PART 1: AIR RAID ON WEST 77th STREET

PART 1: AIR RAID ON WEST 77TH

320 West 77th Street, as it looks today

Not all Upper West Side row houses are really “brownstones,” but 320 West 77th Street was and is, as the photo illustrates -- faced with what is probably Jersey Freestone, giving it the chocolate hue that Edith Wharton famously despised but that I don’t find so bad. Our apartment was fairly cramped: a four-floor walk-up containing two bedrooms, a small bath, a living room and a kitchen with a dining nook, shoehorned into a building about 20 feet wide and perhaps 40 feet deep, if that. My bedroom was at the back, next to my parents’, and that posed a grave difficulty: Dad was a world-class snorer, and the wall separating the bedrooms was thin and cheesy. The snores were loud enough to wake me from the deepest sleep, and no doubt contributed to my life-long insomnia; there was no possibility of getting back to sleep unless or until something awakened him. That something was sometimes my mother, but often, she took refuge on the sofa in the living room, where I spied her huddled form in the middle of the night when I got up to go to the bathroom.

I think she was ready to call it quits, and to save his marriage, Dad taught himself to stop snoring. He approached it like the engineer he had trained to be, investigating the responsible organs – the tongue, the soft palate and particularly the uvula – and he devised a series of exercises, both physical and psychological, that enabled him to gain control of the “snore chamber,” as he called it, even when he was unconscious, awakening himself just enough to stop snoring, turn over, and go back to sleep. He wrote a book, titled How to Stop Snoring, that was published by Exposition Press, in 1947, and it gained a small following.  A judge in Chicago was convinced that the only reason that marriages fell apart was that one of the parties snored, and that adultery, abuse and incompatibility were merely excuses, and he refused to grant any divorces until the supplicants had had time to read Dad’s book and learn their lesson from it. It’s still in print, in paperback. It’s the only thing my father ever had published commercially. That is sad, in that all he ever wanted to be was a writer, and spent most of his adult life at the Smith-Corona, cranking out over thirty full-length plays, none of which was ever produced. 

However, he did manage to produce a TV show and a radio program. During the late 40s and early 50s, polo was played inside the Armory at Park Avenue and 94th – the site is now Hunter Elementary and High School – and Dad put it on the air. It ran only for about a year, despite the presence of the legendary Al Parcells, rated as a “10-goal player,” or just about as good as they come. Dad and I used to attend the matches, which I loved – the crack of the mallet against the ball, the drumming of the hooves and the shouts of the players as they raced up and down the length of what was, in truth, a much more confined space than the genuine outdoor version of the sport. For me, it was like going to the rodeo, though without the calf-roping.

Dad’s radio show was truly brilliant. It was called Can You Top This, and it featured three second-tier (and now forgotten) comedians of the day: Senator Ford, who actually conceived the idea for the show; Harry Hirschfield; and Joe Laurie, Jr. The idea was that listeners would send in jokes – any kind of joke would do, a Jewish joke, a mother-in-law joke, a two-guys-walk-into-a-bar joke – and the host, Peter Donald, would tell one of them on the air. A machine called the “Laugh Meter” would measure the volume of the studio audience’s risibility, and then each of the three comics would have to come up with his own joke on the same topic – and try to score higher and louder. I never doubted that their vast repertoires were equal to this task, but maybe they were fed the audience’s jokes in advance; anyway, they were funny guys, and it really didn’t matter whether they did or did not score high; the stakes were tiny (if you sent in a joke that got used, they sent you $5). When one of my students in an NYU lecture course asked me if I’d ever done stand-up comedy (a compliment I treasure), I give Can You Top This? a lot of credit for forming my delivery style.

Despite the fact that the gang violence depicted in West Side Story was not entirely a fiction, everybody we knew seemed to be middle-class and Jewish. My parents had some old friends in the neighborhood, many of whom lived in the grand apartments on West End or Riverside or Central Park West -- those classic sixes (or eights) with views of the river or the park, some of which, before rent stabilization, were occupied by people paying absurdly low rents because they had gotten in on the ground floor, so to speak. In the apartment below ours lived the Jaffes, a nice family with a daughter just my age, and on Saturday nights, Janie Jaffe and I were allowed to stay up late to watch Your Show of Shows on her parents’ black and white TV  -- two nine-year-olds in their pajamas cracking up at Sid Caesar’s routines with Imogene Coca and Carl Reiner.

Every Sunday morning, my mother would give me two dollars, and I would walk to Zabar’s on Broadway and 80th Street and come home with three bagels, a quarter-pound of nova (sliced to order into translucent strips, often by Saul Zabar himself), a small tub of cream cheese -- and a half-sour pickle, which was on the house. Total cost: a little more than two bucks.  On my way home, I’d buy a Sunday New York Times (I think it cost a dime; the daily edition was 3 cents) at the newsstand by the subway at 79th. Sometimes, after school, I would go grocery shopping with my mother to help her carry the bags down the long hill to our apartment. There were no supermarkets back then, but plenty of little specialty stores like Citarella, on 75^th  and Broadway, which is now a good-sized chain but which then was one tiny shop that sold only fish. Most kids my age probably wouldn’t have eaten poached salmon with hollandaise sauce, but from the start, my palate was as advanced as my mother’s culinary skills, and I cheerfully ate everything she put on the table except borscht, which my father loved, with a dollop of sour cream and half a boiled potato in it. I hated beets and still do.

