“Hi!” I called.
Looking up, Chuck shoved his comb in his back pocket. “Hey, there! How you doin’ …!” He squatted down to grab his books up between the knees of his jeans; but the train whose light now flashed on the far columns down the tracks roared up on the platform’s opposite side to reveal itself an A—not our D. So we had a few more minutes to wait, to talk.
6.4. Many mornings Chuck and I ran into each other, hanging from the enameled handholds in the loud, crowded cars (that had replaced the leather straps of a generation ago, which had given New York subway riders the nickname “straphangers,” and which, a generation hence, would give way to a single horizontal bar), books under our arms. Along the base of the phone company building we strolled past, mornings and afternoons on our way between the train station and the Annex, was a row of rectangular windows that looked into the basement offices, through which we could see men in white shirts and sports jackets working at paper-covered desks. One day that September, Chuck and I stopped to look in one of the windows. Chuck made some comment on the young man in shirtsleeves and glasses bent over his papers inside.
Talking there, however, we must have blocked his light, because he looked up at us.
So Chuck made a funny face, danced up and down, and waved with animated enthusiasm. Inside, the man—twenty-five or twenty-six—burst out laughing, sat back, and waved in reply. We laughed and continued walking. But the next day, we stopped at the window, waved, and made faces again—and again the young man answered in kind.
Coming and going to school, we made this a daily act. From time to time Danny joined in it with us. But after one or another of these mini-comic mimes, I had a serious conversation with Chuck.
“You know, Chuck,” I said, “you or I could grow up to be really famous—a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, or a great musician. Yet this guy, there in the phone company, he’d never know it. Still, we’re all really friends by now. Only he doesn’t even know our names—and we don’t know his. Maybe he could be one of those famous writers, like Eliot in the bank. And we wouldn’t have any way to know.”
“We only see him from the top down, and he only sees us from the bottom up,” was Chuck’s comment. “We probably wouldn’t even recognize each other if we met at eye level.”
And we walked on to the Concourse and the Ascott Bookshop, where, with Chuck lowering over my shoulder, I bought my first Vintage paperback of Camus’s The Stranger and The Rebel (“A brilliant piece of thinking!” declared the small bald man who ran the tiny card-and-book shop. “A brilliant job! You’re really in for a treat!”) and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury with As I Lay Dying in the marbleized green cover adjoined to it.
The mini-mimes continued. Apparently they became something of a topic in the phone company: once or twice, after a month or so, the guy had several other young men and women waiting at the desk with him, who all made faces back through the glass and laughed with us when we passed. Then one morning in spring, when school was nearly over, as we walked by the building, the window was open!
When we looked in, the man got up from his desk, walked over, and said, “Hello!” He stuck his hand out the window and we bent down to shake. “What are you guys’ names, anyway …?” he asked. “I mean, after all this time. …”
“We decided,” I said, a little taken aback, “that our not knowing your name and your not knowing our names was really part of the relationship. So maybe it’s better if we don’t tell you.”
“And you don’t tell us yours,” Chuck added.
That indeed had been, after much discussion, our decision.
The young man looked a little surprised, but then pursed his lips and nodded. “Okay,” he said. “That’s fine.”
From then on, we went back to our pantomimes, with just as much mugging and laughing. It wasn’t quite the same. But school had only a few more weeks to go.
6.5. School closed.
I left the Annex in June of ’57 with an average just over ninety.
That summer I went to a new camp, an international scholarship camp for boys, called Rising Sun. Though the campers were smart enough and nice enough, the place seemed, with its broad catalpa trees and cool gnat-infested waterfall, its Indian rituals and endless talk of the “philosophy of camp,” to gesture abstractly after the ideals Woodland had achieved concretely without effort—or, rather, with great human effort from its owners and organizers, reflected in the seeming effortlessness of its rich and musical reality. While I was away my family moved from the ten rooms above the funeral parlor on Seventh Avenue to a new, fourth-floor, two-bathroom co-op apartment on LaSalle Street. My father drove us back from the camp bus, Elvis Presley sang “Love Me Tender” on the car radio, and as we passed the old brick house on Seventh Avenue, with “Levy & Delany” in aluminum letters still above the door (the sign that had once greeted Nanny had had neon letters in green tin shadow masks and hung out from the building; but that had been taken down years before), I realized I no longer lived there—nor had I realized, two months before when I’d left, that I was not coming back to it.
