New Moon

by Richard Grossinger

  The next year I read two books in English class that raised my consciousness about suggestibility and the relation between puffery and products. Their author, Vance Packard, a pop sociologist, scoped out seductive influences in ads—the subliminal messages behind icons that make us want to buy things. Borrowing ideas from his book The Hidden Persuaders, I decoded a series of Old Gold cigarette ads for my English term paper that spring, showing how the placement of objects in each still life associated the product with either pleasure or success. The particular campaign I chose ran in Life and Look and involved little cameos as if rendered by Dutch masters. Each put a pack of Old Gold among personal items like an astrolabe, an expensive watch, a bottle of brandy, pearls, a fountain pen, a denim jacket, etc.

  Of course, I had hung out at Robert Towers Advertising long enough to know that my stepfather’s agency didn’t design subliminal art. They were into straightforward spiels—postcard landscapes and chic designs, “classics,” Bob declared. He would go through the Sunday Times, find one of his, and crow, “Look at that layout. It’s Johnny Mercer; it’s Rodgers and Hammerstein; it’s Hemingway.”

  He insisted that I was reading things into Old Gold ads, that the point of the advertising business was to show something opulent and attractive—no one hid symbols in layouts. “Richard, you don’t need the Vance Packards of the world to make effective ads. Lose that bum!”

  But I assumed he was too small-time and regional to do the really advanced stuff.

  Being in midtown, he was able to deposit a carbon of my paper onto the desk of the Old Gold guy at a nearby agency. A week later he reported the man’s response.

  “He said it was a good piece of work for a high-school student. Your teacher should give you an A, and he’ll have a job waiting for you when you finish college; but he also said to tell you to forget the subliminal crap. It’s a load of malarkey.”

  A mere year after my flirtation with Vance Packard, Chuck Stein introduced the poetry of Charles Olson in our creative-writing class, then read aloud “The Moon is the Number 18,” setting on the table before us the blue-and-yellow matching trump with its crayfish emerging from a stellar pool, baying wolves and twin battlements on either side of a winding mountain path, a lunar face dripping golden embers.

  I felt a different joy from the intoxication of Zest: a celestial event showering worlds with hermetic particles—a lot heftier than soap suds. This was truly “old gold”: a matrix of living minerals as well as a splash of primal manifestation.

  The naked horned couple chained blindly to a half-cube in The Devil, trump fifteen, bat-winged beasts, became comely Lovers in a garden in the sixth trump, the Satanic figure suddenly a smiling angel, the cube now whole—but only once they realized the chains about their necks were loosely hung. Whether to be in heaven or languish in hell was their choice, just as Zest had been my choice to throw off the shackles of America, to convert my gloom into happiness—to accept a subconscious field of operation. In the seventh trump, that same male and female pair became black and white Sphinxes bowing before the Charioteer of the Earth’s first temple under a curtain of stars heralding the birth of the Symbol and advent of human society.

  The cards didn’t go away like soap. They matured in me and gave me a sense of my own existence. Zest returned and stuck this time and, even better, I was able to transmit it to others by laying down the deck and telling its stories.

  The tarot understood sadness and love, romance and destiny better than I did. It turned crises into opportunities. It showed me that I was never not among sacred things. It anointed me a lay Hierophant, a doyenne of Pentacles, a hero on a grail, a psychotherapist beyond portfolio, always, even when riding the subway, when playing left field or studying for a math exam. It gave an ordinary boy an esoteric alphabet and a way to glimpse the hidden universe. It made me serious and worthwhile to myself.

  It is all subliminal—that is, latent and iconic. The world is a giant, uninterpreted tarot in which a bar of soap can also be a Star.

  Of course, I am getting ahead of myself, confiding news I came to decades later. But those were its seeds. Their crucible was the dream of a chemistry set interpreted by a Village doctor. They were raised to the next exponent by a tarot deck from the Basement of the Occult in the same Village. Their true gestation is unknown, beyond my lifetime.

  After so many years Horace Mann was ending. I was now an elder in the temple that First Formers were entering as mere tykes. It was hard to believe I had been recruited into the cult so young—the current denizens of Pforzheimer Hall looked like third-graders.