The owner of our building was a man of Germanic extraction and temperament named Emery Deutsch. He lived on the ground floor, and he spent much time outside on his concrete patio during the warm months, tending to his shrubs and other plantings. He was the building’s super as well as our landlord, and my father had several run-ins with him about one thing or another: there was no heat, there was too much heat, there was no hot water, the water was too hot, and on and on. I have to admit, though, that Mr. Deutsch ran a tight ship: the stairs and hallways were always spotless. He detested anything that made noise or created a nuisance or attracted dirt or clutter -- like pets, or, in truth, like me; he would probably have forbidden children in the building if he could have. None of the tenants liked him. This was only a few years after the Holocaust, after all.

I had never had a pet, and I desperately wanted a puppy. One day when I was home in bed for the flu, my parents felt so sorry for me that my father went downstairs to ask Mr. Deutsch if he’d make an exception. He came back and did his best Sid Caesar imitation of the answer: “Nein, no! No dogz! Zay piss und shit everyvare!” I was devastated. The next day, attempting damage control, Dad come home with a hamster in a cage. It was not what I’d had in mind. I was picturing a cocker spaniel puppy that curled up in bed with me; the hamster had no ability to relate to humans at all, and watching it run around its little wheel got old fast To my mother, whom Dad had not consulted in advance, the hamster was just a rat without a tail, and when I came home from school a few months later and she told me that it had disappeared, I was sure that she had flushed it down the toilet. She was always getting rid of things she didn’t like that belonged to me. When I was about ten, someone gave me a used, falling-apart but complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the famous 11^th edition, all 29 volumes. I felt very important owning such a scholarly tome, and I read widely in it, but it took up half my bedroom and collected dust. As soon as I went off to boarding school, Mom admitted to me much later, she threw it out -- but, she also confessed, she had stuck a wad of cash in the “M” section for safekeeping and forgotten about it. Who says there’s no justice in the world?

And justice was what I wanted – justice for Mr. Deutsch and his ban on puppies. But obviously, I would have to take matters into my own hands. "Revenge is a kind of wild justice,” wrote Francis Bacon in the 17^th century, and though I was twenty years away from being a Renaissance scholar, I intuited the wisdom of that maxim, and also that of the Italian proverb from the same period that states, "Revenge is a dish that the man of taste prefers to eat cold." Accordingly, I waited several months before taking action, passing the time by thinking up and rejecting various torments. Strew garbage on the stairs? Too messy, even for me. Sneak into the basement and steal fuses from the electrical box, plunging his apartment into darkness? But what if I blacked out the whole building, or electrocuted myself? Set the building on fire? Too extreme, rivaling the sabotage of the Normandy but . . . something along those lines on a smaller scale?  I had been told, by some kid at school, that if you dropped a wooden match from any height onto a hard surface, it would fall head-down and explode on contact. My bedroom was four stories above Mr. Deutsch’s spotless patio. What if I drove him crazy by bombarding him, one or two missiles at a time, while he was inside? He’d rush out, but I’d duck back inside my window and he’d be baffled. Perfect! Or so it seemed.

 My mother had a full box of Diamond kitchen matches next to the stove. It was late in the afternoon, sometime around October or November; I remember that the leaves on the trees in all the back yards were turning brown. I was home alone. Mr. Deutsch was nowhere to be seen. I decided to drop a single match, as a test; I wasn’t certain the kid at school was right. I opened the box and, holding it in my left hand, pushed up on the window with my right. But it had been painted over so many times that it wouldn’t budge. I put the matchbox down on the sill, and with both hands yanked up as hard as I could on the handholds at the bottom. The window lurched open, and I lurched with it, nudging the box of matches into space.

The kid at school wasn’t lying. Two hundred matches went tumbling down, as in the air-raids that the newsreels had shown during the war. It was my own miniature version of the fire-bombing of Dresden. The whole patio seemed to ignite at once, accompanied by a devastating crackle. I was awestruck, and didn’t retreat as planned from my perch when Mr. Deutsch burst out into his yard. The matches went out as soon as they flamed, thank God, but the patio was blanketed with little smoldering sticks. Mr. Deutsch tipped his head back and there I was, staring down at him. With determined strides, he went back inside; in a minute, I could hear him pounding up the stairs. Our apartment door was locked, but I knew he had a passkey, and – thinking clearly, for the first time that day -- I threw the deadbolt on the front door and cowered in my bedroom. Mr. Deutsch hammered on our front door for a while and then, sure enough, I heard his key slip into the lock, but the deadbolt defeated him. Eventually I heard his retreating footsteps and I started to breathe again.  

When my father got home, Mr. Deutsch was waiting for him. Dad later told us that there were threats of eviction and even criminal action for what was certainly an act of vandalism. I don’t know how Dad talked him down; Maybe he reminded Mr. Deutsch that being a German in a predominantly Jewish New York neighborhood worked against him. I don’t even remember whether I was punished. I do remember how proud I was of myself for engineering a Resistance attack that was spectacular while it was going on and left no collateral damage behind.

