6.51. I was a week or so back from Rising Sun. Bill Kuba, the crew-cut Iraqi camper, who’d stayed with us a few days and impressed Mom with his shopping acumen when she’d taken him to Sak’s to buy his mother a coat, had flown home. I was stretched out on the bed in my new bedroom, reading the new Theodore Sturgeon novel, The Cosmic Rape. Suddenly my radio stopped its music and the newscaster came on to announce, with great excitement, the successful Russian launching of Sputnik, the first satellite to circle the earth. He finished with an account of the school opening at Little Rock, Arkansas, that day, where local students and their parents had demonstrated angrily against the Supreme Court’s ruling that the schools should no longer be racially segregated: “… standing outside the school shouting insults and even hurling rocks and beer cans at the Negro students who had to walk between them into the formerly all-white school.”
A few hours later on that blowy September afternoon, I wrote to a Danish camper, Munthe, drafting the letter on a page in my school notebook. “It’s both astonishing and tragic that these should happen on the same day.” Then, I walked into the living room where a copy of the Times lay half on the hassock and half on the floor. That Saturday’s book review was ebulliently praiseful of its novel that week, On the Road, by a new rebellious, experimental writer, Jack Kerouac, whose name I’d already seen on the dedication page of a small black and white pamphlet of poems I’d recently bought, called Howl, by Allen Ginsberg.
6.52. Chuck had moved down with his father to an Air Force base in Florida — and a year later would transfer to a boarding school in Alabama and become involved in civil rights activities. The first thing I did in our new co-op was organize a dance for the teenagers who lived in Morningside Gardens and those who lived in the General Grant Houses, so that we would at least all have met each other and might hopefully begin easing any tensions built into the situation of a middle-income co-op and a low-rent city housing project cheek by jowl. Despite the disapproving mother of one of our kids — the wife of another black city judge — it worked and well, too. There were no incidents between the children in the two projects for more than half a dozen years. And I was a sophomore in Science’s main building — which was on the other side of the Concourse, so that I no longer passed the phone company mornings and afternoons.
Not much happened to Erik Torrent as he made his way through the pages of Lost Stars, which I took up again that year. Mostly he wandered around the city, thinking about his problems with his mother (for me, this was quite a narrative exercise, since my own mother was a bulwark of common sense and sensitivity; I’d always thought problems were by definition associated with fathers; that my exercise fell in the decade’s attack on Mom in particular and women in general I didn’t twig for three more years), or sometimes with his basketball buddies. I’d made him fifteen, rather than fourteen — who could possibly be interested in the adventures of a fourteen-year-old (my age — and Joey’s — when I began it)? Also there was no way to tell, from reading it, if Erik did or did not go to school. (Who could possibly be interested in reading about something as dull as school? Even a school like Science.) From time to time he sat in the subway station, having deep and intense conversations with his brilliant, witty, compassionate, but darkly troubled (and always nameless!) friend. Even more frequently, especially as the book went on, he would go home, go to bed, drift into slumber, and begin to dream — whereupon I’d insert a new short story, perhaps a play I’d been writing, an A+ seventh grade English composition that had turned up among some old papers; once I even considered including an old science report on viruses that had gotten a particularly good mark in Dr. Joseph’s natural science class — in short, pieces about entirely unrelated characters and topics.
The next morning, after one or another oneiric interpolation, Erik would wake and, once more, begin his wanderings about the city.
It bespoke an odd conception of the novel.
6.53. Once, while I was writing Lost Stars, I bit off all my own nails, making them as short as I possibly could. Then, with the point of a straight pin, I scraped beneath their quicks till they bled, in order to bite away just a bit more — so that I would know for myself what it felt like to have such wonderful hands. It was an experiment that fell somewhere between the erotic and the aesthetic. I also spent a few hours gnawing at my cuticles, in hopes they would thicken (like Robert’s, like Johnny’s, like Mike’s, like Joey’s). In the midst of all this, my Uncle Hubert stopped by to visit Dad and noticed my fingers. “You’re biting your nails,” he said to me, frowning at me in my father’s office, standing over the fluorescent desk lamp. I was surprised anyone had noticed and was, on some profound level (though I’d already realized most people held it a reprehensible habit), shocked. “I’ll tell you what,” he went on. “If you can stop biting them for a month, I’ll give you five dollars. How’s that?”
“Okay,” I said — though I had never really bitten my nails before that week.
A month later, I presented him with my hands, the nails grown neatly out again. It was certainly the easiest five dollars I’d ever made. For though from time to time I tried to, it was as impossible for me to establish the habit as, doubtless, it was for Robert or Joey to break it.
6.54. It’s arguable that the strongest factor helping along Marilyn’s and my friendship was the happenstance that, at the beginning of my sophomore year and her junior one, when those of us who’d been at the Annex were moved to the main building, we were both assigned pale green coat-lockers in the back of the same classroom (it happened to be my homeroom), so that now we met every morning and every afternoon.
There, in the first days of classes, we stood about discussing the textbook for Marilyn’s creative writing class, which contained a story called “One With Shakespeare,” which had been the butt of much joking. Suddenly, at the front of the room behind her desk, my homeroom teacher — who also taught me social studies — a tiny, redheaded woman with glasses, boomed out, to fill the room with a sound none of us suspected she’d possessed: “YES, DICTION AND PROJECTION ARE EXTREMELY IMPORTANT FOR ALL THEATRICAL EFFECTS!” Then she smiled and said: “I used to be in the theater, you know.” But the space between the scarred desks and the back wall became a locus of surprise and exploration, as well as one of friendship.
There I listened to Marilyn talk with distress about an advanced math class to which she had been assigned and from which she was transferring. (I was bewildered why anyone would want to get out of such a class — I was even rather disapproving.) There Marilyn told me her creative writing teacher, Mrs. Applebaum (who’d been my cousin Nanny’s teacher when she’d written her “Sleeping Beauty” essay that had appeared in Dynamo), had assigned the class to purchase special notebooks to keep for journals. Even though I was a year away from any such class, that afternoon I purchased my own brown spiral notebook from a candy store on the Grand Concourse where many of us stopped in for school supplies and seven-cent egg creams — a wonderful New York beverage that contains no egg at all. That evening I began a journal, which, intermittently, I’ve kept ever since. And it was in front of those lockers that, laughing, Marilyn told me how another young woman in her writing class, when a young man read out an overwritten, self-indulgent, ten-page poem, sat back and, after a moment’s silence, remarked: “It needs a little cutting. But you’ve got great material there for a couplet.” And her friends from her own year — Cyndy and Lew and Richard — would drop by there to meet her. And soon I seemed to have been absorbed and more or less accepted by the older group.