New Moon

by Richard Grossinger

  Science had once been a viable alternative to writing for me—a possible career—but I didn’t experience the Amherst version as old-fashioned science; it was one-upmanship in which Amherst men tried to outsmart Newton and Galileo, pretended to reinvent the laws of physics and were given grade points solely for style. My physics teacher ignited the homecoming bonfire with a Rube Goldberg-like contraption.

  I stopped going to either math or physics, falling irreversibly behind. They had become another obstacle course.

  Generalities are specious, the above no exception, but they approximate a tone and milieu. There was a requisite hipness to most discourse (“fine, fine, fine”—pronounced with breezy, detached enthusiasm). The default posture was to be wry and aloof or you were uncool. My classmates were preparing to be doctors proficiently, playing hockey proficiently, dating proficiently—generic good guys. Amherst even had a self-satirical slogan—“cowboy cool”—set against Harvard’s pretext of highbrow scholarship. Fancy cowboy hats were a favorite campus garb (though one upperclassman went through the day in monk’s robes and sash carrying a giant flag—a lion’s crest—of one of the German duchies).

  I had a few buddies—Marx of course, the poet Al, Marshall the guy whose room was trashed, Syed Zaidi, an Iranian upperclassman who introduced me to Hindu philosophy, and Ken Cousins, a sophomore linebacker on the varsity football team and a poet. These folks and I were united in resistance to the monolith, but I was struggling emotionally too, and at a scale Dr. Friend had presaged.

  One Saturday I wrote a description of the party developing down the hall; I named the piece “Elmer the Cow” and sent it to the Amherst Literary Magazine. My title was a synthesis of “Elmer’s Glue” and Eeyore the donkey, snow piled on his back (in Winnie the Pooh) because he had no home—a blend of self-pity and rebellion:

  I went to the window, opened it, grasped the fluffy cold from the sill, and squeezed it into nothing in my hand. I looked straight down at a steaming drain-pipe, up at the hurried snow falling from heaven-black, out at where I knew the mountains and stars to be.

  The music droned and twanged in the hall, and I opened my door. I was looking at a messy-haired girl and a smooth-haired drunk boy. He had her pinned against the wall….

  My friend, I hate to be bitter, but Amherst was a snowdrift doused in whiskey, beer, and perfume—smeared with lines of red lipstick and broken brown glass, melting into a river of mud—clogging the delta to the great and endless sea (where a rowboat waits for me).

  To my amazement, it was published. The day it appeared I found the pages torn out and nailed to my door, obscenities scrawled on them.

  In early February a maintenance crew replaced the marked-up bathroom doors with coated Formica. The only one around by chance to view the demolition, I felt a manic glee as the rune-cluttered relics got hauled off, likely by petition of Leo Marx. I don’t know what spell came over me, but it wasn’t the first time I did something too dumb and death-wish to believe. With a bunch of felt pens I covered the new doors with grade-school pictures: penguins with party hats blowing horns, baby animals.

  That evening a committee of about a dozen from down the hall appeared at my door and ordered me out of my room into the john. There they presented me with Ajax and paper towels and ordered me not to leave until “every surface—every single one—is unblemished.”

  “Can’t you let the school give us nice new doors,” chided Jynx, “without polluting them with your porn.” The rest laughed.

  Chastened by the quick arraignment and antipathetic mob—how did people always know it was me?—I worked assiduously for an hour, scrubbing the drawings fainter and fainter until they finally dwindled into pale spots. As an inspection crew approved my work, I stood there trying to look contrite. Then I skulked away and closed my door. The knob came off in my hand. My mind raced, sorting options until its own tumblers dropped into place: it had been rigged! I was locked in!

  I looked hastily about, as I promised myself not to panic. A crowd gathered and began pounding my door and jeering. These were no amateurs; they had hung a bed out a window. Yet I felt strangely detached. The person they were assaulting was an asshole; he deserved this. I sat on the bed dazed, fascinated. Their epithets like my mother’s had no meaning; they were like the roar of a distant crowd.

  Then a liquid began to flow under the door into the room. Before I had a chance to think what it was—lighter fluid! A curtain of flame shot up. I told myself that this was part of the prank, that I still wasn’t afraid. I opened the window to get rid of the smoke.