PART 2: THE RITES OF MANHOOD

                                                                                    P..S. 9 as it looks today

            

I went to elementary school at P.S. 9, on 82nd Street and West End Avenue. It has another name now: it’s called the Mickey Mantle School, and it serves children with learning disabilities, though its connection with the great Yankee slugger baffles me.  In the third and fourth grades, I was Miss Coveny’s pet because I could spell anything. Her classroom faced west, and in the afternoon, the sun came in and illuminated the grain in the ancient desks, with their hinged tops and anachronistic inkwells and graffiti carved into them by generations of my forebears; “Max is a fart” greeted me every day as I took my seat. The blackboards were milky with decades of use, so that whatever was written on them was often illegible. Miss Coveny herself was a tiny, gray-haired lady who always had an amused smile on her face; she was patient and kind, and – unlike public school teachers these days – she knew everything: geography, American history, arithmetic, even science – and she knew how to teach them. I thrived under her patient tutoring; the fact that I spent the rest of my life in classrooms is certainly tied to the fact that I felt so at home in hers. There were three other Richards in the class, and she called the others Richard Two and Richard Three, but I was Richard the First. “Richard the First,” she would say, almost flirtatiously, “I know you can tell us who the first three presidents of the United States were.” And I was only too happy to prove that I could.

But in all other ways, I failed to measure up to the usual standards of boyhood. Though tall, I was overweight, thanks to Mom’s cooking, and after school, when most of the boys in the class were playing baseball in Riverside Park or stickball or stoopball or Chinese-American (which was handball, in two versions: in Chinese, the ball had to hit the wall first, in American, the sidewalk first), I walked home by myself, ate some Graham Crackers, and holed up in my bedroom with a book. Not necessarily a good book; the embryonic professor of English hadn’t yet surfaced. I read not Shakespeare and Austen but boys’ adventure books. I was addicted to a series of 20 novels featuring Bomba the Jungle Boy, written under various pseudonyms, which were pretty much a rip-off of Tarzan. And there were 21 novels in the “Buddy” series, by Howard R. Garis, chronicling the adventures of an earlier version of Harry Potter, minus the wit and imagination.

Not that I never went out, you understand. Every Saturday afternoon I went to the movies, always alone. Moviegoing wasn’t a social activity for me; I loved movies and didn’t want to be distracted while I was watching them. The Upper West Side was full of theaters, and I always had plenty of films to choose from. The Thalia and the Symphony were art houses, too arcane for my tastes in those days, and The New Yorker, Dan Talbot’s inestimable contribution to the art of film and the culture of the neighborhood, hadn’t been opened yet. But there were several first-run theaters on Broadway within walking distance of our apartment. Loew’s Orpheum Is still there, expanded into a multiplex and renamed AMC Loews 84th Street 6 (but the name migrated across town; there’s a Loew’s Orpheum on 86th and Third.) RKO 81st Street had opened in 1916 as a vaudeville house, in which Jimmy Cagney made his debut as a dancer; it was later a CBS television studio and was finally torn down and replaced by an apartment building, its ornate but intimate auditorium renovated into the building’s lobby. The 77th Street Theater, the tackiest of them, closed in 1950 and became a supermarket. And there was the Embassy newsreel theater on 72nd and Broadway, which I used to frequent with my father, which, in this pre-TV era, showed pretty much what the networks give you today at 6 and 11 – headline news, human-interest features, weather, sports and, as a bonus, a cartoon; my favorite, Tom and Jerry, dates back to 1940 and Bugs Bunny to the thirties. There would be always be a short called The March of Time, produced by Time Inc, narrated sonorously by Westbrook Van Voorhis. It wasn’t just news; there were editorials and commentaries as well, which made it a kind of precursor to the Sunday Times Review section, only with illustrations that moved.

These movie houses were all, to a greater or lesser extent, a little bit squalid, with floors sticky from spilled soda and seats worn almost bare from generations of behinds. They all had smoking sections, which, along with notes of urine and popcorn, produced their distinctive nose, and there were children’s sections, ghettoes for unaccompanied minors like me. But then there was the Beacon, on Broadway and 74th, which was and is something else – a veritable palace, repurposed several times and now enjoying its old age immensely. Its rococo splendor rivaled La Scala or the old Met. I can still visualize its two-story lobby, its marble floors and brass staircase railings, and in the auditorium itself – vast by today’s standards, though not as large as Radio City Music Hall – the statues of Greek gods and goddesses on either side of the proscenium, which earned it inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places. I also clearly recall being groped there, at about age ten, by an elderly man who followed me into the men’s room. I shouted and pushed him away, and he ran; an usher who witnessed his exit asked me what was going on and I answered “Nothing,” not because nothing was going on but because I didn’t know how to process or describe it.

The beauty part is that the Beacon, of course, is still around, a performance space for rock concerts by musicians like Mariah Carey and the Allman Brothers (who did literally hundreds of shows there). A few years ago, my wife and I went to the Beacon to hear Ani Difranco, whose lyrics are some of the best poetry around, and it was a unique experience for a straight older couple being surrounded by her fans, mostly young lesbians who were making out while their cult object performed. The Beacon has been the site of both the Emmy and Tony Award shows; Cirque de Soleil has done shows there, as have comedians like George Carlin and Jerry Seinfeld. Apparently, it’s Seinfeld’s favorite performance space.

The Beacon, in all its glory.

In the roped-off children’s ghettoes of the all feature-film houses, at matinee time, we were supervised by flashlight-carrying matrons whose job was to prevent kids from acting like kids – horsing around, littering the floor with candy wrappers, commenting aloud on the film. Sitting through two full-length pictures seemed perfectly normal, then, but they were shorter than today’s – probably, 90 minutes was the norm, though you usually got a cartoon and sometimes The March of Time as well. I remember seeing Hitchcock’s Rope as well as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and I developed a crush on Natalie Wood, who was exactly my age, in Miracle on 34th Street – as who did not?  I hated The Red Shoes but I loved The Third Man. Children’s admission was a quarter.

