My mother was appalled. “His classmates are doing the Mayor of New York, the Editor of the New York Times, and who does he come up with: Freddie Rosenberg, insurance agent from Liberty!”
Mr. McCardell all but agreed, declaring, when returning my venture with the rest, that he knew my subject better than any other profilee—far better, in fact, than he wanted to know him. Nothing else sounded quite like Freddie Rosenberg saying, “Fuck them royally and fuck them all”—that from a section he read aloud to the class. He then became the first magister to give me the grade that was to typify my subsequent academic career: A or F, inked as such, on top of the first page. Luckily it was the former that he averaged into my final grade.
Later that spring, while taking a Fontainebleau reservation on the phone, my mother got into an extended conversation with a camp owner who, upon hearing she had eligible kids, so impressed her with a song and dance about his facilities that she invited him to our apartment to show his slides. We gathered in the living room for the pitch. I was only a peripheral observer, but our visitor had been coached. After Jonny and Debby were signed up and I was headed back to my study, he said, “Wait a second, son,” and made me an unexpected offer: I could live with the waiters and be paid $500 to edit Kenmont’s newspaper, the Clarion.
I had nothing left at Chipinaw, so I said okay.
Kenmont turned out to be the spiffy “country club”–style camp that Wakonda aspired to. There were no scheduled activities for teenagers, so most of the guys spent their days at the golf course and tennis courts or on the lake in rowboats and canoes with girls. The two campuses—Kenmont and Kenwood—were contiguous without parietals. A coffee shop was open for socializing till 9 p.m.
I read my bunkmates at once as self-important jerks. Ranking each other out was their main relational activity. Even by low Chipinaw standards, I found little empathy or intimacy; that was all repressed lest we be thought homos. Life was a perpetual contest to see who could put a peer down the hardest, then how wittily the person would come back. They repeatedly said lines like, “You stupid iriot!” (imitating the comedian Buddy Hackett) and “How’re they hanging?”
On the initial morning of camp we were given instructions by a short man about thirty. “Now look here, you guys. I’m kind of with you the first week to make sure you obey the rules. I don’t give a damn if you smoke, drink, or fuck around, but wait till after the first week. You see, the head counselor’s new and—”
“What’s his name?” interrupted a fat, curly haired kid named Love, who carried an umbrella, though the sky was clear. He waved it in the air.
“His first name is Bob. He’s from the U. of Florida and majoring in recreation. His second name sounds like a sweet-smelling flower, and I couldn’t spell it if you gave me all the letters.”
“Oh swell. Sounds like a real winner, doesn’t he?” Love said, smiling at the group. “Let’s give him three big cheers.” And each time he yelled, “Hip, hip!” and waved his umbrella in the air, he was followed by a chorus of “Hurray!” Then he nodded sharply and sat down with a grin of satisfaction. The meeting dispersed without conclusion of the lecture.
Two of us were outsiders—campers who had never been to Kenmont. My fellow newcomer was immediately dubbed Spartacus because he acted dumb and automatically did everything Love asked of him. Love named me Lightning after the sluggish character on the Amos ’n’ Andy Show because I was slow to respond to goads and put-downs.
I had brought along a tape of super-realistic sound-effects and, before my bunkmates knew I had a recorder, I turned it on under my bed toward midnight. One jet followed another, each one louder and closer to a sonic boom.
“Jeez, I didn’t know there was an airfield around here,” Asher exclaimed.
“Must be since last summer,” remarked Eric.
A train sound followed … first a remote whistle, far away … then closer and closer until it seemed about to crash through the bunk. “Christ almighty!” Eric bellowed, jumping to his feet and yanking on the light. When they discovered the source they fired their empty beer cans at me. Then Fred drained one on my covers, and they turned over my bed and pummeled me on the floor in the blankets.
“Lightning’s asleep,” Asher said. “Let him be.”
“What do you mean let him be!” Eric retorted, as he flipped over the mattress and jumped on top of it and me. Fred kept whacking his pillow against my head.
