Even the holocaust had a human mask. Its terror was mutable.
The Moral Rearmament speaker faded. Life returned to its rhythms, patterns, and moods. The minutes, hours, and days resumed their spell, as the things that had occupied them became real again. The intruder, who had briefly seemed larger than reality itself, dwindled into a shrill nobody, a mouse in suit-and-tie that roared. Existence was too dense to be coopted for long by an Idea.
All that winter I was enchanted by Keith. Hardly understanding the impulse, I honored his presence as that of a mythic being: Cupid the boy. He was my amulet, his light brown hair combed in a self-conscious wave across his forehead. When I glimpsed him in stray moments I would commemorate these as omens and signs, for they changed the color of daylight. It was as if Athena suddenly revealed her true nature to a mortal, turning autonomously from a woman into a goddess. Of course, only the chosen one saw.
Keith was ostentatiously booting his schoolbag in front of him. With a heraldic flourish he was Mercury delivering a message to my class. The rest of the hour vibrated at a different frequency.
One Monday I arrived at school feeling itchy and sore, every blackhead burning, subway stench in my pores. At lunch a voice from behind the desserts said, “What do you want?” I stared, for a moment, into the eyes of Keith.
In chapel choir Keith’s Latin solos filled the auditorium, transmitting hope and consolation. In myself I found only his shadowing—flat and unlivable. In him, it was realized, vibrant.
The name I gave this event (when I described it in my writing or talked to Dr. Friend) was borrowed from how I thought of Rodney once: Keith was my “idol”—today I would change it only to its Greek root: eidolon: “apparition.”
One afternoon he starred in a Gilbert and Sullivan production. I brought along a small battery-run recorder. That night, after everyone else had gone to bed, I took the machine into the bathroom, ready for a numinous performance.
Most of the windows in the courtyard were dark. There was an old man reading a newspaper, a woman in a black evening dress, part of a body at a kitchen table with flowers—all made memorable by the fact that Keith was about to manifest, all frozen in time by the hissing blank at the beginning of the reel. Then, I heard him.
I have no idea what words he sang, but I made my own lyrical gibberish out of them, then turned to the terse magnetic strip again and again, for luck and confirmation: “They are, they are, the quarums they seek. / They are, they are, and they are. / They are, they are, the quarums they seek. / Statitimski is hidden afar, yes afar.”
At Christmas I hung out at the Grossinger’s Nightwatch, but there were always cooler, quippier guys. One afternoon, in fact, the whole rock-’n’-roll group The Tokens who sang, “Hush my darling, don’t fear my darling,” swaggered into the room looking like a street gang and declared themselves in their Brooklyn accents, “Where duh girls? The lion sleeps tonight, baby!” The “girls” were totally snowed.
Departing the tattered social realm, I took my martyrdom to a more pagan temple. I fetched my skates and snuck into the closed rink. I switched on full floods, picked some pop music from the rink’s limited repertoire (“Witch Doctor” and the score from West Side Story were my favorites), and raced around for a half hour or so in the frigid black. It was my father’s hotel and I could do what I wanted, break the rules until he found out. He would have been appalled at the electric bill and insurance liability, but no one else dared stop me.
Stars above the golf course, the glowing crystal became a chapel, its frozen surface mine to inhabit and strafe—my track of Martian-canal ice. I was racing alongside Ray Blum, ready to make my final charge into the lead, Grossinger’s written diagonally on my soul. But this wasn’t any ordinary meet or trope of Silver Skates. I was at one-third terrestrial gravity, flying above the surface, igniting and outstripping my melancholy, converting it to pleasure.
The threads I cut were the grooves of my life. Almost mechanically I set before me figures of my life: my mother, Jonny, Rodney, Karen, Keith; I blended with them to enact greater swiftness, ripping the ice in quickening steps, pushing tempo beyond breath, beyond agility, beyond stamina: “I told the witch doctor / I was in love with you / And then the witch doctor / He told me what to do.”
Zoom, clip the corner low, trust the blades, make myself one with my own velocity.
“He said that / ooo eee, ooo ah ah, ting tang / Walla walla, bing bang.”