My allowance was 45 cents, the remainder just covering the price of an ice-cream soda at the Apthorp Pharmacy’s soda fountain after the show. If you’re not yet a member of AARP, perhaps you don’t know what a “soda fountain” was. They’re all gone. Sometimes they were stand-alone restaurants (Schrafft’s, a chain of genteel lady-lunch parlors, had both tables and a soda fountain; you can find their memorabilia on Ebay) but mostly they were in pharmacies.  Most of the Apthorp’s pharmacy was taken up with an immense and beautiful green marble counter, behind which labored the mid-twentieth-century version of baristas, (behind their backs everyone called them soda jerks) making and serving ice cream sodas (syrup, milk, carbonated water and a scoop of whatever flavor you wanted); milkshakes (each blended to order, with or without malt powder);  frapp´es, which were a subcategory of milk shakes;  banana splits and hot fudge sundaes and cones. Almost every little news shop sold egg creams, which were just seltzer, milk and syrup – no egg, no cream. At the Apthorp, I always ordered a black (chocolate syrup) and white (vanilla ice cream) soda, and one day, finishing it with a slurp, I put my twenty cents down on the counter and the soda jerk, who was indeed a jerk, said, “Uh, uh. Twenty-five.”

“But it’s always been twenty. It’s all I have,” I said.

“Too bad, kid. Guess I’m gonna have to call the cops,” he replied.

He was just playing with me, and eventually, with a stagy sigh, he took my twenty cents and made me promise to bring him the nickel I owed him when I came back. But I never did. I found another soda fountain, and though it wasn’t as good, I didn’t want to relive my humiliation. My parents obligingly raised my allowance to fifty cents, and my Saturday ritual continued through the sixth grade.

My father worried that I wasn’t getting enough exercise, but when I was nine he was fifty, a great eater of red meat, sedentary by nature (his only form of regular exercise was reaching for a Lucky), so he wasn’t able to teach me how to shoot a jump shot, or even play catch with me in Riverside Park. So my parents enrolled me in “The Harts,” an after-school playgroup run by a man named Ed Hartman, who picked up ten kids every afternoon in a van and took us to Central Park, where we played soccer and dodgeball and did whatever else it took to tire us out. This was a good thing for me; I was meeting other kids and the exhaustion left me feeling pleasant, as my first endorphins made their circuit of my system.   

The only form of exercise that Dad and I could perform together was walking, and our walk became a regular weekend activity, just the two of us. If my mother was out for the evening after we came home (which happened regularly; my father detested parties, but she loved them), we’d have been sure to stop at the  C & L on 70th Street or Tip Toe Inn on 89th, and buy ourselves our favorite dinner: “specials” (as Jews referred to knockwurst in those days, perhaps out of distaste for German food and words), baked beans, seeded rye bread, potato salad and half-sour pickles, and a bottle  of Dr. Brown’s cream soda for me and celery tonic for Dad to wash it all down with. “Batching it,” Dad called it.

On Sundays, the two of us would invariably end up at the Museum of Natural History, of which I never tired. Long before Jurassic Park served as a prehistoric primer for other ten-year-olds, I knew my dinosaur skeletons intimately – brontosaurus, triceratops, pterodactyl and of course T-rex.

I also loved the bronze statue of the Zulu hunter in the entrance lobby, poised to hurl his spear at the bronze lion crouched across the gallery. I was fascinated by the enormous and repulsive insects displayed in glass cases. I was impressed by the size of the testicles on Teddy Roosevelt’s horse in front of the Central Park West Entrance. When Noah Baumbach titled one of his autobiographical films The Squid and the Whale, I instantly recalled those two gigantic models hanging from the ceiling (and, what’s more, I knew which parent was which, having taught alongside both). I could have done without the stiffly-posed and not at all lifelike dioramas showing life-sized Indians in front of their lodges; for me, that was unnatural history. But anything from the animal or mineral kingdoms, especially if it ate other creatures or was eaten by them – bring it on.

And if there was a new show at the Hayden Planetarium, we always took that in. The beautiful, enormous, infinitely complex machine that projected whole galaxies on the domed ceiling was, for me, a work of sculptural art.

Dad knew a lot about astronomy, and was always drawing diagrams of the solar system for me, illustrating the difference between solar and lunar eclipses and explaining why Mars appeared red. We talked about getting a small reflector telescope, but Mr. Deutsch would never have given us the key to the roof, and the New York sky is pretty washed out by the city lights anyway, so that never came to anything.

In warm weather, we walked as far as the Central Park Zoo, on Fifth Avenue. The polar bears were always our first stop; I had a sense of how ferocious they must be in the wild, with those black claws and yellow fangs. And had slight interest in the sea lions, sleek and graceful as they dove and surfaced in their pool, because they were all females; I wanted to see the males, which I knew from pictures in National Geographic, who were enormous, with manes and teeth, but they were too wild and dangerous to be on exhibit.

My favorites of all the zoo animals were the monkeys, of course – the gibbons because of the remarkable athleticism of their gymnastic routines, and the chimpanzees because of their grossness. If you got too close to the cage, they spit at you or threw their feces; always, one or two of the males were masturbating, their swollen penises bright red. I thought of them as merely mischievous but would have been happy to know that they were, in fact, quite dangerous; years later, I read an interview with the director of a zoo who said that if his Bengal tiger got loose he’d try to capture it, but if a male chimp got loose he’d order it to be shot on sight. Everyone loved the monkey house; it was by far the most crowded building in the zoo.