  The reign of A’s was over—their mirage no longer fooled me—and I found it impossible to work with the same dauntless spirit. In fact, I didn’t understand how I had done it for six long years since dinner at Tavern on the Green.

  I had changed, but the school hadn’t. In English we went from Hamlet to the rage of Timon of Athens and his banquet of stones. In history I imagined Clinton a kind of Timon as he dragged us through the Industrial Revolution at breakneck speed, threatening and slandering us in comparison to seniors of other years. This wasn’t just his standard performance; he was appalled by our uncritical enthusiasm for mysticism, our lack of respect for school tradition, our sloppiness and longish hair, the rowdiness of the Senior lounge, and what he termed our “insolence” as typified by Alpert’s public outbursts and Stein’s campy satires. Recently Chuck had stood blocking the way to Chapel, stomping like Rumpelstiltskin, as he tore dollar bills to pieces and threw them at astonished underclassmen, proclaiming that money was the source of all evil.

  “The worst class ever, hands down,” he declared. “I had hoped for better than wise-asses and smart alecks for our seventy-fifth-anniversary year.”

  He wasn’t prescient enough to see the counterculture—almost no one was. For we were mere pikers compared to what was coming down the road just behind us.

  Mr. Metcalf threw plenty of baseballs in those final months. He too thought we were an embarrassment to tradition—unrepentant slackers. I looked for some concession or relief to acknowledge our journey from Caesar to Cicero to Vergil, to ratify our tour of duty, but it seemed as though he wanted only to rush us through as many stanzas as possible before we got away for good.

  I peaked at midterms, after my acceptance at Amherst. At that point I got A’s in Latin and English and an A+ on the famous senior history exam, said to be the hardest test in the school. I had mastered the chronicle of the world up through the French Revolution and then written like a demon for two hours.

  Mr. Clinton extolled me as one of the best he had ever had. He made out my desperate scrawl, the clock outracing my mind-splay, as I check-listed Robespierre, the Jacobins, and doomed figures through Thermidor to the guillotine, all in the last five minutes (and a stolen forty-five seconds before a ruler snapped in front of me). It was a mere list because I had budgeted my time poorly and expended too much on other questions, but Clinton had written, “Outline style excellent!” Wow, I couldn’t lose.

  When we returned from Christmas holiday for our last term, I hung out with a group from Westchester who played hockey on a frozen pond Fridays after school. It was my baptism in the sport, and I adored the live action with its rhythms, the aesthetics of each actual score through the busy slot (like in so many of Jonny’s and my made-up games). Ice hockey captivated me in a way that soccer never had.

  Each ball or quoit (with its shape and role in the sport to which it gives rise) determines the mood and tenor of its caper. Footballs, tennis balls, basketballs, ping-pong balls, even shuffleboard disks weave energy fields, and to me suddenly none were as delectable as the chaotic scrum cast by a small flat cylinder of rubber ricocheting on ice. Piles of coats formed the two sides of the goal, and missed shots rolled across the pond toward infinity.

  Having played only with tin men, I was unskilled at stickhandling. I could race but I couldn’t dribble or shoot. I tried to control the puck when it came my way, kicking at it wit
h speed skates as it rolled behind me. I never managed to advance through clusters of opponents before someone parted me from my prize.

  For that whole winter we tried to get hockey sanctioned as a PE sport, a difficult proposition at a school without a rink. Our hopes were based on the fact that there was a facility visible from the El, only a few blocks down Broadway. We spent months going through formal procedures … a signed petition … finally a faculty sponsor willing to accompany us there and ref our games—we found a young newcomer who had played in college.

  Why this one victory, so paltry and late, should have obsessed not only me but thirteen other seniors is, in retrospect, baffling; yet we threw our heart and hopes into it. Finally one of the coaches suggested that if we were so gung-ho, we try flooding the tennis courts. Grateful to be let out of a day of body-building, we spent an entire gym period on this foolhardy adventure. A hose was dragged out of its frozen coat, ripping up ice as it dragged along; then liquid toppled out in sputters and sloshed over snow. Drifts filled with water and caked. Those of us with shovels pushed snow against the fence, forming barriers to keep potential ice from running out.