“It was an all-star prank,” I wrote to Jake the next day, “better than their dumb rank-outs, and not one asshole congratulated me for it.”
My passion that summer was the Southern novelist Robert Penn Warren, as his oratorical flights were touchstones for my own emergent prose. While aspiring to the same lyrical epiphanies, I ended up with clunkier, more ambivalent passages, so I memorized my favorite Penn Warren hits; for instance, about the moon borrowing its light from the sun in All the King’s Men and, midway through The Cave, recounting the demise of a man trapped underground while giving his departing soul a radiant wellspring: “… the handsome and generally admired carnal envelope of Jasper Harrick is, even this instant, as certain chemical changes begin, entering the great anonymous economy of nature. His soul, assuming that he ever had one, has flowed back to that burning fountain whence it came.” My writing hung similarly between revelation and doubt.
Meanwhile summer became a languid puzzle through which I wandered, preoccupied with novels and baseball games on the radio. It sufficed to have a catch now and then with my brother or find a meadow in which to lie and read among Queen Anne’s lace and purple clover. During part of each day I prepared the Kenmont Clarion, sending young kids on assignment, editing and typing their articles, cranking the mimeo, and dispatching the sheets for campus-wide delivery.
Most nights I hung out in the coffee shop with a soda or shake and my book, lost in Kentucky towns amid sales of debt, secret lineages, and almost-passing octoroons, RPW’s nineteenth-century tales of statutory intrigue and romance. When there was a ballgame, I brought my radio shaped like a baseball (that Milty had gotten me from the Hotel’s novelty supplier that spring) and sat on the side, listening to Mel Allen and colleagues, watching other kids dance. I had no courage to “make a move,” in fact no move to make. The days of summer glided by.
Then one evening Eric announced that he was breaking up with Tina, a petite, sullen-looking blonde I had been admiring from a distance. A few nights later I left my radio and novel in the bunk and showed up at the coffee shop early. I took a seat closer to the action.
Tina came in later than usual and staked out a bench in the far back with a friend; the two huddled there, whispering. I had spent the whole day working up to this deed and I couldn’t drop it because of an unfavorable-looking break. I strode across the room with the eerie sensation of transecting polygons of a cubist painting. I stood at her bench and asked if she wanted to dance. With a look of resignation, she rose, stared at her friend, and then paced listlessly ahead of me to dead center on the floor. She turned to face me, eyes cast downward. I set my hands on her back and waist. She was stiff and brittle. I hadn’t expected that; I had imagined her as fiery and lynx-like, the way she looked. She was cold cardboard, a cut-out of a pretty girl in a dress. It would have been presumptuous to dance close, but it wouldn’t have mattered because she wasn’t there.
To all the things I tried to say, she chirped intentional sarcasm, “Oh, isn’t that nice!” After the dance, turning on a dime, she strutted back to her friend.
The main thing I thought, standing there for all to see—and yes, everyone was staring at Lightning’s disgrace, the only handy entertainment—was that for the first time I wasn’t afraid the Russians might bomb. In fact, I hoped if they did, they would do it right away. Fred came running up to me. Ever since he had heard a song called “Paco Peco,” he ended all his big exclamations with an “o.” “Lightning, why do you have to be such a shmucko? She’s not the right type for you. She’s much too fast. You make a fool ou
t of yourself when you do stuff like that.”
I departed the coffee shop, “Michael, row your boat ashore …” fading as I strode through grassy fields beyond the rec hall, toward the brief forest, headed back to the bunk, the stars (as ever) a bottomless cipher. Between daydream Tina who lived in Neverland and candy-Tina with whom I shared one dance were imaginal worlds I could neither fathom nor trespass. Though I imagined myself in exile, I felt inexplicably huge and liberated, as if sorrow, dram by dram, were magically being churned into joy.
My mishap delighted me, for the courage to act and be revealed outweighed the paltry result. In awe of the universe, I commiserated silently with habitants of distant worlds. The twinkling presentation was so durable and vast it had to be real, to them too; it had to hold the meaning behind everything that was happening.