  At windows elsewhere in James, kids were chanting for me to jump. I felt a wild surge, like my fury at my brother during our brawls, but there was no way to get at them, even to fight and be beaten to a nubbin. I looked for a weapon and found only my hockey stick. Good enough! Leaning out the window as far as I could I swung away, whacking at those taunting me, driving them back inside, busting windows. The feeling and sound of the glass smashing was gratifying. Then I could hear, as if far away, Al and Sid arguing with guys outside my door. There was shoving and angry words. Finally they crashed in, pulled me out, and led me down the hall to their room. I sat there insensate, in a kind of shock.

  The next morning Dean Esty summoned me to his office. He had a one-sided version of the event and didn’t want to hear a rebuttal. He told me that I would be billed for the broken windows and I was now on probation.

  Word of the incident spread rapidly. A group from Stearns, the neighboring freshman dorm, came the next evening to express empathy and solidarity. When I recounted my penalties, to a one they said I should fight back: “Those morons do all that shit, and you get blamed.” They told me that lots of other students, upperclassmen too, were on my side. They offered to circulate a petition on my behalf.

  I was grateful for the fellowship, but I wanted to be left alone, to have this unearned fame evaporate at once. I was no hero, no martyr; I had no one but myself to blame. I was crazy dumb Richard Towers from the Martha and Bob Towers household, a jerk who finally got his due. I had been wandering in a stupor, playing asinine pranks and daydreaming, almost forever. It wasn’t gallant or romantic; it was bullshit.

  The shouts and flames, the broken glass, had woken me at last: my fantasies of Betsy and “Elmer the Cow” jeremiad were self-aggrandizing delusions.

  There was one consequence of the mayhem I didn’t hear about for twenty-one years, which is how long it took me to return to Horace Mann after the 1962 World Series.

  Mr. Clinton was still there. When a student of his I thought of him as an old man. Yet, after two decades, he had turned surprisingly young again and welcomed me with tenderness and observable joy. At lunch we talked about the years gone by.

  “Do you remember when you were locked in your room freshman year at Amherst and it was set on fire?” he asked.

  “You knew about that?” I said, astonished.

  “Knew about it? Dean Wilson from Admissions had the gall to call us up and complain about our recommending you. He said you weren’t the caliber of an Amherst man. I gave him some choice words. His ears were burning.”

  Tears formed at the corners of my eyes. They had known? They had been my supporters? Horace Mann, in all its years of silent complicity and rigor? “I was pretty crazy then,” I confessed, “and I brought it on myself, but still, locking me in the room and setting it on fire—”

  “Those prep-school sadists. I know the quality of human being. I told Dean Wilson that. I shoved his piety right back up his ass.”

  In the spring I applied as a transfer student to both the University of California in Berkeley and Swarthmore. In April I took the bus down to Philadelphia to visit my old first choice. It was barely spring in Massachusetts, but Pennsylvania blossoms were already on the trees, as boys and girls sat studying on the many lawns. Compared to Amherst’s obstacle course, this was nirvana.

  The Dean of Admissions was blunt. “Your grades don’t merit a transfer, and you’re on probat
ion. In any case, we consider Amherst a model of what we’d like Swarthmore to become.”

  In little more than a semester I had squandered my entire Horace Mann career.

  On my way north I stopped in New York. I went to my mother for solace. She sat in her bedroom as I will always remember her—by the window with her reflector held taut against her throat, looking away from me into the sacred sun. She told me that I was missing classes, to go back to school. She never opened her eyes or put down the silver cardboard. She didn’t want to look at me, she said, until I got myself straightened out. She had had enough of my nonsense. My performance was an embarrassment both to her and to Horace Mann.

  Math and physics were a lost cause. But otherwise I did the required work and kept up my coursework. I even had the gumption to try out for freshman baseball, which meant carrying out drills in an indoor diamond called The Cage. I participated in workouts with two other shortstops (the outfield, where I wanted to be, was overcrowded). Fielding grounders and throwing across the greenhouse sod was as grueling and vacuous as ropes and tires. I was good enough to be on the field with them but not to make the team. So one afternoon I ended a career of competitive hardball going back to first grade, for good this time. “You’re quitting!” the coach snapped when I told him I wanted to switch to intramural softball; he insisted on hearing those words before he would sign my release.