Once or twice we took the subway up to the Bronx Zoo, whose views offered animals in something like their wild habitats, separated from us only by moats, but I never warmed to the place as I did to its smaller counterpart in Central Park. This was before the animal rights movement got started at large, but it was already affecting the type of zoos that were getting built. I was too young to realize how cruelly the panthers and tigers were suffering, going slowly nuts as they stalked from side to side behind the bars of their maximum-security prisons. But I loved the red brick buildings and the sidewalks composed of hexagonal paving stones, and the carousel a few hundred yards away supplying musical accompaniment.

Dad and I got along very well. His presence is more vivid in my memory than my mother’s, whom I always picture getting dressed to go out, the scent of her perfume filling the small apartment. Very seldom did I go anyplace with her, except to Canada. All my friends today know how to ski because their parents took them on vacations to the mountains, but we never went anywhere. We always had a car, but Williamsburg and Monticello might as well not have existed. As for Europe, the subject never arose, perhaps because of the expense and inconvenience (15 hours each way on a DC-4 or a week on a liner). Mom and Dad had gone to Mexico on their honeymoon, but never discussed it and seemed disinclined to repeat the experience, either with or without me. Cuba was a popular destination in the days of Meyer Lansky, but it was a place to drink and gamble and see floor shows, not to play with your kids on the beach. So aside from Chicago (one time, all three of us) and Montreal (many times, with my mother only), I grew up exclusively in New York.

I didn’t know what I was missing, so I never nagged them to take me anywhere, and we mostly got along fine. School was a different matter. There was a little bullying going on in the third grade, nothing out of the ordinary, and despite being the tallest boy in the class, I got picked on by kids smaller than I who intuited that I wouldn’t put up much of a struggle. And everybody was afraid of the older boys in the neighborhood, who went to the local middle school, Joan of Arc, only a couple of blocks away. Once, three of those big boys surrounded me as I was waiting for my playgroup bus after school, and one of them called to a girl who was with them, “Hey, Marie? This the guy?” I don’t know what “the guy” had done, but I did know that my life was in Marie’s hands. She made a show of inspecting me, and finally pronounced, “Nah.” My interlocutor shoved me into the fence behind me and they sauntered off. When I got home, in order to shock my parents, I told them they’d have to buy me a knife to defend myself when I was enrolled in Joan of Arc the following year, which was perhaps why I got shipped off to boarding school instead.

There were sometimes fights after school – usually in the yard, but if they were spontaneous, right there on West End Avenue. I had been an unwilling participant in a couple of them, always getting the worst of it; I had no idea how to defend myself. But I was aware that status was tied to aggression, and in order to redeem my reputation, I picked a fight with Willard, the one boy in my class I was sure I could beat up. I beat him up on West End Avenue, right in front of school.  Or, more accurately, I had at him; he pretty much just stood there, hunched over, his arms crossed in front of his face, looking resigned. I started swinging wildly, missing more than connecting, but after a while there was blood dripping out of his nose..  Mrs. Birnbaum, our home-room teacher that year, barged through the circle of spectators and pushed me away from Willard. “Look at him!” she spat at me, and I did. It was a pretty gory sight, though in truth nothing more serious than a nosebleed; he wasn’t even crying. “Are you pleased with yourself?” she demanded, and I answered, truthfully, “Yes,” which left her speechless.

I really only had one everyday friend in those days: a boy named Steve, who lived in the only elevator building on my block, a few doors east of 320. He didn’t go to P.S. 9, so I’m not sure how I met him. Steve was a year older than I, and that was a big deal because he had reached puberty (he was twelve) and I hadn’t. But then I did. One afternoon I was looking idly across the courtyard from my bedroom window – it could have been the set for Rear Window –  and I saw not a murder, but something much better: a naked woman, or rather, the torso of one, framed in her window from shoulders to knees. What she was up to, I have no idea: adjusting her blinds? But there it was, the thing itself, and for the first time ever, part of my body made an appropriate response.  What an odd feeling that was. The vision only lasted a few seconds, and then she was gone. I dived for the phone.

            “Steve!” I shouted. “I got a boner!”

            “It’s about time,” he answered. “So did you do it?”

            “Do what?”

            “What I’ve been telling you about! Beating off!”

            “Uh, what do I do, again?”

            “Oh, Jeez,” he said and hung up.

By this time my erection had subsided, and I had no idea how to summon it again, so I let the matter slide. But that night, in bed, as I recreated the vision of that afternoon, the welcome guest reappeared, and for the first time, but not the last, I took myself in hand. After a short time, the surprise present that Nature gives you when you reach that age occurred, though unaccompanied by any issue of fluid. The next day I called Steve again and described the experience in detail. “Yeah, I don’t get anything coming out, either,” he confessed, which was generous of him, because my status, sexually speaking, was now pretty much equal to his.

If you’re a man, reading this, you’ll recollect those first heady days when sex was much too special to share with anyone else. If you’re a woman, you probably have your own version of the story, a route that was perhaps a little more roundabout, and might have involved some recognizable human emotion, instead of merely sensation. A few weeks passed, Steve and I comparing notes after school when I usually went over to his apartment and we sat in his room, surrounded by model airplanes which his father helped him build, and which he never flew. More interesting, and more surprising, was the fact that he owned a rifle. In retrospect, it seems to me that his parents were nuts to have given a young Jewish city boy a weapon, even if there were no bullets for it. They owned a house up the Hudson where they went in the summertime, and that was where he got to shoot it; they didn’t leave it there over the winter because they were afraid it would get stolen, so it lived in his bedroom closet in New York – or at least it was supposed to, but neither of us could resist playing with it. Guns were not as foreign to me as sex was; I had gone to sleepaway camp the summer I was nine, and spent as much time as I could on the rifle range because I was hopeless at volleyball and softball, but I could aim a gun and hit a paper target fifty feet away. Steve’s rifle was just like the ones they had there: a bolt-action single-shot .22. We would take turns sighting it on various points of interest across the courtyard, like a particular off-color brick or clothesline fastener. “Think you could hit that in one shot?” one of us would ask.