I invoked and dispelled the fog of studying, the core loneliness, so many unrequited desires—all translated into an orbital dance. Those I wanted to defeat I defeated. Those I wanted to love became part of me. Those I didn’t understand my feelings for, I tested.
“Tonight, tonight / won’t be just any night…. ” was my absolute theme song, when I could get myself up to my fastest. Turntable to loudspeaker to skates, it was Keith and me, dark sonic arcs hitching breaths of ice, hollowing my skull, blades rasping, tearing for a quickening grip at corners. They held my fury and apotheosis. It was euphoric, if a bit hyper.
I wouldn’t have begun to understand the psychic proposition of chakras, but I recognized their effects in my being. I was raising the overall vibration of my aura, changing the color of my feelings from brown and black to indigo and phosphorescent violet. Plus, this was an era when athletic accomplishments were a mark of being a guy, a viable human being; I was graving an indisputable male signature.
I was north of Horace Mann, north of New York City, north of Westchester and its parties, north of the subway, beneath the Milky Way. And then, soaring to epiphany: “Tonight there will be no morning star…. ”
That was the droplet at my heart—a faraway sun that gave light to unknown worlds.
On New Year’s Eve I sat at the teen table dateless. When the lights went off and “Auld Lang Syne” began, I imagined time itself evacuating through the walls. These were famous seconds, rustling by like pages of old books. I ducked through the fire door into sub-zero night. From roofs and trees, snow glistened. Icicles hung in moonlight as if on Luna itself. A sudden wind shook frozen pods like rattles on the uppermost branches, as frigid a plaint as I had ever heard. When the Earth performed such a requiem, I was a mere ember, a speck of carbon sustained by desire. I took off my jacket and tie and unbuttoned my shirt and collar. I let in the icy serpent. Then I ran, the Hotel’s din fading under my escape velocity.
Through frost flowers on my bedroom window a single streetlight radiated delicate grains. I lay there, engulfing Keith in my warmth, or was it I in his?
I spent the winter trying to call Keith’s attention to me. I typed up slides for Wednesday sings, putting unusual lyrics on them, which I submitted anonymously with symbolic messages (which, of course, he would never decipher). I joined the carnival publicity committee and set up an exhibit, using a battery-operated guzzling monkey with a beer can, a banana, and an expanding stomach. Keith came by, stood and watched, then said, “Isn’t that sexy” to a friend. Puck the imp! A score!
Another time, I heard him mutter as he was walking down the hall, “Don’t tell me he’s done it again.” Each syllable and cadence was precious.
But Keith was changing inside me. I tried to keep him innocent and unsexual like the kids in my old spaceship drama, but he had an implicitly androgynous quality. Four months after I transfigured a pixie-like schoolmate into an eidolon, the other shoe dropped. I imagined him driving a car and picking me up outside my apartment building on a Friday afternoon. He would laugh and look into my eyes. As I played with his hair, his smile melting mine, he became something that was neither boy nor girl and lay atop of me, swallowing my desire in his icon.
Beyond this vision a scenery formed on its own, a cornfield and haystacks, moon-yellow—the shade and fragrance of straw I associated with him. He was wanton and luminous; he arose from a leather trunk in the attic; he played the panpipes. He held me prisoner in his room, drawing me unto himself. In this fantasy he was no longer Keith my friend and guide; he was the
resolution of my ungauged desire.
I wanted to lose whatever was left of myself in him. He could jump on me, beat me up, and that would be okay, for soon enough I would be burnt away and nothing more than part of him. I was a shred of steel filing, and he was a dense, raw magnet, drawing me forever unto himself. He was still elfin, but gamy and seductive too. And now he knew my reckless hunger for him.
I checked the sperm from such fantasies to see if it was bloody or dark.
I arrived five minutes late at Dr. Friend’s, so the door from the waiting room was open. I walked in and placed myself on the couch, fixing my eyes on the photograph of broken pottery.
“I’m sorry I’m late. The train was incredibly slow. It just took forever getting to l68th Street.”
“There’s no need to be sorry.” His voice as always detached.
“Of course there is. I wasted some of your time.” I was parodying a tone he often took.
