giorgiyygnf

He had only meant to let her know she needn’t be concerned that he would lose his equilibrium again, needn’t worry about her own natural-enough infatuation, and the result may well have been that having exaggerated the implications of that kiss, having overestimated what constituted provocation, he went on to alter a perfectly harmless spontaneous bond, only to exacerbate a stuttering child’s burden of self-doubtAnd all he had ever meant was to help her, to help her heal!
What then was the wound? What could have wounded Merry? The indelible imperfection itself or those who had fostered in her the imperfection? But by doing what? What had they done other than to love her and look after her and encourage her, give her the support and guidance and independence that seemed reasonable to them–and still the undisclosed Merry had become tainted! Twisted! Crazed! By what? Thousands upon thousands of young people stuttered–they didn’t all grow up to set off bombs! What went wrong with Merry? What did he do to her that was so wrong? The kiss? That kiss? So beastly? How could a kiss make someone into a criminal? The aftermath of the kiss? The withdrawal? Was that the beastliness? But it wasn’t as though he’d never held her or touched her or kissed her again–he loved her
Once the inexplicable had begun, the torment of self-examination never endedHowever lame the answers, he never ran out of the questions, he who before had nothing of consequence really to ask himselfAfter the bomb, he could never again take life as it came or trust that his life wasn’t something very different from what he perceivedHe found himself recalling his own happy childhood, the success that had been his boyhood, as though that were the cause chanel cc logo earrings of their blightAll the triumphs, when he probed them, seemed superficial; even more astonishing, his very virtues came to seem vicesThere was no longer any innocence in what he remembered of his pastHe saw that everything you say says either more than you wanted it to say or less than you wanted it to say; and everything you do does either more than you wanted it to do or less than you wanted it to doWhat you said and did made a difference, all right, but not the difference you intended
The Swede as he had always known himself–well-meaning, well-behaved, well-ordered Seymour Levov–evaporated, leaving only self-examination in his placeHe couldn’t disentangle himself from the idea that he was responsible any more than he could resort to the devilishly tempting idea that everything was accidentalHe had been admitted into a mystery more bewildering even than Merry’s stuttering: there was no fluency anywhereIt was all stutteringIn bed at night, he pictured the whole of his life as a stuttering mouth and a grimacing face–the whole of his life without cause or sense and completely bungledHe no longer had any conception of orderHe envisioned his life as a stutterer’s thought, wildly out of his control
Merry’s other great love that year, aside from her father, was Audrey HepburnBefore Audrey Hepburn there had been astronomy and before astronomy, the 4-H Club, and along the way, a bit distressingly to her father, there was even a Catholic phaseHer grandmother Dwyer took her to pray at StGenevieve’s whenever Merry was visiting down in ElizabethLittle by little, Catholic trinkets made their way into her room–and as long as he could think of them as trinkets, as long as she wasn’t going overboard, everything was chanel earrings fake okayFirst there was the palm frond bent into the shape of the cross that Grandma had given her after Palm SundayAny kid might want that up on the wallThen came the candle, in thick glass, about a foot tall, the Eternal Candle; on its label was a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and a prayer that began, “O Sacred Heart of Jesus who said, ‘Ask and you shall receive’” That wasn’t so great, but as she didn’t seem to be lighting and burning it, as it just seemed to sit there on her dresser for decoration, there was no sense making a fussThen, to hang over the bed, came the picture of Jesus, in profile, praying, which really wasn’t all right, though still he said nothing to her, nothing to Dawn, nothing to Grandma Dwyer, told himself, “It’s harmless, it’s a picture, to her a pretty picture of a nice manWhat difference does it make?”