  “Okay, I’m quitting!”

  But games were fun again. I played center, made catches that had people shaking my hand at lunch, and even hit a few home runs. I finally got to come down from a higher league.

  That spring Leo Marx took me to lunch at the Lord Jeff Inn with a friend of his from New York: Catherine Carver, a senior editor at Viking Press. He had advised me ahead of time that she was highly respected in her field, having worked with many famous authors, including Saul Bellow and Hannah Arendt. Her willingness to meet me on the basis of the few English papers he had sent her was an honor. A slight, dignified woman with a mannered voice, she skimmed through the high-school novel I now called Salty and Sandy. Continuing to peruse it during dessert and coffee, she asked for my carbon to take back to New York. A week later she wrote:

  This is just to say how very glad I am to have seen you, and read some of your manuscript, on Monday. As I told you then, I think what you’ve written is clear evidence that you are going to be a writer; and although I can’t say until I read all of it how much work this book is going to require before it can be published, I am certain that there is a novel in those 600 pages…. Even the roughest of them has a quality of expressiveness that is very much your own; I am most hopeful about your future in this line of work—as you should be.

  For the remainder of the spring term I nurtured those words. I had no intention of returning to Amherst.

  I also wasn’t returning to New York. My father was paying for college, and we both assumed I would live with him and Aunt Bunny, no fanfare or negotiation required. I had escaped my mother’s realm by surviving it. I had molted at last.

  The day before I left for Grossinger’s I received Miss Carver’s special-delivery packet with section-by-section instructions for turning my book into a publishable novel. This was the real deal! And I had a whole summer with my sunnier family to carry it out. The first time I would get to live at Grossinger’s I could begin my career as a novelist too!

  My father dashed that scheme in about thirty seconds. “You’re living in my home, you work for me.” As far back as my mother’s attempts to valorize prep school, he had made it clear that he looked down on intellectual pursuits. I had assumed the prestige of Viking would transcend his objections and he would recognize me as an aspiring writer—but that was pure naïveté.

  “You can’t just study,” he averred. “You’ve got to prepare for life.”

  “But writing is a job. It isn’t school.”

  “It’s too competitive a field. You’ll never make it. You need a real career.”

  I had waited all my life for him, and now … who was he? Expecting me to begin hotel training at once, he had made up his mind to place me in the bureaucracy at his own first job: assistant dead-letter clerk. Debate was pointless; he was presenting a fait accompli.

  Michael and James were at camp and Jerry was upstate with his family for the summer, so the house was nearly empty. I inherited Jerry’s small room on the third floor next door to Emma, a large elderly black woman from Carolina. She had worked for Aunt Bunny’s parents for three decades and had come out of retirement to help prepare meals and cocktail parties for our family. She called hotel maids to do any serious cleaning and spent much of each day in her room watching TV—she never missed a Mets game.

  Major-league baseball had receded from me that spring in the trials of college. Now I didn’t care about the Yankees anymore, didn’t identify with the self that had rooted for them, but I lay on the floor of Emma’s room many an evening and afternoon, watching the early Mets with their procession of ne’er-do-well hopefuls—Elio Chacon running the bases like a crazy man, Jimmy Piersall traversing them backwards as a spoof on baseball, Bob Miller pitching his heart out and the bullpen blowing the lead, Marv Throneberry summoning a droplet of his minor-league power as a Yankee farmhand while missing second and third like a locomotive without a conductor, Jim Hickman evincing the clout and speed of Mickey Mantle, then evanescing back into strikeouts. Sitting up in the bed in her nightgown, almost bald without her wig, Emma moaned, hooted, clapped, and did her knitting. It was as good ballgame company as I had ever had. Plus the shifting roster of Metropolitan troops reminded me of my old armory game: Duke Carmel, Cliff Cook, Galen Cisco, Ron Hunt, Cleon Jones. I was hooked, a Mets fan henceforth.

