigarette smoke and wizened sharks gambling—and I was still the child Richie, getting their handshakes and greetings, summoning maestro Milty for a butter-pecan/peach malt, culling tomatoes with Aunt Bunny from among the minty leaves of yore. While everything else inside me ached, the sheer habit and density of existence bore me along.

  One afternoon I sat with staff hypnotist Nat Fleischer, under a tree by the Lake, trying to explain my tangled emotions. He was charmed by my adolescent restiveness but refused to acknowledge its cosmic edge. To his mind I had yearnings and intimations because I was feeling unfamiliar hormones, that was all. “You’ll always want to remember this time,” he added, “because love will never be so innocent again.”

  I would watch him romancing guests, women not particularly attractive to me (but then he told me I had no notion of what real erotic power was). I startled us both when I came upon him a few days later beneath that same oak with an ugly but naked lady. He had the presence to pull a towel around himself, a blanket over her, get up, and politely introduce us. He was continuing to inform me, “No big deal.”