What did it was the statue, the plaster statue of the Blessed Mother, a smaller version of the big ones on the breakfront in Grandma Dwyer’s dining room and on the dressing table in Grandma Dwyer’s bedroomThe statue was what led him to sit her down and ask if she would be willing to take the pictures and the palm frond off the wall and put them away in her closet, along with the statue and the Eternal Candle, when Grandma and Grandpa Levov came to visitQuietly he explained that though her room was her room and she had the right to hang anything there she wanted, Grandma and Grandpa Levov were Jews, and so, of course, was he, and, rightly or wrongly, Jews don’t, etcAnd because she was a sweet girl who wanted to please people, and to please her daddy most of all, she was careful to be sure that nothing Grandma Dwyer had given her was anywhere to be seen when next the Swede’s parents visited chloe paddington handbag Old RimrockAnd then one day everything Catholic came down off the wall and off her dresser for goodShe was a perfectionist who did things passionately, lived intensely in the new interest, and then the passion was suddenly spent and everything, including the passion, got thrown into a box and she moved on
Now it was Audrey HepburnEvery newspaper and magazine she could get hold of she combed for the film star’s photograph or nameEven movie timetables–”Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10″–were clipped from the newspaper after dinner and pasted in her Audrey Hepburn scrapbookFor months she went in and out of pretending to be gaminish instead of herself, daintily walking to her room like a wood sprite, smiling with meaningfully coy eyes into every reflecting surface, laughing what they call an “infectious” laugh whenever her father said a wordShe bought the soundtrack from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and played it in her bedroom for hoursHe could hear her in there singing “Moon River” in the charming way that Audrey Hepburn did, and absolutely fluently–and so, however ostentatious and singularly self-conscious was the shameless playacting, nobody in the house ever indicated that it was tiresome, let alone ludicrous, an improbable dream of purification that had taken possession of herIf Audrey Hepburn could help her shut down just a little of the stuttering, then let her go on ludicrously pretending, a girl blessed with golden hair and a logical mind and a high IQ and an adultlike sense of humor even about herself, blessed with long, slender limbs and a wealthy family and her own brand of dogged persistence–with everything except fluencySecurity, health, love, every advantage imaginable–missing only was the torebki louis vuitton ability to order a hamburger without humiliating herself
How hard she tried! Two afternoons she went to ballet class after school and two afternoons Dawn drove her to Morristown to see a speech therapistOn Saturday she got up early, made her own breakfast, and then bicycled the five hilly miles into Old Rimrock village to the tiny office of the local circuit-riding psychiatrist, who had a slant that made the Swede furious when he began to see Merry’s struggle getting worse rather than betterThe psychiatrist got Merry thinking that the stutter was a choice she made, a way of being special that she had chosen and then locked into when she realized how well it workedThe psychiatrist asked her, “How do you think your father would feel about you if you didn’t stutter? How do you think your mother would feel?” He asked her, “Is there anything good that stuttering brings you?” The Swede did not understand how it was going to help the child to make her feel responsible for something she simply could not do, and so he went to see the manAnd by the time he left he wanted to kill him
It seemed that the etiology of Merry’s problem had largely to do with her having such good-looking and successful parentsAs best the Swede could follow what he was hearing, her parental good fortune was just too much for Merry, and so, to withdraw from the competition with her mother, to get her mother to hover over and focus on her and eventually climb the walls–and, in addition, to win the father away from the beautiful mother–she chose to stigmatize herself with a severe stutter, thereby manipulating everyone from a point of seeming weakness”But Merry is made miserable by her stutter,” the Swede reminded him”That’s why we brought her to see fake birkin