His bedroom overlooked the same courtyard as mine, as did every south-facing room on our street, and I pointed out to him the window that was my portal to visual delight, but the woman never reappeared, and even if she had, she was so far below us that the angle would have prevented us from seeing much anyway -- whereas her apartment and mine were both on the fourth floors of our respective buildings. Sometimes he would point the rifle at her window, though that gave me a queasy feeling -- I didn’t want to shoot that woman, though I wasn’t sure what I did want to do to her.

One evening, the phone rang during dinner. I jumped up to answer it, as was my wont; my parents preferred that I screen their calls. It was Steve.  “DICK!” he screamed. “I GOT SPERM!”

Our apartment was small enough that his voice penetrated from the living room to the kitchen, where we ate, and my mother caught something. “What did he say?” she demanded. “He got what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he said . . . worms, or . . . I don’t know.”

Mother rolled her eyes. Dad hadn’t said a word through all this; he was having trouble keeping a straight face. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” I told Steve. “I gotta go.” Instead of feeling envy for him, or annoyed that our equal footing had been so short-lived, I felt shame. We were two dirty boys doing taboo things, and we had almost gotten caught. When I was under the covers later, I took the night off.

One day, predictably, Steve said to me in his bedroom, “Wanna do it together?” I was a little quicker on the uptake then; after all, “it” was all we ever talked about. I thought his question over for a minute. This seemed to be taking things to a whole new level. I wasn’t sure whether he meant do it to ourselves in unison or do it to each other, an idea that made me sick with apprehension -- though there was a little thrill running through it, a figure in the sexual carpet. But not enough of a thrill to outweigh the queasiness. I know it’s common for boys, even if they grow up to become straight adults, to indulge in a little same-sex experimentation, but I didn’t know it then. This was the 1950s, and homosexuality was still pretty much the love that dare not speak its name. Now it speaks its name loudly and clearly; when I was teaching at NYU, female students had no hesitation in describing themselves to me as “LUG” -- lesbian until graduation. But the categories were not fluid in my mind. It was that naked woman I wanted more of; Steve’s offer to show me his if I showed him mine couldn’t compete with that. “No. I don’t want to. No,” I said.

 “Chicken!” he sneered.

 “OK, I’m chicken. I don’t want to.”

By way of reply, he went to his closet and fetched out his rifle -- along with a small red and black cardboard carton with the words “Winchester 22 LR 40 grains” printed on it, which he must have smuggled home from the country house. He opened the box, and there they were, fifty little soldiers massed together, each wearing a lead helmet. Picking the gun up again, he slid back the bolt, and placed a round in the chamber. Then he slid the bolt back into firing position. All the while, I stood as if frozen, watching him. The gun made a portentous mechanical sound as he cocked it.

“I’m going to go,” I said.

i

 “No, you’re not,” he said, pointing the muzzle at my chest. “You better do what I told you. You better do it.”

I couldn’t breathe. I was imagining that tiny, molten piece of lead piercing my abdomen. I didn’t know what the right thing to say was, so I didn’t say anything. Then we heard the front door being unlocked; Steve’s mother had come home to save me. He lowered the rifle and I ran from his room, past the startled lady, and down eight flights of fire stairs. I could hear her calling after me, “Dick, what’s wrong? Did something happen? What happened?” The fire stairs led to an alley, which fortunately opened onto 77^th Street. Once I was home, I double-locked the door, though I knew I wasn’t being chased. But I had been badly frightened. I never called Steve again, or he me. That friendship, if that’s what it was, was over.

 After that, I didn’t want to go home to my solitary room after school, and I started wandering into Riverside Park to the baseball fields. My Dad had taken me to a ball game at Yankee Stadium -- I think the Yanks were playing the Boston Red Sox – and to my surprise, I loved being there, the immense emerald field, the smell of cigarette smoke and stale beer, and the enormous crowd roaring when Joe DiMaggio, who was in his last season, hit a double. In the park, when there was an odd number of kids present, I got to play, though I was always the last to be chosen. My father, delighted with my new pastime, had bought me a baseball glove, which was so stiff that the ball popped out before I could capture it; I didn’t know you had to break gloves in before you used them. I was invariably put in right field, the traditional position for the worst player on a pickup grade-school team; you weren’t often called upon to throw the ball all the way to home plate for the catcher to tag out the sliding baserunner, like in the Big Leagues. Seldom was a fly ball hit to me, and when it was, seldom did I catch it. Mostly, I retrieved ground balls that had gotten through the infield and threw them back in. At bat, I was pleased with myself if I made contact at all, even if it was only a foul ball. Twice, I hit the ball fair, but the first time, I was so slow of foot that the opposing right fielder retrieved it on the bounce and threw me out at first. But let the record show that I had one clean single – a line drive over the shortstop’s head, no less – to show for my first baseball season.

Dad knew a lot about astronomy, and was always drawing diagrams of the solar system for me, illustrating the difference between solar and lunar eclipses and explaining why Mars appeared red. We talked about getting a small reflector telescope, but Mr. Deutsch would never have given us the key to the roof, and the New York sky is pretty washed out by the city lights anyway, so that never came to anything.

