Now, along with my schoolbooks, I carried my spiral notebook everywhere. Generally I wrote down impressions, journal entries, or jottings on occasional projects (along with a fair amount of homework) in the front of the book. In the back, usually working forward, I would write more masturbation fantasies — the black looseleaf had never been returned.
Two parallel columns …?
The entries in the back and the front of the book, over a period of four to six weeks, would move closer and closer together, like complex graphic parentheses, eating from both sides the diminishing central sheaf of blank, blue-lined white — till, sometimes, they interpenetrated.
Then, writing itself would seem to be — whether devoted to reality or fantasy, material life or lust, whether at the beginning or at the end of the notebook — marginal to a vast, empty, unarticulated center called the real world that was displaced more and more by it, reducing that center to a margin in its turn, a mere and tenuous split between two interminable columns of writing, one finished, one still to be begun … as I began the next notebook.
6.55. At Science, the Jewish holidays transformed the schooclass="underline" a good eighty percent of the student body stayed home, so that for practical reasons classes had to be combined and condensed. On these days nothing of pedagogic import got done. But suddenly the student population crowding the stairs between classes was seventy or eighty percent black. On the stairwell, during one such changeover, as I looked up at the heads crowding before the wire-covered landing window, I saw one of the black students.
He’d been in my freshman gym class and had always been quick with banter and repartee with the gym teacher, who’d alternated between enjoying it and being frustrated by it.
But that afternoon there’d been a tie-up on the steps, and, lean and with his small round head, the young man had set himself apart. Now he called out: “No, stupid, you go this way. And you guys go that way, then there won’t be any tie-up. No, this way! Go on, now!” and with the overhand gesture of his long arm in its blue-and-white striped shirtsleeve, the traffic jam dissolved.
His name, I knew from gym, was Stokely Carmichael. The year before, Chuck had had occasion to make a couple of remarks about him. I think they’d been put on detention together.
Later on in the term, for what offense I don’t recall, I was assigned three days’ detention (my single brush with it during my four years at the school), which meant coming in early and sitting with the senior gym teach, Mr. Ray, and the eight or nine other delinquent students there at any one time, until classes started.
On the subway my first morning, when I got on at 125th Street, Stokely was sitting across the car from me. We smiled at each other, and I went to sit by him on the yellow wicker seat with its green metal rim. “Now what are you doing, coming in this early?” he asked me.
“I’m on detention.”
“You?” Stokely laughed. “Detention’s for me. I didn’t think you did stuff like that.”
“Well,” I said. “I guess I do.”
“It’s not so bad,” he said, reassuringly. Not that I’d really been worried about it. “I think they’ve got me on detention for the rest of the year, just about!”
I commiserated. But Stokely pooh-poohed it.
We fell into talking. I remember he told me about his grandmother and that his family was from the West Indies. That morning, in the detention office, we sat together. Pretty soon Stokely was joking back and forth with the massive Mr. Ray, who kept up his end pretty well, only remarking at one point, trying to suppress his own grin while the rest of us were laughing: “You know, Carmichael, this isn’t supposed to be fun in here. This is punishment!”
“I know,” Stokely said. “But you gotta give a guy a break sometimes, don’t you?”
6.56. Meanwhile the “novel,” with one dream and another, grew, in its agglutinative manner, till it was more than a hundred eight pages long. Finally, it just … stopped.
And the friendship with Joey had lost its silent, sexual edge.
Once the new term started, he was simply one of my school acquaintances, a little less interesting than some, a little more friendly than others — so that it was hard even to remember why it had been so important to keep the relationship, which in its reality, had never been more than conversational, away from Danny and Chuck, from Marilyn — from, indeed, anyone else; though, really, even Joey had no idea what had prompted my period of deep and committed concern with all that had concerned him.
The position of “Muse,” if that’s the word, had by that time been taken over by two new boys.
One was a towering, bronzed, crew-cut senior named Constantine, whom everyone called Gus, and whom, as I watched him for days, now as hall monitor, now joking with his friends, now flirting with the senior girls in the lunchroom (a head and a half taller than anyone else in the school, including Joey, his nails were bitten to a wholly different order — the details and differences I would notice and notate were endless), I only got to speak to him maybe three times: as a senior being addressed by a sophomore, he was all goodwill and, at once, completely unavailable to anything beyond the immediate comment of the moment. He was going to NYU next term — the terrifying possibility of running into him there was probably at least a minor reason, when, a year later, I won a four-year scholarship to the place, I turned it down in favor of City College.
My second Muse for that year was another senior, named Peter. In many ways he was a more compact, more muscular Chuck. Sophomores and seniors took gym together. Peter and I were in the same gym class. In the first session, when the gym teacher was testing us, Peter (in his black chinos, white T-shirt, and sneakers) and I were the only two students in our section who could do a flying split. Later, in the locker room, joking about it with him after class, I realized this muscular, ivory and gold student, two years ahead of me, had a severe speech defect. He’d been born with a paralyzed uvula (at first, I thought it was a cleft palate; the distortion it lent his speech was much the same). Though he didn’t bite his nails, the fascination was similar to that I’d felt toward Joey, toward Gus — and just as sexual. Though we didn’t become particular friends, I began to watch him all around the school, following him pretty much unobserved, making notes about him, writing down my impressions of him. Though the results were not another novel, eventually Peter (unnamed) became the object of an informal essay, which took a second prize in the next year’s National Scholastic Contest.
6.561. One thing that has slipped between these enumerations is the Jack and Jill of America. The Jack and Jill was a black social club which middle-class black parents joined to provide monthly programs for their younger children and seasonal affairs for the older ones: horseback riding afternoons, outings at Bear Mountain, days at the beach, parties at Halloween, Christmas, and Easter — and dances all through the spring and summer. I’ve since known black parents who would have done anything short of kill to get their children into the Jack and Jill. (One of the members was the handsome, aggressive, adopted son of the first black cabinet member, Robert Weaver. The boy flirted mercilessly with my sister at one of these summer parties, danced the “fish” with her, and was as spectacular a nail-biter as Gus or Joey — and, half a dozen years later, killed himself.) And I have met others who would have died before letting their kids join, hating all it spoke of dusky country clubs, of an Old Darkies’ network, loathing the whole web of middle-class social connections and middle-class social pretensions it stood for.