An evening or so later, standing on LaSalle Street and looking down between the dozen twenty-one-story apartment slabs that made up the Morningside Gardens Cooperative to the right and the city-subsidized General Grant Houses to the left, like a gigantic folded drape of red brick above the sycamore saplings down both sides of the street, just set out in their plots (with guide poles and support wires and cloth bindings still wrapping their trunks), the thousand lighted windows yellow and orange above them under the deepening blue, I knew I had started another sector of my life.
6.51. I was a week or so back from Rising Sun. Bill Kuba, the crew-cut Iraqi camper, who’d stayed with us a few days and impressed Mom with his shopping acumen when she’d taken him to Sak’s to buy his mother a coat, had flown home. I was stretched out on the bed in my new bedroom, reading the new Theodore Sturgeon novel, The Cosmic Rape. Suddenly my radio stopped its music and the newscaster came on to announce, with great excitement, the successful Russian launching of Sputnik, the first satellite to circle the earth. He finished with an account of the school opening at Little Rock, Arkansas, that day, where local students and their parents had demonstrated angrily against the Supreme Court’s ruling that the schools should no longer be racially segregated: “… standing outside the school shouting insults and even hurling rocks and beer cans at the Negro students who had to walk between them into the formerly all-white school.”
A few hours later on that blowy September afternoon, I wrote to a Danish camper, Munthe, drafting the letter on a page in my school notebook. “It’s both astonishing and tragic that these should happen on the same day.” Then, I walked into the living room where a copy of the Times lay half on the hassock and half on the floor. That Saturday’s book review was ebulliently praiseful of its novel that week, On the Road, by a new rebellious, experimental writer, Jack Kerouac, whose name I’d already seen on the dedication page of a small black and white pamphlet of poems I’d recently bought, called Howl, by Allen Ginsberg.
6.52. Chuck had moved down with his father to an Air Force base in Florida—and a year later would transfer to a boarding school in Alabama and become involved in civil rights activities. The first thing I did in our new co-op was organize a dance for the teenagers who lived in Morningside Gardens and those who lived in the General Grant Houses, so that we would at least all have met each other and might hopefully begin easing any tensions built into the situation of a middle-income co-op and a low-rent city housing project cheek by jowl. Despite the disapproving mother of one of our kids—the wife of another black city judge—it worked and well, too. There were no incidents between the children in the two projects for more than half a dozen years. And I was a sophomore in Science’s main building—which was on the other side of the Concourse, so that I no longer passed the phone company mornings and afternoons.
Not much happened to Erik Torrent as he made his way through the
pages of Lost Stars, which I took up again that year. Mostly he wandered around the city, thinking about his problems with his mother (for me, this was quite a narrative exercise, since my own mother was a bulwark of common sense and sensitivity; I’d always thought problems were by definition associated with fathers; that my exercise fell in the decade’s attack on Mom in particular and women in general I didn’t twig for three more years), or sometimes with his basketball buddies. I’d made him fifteen, rather than fourteen—who could possibly be interested in the adventures of a fourteen-year-old (my age—and Joey’s—when I began it)? Also there was no way to tell, from reading it, if Erik did or did not go to school. (Who could possibly be interested in reading about something as dull as school? Even a school like Science.) From time to time he sat in the subway station, having deep and intense conversations with his brilliant, witty, compassionate, but darkly troubled (and always nameless!) friend. Even more frequently, especially as the book went on, he would go home, go to bed, drift into slumber, and begin to dream—whereupon I’d insert a new short story, perhaps a play I’d been writing, an A+ seventh grade English composition that had turned up among some old papers; once I even considered including an old science report on viruses that had gotten a particularly good mark in Dr. Joseph’s natural science class—in short, pieces about entirely unrelated characters and topics.
