Chuck sat at the desk behind mine.
Our homeroom teacher, standing behind the desk now with his hands in his pockets, greeted us, telling us to take seats (“Those in the back, please hurry up. We have a lot to do this morning”) turned now to write his name on the board.
Mr. Tannenbaum began to call out the names of the various kids in the class — “Please answer ‘present’”—while I looked around.
Once the names had been gone through, behind me Chuck whispered: “I could have really messed up his day and told him my whole name. Charles Edward Rufus Rastus McSweeney O’Gorman Van Pelt Abramson.”
I turned around laughing. “Is that really your whole name …?”
Mr. Tannenbaum glanced over, and I looked back.
“Yeah,” Chuck went on whispering, obliviously. “But Charles Edward Abramson is about all most people can take.” I looked over my shoulder again, where, on a piece of notebook paper, Chuck had begun to draw his monogram.
Mr. Tannenbaum called out more names.
The tall kid was sitting diagonally back in the room from me. I glanced around at the students, correcting their names through the roll call. His name was Joseph Torrent. (“Do people call you Joe?” Mr. Tannenbaum asked.
(“Yeah — or Joey. …”A kind of squeakiness accented his premature adolescent baritone, as though his voice had not quite finished changing.)
Moments later, Mr. Tannenbaum was announcing that now we were all to get up, leave the seats we had taken, and take seats in alphabetical order, starting with the first seat in the first file and working back, then continuing with the first seat in the second file, and so on. I moved quickly to the back, momentarily losing Chuck (who’d gone forward, knowing his name would put him toward the front), and angling toward the big kid. I nearly bumped into him. With the same determination I’d had when I initially spoke to Chuck, I said, “Joe, this has got to be a lot more confusing than it’s worth.”
“Yeah,” he said. And grinned. “It sure is.” Then he frowned again. “What was your name again?”
“I’m Chip.” I held out my hand. Not expecting that sort of greeting in the crush of students, he looked a little surprised, and then took it and shook. The skin was dry and warm, and slightly roughish. I liked that. Somebody toward the front said, “Hey, there were some more D’s and E’s — I know!”
“That’s me,” I said. And took off, back toward the front of the room, to take my seat, realizing that it was only one seat diagonally behind Chuck’s anyway. “This isn’t so bad,” I told him.
While the kid beside me said, “Was your name Chip? I’m Danny.”
“Hi,” I said to the kid in the glasses with his spade-shaped face and hair that was nappier than mine, and shook hands. The fingers were thin, the nails ordinary length and clean, and not, to me, interesting at all. “This is Chuck,” I said.
Chuck turned around. “Pleased to meet you.”
Mr. Tannenbaum said, “Keep it down, now. We’re trying to do this with as little noise as possible.” He began to stack “Delaney Cards.” “It seems the next thing on our agenda is to elect the class representative to the Student Government Organization. …”
While I waited outside the room with Gene, Mike, and Leo for the election to be over, I wondered whether Joey had voted for me or not. Someone beckoned us in through the window. As I came in, after Gene and before Mike, I glanced at Joe. He grinned, and I grinned back — then went to take my seat beside Danny and Chuck, as Mr. Tannenbaum announced, “Chip Delany is our GO representative,” and I looked at the board where my name was written, the ghosts of the three others just legible on the black slate under the sweeping marks of the eraser. Well, I thought to myself, chances were Joe had.
Between two other classes where neither Chuck nor Danny was involved — I did not want any of my other friends to know about this friend — I talked to Joe some more. There were three lunch periods. Danny’s and Chuck’s was not the same as mine, that first term. And so I ate my lunch with Joe, asking him about himself, telling him a bit about me — and, every time I could without being obtrusive about it, glancing at his big, heavy-fingered hands, with their permanently grubby knuckles and their gnawed nails.
When Chuck and I came down from the GO meeting, as I walked into the school’s dark foyer, out in the sun beyond the stained glass transom I saw Joe and several of his other friends standing around — apparently for some reason they had stayed after school too. They were just turning to leave — but I stepped up to the wall, where a wide bronze plaque hung (commemorating what in the elementary school’s nether history, I could not possibly say now) and demanded, “Now who do you think all these people could be?”
Chuck looked back, came up, and in minutes we were joking about this name and that — for at least five minutes … time to let Joe get to the corner and out of sight. I even contemplated suggesting I’d forgotten a book upstairs, and asking Chuck to return with me. But certainly Joey was far ahead enough by now to obliterate any possibility of my having to talk with both at the same time — a burden that seemed to lie just beyond the edge of possible endurance.
On days when I didn’t ride home on the subway with Danny or Chuck, however, I’d hunt up Joe and ride down with him, occasionally going a few stops past the 135th Street station, where ordinarily I got out, to the Ninety-sixth Street station, where he left the train. Sometimes, I even sat with him on the benches against the station’s tiled wall for half an hour, listening to him talk about adolescent problems that ran from his difficulties in getting along with his mother (like Chuck’s, Joey’s parents were divorced) to misunderstandings he’d had with some friends with whom, from time to time, he played basketball.
Science’s 140 IQ average meant, of course, that many students were substantially above it. (I didn’t realize at the time that a kind of instinct made me seek out the brighter kids.) But it also meant that there were many below it — students of good or even ordinary intelligence, who had acquired good study habits, who were by temperament hard workers, and who were willing to put real energy into whatever tasks were put them.
Chuck and Danny were students who glittered. Whether they did well or badly, whatever they were involved in was always interesting. Joe, on the other hand, fell squarely into the latter group. (He had done better than I on the entrance exam; no one had had to maneuver his name around on a waiting list.) The problem these students had at Bronx Science was that often, if only because of their diligence, they’d been the smartest or among the smartest students in whatever school they’d come from. But now because there was such a concentration of real brilliance around them — and all the eccentricity that went with it — they were reduced to the position of the normal. Often they were not happy with it.
And that was very much Joe.
6.321. The double narrative, in its parallel columns. …
(When, thirty-three years later, I asked Chuck about his recollections of our first day in school together, he told me over long distance from Missoula, Montana, while sunlight through Amherst’s leaves dappled my uncurtained storm windows: “The thing I remember about that first day was that Mr. Tannenbaum wore ‘space shoes’ … that this man, who from the way he dressed, should have been wearing the most conservative dark-brown wing ripped Oxfords — he wore space shoes! In the newspaper, every weekend, there used to be that little advertisement, ‘Come get your feet poured …’ or something? And he had them — like your mother. I can remember her wearing them, in the library across from the Museum of Modern Art where she worked. ‘Space shoes’—they were really strange to see on someone back then.” But because my mother did wear them, Mr. Tannenbaum’s hadn’t made the same impression on me.)