In warm weather, we sometimes got as far south and east as the Central Park Zoo, on Fifth Avenue. The polar bears were fascinating; I had a sense of how ferocious they must be in the wild, with those black claws and yellow fangs. And I loved to watch the sea lions in their large pool, sleek and graceful and not at all representative of their species, since all of them were females.

I saw male sea lions in Patagonia as an adult, and they were as huge and ferocious as the polar bears, fighting younger rivals for their harems to the death on an ice sheet as we floated only yards away on our excursion boat. My favorites were the monkeys, of course – the gibbons because of the remarkable athleticism they displayed in their gymnastic routines, and the chimpanzees because of their grossness. If you got too close to the cage, they spit at you or threw their feces; always, one or two of the males were masturbating, their swollen penises bright red. I thought of them as merely mischievous but they were, in fact, quite dangerous; I read an interview with the director of a zoo who said that if his Bengal tiger got loose he’s try to capture it, but if a male chimp got loose had order it to be shot on sight. Everyone loved the monkey house; it was by far the most crowded building in the zoo. There were, in addition, a couple of excursions to the Bronx Zoo, which views offered animals in something like their wild habitats, separated from us only by moats, but I never warmed to the place as I did to its smaller counterpart in Central Park. I was too young to have a sense of how cruelly the panthers were suffering, stalking from side to side of their narrow cages; zoos these days take such concerns seriously. But I loved the red brick buildings and the sidewalks composed of hexagonal paving stones, and the carousel a few hundred yards away supplying musical accompaniment. 

We got along very well in those days. His presence is more vivid in my memory than my mother’s, whom I always picture getting dressed to go out. School was another matter. There was a little bullying going on in the third grade, nothing out of the ordinary, and despite being the tallest boy in the class, I got picked on by kids smaller than I who intuited that I wouldn’t put up much of a struggle. And everybody was afraid of the older boys in the neighborhood, who went to the local middle school, Joan of Arc, only a couple of blocks away. Once, three of those big boys surrounded me as I was waiting for my playgroup bus after school, and one of them called to a girl who was with them, “Hey, Marie? This the guy?” I don’t know what “the guy” had done, but I did know that my life was in Marie’s hands. She made a show of inspecting me, and finally pronounced, “Nah.” My interlocutor shoved me into the fence behind me and they sauntered off. When I got home, in order to shock my parents, I told them they’d have to buy me a knife to defend myself when I was enrolled in Joan of Arc the following year, which was perhaps why I got shipped off to boarding school instead.

There were sometimes fights after school – usually in the yard, but if they were spontaneous, right there on West End Avenue. I had been an unwilling participant in a couple of them, always getting the worst of it; I had no idea how to defend myself. But I was aware that status was tied to aggression, and that I would have to redeem my reputation. There was only one boy in my class I was sure I could beat up, Willard, so one day, I beat him up. I picked a quarrel with him over nothing, and at three o’clock, surrounded by ten or twelve other boys, we had at each other on the corner of West End Avenue and 82^ndStreet. Or, more accurately, I had at him; he pretty much just stood there, hunched over, his arms crossed in front of his face, looking resigned. I started swinging wildly, missing more than connecting, but after a while there was blood dripping out of his nose. I think I must have hit his hand hard enough to shove it backwards.  Mrs. Birnbaum, our home room teacher, barged through the circle of spectators and pushed me away from Willard. “Look at him!” she spat at me, and I did. It was a pretty gory sight, though in truth nothing more serious than a nosebleed; he wasn’t even crying. “Are you pleased with yourself?” she demanded, and I answered, truthfully, “Yes,” which left her speechless.

I really only had one everyday friend in those days: a boy named Steve, who lived in the only elevator building on my block, a few doors east of 320. He didn’t go to P.S. 9, so I’m not sure how I met him. Steve was a year older than I, and that was a big deal because he had reached puberty (he was twelve) and I hadn’t. But then I did. One afternoon I was looking idly across the courtyard from my bedroom window, like James Stewart in Rear Window, and I saw -- not a murder, but something much better: a naked woman, or rather, the torso of one, framed in her window from shoulders to knees. What she was up to, I have no idea: adjusting her blinds? But there it was, the thing itself, and for the first time ever, part of my body made an appropriate response.  What an odd feeling that was. The vision only lasted a few seconds, and then she was gone. I dived for the phone.

            “Steve!” I shouted. “I got a boner!”

            “It’s about time,” he answered. “So did you do it?”

            “Do what?”

            “What I’ve been telling you about! Beating off!”

            “Uh, what do I do, again?”

            “Oh, Jeez,” he said and hung up.

By this time my erection had subsided, and I had no idea how to summon it again, so I let the matter slide. But that night, in bed, as I recreated the vision of that afternoon, the welcome guest reappeared, and for the first time, but not the last, I took myself in hand. After a short time, the surprise present that Nature gives you when you reach that age occurred, though unaccompanied by any issue of fluid. The next day I called Steve again and described the experience in detail. “Yeah, I don’t get anything coming out, either,” he confessed, which was generous of him, because my status, sexually speaking, was now pretty much equal to his.

