“The bungalows went up and he went to meet the Friday night trains on the hill that brought the droves of what were still called campers for their weekend in the country. Saw with the gradual development the appearance of the fabulous ‘extras’—handball courts, an entire ball field with wooden bases, two or three tennis courts and, one summer (it had gone up over the winter) an actual outdoor roller-skating rink, which later, when the bungalows were finally purchased, the developers would fail to maintain so that he would see it literally reclaimed, the shuffleboard court inset within the oval rink the first to go, the painted numbers fading, fading, gone like a dissolve in films, then weeds springing up irresistibly through cracks in the cement that had not been there the year before and the once smooth white concrete overrun with sudden wolf-man growths and sproutings, the rink itself collapsing piecemeal, drowning in ivies, nettles, briars and poisonous-looking trees. Eventually not a handball court was left standing, not a tennis court, nor a single dock for canoes, the rollers rusted, jammed, as if the renters, now owners themselves, had no interest in the out-of-doors at all, had repudiated it, as if life were meant to be lived inside and the games they once played as bachelor boys and bachelor girls—‘The Good Sports,’ ‘The Merry Maidens’—were over, literally, the scores frozen, more final than Olympic records. (Though he and his cousins and friends still used the courts, their skills damaged by the disrepair.)
“But — this was the period of transition before the renters became owners — the developers themselves were now the aristocracy. Men like Klein and Charney, rarely seen and imbued with power and magic like emperors of Japan, not just through money or force (he’d seen Charney, an old, crippled millionaire driven in a limousine by a black man who smoked cigars, parked in front of his eight bungalows to collect the rents shyly offered up to him through the barely opened window of his car) but through ownership itself: men with houses, power to evict. That many of the bungalows stood vacant during the war didn’t detract from this power but reinforced it, as though men with empty houses were even more powerful than men with full ones. (Klein he’d also seen, a fat man like the Captain in the Katzenjammer Kids, walrus mustache and all, who always wore a khaki shirt.)”
(“And what, incidentally,” he would write in the margin, “was all this crap? This stroll down memory lane? I didn’t care a fart for my childhood, was more moved by someone else’s — anyone’s. Why, I was the kid who went to bed early, whose mother had me in the sack at seven o’clock, even in summer, whom daylight saving failed to save, imposing on me instead with its bright eight-thirties a sense — some of this was wartime, remember — of having worked night shifts, swing shifts, putting him — me — at odds, possibly forever, with the light.”)
“Later, the war over now, the bungalows were winterized. Roofs came down and insulation tucked into them. Porches were enclosed, rooms added on, showers moved inside, money spent. There were almost no bachelors left, though even when they were still around he had already begun to forget who went with whom, seeing the following summer what were still familiar faces in now unfamiliar conjunctions (realizing only later what had happened — winter with its cozy betrayals — and just as light stood for something hostile, so cold began to seem mysterious). Only his parents’ place, one of the first to go up, remained untouched, bungalows his had once dwarfed dwarfing his, bursting their boundaries, inching forward toward the road in a sort of architectural horse race, assuming complicated shapes, the original shell disappearing, swallowed in second and even third growth. Yet no one lived there in winter, or only a handful. The rest were small-time Kleins and Charneys themselves now, landlords casting their nets to catch the overflow from Pompton Lakes (where oddly violent industries had begun to spring up — a munitions factory, a quarry, a training camp for professional boxers, roadhouses that were said to be gambling casinos) but landing instead vague gypsy types, self-proclaimed migrants following nameless crops in unmarked seasons, New Jersey hillbillies with Italian names. As though — he understood what was going on: men of forty plotting their retirements twenty-five years hence where they had been thirty — being a landlord was a necessary first step in becoming a homeowner, as a knowledge of the names of the presidents and their incumbencies was a necessary first step in becoming a citizen. A gradual breaking-in period, in the three summer months they occupied the bungalows themselves learning the bugs of furnace and washing machine and garbage disposal before one dared live amongst such things oneself for any extended period. Meanwhile, in winter, they continued to live in apartments, marking time, getting down payments together, even moving from apartment to apartment as though this too were good practice.
“His parents stopped going in the summer, or went for only a couple of weeks every third or fourth year. The building had stopped entirely. Now, in its hodgepodge of composition roofs and variously synthetic fronts — imitation brick, tile, aluminum siding — it looked like a tub of mixed fonts waiting to be melted down. It was finished. It was awful. High, dangerous grasses grew in the infield, the outfield was a no man’s land, the river too low to swim in, the once presentable Ramapo Mountains behind them gone bald from too much blasting in the quarry. The bungalows, now houses of a sort, were locked into a permanent shabbiness which no paint or extravagance of metal awning could disguise.”
“Meanwhile,” he would write later in his preliminary notes, “in the early Sixties, a word went out: CONDOMINIUM.
“At first one thought it was a metal alloy, or perhaps a new element. Maybe it was used to fashion industrial diamonds. There were those who thought it had to do with big business, international stuff — combines, cartels. Others thought it was a sort of prophylactic. It was strange that the very people who would later become most intimate with the term should at first have had so vague a notion of what it meant. Only after doctors tell him does the patient know the name of his disease. Condominium. (Kon´-d
-min´-ē-m.)
“Perhaps it strikes you as strange that these should suddenly have become so popular. After all, the concept is not entirely new; there had been cooperatives for years. But a closer investigation reveals it’s not that mysterious. Myth is more persistent than staph. Accuse others of what you’re guilty of yourself and go scot-free. The Jews, say the gentiles, are too clannish; they stick together. Yet the cooperative was a gentile device, an arrangement whereby individuals owned their own apartments but could not sell them unless they had permission from the other owners. There were few Jews in cooperatives. He did not know any. Participation in a co-op was often restricted and the constituency of a building monolithic. The condominium, on the other hand, simply grants each owner a recordable deed, enabling him to sell, mortgage or otherwise dispose of his property in any way he sees fit, independent of the will and advices of the other owners in the building. It is this last fact which makes all the difference, driving home the last implication of ownership, giving dominion ( con-domini- um) over possession, reserving to the possessor the ultimate rights of belonging, extravagantly excluding all other men’s say-so, finessing all putative ownership’s tithe and obligation and easements, both Platonic and legal, making it unique, total, proprietorship in depth and in fact.