“If I were you I would think more carefully about whose time is being wasted.”
“Okay. One point for you.”
“My, aren’t we angry today. Angry, sarcastic, and bitter. What’s all that about?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing at all.”
“Well, what are you thinking about?”
“Only about how the damn train slowed me down.”
“Was it all the train’s fault?” I didn’t answer. “Was it really all the train’s fault.” I stared at the second hand sweeping away our time within the clock on the far wall. The radiator hissed, the odor of its steam musty, trite.
A few minutes passed and then I said, “I hope you didn’t think I was going to sit around here and answer stupid questions about trains all afternoon.”
“You were the one who brought up the train.”
“Well, you always tell me what I’m thinking. You do, don’t you? Well, if you’re not going to talk, I don’t see why I should.”
I lay there quietly for a while and then unwittingly closed my eyes. A drowsiness engulfed me….
I awoke with a start—it was dark outside. I was totally disoriented, my hour almost up. I felt instantly contrite. “Hey, that’s the first time I ever fell asleep here.”
“There’s always a first time.”
“I feel better now.”
“Well, you escaped. You used up the whole session without talking about the thing that’s bothering you.”
“I feel sad.”
“Good. Maybe we can use the remaining time and accomplish something.”
“What should I talk about?”
“What did you dream? Do you remember?”
“Nothing really.”
“Oh come now.”
“I was in the country somewhere with Keith. Late afternoon. The light is very green.”
“Any perceptions.”
I saw the second hand erasing my last minute. I recalled an apple tree, Keith beneath … as if Keith were me. Then I remembered. “It just faded into a bunch of cartoon characters dancing around and jumping in and out of the back elevator shaft of our building.”
“Where were you?”
“Running around the hall trying to escape from them.” There was no reply. Then the overhead light clicked on, signaling the end of the hour.
I heard him getting up. I turned and looked right at him. “I’m having fantasies about Keith. I’m thinking about him as a girl … and the fantasies are so strong.” I was pleading with him now. He was expressionless. I dropped my head and smiled at the wooden soldier on his desk. “I’m afraid I’m…. ”
“You’re afraid of what, that you’re a homosexual? Nonsense. Everyone who’s ever lived has had those fantasies. A boy, a girl, what does it matter in the mind? You’re reaching out to something unknown, something you want and don’t yet understand. And you miss the obvious—that thought and action are two separate things. You can think whatever you want, and it doesn’t mean you are likely to do it or that if you did, it would be the same thing.” He paused and considered. “It’s really that you are so guilty—guilty of what you are, guilty of what you aren’t. What you want you hate yourself for wanting. You obsess, and then there’s no way out. Perhaps that’s the reason for Keith. He’s not real, you know. No doubt you have created him in order to share the burden of your guilt.”
I froze in sheer wonder. After weeks of sterile, boring sessions the face of the master shone again, reminding me of the power of insight to heal and transform. In recent months I had become such a wise guy, a big shot—Richard the star writer, Richard the psychiatric pro, Richard the speed demon. Now I bowed to the inevitability of the unconscious, the power of the unknown.
A realization born once of a chemistry set spilled in a dream had come again. A long, entangled mystery unravelled, exposing Keith for what he was—another semblance, cast against a lifetime of mystery visitors. He was a feeling I had always had, a vagrant figure encompassing the allure in the world. No wonder I had chosen a magnificent child playing the flute to represent him. The Keith who bounded through Horace Mann and sang with the voice of the forest was my blond and wild twin in whose seductive grip, dark sparkly “I” became beautiful too. In my hunger to encompass him—and girls through him—he had become the captive side of desire, yet always driving me toward who I was.
I couldn’t say that then, so I said, “There’s nothing bad about these thoughts? I’m not doomed?”
“Of course not,” he smiled back. As I went through the door he added, “Why do we always accuse ourselves of the worst?”
“Because we’re crazy or something,” I laughed.
He looked up startled, then gave out his deepest-ever sustained guffaw. “See you Friday, you funny kid.”