If you’re a man, reading this, you’ll recollect those first heady days when sex was much too special to share with anyone else. If you’re a woman, you probably have your own version of the story, a route that was perhaps a little more roundabout, and might have involved some recognizable human emotion, instead of merely sensation. A few weeks passed, Steve and I comparing notes after school when I usually went over to his apartment and we sat in his room, surrounded by model airplanes which his father helped him build, and which he never flew. More interesting, and more surprising, was the fact that he owned a rifle. In retrospect, it seems to me that his parents were nuts to have given a young Jewish city boy a weapon, even if there were no bullets for it. They owned a house up the Hudson where they went in the summertime, and that was where he got to shoot it; they didn’t leave it there over the winter because they were afraid it would get stolen, so it lived in his bedroom closet in New York. Guns were not as foreign to me as sex was; I had gone to sleepaway camp the summer I was nine, and spent as much time as I could on the rifle range because I was hopeless at volleyball and softball, but I could point a gun and hit a paper target fifty feet away. Steve’s rifle was just like the ones they had there: a bolt-action single-shot .22. We would take turns sighting it on various points of interest across the courtyard, like a particular off-color brick or clothesline fastener. “Think you could hit that in one shot?” one of us would ask.

His bedroom overlooked the same courtyard as mine, and I pointed out the window that was my portal to visual delight, but the woman never reappeared, and even if she had, she was so far below us that the angle would have prevented him from seeing much anyway -- whereas her apartment and mine were both on the fourth floors of our respective buildings. Sometimes we would point the rifle at her window, though that gave me a queasy feeling -- I didn’t want to shoot that woman, though I wasn’t sure what I did want to do to her.

One evening, the phone rang during dinner. I jumped up to answer it, as was my wont; my parents preferred that I screen their calls. It was Steve.  “DICK!” he screamed. “I GOT SPERM!”

Our apartment was small enough that his voice penetrated from the living room to the kitchen, where we ate, and my mother caught something. “What did he say?” she demanded. “He got what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he said . . . worms, or . . . I don’t know.”

Mother rolled her eyes. Dad hadn’t said a word through all this; he was having trouble keeping a straight face. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” I told Steve. “I gotta go.” Instead of feeling envy for him, or annoyed that our equal footing had been so short-lived, I felt shame. We were two dirty boys doing taboo things, and we had almost gotten caught. When I was under the covers later, I took the night off.

One day, predictably, Steve said to me in his bedroom, “Wanna do it together?” I was a little quicker on the uptake then; after all, “it” was all we ever talked about. I thought his question over for a minute. This seemed to be taking things to a whole new level. I wasn’t sure whether he meant do it to ourselves in unison or do it to each other, an idea that made me sick with apprehension -- though there was a little thrill running through it, a figure in the sexual carpet. But not enough of a thrill to outweigh the queasiness. I know it’s common for boys, even if they grow up to become straight adults, to indulge in a little same-sex experimentation, but I didn’t know it then. This was the 1950s, and homosexuality was still pretty much the love that dare not speak its name. Now it speaks its name loudly and clearly; when I was teaching at NYU, female students had no hesitation in describing themselves as “LUG” -- lesbian until graduation. But the categories were not fluid in my mind. It was that naked woman I wanted more of; Steve’s offer to show me his if I showed him mine couldn’t compete with that. “No. I don’t want to. No,” I said.

 “Chicken!” he sneered.

 “OK, I’m chicken. I don’t want to.”

By way of reply, he went to his closet and fetched out his rifle -- along with a small red and black cardboard carton with the words “Winchester 22 LR 40 grains” printed on it, which he must have smuggled home from the country house. He opened the box, and there they were, fifty little soldiers massed together, each wearing a lead helmet. Picking the gun up again, he slid back the bolt, and placed a round in the chamber. Then he slid the bolt back into firing position. All the while, I stood as if frozen, watching him. The gun made a portentous mechanical sound as he cocked it.

“I’m going to go,” I said.

 “No, you’re not,” he said, pointing the muzzle at my chest. “You better do what I told you. You better do it.”

I couldn’t breathe. I was imagining that tiny, molten piece of lead piercing my abdomen. I didn’t know what the right thing to say was, so I didn’t say anything. Then we heard the front door being unlocked; Steve’s mother had come home. He lowered the rifle and I ran from his room, past the startled lady, and down eight flights of fire stairs. I could hear her calling after me, “Dick, what’s wrong? Did something happen? What happened.”The fire stairs led to an alley, which fortunately opened onto 77^th Street. Once I was home, I double-locked the door, though I knew I wasn’t being chased. But I had been badly frightened. I never called Steve again, or he me. That friendship, if that’s what it was, was over.

 After that, I didn’t want to go home to my solitary room after school, and I started wandering into Riverside Park to the baseball fieldsl. My Dad had taken me to a ball game at Yankee Stadium --I think the Yanks were playing the Boston Red Sox – and to my surprise, I loved being there, the immense emerald field, the smell of cigarette smoke and stale beer, and the enormous crowd roaring when Joe DiMaggio, who was in his last season, hit a double. In the park, when there was an odd number of kids present, I got to play, though I was always the last to be chosen. My father, delighted with my new pastime, had bought me a baseball glove, which was so stiff that the ball popped out before I could capture it; I didn’t know you had to break gloves in before you used them. I was invariably put in right field, the traditional position for the worst player on a pickup grade-school team; you weren’t often called upon to throw the ball all the way to home plate for the catcher to tag out the sliding baserunner, like in the Big Leagues. Seldom was a fly ball hit to me, and when it was, seldom did I catch it. Mostly, I retrieved ground balls that had gotten through the infield and threw them back in. At bat, I was pleased with myself if I made contact at all, even if it was only a foul ball. Twice, I hit the ball fair, but the first time, I was so slow of foot that the opposing right fielder retrieved it on the bounce and threw me out at first. But let the record show that I had one clean single – a line drive over the shortstop’s head, no less – to show for my first baseball season.