  It was an engineering impossibility and, though we were laughing, our soaked shoes eventually froze, making for an unpleasant ride home. The next day I tried gliding on the surface we had laid, but after two strides I went through it. It recalled my dreams of skating down winter streets that became summer ponds with lily pads and turtles.

  Finally we got permission to hike to the Broadway rink with our coach. From PE we marched out of Horace Mann, down the hill, along the El, through the aromatic zone of the industrial bakery, through the many lands that bordered our hermitage, unvisited these many years—factories, warehouses, groceries, hardware stores, restaurant outlets: the Bronx. Carrying skates and sticks, bubbling with enthusiasm, we came to the outer gate only to find that the rink had already been rented to a girls’ school.

  I peered over the wall. Half the ice was lost to warm weather anyway. On the other half, girls, so many in different colored clothes like flags of different nations, were skating there—had been, in fact, all winter.

  That image became my harbinger for the dissolution of Horace Mann, a rigorous academy crumbling into something without boundaries or definition. HM of yore had held the world in place while we bumbled through adolescence. The half rink with its female flags was blithe and common, way too lenient a replacement for all that we had braved and survived.

  Some of my hockey friends had access to cars, and during spring vacation a gang of them drove up to Grossinger’s. Just like that, no mention to PG! I left word at the front gate and they zipped on through.

  After the rink closed for the guests that afternoon, we designated colored squares along the wall for goals, then played in various combinations of four on four, using rink master Irv Jaffee to round out the teams. He whizzed in and out of us, the old fox, teasing with the puck, ritually shouting, “Keep it on the ice, boys,” which was hard for kids used to zinging it. But there was plenty of expensive glass at stake.

  One afternoon near the end of February I bought a New York Post for the subway ride home. Whereas once I would have thought only of getting as much of a head start as I could on my homework, now I combed the sports for every last morsel of baseball. There were only spring-training dregs, so I read the hockey news even though I didn’t follow the sport.

  I knew the basic storyline from banter among my friends: the Rangers, a perennially bad team, had been in the upper echelon through the early part of the season after picking up elite defenseman Doug Harvey from the mighty Montreal Canadians near the end of his career. He had provided heretofore absent leadership, but now they had fallen into a battle with Detroit for the fourth and final playoff spot. That night they were playing the last-place Boston Bruins at Madison Square Garden. The Post said they had just traded for a defenseman named Pete Goegan. His diphthonged name was the trigger: I liked the “oe” between “g’s.”

  I had never seen a hockey game, or, for that matter, any pro sport but baseball. But I wanted to know what the game looked like, so I stayed on the IRT till 59th Street and showed up at Bob’s office. Hunched over drawings with his art director, my stepfather turned and looked at me. “What’s up, Rich?” he asked impatiently, understatement hiding his astonishment at this after-school visit. I showed him the Post and asked if he wanted to go to the Rangers game.

  He scanned the article and underwent a flip of moods. “You know something—you and I have never once been to the Garden. I used to live there.” Breaking all precedent, he called Bridey and told her not to expect us for dinner. We ate quickly at his account McGinnis’s near the Garden, then joined the arena crowd.

  The rink startled me—how large its surface, the dwarf-size nets: rope-like cages replicating how we laid our coats, not long and wide like soccer goals (as I had imagined). I was startled too by how cold the breeze off the ice. Carrying sticks like spears, the players skated around their own nets, two different-colored warm-up gyres grazing at their midpoints.

  After the anthem a referee dropped the puck; suddenly there was a swarm of players in front of the Rangers goal, the goalie fell down, and a red light went on as the crowd booed. Boston scored again almost immediately. Then the Rangers got to play with an extra man, a rule I knew nothing about. Andy Bathgate, the star, shot it from way out; somehow it went through the players in front of the net and bounced in. The light behind the Boston goal flashed and the crowd exploded.

