I would have to create another.
Thus desire set two graphic poles:
At one pole, everything tried to hold off writing, to delay beginning it, to halt it, to interrupt it, to keep the word at bay and restrain it from the paper, to retain it as a secret in the mind for longer, and longer, and longer, so that the pleasure of its inner repetition would endure. …
At the other pole, all forces drove to realize the word on paper, to let the immediate feedback and intensifying potential of the letter enrich and specify, clarify and analyze, increase the imaginative specificity that was one with its insightful and experiential richness — a richness that made its resonances in my young body sing and soar — the richness art alone renders of the everyday … and which mysticism sometimes broaches with the extraordinary.
My mother found the loose-leaf and, without telling me, gave it to my psychiatrist, Dr. Zeer — a pudgy Cuban, who wore glasses and smoked cigars, and whom I was seeing at the North Side Center. My terrible spelling and the erratic grades it produced had, at that point, been diagnosed as “probably attention-getting behavior,” and the biweekly therapy sessions, on the top floor of the New Lincoln School at 110th Street, had been the result.
Dr. Zeer and I talked about them calmly and sensibly enough, though not with much comprehension on his part (or, finally, on his superior’s, Dr. Kenneth Clark, who excerpted them at some length in an article on “Prejudice and Your Child” in Harper’s magazine and then in a book of the same title) of their erotic function. But it was my first indication that the movement from private to public by way of writing was not as traumatic as desire, with its attendant terror of total, social, absolute, and individual rejection, often makes us fear.
6.1. A citywide test had been required for entrance to the Bronx High School of Science, and there’d been some question about my score: I had not received a full acceptance, but had been put on a waiting list. Then Judge Delany, a friend of the principal, had done things to get my name moved toward the top. I’d been upset about it, and — for a while — had threatened not to go, deciding to attend another city science school, Brooklyn Technical High School, where my scores had honestly gotten me in. There’d been family arguments; I’d sulked. But somehow that was all past. I was to attend the Bronx High School of Science. My father had insisted. And by now I was looking forward to it.
6.11. That June, Science held a student orientation meeting at the Science Annex. My mother, who never rode the subways, took me up to the school by several buses, and we joined the two hundred fifty entering freshmen in the basement cafeteria, big as my last school’s gym. (The entering sophomore class was several times larger.) The walls were rough yellow tiles. The windows were screened over with diamond-woven wire grilles, letting in the blue of the Bronx afternoon.
Kids and parents sat on the cafeteria benches, on the tables, or crowded around the sides of the room and, toward the front, sat on the floor. A few seats away I noticed a striking boy, sitting on a table corner, brown loafers on the bench before him. Almost all the other students had come in slacks, many in sports jackets, the girls — only one in five of the Science students was a girl — in jumpers, skirts, and fresh blouses (this was 1956). But this boy had on jeans and an electric blue corduroy shirt, several buttons open over a bare chest. He was blond, gray-eyed, and good-looking. It was also clear, as I snuck glances at him, that he’d come without his parents. I don’t remember anything the principal, Dr. Morris Meister, said. I think the main purpose of the “orientation session” was to let the bulk of us know where the school was, since we came from all over the city’s five boroughs.
After it was over, we were told to file up the stairs, cross the roof, and go down the far steps of the building to the exit. This was the way, it was explained to us, we would enter the school for the next year. (The Science Annex was actually an elementary school for the first three floors, and the entering first-year high school students used only the top two stories.) Everyone was neatly lined up along the right edge of the stairwell, in single file, parents and children. The progress was unbelievably slow, but the left side of the stairwell was still clear, thanks to our lineup.
Then an electric blue and blond streak dashed past, on up the stairs, and toward the roof: the parentless youngster had decided he’d had enough of this inefficiency-in-the-name-of-order and had used the free space to run on up, over, and out.
6.2. That summer was my final one at Camp Woodland — in the oldest “work camp” group. My five summers there were an astonishing lesson in humanity, tolerance, and the workings of the social world as truly caring men and women tried to envision them.
That particular year there was a youngster at camp named Ben. He’d suffered from TB as a kid and had been left with several major motor difficulties. He wore glasses, as I did. He was somewhat fleshy. His movements were awkward, and his speech was highly distorted. Nevertheless, Ben was a dyed-in-the-wool genius. He played the piano wonderfully. He was also a lightning calculator. You could ask him questions like, “Ben, what’s three thousand seven hundred fifty-two point seven-six times twelve thousand five hundred seventy point three?” and he would answer, “It’s forty-seven million one hundred seventy-three thousand three hundred nineteen point oh-three,” in about the time it would have taken him to recite his name.
Though Ben was my age — thirteen — he was already a sophomore at Science.
With his speech defect and his motor difficulties, plus his gigantic intellect (his range of information was certainly not limited to number crunching), he still lacked anything any other thirteen-year-old could relate to as a sense of humor.
He was something of a misfit at camp.
Nevertheless I liked him.
Also — and I think this was certainly a point of sympathy between us — we both masturbated in the same way, rubbing ourselves against our mattresses, rather than the more socially accepted hand method. In Ben’s tent, thirty feet up the hill, this was the occasion for some teasing. (I was in the boys’ bunkhouse below, and once the first comment was made to me about it, I made sure I only did it well after lights-out.) Ben, however, was hardened enough to derision that he made no special effort to keep it from the other boys, most of whom were, after all, pursuing the same ends by manual means.
By the time I’d left elementary school, back in May, I’d managed to give myself a rudimentary knowledge, largely self-taught, of differential calculus; but, if only because it was self-taught, there were great gaps in my knowledge, and though I’d made it through the first half of the elementary calculus textbook I’d taken it on myself to master, the second half (on integral calculus) had defeated me.
Ben, I think, would have responded to anyone who was friendly with him and patient. At any rate, we had lots of sessions together that summer, when he tried to cover over the holes in my self-apprehended mathematical interests. Although sometimes he lost patience, he was moderately good at it. And I was flattered to be paid attention to by a certified genius, however well or poorly I actually understood his formulas, diagrams, and mouth-muffled explanations.