The next morning, after one or another oneiric interpolation, Erik would wake and, once more, begin his wanderings about the city.
It bespoke an odd conception of the novel.
6.53. Once, while I was writing Lost Stars, I bit off all my own nails, making them as short as I possibly could. Then, with the point of a straight pin, I scraped beneath their quicks till they bled, in order to bite away just a bit more—so that I would know for myself what it felt like to have such wonderful hands. It was an experiment that fell somewhere between the erotic and the aesthetic. I also spent a few hours gnawing at my cuticles, in hopes they would thicken (like Robert’s, like Johnny’s, like Mike’s, like Joey’s). In the midst of all this, my Uncle Hubert stopped by to visit Dad and noticed my fingers. “You’re biting your nails,” he said to me, frowning at me in my father’s office, standing over the fluorescent desk lamp. I was surprised anyone had noticed and was, on some profound level (though I’d already realized most people held it a reprehensible habit), shocked. “I’ll tell you what,” he went on. “If you can stop biting them for a month, I’ll give you five dollars. How’s that?”
“Okay,” I said—though I had never really bitten my nails before that week.
A month later, I presented him with my hands, the nails grown neatly out again. It was certainly the easiest five dollars I’d ever made. For though from time to time I tried to, it was as impossible for me to establish the habit as, doubtless, it was for Robert or Joey to break it.
6.54. It’s arguable that the strongest factor helping along Marilyn’s and my friendship was the happenstance that, at the beginning of my sophomore year and her junior one, when those of us who’d been at the Annex were moved to the main building, we were both assigned pale green coat-lockers in the back of the same classroom (it happened to be my homeroom), so that now we met every morning and every afternoon.
There, in the first days of classes, we stood about discussing the textbook for Marilyn’s creative writing class, which contained a story called “One With Shakespeare,” which had been the butt of much joking. Suddenly, at the front of the room behind her desk, my homeroom teacher—who also taught me social studies—a tiny, redheaded woman with glasses, boomed out, to fill the room with a sound none of us suspected she’d possessed: “YES, DICTION AND PROJECTION ARE EXTREMELY IMPORTANT FOR ALL THEATRICAL EFFECTS!” Then she smiled and said: “I used to be in the theater, you know.” But the space between the scarred desks and the back wall became a locus of surprise and exploration, as well as one of friendship.
There I listened to Marilyn talk with distress about an advanced math class to which she had been assigned and from which she was transferring. (I was bewildered why anyone would want to get out of such a class—I was even rather disapproving.) There Marilyn told me her creative writing teacher, Mrs. Applebaum (who’d been my cousin Nanny’s teacher when she’d written her “Sleeping Beauty” essay that had appeared in Dynamo), had assigned the class to purchase special notebooks to keep for journals. Even though I was a year away from any such class, that afternoon I purchased my own brown spiral notebook from a candy store on the Grand Concourse where many of us stopped in for school supplies and seven-cent egg creams—a wonderful New York beverage that contains no egg at all. That evening I began a journal, which, intermittently, I’ve kept ever since. And it was in front of those lockers that, laughing, Marilyn told me how another young woman in her writing class, when a young man read out an overwritten, self-indulgent, ten-page poem, sat back and, after a moment’s silence, remarked: “It needs a little cutting. But you’ve got great material there for a couplet.” And her friends from her own year—Cyndy and Lew and Richard—would drop by there to meet her. And soon I seemed to have been absorbed and more or less accepted by the older group.
Now, along with my schoolbooks, I carried my spiral notebook everywhere. Generally I wrote down impressions, journal entries, or jottings on occasional projects (along with a fair amount of homework) in the front of the book. In the back, usually working forward, I would write more masturbation fantasies—the black looseleaf had never been returned.
Two parallel columns …?
The entries in the back and the front of the book, over a period of four to six weeks, would move closer and closer together, like complex graphic parentheses, eating from both sides the diminishing central sheaf of blank, blue-lined white—till, sometimes, they interpenetrated.