  For almost two periods thereafter, the Rangers surrounded the Boston net but were unable to put the puck in. The territory was always so clogged, and the rubber bounced zanily over it, onto it, and across its opening as ooo’s and aah’s undulated across the arena. By now I was totally in the frenzy, poised in expectation, sighing in disappointment. I loved the speed and bumptiousness, the dragon’s lairs for goals, the potential of illuminated flashes proclaiming scores. There were only a couple of desperate minutes left when Bob’s adopted favorite, Irv Spencer, passed to a player whose slicked-down black hair looked like his name, Dave Balon. As I strained to see, the red light went on; the game was tied. And that’s how it ended.

  I blabbed about this event so much to Jonny that my enthusiasm became contagious and soon he was as involved as I was in the fate of the Rangers. That weekend we got Bob to take us to a game together.

  The Rangers were beaten soundly by surging Detroit, but an announcement after the match took away some of the sting: for the first time in ten years, hockey would be on radio in New York—for the remainder of the season.

  Several nights later Jon and I sat with our schoolbooks open, the radio beside us, the game beginning. I sensed trouble as my mother and Bob burst in the front door late, deep in altercation. They went straight to their room and continued shouting. I knew from the shift in cadence that their agitation had scapegoated us. Sure enough, Bob came marching down the hall as her emissary and directed his comments at me: “Just because you’ve stopped studying is no reason to drag this boy in too.”

  Obediently I took the play-by-play into my study but kept Jonny posted on the score through the door.

  A week later the Rangers and Red Wings met in a showdown. Jon and I kneeled by the radio: “Ingarfield and Ullman are ready. The puck is dropped…. ”

  Detroit seemed to score at will and took a quick 4-2 lead. Then a Ranger defenseman slid in a long shot. We clapped. My mother shouted a warning from her room. We lowered the volume. The Rangers scored after the next face-off, then again a minute later. We cheered with clenched fists in silence. But as the last seconds were counted off, the Rangers passing the puck around from player to player in ritual keep-away, we couldn’t contain ourselves. Our muffled shouts rose to squeals. “You better tell those two maniacs I’ve had enough of this nonsense. You started this crap with your goddamned hockey, and you’d better stop it right now.” I felt an old familiar rush of guilt.

  I awaited Bob’s appearance. I kne
w well the blend of pain and anger that would be on his face, his lips pressed in bottled emotion.

  “C’mon, Richard,” he pleaded. “Enough of this chazerai. Let this boy get back to his studies. What’s wrong with you? Have you quit dead on the last lap?”

  I seemed to have. In lieu of homework I was playing a spinner baseball game in the bathroom, inventing a whole season between the two new National League franchises, the New York Mets and Houston Colt .45s. Using their expansion rosters to make out line-ups and keeping scorecards of every game, I brought stats from my made-up league to school, and Jake and our baseball crew perused them. Guys adopted favorite players; mine was the ex-Red Elio Chacon, now a Met. After Jake picked Merritt Ranew of the Colts, every Monday he came rushing up to me: “How’d my baby Ranew do over the weekend?” Once he even had me bring the game to his home in Yonkers. “C’mon, Merritt baby,” he shouted, as I spun away.

  Then the real Mets took the field in spring training. I was enchanted by the look of former Cincinnati Red, Jay Hook, in his blue-and-orange New York uniform, blue letters across the front, throwing Met curves. It was like a whole unexplored Babylonian civilization suddenly in our midst, a new game on the radio dial, emerging fresh and untarnished by prior pennant races. The Mets didn’t have to win. Everything about them was novel and enthralling, even their names: Herb Moford, Choo Choo Coleman, Charlie Neal, Larry Foss, Al Jackson, a menagerie of fairy-tale characters like the packs of Earthlings who replaced Flash Gordon in the days of P.S. 6. I was at the beginning of time again, among unknown legionnaires.

  In the second exhibition game someone neither I nor the announcers had heard of named Rod Kanehl replaced Neal at second base and, a couple of innings later, ignited a game-tying rally with a single. All through spring training Kanehl continued to amaze, the master of 1-1 in the box score (one at-bat, one hit). Against all odds he made the team. Once in New York, he rode the subways recreationally; a fan darling, nicknamed The Mole, but I had spotted him first.