Then I intoned (along with Dion & the Belmonts) the obvious song: “Each night I ask the stars up above …. ” Its denizen wasn’t mirage-girl Tina, a fleeting stand-in. It was an aggregate eidolon: Annie Welch, Joan Snyder, Harriet, Karen, girls unnamed and forgotten, a Puerto Rican teen in a yellow dress glimpsed from the El: “… why must I be a teenager in love?” Because that was the question, but only in its largest sense. Stars and melody, words and beat came together, evoking an Elizbethan elegy or The Fairie Queene. It may have been narcissistic melodrama, teen kitsch, but the bigness I felt was inherent and unmistakable.
I thought back to Samuel Coleridge’s Ode on “Dejection,” elucidated in English class a few months earlier—1802 England, addressed to an unavailable woman, Sara Hutchinson: “May all the stars hang bright above her dwelling, / Silent as though they watched the sleeping Earth!”—the couplet as cogent on the playing fields of Kenmont as the sheep-filled meadows of the Lake Country, nor disparate from Bobby Darin crooning, “Somewhere beyond the sea, / She’s there, waiting for me…. ” Or those Everly Brothers in their pompadour mummery, “Let it be me…. ” The mystery woman, the mystery man, the mystery mission, the unknown witness, the Beloved: “A Nocturnal Upon S. Lucy’s Day,” “Ode on Intimations of Immortality”—all our lives our inner selves reach out for such an assignation. And it could not have been stated more clearly by that least likely garage band: “Can’t you see I came to the party / ’cause I knew that you’d be here.” Welcome to a festival universe—fast-moving clouds over an untended world.
On the radio back at the bunk pinch-hitter Johnny Blanchard swinging two bats in the on-deck circle (in my imagination, Joe Glazer hunched in his box recalling my act of heresy and divination)…. Johnny Blanchard, third-string catcher, hard drinker, sacred bum, came up to the plate and ripped a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth to pull out a game against the Red Sox. And in that epiphany Joe Glazer made a blessing and sent it my way with his greeting and compliments, “You nailed it, kid!”
And from farther off in time and space: “The voice I hear this passing night was heard / In ancient days by emperor and clown.” No kidding, John Keats.
The Yankees chased Detroit all that summer while Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris piled up unprecedented numbers of home runs, both ahead of Babe Ruth’s 1927 record pace. For much of July I listened on my radio. Then I heard that George, the chubby middle-aged steward of the kitchen, was a fanatic Yankee rooter and had a TV in his room beside the dining hall, the only one in all of downtown Kenmont. George was notoriously unapproachable and surly, plus he despised the wise-ass waiters in my bunk, but I wasn’t them. After a few weeks he must have discerned my legitimate interest (and non-asshole status), for he invited me to his “palace,” as he called it. Thereafter I became a regular guest. I stretched out on the floor while he sat on the edge of the bed in his undershirt with a beer. It was barely more than a oversized closet, but at summer camp a TV was a towline into civilization, and Johnny Blanchard rewarded us with a string of unlikely hits.
George and I would keep the silence of each other’s company, discussing only crucialities of the game except for his occasional commendation: “You’re a real mensch; how do you stand living with those shit-faced creeps? Tell me that!” He didn’t expect an answer, that was my virtue.
I remember how instantly alert we were whenever the Tigers’ score was announced.
“Whitey Herzog has just homered for Baltimore in the first.”
“Make it two on,” George said.
“A runner on base, so Detroit’s down 2–0.”
“We’ll take it.”
One evening the older kids visited the nearby Shakespeare Theater in Stratford for a performance of Macbeth. In my wildest dream I would not have imagined … there was Keith in the crowd, the real boy. I had never talked to him, but now it was simple. I mean, we were the only two HM kids there. We chatted like any schoolmates about how each of us had gotten there, then … good luck and goodbye. Dr. Friend was right; Keith was simply another person. The eidolon had been my creation.