3
MOON RIVER
It became spring. I wore light cloth suits to Horace Mann and awaited the new baseball season with the ardor of childhood. It was the year of American League expansion—there were two new teams, the Los Angeles Angels and a second Washington Senators (the first one now in Minnesota), which gave the pennant race an air of magic. Since the number of teams had always been fixed, it was as if two new planets had just been discovered in the Solar System. How would they play and look in the standings?
From the first exhibition game I was clipping Yankee box scores from papers and pasting them in a datebook with clear Magic Mending Tape, the piny smell of which still reminds me of spring 1961.
Soon after the regular season started I stumbled on a gold mine: Grossinger’s shared a box at Yankee Stadium with Eddie Fisher’s company, Ramrod Productions. Not only was it rarely used, but the strips of tickets were kept in a binder in the Hotel’s New York office, currency for the taking. From then on, every Friday that the Yankees were home, I would ride the subway straight to 57th Street and then call a number of friends depending on how many seats I had. A lanky sports fanatic from history class named Jake had become my fungo partner and Yankee pal; he was always my first choice.
In our cubicle behind the visitors’ dugout we were surrounded by hardcore season ticket-holders with their spiral-bound scoresheets and pages of stats. They would debate strategy as the game unfolded. If I inserted an opinion they might pause in curiosity, hear me out, and, to a one, dismiss it. But they had short memories and would invite me back into their colloquium. It was a burlesque routine: they would argue, bicker, yell at each other, then turn to me for a verdict. Whatever I offered they opposed in chorus: “No! No!” “How could you…?” “What are you, crazy?”
One afternoon that spring, I predicted that Johnny Blanchard, who hadn’t batted all year, would get a key pinch hit. Joe Glazer, the resident expert, was furious at the time that Ralph Houk had sent him up with the game on the line. He said, “Aw, c’mon, kid. Whadda you know?”
“Third-string catchers love third-string catchers,” I jived.
When I proved right he gave me an irritated swat, not able to conceal half a smile.
My mo
ther did not interfere with my schoolwork anymore, but junior year from either a misunderstanding on her part or hyperbolic rhetoric by Mr. McCardell on parents’ visiting day, she got it into her head that my entire academic career hung on my junior “Profile.”
The “Profile” was meant to be the most challenging English assignment of our tenure—a biography in the style of New Yorker pieces. From the get-go she and I had a disagreement about my topic. I figured that it didn’t matter whom I chose, as long as I wrote well; she was adamant that I select a prominent figure. She quickly rejected my more modest ideas—pitcher Billy Stafford and adman David Ogilvy—and, through a newspaper friend of Bob’s, lined up an interview with Dag Hammarskjöld. I fell months behind starting on my draft while waiting for the fabled appointment. A week beforehand, he cancelled, and I was relieved. I couldn’t imagine why the secretary general of the United Nations should take time out from trying to prevent nuclear war to talk to a high-school kid, and I was glad I didn’t have to be that kid.
The paper was due on the Monday after Easter. Now, with three weeks to go I didn’t even have a subject. When Easter vacation came, my mother tried to keep me home to work on it. Not only was she certain I would never find someone suitable at Grossinger’s, but she remembered how embarrassed she was when I wrote my practice Profile a year earlier on Lou Goldstein. “Can you imagine it, Bob,” she said. “He writes about that idiot and hands it in at … Horace Mann.” She said the name as though she still had a greater claim on the school than I did.
Against her remonstrances I went to the Hotel as planned and, with Aunt Bunny’s help found a quick accomplice—Freddie Rosenberg, an insurance agent in Liberty who was the husband of her close friend Marcia and looked like Paul Newman. He wasn’t secretary general even of his own office, but he was available.
During the next two weeks I doggedly hung around Freddie, transcribing his story in his own words, from personal interviews in his office to off-the-cuff remarks to secretaries and clients on the phone. One Sunday he took me ice-fishing “with the guys,” boasting all the way that he was the only one with a biographer. I stood on the lake, barely able to grip the pen and pad in the wind to take down his jokes and off-color comments about his wife. Then I claimed one of the Hotel’s office IBMs and sat among the secretaries, typing my notes into the “Freddie Rosenberg Profile.” On Monday I handed in the longest paper in the class by far, over fifty pages. Freddie had written it for me.
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