All through those summers, professional musicians like Seeger and Luise Beavers came to make us music; and local musicians like Grant Richards sang to us about “Bessie the Heifer” and aging Mike Todd played the harmonica and clacked his rhythmic, rattling spoons in frantic chatter, stamping his boots while we listened, fascinated.
Then, in my fourth year, suddenly I was in the older Woodland workcamp, further down the hill. Now, all the time, I was in and out of a building just up across the road, which I’d only glimpsed in previous years, called, beautifully and mystically, Butterfly Cottage.
5.41. At moments of real tiredness, during mornings or afternoons, I would suddenly seem to recede down a hall, so that everything I looked at would appear to fall into the distance, as if I were observing the stairwell or the backyard or the street through a hollow tube from a paper towel roll. It didn’t particularly stop me from responding to or talking to people. In my early adolescence, I got so that — sometimes — I could make it happen; but shortly after I gained some control over it, it began to happen less and less until, when I was about sixteen or seventeen, it ceased.
And:
Each night, as I was falling asleep, suddenly I’d be shocked awake — rather as if some phantom, passing, had struck the soles of my feet. Once, when I was four, the little convulsion that went with it was enough to make me fall out of bed. This nightly myoclonic tremor grew milder and milder as I got older — but I often felt I couldn’t go to sleep until it had happened. For then, only minutes later, I would drift off again — and the next time I woke it would be morning. This continued into my early thirties. Sometimes it even happens today.
And also:
Daily — sometimes even two or three times a day — I would undergo a moment’s heart-pounding panic, as I realized that, someday, I would die … that, indeed, I would have to live through the last few seconds of my life and make the transition into permanent infinite nothing. (For all my religious upbringing, the consolations of heaven never seemed more to me than myth or metaphor — possibly, I suspected, a radically misplaced one.) At its best, this panic would last two to five seconds: if I were walking down the street, it would make me swallow, or perhaps speed my pace. My heart would hammer, twice, three times. My breath would grow rapid and shallow. These attacks were total — and almost blinding. When they lasted only a second or two, I was basically all right — once they were over. A four- or five-second one, however, could make me halt and lean against the wall of the building. I might even have to sit on a stoop. There were periods in my life when these attacks would last ten, twelve, or even fifteen seconds. At such length they left me physically devastated. When they lingered that long, I might even cry out in the midst of one, or have to lie down for half an hour afterwards. Sometimes I speculated that, should one ever last as long as a minute, I would probably not survive. This, too, I learned to control; for a while in my adolescence, by moving my thoughts closer and closer to the reality of death, I could bring one of these panics on. But since they almost always occurred as a surprise, there was seldom anything I could do to prevent one. Yet sometime in my early thirties, I realized what had been a daily occurrence all through my childhood now only happened every week or so. …
Finally even these ceased.
But consider these three things inscribed again and again, page by page, in a second column of type that doubles the one that makes up this book, a parallel column devoted only to those elements that are repeated and repeated throughout any day, any life, incidents that constitute at once the basal and quotidian — waking up, breakfast, lunch, dinner, washing, elimination, drifting off to sleep — as well as the endlessly repeated risings and fallings of desire.
There is almost nothing I will write of — or have written of — here that is more than four minutes or four hours (and certainly no more than fourteen) from one or, often, all three.
5.5. When I was about ten or twelve, my father used to take me to the movies fairly frequently. He’d always done it grudgingly, however, so that only later did it occur to me that he probably got a kick out of such movies too: for over those years, he took me with him to see Mighty Joe Young, The Day the Earth Stood Still, It Came From Outer Space, This Island Earth, and Fort Ticonderoga (because, like Outer Space, it was in 3-D). My memories of those pleasant times are tarnished by the fact that, when he would grow angry at me, he would punish my transgressions (usually, at least in my memory, fairly small ones, like speaking to him in the wrong tone of voice or some other minor enthusiasm of mine he would take as disrespect) by not taking me to see one that I wanted to.
Once he forbade me to see House of Wax (also in 3-D), as punishment for what I no longer remember. (A film I also had already missed, as another punishment, was The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr T, whose coming attractions I’d seen with my dad at another picture and been dazzled by.) When I went to spend my spring vacation with Mom over at my cousins’ in New Jersey, Dorothy (three years my senior) had taken me to see Call Me Madam with Ethel Merman and Donald O’Connor (whom I instantly fell in love with, and went tap dancing around the house till I had to be told to stop), and Oh, You Beautiful Doll. And, after I went to see it with Boyd (five years older than I), I carried on so much about Burt Lancaster’s acrobatic performance in The Flame and the Arrow, that, when my father came over to visit us in Jersey, he scowled and said, “Didn’t I forbid you to see that …?”
“No, Dad!” I protested with a sudden chill of guilt and fear, with the inchoate feeling every child has at such a parental accusation that, deeply and unknowingly, they’ve done something wrong. “That was House of Wax …!”
“Oh …” he said (while Dorothy and Boyd glanced at each other uncomfortably, thinking their young cousin had tricked them into violating an unknown parental prohibition). “Are you sure …?” unable quite to understand how I could have enjoyed something so much unless it was in violation of his will.
5.6. At Woodland, I read some of my first science fiction stories.
There I also began to play the guitar.
After half a dozen years of violin lessons, and three years in my elementary school orchestra as first-chair violinist, a position (and desk) I shared with an older boy named Tony Hiss, the new instrument was very easy. Though when I’d begun, he’d played the violin no more than I did, my father had gotten a set of elementary books and for the first three months had been my teacher — for he was a man who could get music out of just about any instrument he picked up. He’d played the cornet until shortly before I was born and, when much younger, had sat in a few times with Cab Calloway’s band. He and my mother had been close friends of Cab and his wife, Lady Constance, and Christmas — Cab’s birthday — would see the four of them at an annual hockey game with which Cab celebrated, before his party, later, up at his home, the recreation room set up as a replica of the Cotton Club, the only way that anyone black who was not a performer working there could ever get to see it, as Negroes were not allowed in as audience.