Summer reached its apex in mid-August. No dawn fog—at seven the sun was already a blazing ball. Lawn-mowing tractors perfumed the air, grasshoppers launching and landing in the distance. I had broken my middle right finger playing catch with Fred—we were pitching to each other and he was showing me his curve—now the splint was finally off. I hadn’t held a ball in three weeks, my longest abstinence. Even in the daunting heat, I wanted to play. So I found my brother, and we collected a sack of hardballs. I ran to center field. He swung from the backstop.
I had the rhythm that day, throwing my body in the path of sinking liners, tumbling over and over with the ball.
“You’re a prophet!” Jon shouted.
It was true; the day was jubilant, auspicious beyond reason.
We kept changing places, batter and fielder, until we were both soaked and exhausted and lay silently together in the grass. Then we parted. He headed toward his bunk; I veered to the coffee shop where I bought a cold orange.
“We’ve sold a lot of these today,” the boy said as he dropped a cup over the bottle. I guzzled down a brief torrent. A fan turned ineffectually, as flies buzzed around rolls of gummed paper rich with flies. Over in the corner Asher was lying on his belly next to a tall, pretty girl I hadn’t noticed before. He had his shirt off, and she scratched his back while throwing out witty asides. “What’s this?” … stopping and scraping a little. As he strained to look up and around at himself she sassed, “Oh, nothing, son,” and went on drawing in curlicues on him. She was so quirky and droll I couldn’t keep my sideways glance from her. She had reddish brown hair, and there was something distinctly Keith-like about her—the theatricality, the playful intelligence, the melodic, showy voice.
Once again, an image of Pan had captured my wandering attention.
Through the remainder of the summer, though I never approached her, I watched Jill. She was spunky and brash, more than a match for Asher. I would overhear him talking excitedly to Eric about her: “She French-kisses! She stuck her tongue in so far I thought I was going out of my mind.”
Eric could barely contain his lust and envy.
The last week of camp I was standing with George in the kitchen before lunch, poring over the day’s stats. Maris had hit two more homers; we knew that, but had just discovered, to our chagrin, the Tigers won their late game. A voice from behind me said, “Oh, don’t tell me Maris hit another.”
Jill moved in between us like a pro to scan the box scores. “My favorite player’s Wally Moon. I want to see how he’s doing. There. Not bad, not bad!”
“He’s okay,” I added unnecessarily.
“He’s better than okay,” she shot back. Her eyes were pale, transparent; she had on large earrings, and her hair was arranged in a complicated French twist. George went on studying the page as though the phenomenon wasn’t there.
The next day the boys played the girls in the annual softball game in which the boys had to bat left handed (or right handed if they were lefties). Jill was the Yogi-catcher with a mask on. She fell to her knees and deftly grabbed an outside pitch on one bounce a
s I batted. Then I fouled one back; she threw off her mask, dove, and just missed it. Her lipstick and busty polo shirt notwithstanding, she was a player.
After Kenmont I returned to Grossinger’s where storm clouds were gathering. Jay and his brothers had been absent for years, and now Jay’s parents, with Barry’s father as their lawyer, were suing my grandparents over abuses of management. Aunt Bunny told me that they were justified. “But what can we do?” she lamented. “Your grandfather owns all our shares, and he insists on acting on his whims without consulting his partners. When he dug the first hole for the indoor pool he was warned that he would hit reservoir pipes going into New York City. He said nobody was going to tell him where he could dig on his own property. He got one giant geyser, and it wasn’t oil!” She flipped two fingers and her thumb in the air. “So then he had to fill in the hole and pay the fine too. Now he’s off on some other hare-brained scheme and your father hasn’t the guts to stop him.”
Uncle Paul had entered a more cantankerous phase—cursing the union organizers, bawling out guests for not being dressed properly in the dining room. And everyone in the family, as usual, was choosing sides.
But Grossinger’s was still my haven. I played ball on the staff field with Jerry, watched the Yankees on TV, shot rolls of Kodacolor, and wrote about the summer. As Aunt Bunny and I came dripping into the cabana one afternoon from a swim I told her about Jill and, en route through the lunch buffet, she responded with an insanely flagrant idea: “You should call her and ask her out.”
“I don’t even know her,” I protested.
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