  Assigned to train me, the elderly woman who ran the mailroom spelled out my dreary parameters the first morning. I was expected to sit at a desk for eight hours logging undeliverable letters in a ledger. Since the Hotel was a transient establishment, there were dozens of these items daily: for guests who had long ago left; staff who had been fired or quit, or never came; one-night-stand entertainers; even celebrities who hadn’t been there for years or never been there.

  It was soon clear that the only functional part of the job was re-addressing mail to those few who had actually left forwarding information. With an alphabetical list to consult and occasionally update, that part took an hour, sometimes two. My other six hours were spent going through grubby filing cabinets trying to match names on envelopes to anything at all in the crumpled chaos. In one week I didn’t find a single match; yet my supervisor thought it worthwhile to spend as much as half an hour trying to locate a staff member from ten years prior—to try to forward a card that said: “Greetings from Tennessee” (on both sides). Ultimately all this mail ended up in dead-letter boxes, the log books themselves piled in similar cartons, sealed, then stored in a dusty closet.

  A fan rattled all day, and a janitor periodically passed through, sweeping scraps off the floor, cigarettes from ashtrays into a metal container on a stick. This was Grossinger’s too, one of the enchanted tableaus I soldiered through in childhood. It registered quite differently now, to one trapped within. I struggled against intermittent surges of panic, scarier than the glimmers I felt during captivity in a burning room. My father had changed from hero and protector to warden—and there was no rescue squad in sight.

  I itemized the organizational inefficiencies of the mailroom, expecting PG to see that the job was a waste of time, not just for me but anyone. He shook his head: “You’ll learn discipline. And it’s where I began.”

  My next ploy was to have Catherine Carver write him a sanguine letter, but that didn’t move the needle either. “If she wants you to work for her, let her pay you.”

  By the second week I was no longer under supervision, so I took to throwing more and more of the unforwardable items into the dead-letter box without checking the files. Finally, I stopped entering any letters into the ledger and tossed all of them. I finished the job in less than an ho
ur and sneaked back to the house to write.

  Aunt Bunny and Emma were my lookouts. If my father came home from work to watch television (as he did at some point almost every day), they alerted me and created a diversion so I could leave by the fire escape.

  At Catherine Carver’s suggestion I worked only part-time on Salty and Sandy, while beginning a new, more traditional novel The Moon. My characters were based on people from Amherst and the teen tour, each chapter told from the viewpoint of a different person. Every fifth chapter (assigned to “The Moon”) was conceived as the mind-flow of a cosmic being.

  Living at Grossinger’s was still the fulfillment of my fondest childhood dream. Although the experience wasn’t what I had imagined, it was bounteous enough and, other than my sentence to the mailroom, the landscape was as convivial and beatific as ever. During weekends I hauled my typewriter, two makeshift paperweights, and a stack of paper to the family cabana and worked on sections of my books, taking occasional breaks to swim and socialize, sometimes with other authors working there. For several mornings I typed next to playwright Paddy Chayefsky at the adjacent cabana. At one point he looked over my shoulder and pointed out false lines in my dialogue.

  Aunt Bunny and I had never had this much time together, so we chatted like magpies, an intimacy my father barely tolerated. Seeing the two of us together he snarled, “Richard, fix me a Coke on ice.” I stomped into the kitchen, prepared it, and set it beside him. Without a “thank you” he barked out his next order: “Go to the Hotel and pick up the evening papers and my crossword puzzle book.” There were countless such directives and ruses, more knee-jerk than premeditated. Males of his bent played Humphrey Bogart over Jimmy Stewart. He not only didn’t like conversation, he was a proud Philistine; he didn’t want any serious topic within fifty feet.

  Meanwhile Aunt Bunny, like Grandma Jennie, assembled her own clan of friends, mostly male, from the bevy of journalists, movie directors, entrepreneurs, and scholars of indeterminate origin who frequented the Hotel—on the grounds as paying guests, paid lecturers, gratis celebrities, or honorary family. As these luminaries came and went all summer, I hung around with my stepmother’s clique, reading fortunes and engaging in repartees of politics and literature.