LOST STARS
by Samuel R. Delany
Then, on the next page of my looseleaf, I began to describe how tall, dark-haired Erik Torrent stood on the walkway of the George Washington Bridge, watching the sunlight flash and flicker on the water hundreds of feet below, while farther out it became a sky blue slab of light, his fingers resting on the metal railing.
And I described in detail after detail his hand.
I had been looking at such hands on bus drivers, on the garbage man, on construction workers sitting with their lunches against brick walls, on a friend in school, on subway conductors, on a workman bellowing from the corner beside a flaming drum, or on strangers across from me on the train — black, white, and Hispanic — for years. (Their descriptions had been among the first naturalism to make its way into the purloined looseleaf.) I tried to describe his astonishing fingers (and I knew already that the astonishment was a bodily response such hands could produce in me when I saw them) in such a way that would fix this experience outside of language somewhere (I knew the fascination was private and sexual and couldn’t have spoken of it to Chuck or Danny or Marilyn — or, indeed, to Joey himself), somehow within it.
6.332. Walking up the subway platform at 125th Street, school books dragging down my arms, through the people standing about, waiting for the train to take them to work, I saw Chuck standing before one of the gum machines attached to the columns at the platform edge. His books were on the cement at his feet. Squatting a little so he could see himself in the small mirror the machines had bolted to their faces, he was combing his blond hair with a black pocket comb, smoothing it each stroke with his free hand, pushing it a little one way, then the other.
I’d heard people say, “You know, boys are just as vain as girls.” But I wondered if that didn’t mean Catholic boys; for besides Chuck, the only boys I’d ever seen do that were the Hispanic kids, on their way to Cardinal Hayes High School or — I just assumed in my adolescent smugness — to the various vocational schools in the city.
“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.