Then, writing itself would seem to be—whether devoted to reality or fantasy, material life or lust, whether at the beginning or at the end of the notebook—marginal to a vast, empty, unarticulated center called the real world that was displaced more and more by it, reducing that center to a margin in its turn, a mere and tenuous split between two interminable columns of writing, one finished, one still to be begun … as I began the next notebook.
6.55. At Science, the Jewish holidays transformed the school: a good eighty percent of the student body stayed home, so that for practical reasons classes had to be combined and condensed. On these days nothing of pedagogic import got done. But suddenly the student population crowding the stairs between classes was seventy or eighty percent black. On the stairwell, during one such changeover, as I looked up at the heads crowding before the wire-covered landing window, I saw one of the black students.
He’d been in my freshman gym class and had always been quick with banter and repartee with the gym teacher, who’d alternated between enjoying it and being frustrated by it.
But that afternoon there’d been a tie-up on the steps, and, lean and with his small round head, the young man had set himself apart. Now he called out: “No, stupid, you go this way. And you guys go that way, then there won’t be any tie-up. No, this way! Go on, now!” and with the overhand gesture of his long arm in its blue-and-white striped shirtsleeve, the traffic jam dissolved.
His name, I knew from gym, was Stokely Carmichael. The year before, Chuck had had occasion to make a couple of remarks about him. I think they’d been put on detention together.
Later on in the term, for what offense I don’t recall, I was assigned three days’ detention (my single brush with it during my four years at the school), which meant coming in early and sitting with the senior gym teach, Mr. Ray, and the eight or nine other delinquent students there at any one time, until classes started.
On the subway my first morning, when I got on at 125th Street, Stokely was sitting across the car from me. We smiled at each other, and I went to sit by him on the yellow wicker seat with its green metal rim. “Now what are you doing, coming in this early?” he asked me.
“I’m on detenti
on.”
“You?” Stokely laughed. “Detention’s for me. I didn’t think you did stuff like that.”
“Well,” I said. “I guess I do.”
“It’s not so bad,” he said, reassuringly. Not that I’d really been worried about it. “I think they’ve got me on detention for the rest of the year, just about!”
I commiserated. But Stokely pooh-poohed it.
We fell into talking. I remember he told me about his grandmother and that his family was from the West Indies. That morning, in the detention office, we sat together. Pretty soon Stokely was joking back and forth with the massive Mr. Ray, who kept up his end pretty well, only remarking at one point, trying to suppress his own grin while the rest of us were laughing: “You know, Carmichael, this isn’t supposed to be fun in here. This is punishment!”
“I know,” Stokely said. “But you gotta give a guy a break sometimes, don’t you?”
6.56. Meanwhile the “novel,” with one dream and another, grew, in its agglutinative manner, till it was more than a hundred eight pages long. Finally, it just … stopped.
And the friendship with Joey had lost its silent, sexual edge.
Once the new term started, he was simply one of my school acquaintances, a little less interesting than some, a little more friendly than others—so that it was hard even to remember why it had been so important to keep the relationship, which in its reality, had never been more than conversational, away from Danny and Chuck, from Marilyn—from, indeed, anyone else; though, really, even Joey had no idea what had prompted my period of deep and committed concern with all that had concerned him.
The position of “Muse,” if that’s the word, had by that time been taken over by two new boys.
One was a towering, bronzed, crew-cut senior named Constantine, whom everyone called Gus, and whom, as I watched him for days, now as hall monitor, now joking with his friends, now flirting with the senior girls in the lunchroom (a head and a half taller than anyone else in the school, including Joey, his nails were bitten to a wholly different order—the details and differences I would notice and notate were endless), I only got to speak to him maybe three times: as a senior being addressed by a sophomore, he was all goodwill and, at once, completely unavailable to anything beyond the immediate comment of the moment. He was going to NYU next term—the terrifying possibility of running into him there was probably at least a minor reason, when, a year later, I won a four-year scholarship to the place, I turned it down in favor of City College.
The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village Page 9