He’d invoked in me, when I was a boy–as he did in hundreds of other boys–the strongest fantasy I had of being someone elseBut to wish oneself into another’s glory, as boy or as man, is an impossibility, untenable on psychological grounds if you are not a writer, and on aesthetic grounds if you areTo embrace your hero in his destruction, however–to let your hero’s life occur within you when everything is trying to diminish him, to imagine yourself into his bad luck, to implicate yourself not in his mindless ascendancy, when he is the fixed point of your adulation, but in the bewilderment of his tragic fall–well, that’s worth thinking aboutI am out there on the floor with Joy, and I am thinking of the Swede and of what happened to his country in a mere twenty-five years, between the triumphant days at wartime Weequahic High and the explosion of his daughter’s bomb in 1968, of that mysterious, troubling, extraordinary historical transitionI am thinking of the sixties and of the disorder occasioned by the Vietnam War, of how certain families lost their kids and certain families didn’t and how the Seymour Levovs were one of those that did–families full of tolerance and kindly, well-intentioned liberal goodwill, and theirs were the kids who went on a rampage, or went to jail, or disappeared underground, or fled to Sweden or CanadaI am thinking of the Swede’s great fall and of how he must have imagined that it was founded on some failure of his own responsibilityThere is where it must beginIt doesn’t matter if he was the cause of anythingHe makes himself responsible anywayHe has been doing that all his life, making himself unnaturally responsible, keeping under control not just himself but whatever else threatens to be uncontrollable, giving his logo dolce

“This will not do! You are not an Algerian woman! You are not from Algeria and you are not from India! You are an American girl from Old Rimrock, New Jersey! A very, very screwed-up American girl! Four people? No!” And now he refused to believe it, now it was he for whom the guilt made no sense and could not beShe had been much too blessed for this to be trueHe could never father a child who killed four peopleEverything life had provided her, everything life offered her, everything life demanded of her, everything that had happened to her from the day she was born made that impossibleKilling people? It was not one of their problemsMercifully life had omitted that from their lives
Killing people was as far as you could get from all that had been given to the Levovs to doNo, she was not, she could not, be his”If you are so big on not lying or taking anything, small or great–all that crap, Merry, completely meaningless crap–I beg you to tell me the truth!”
“The truth is prada logos simpleYou must be done with craving and selfhood
“Merry,” he cried, “Merry, Merry,” and, the unbridled unchecked in him, powerless not to attack, with all his manly brawn he fell upon her huddled there on the grimy pallet”It isn’t you! You could not have done it!” She put up no resistance as he tore from her face the veil cut from the end of a stockingWhere the heel should be was her chinNothing is more fetid than something where your foot has been, and she puts her mouth up against itWe loved her, she loved us–and as a result she wears her face in a stocking”Now speak!” he commanded herHe pried her mouth open, disregarding a guideline he had never before overstepped–the injunction against violenceIt was the end of all understandingThere was no way for understanding to be there anymore, even though he knew violence to be inhuman and futile, and understanding–talking sense to each other for however long it took to bring about accord–all there was that could achieve a purse logo lasting resultThe father who could never use force on his child, for whom force was the embodiment of moral bankruptcy, pried open her mouth and with his fingers took hold of her tongueOne of her front teeth was missing, one of her beautiful teethThat proved it wasn’t MerryThe years of braces, the retainer, the night brace, all those contraptions to perfect her bite, to save her gums, to beautify her smile–this could not be the same girl
“Speak!” he demanded, and at last the true smell of her reached him, the lowest human smell there is, excluding only the stench of the rotting living and the rotting deadStrangely, though she had told him she did not wash so as to do no harm to the water, he had smelled nothing before–neither when they’d embraced on the street nor sitting in the dimness across from her pallet–nothing other than a sourish, nauseatingly unfamiliar something that he ascribed to the piss-soaked buildingBut what he smelled now, while pulling open her mouth, was a chanel white watch human being and not a building, a mad human being who grubs about for pleasure in its own shitHer foulness had reached himHis daughter is a human mess stinking of human wasteHer smell is the smell of everything organic breaking downIt is the smell of no coherenceIt is the smell of all she’s becomeShe could do it, and she did do it, and this reverence for life is the final obscenity
He tried to locate a muscle in his head somewhere to plug the opening at the top of his throat, something to stop him up and prevent their sliding still further into the filth, but there was no such muscleA spasm of gastric secretions and undigested food started up the intestinal piping and, in a bitter, acidic stream, surged sickeningly onto his tongue, and when he cried out, ” Who are you!” it was spewed with his words onto her face
Even in the dimness of that room, once he was over her he knew very well who she wasIt was not necessary for her to speak with her face unprotected to inform him sac chloe that the inexplicable had forever displaced whatever he once thought he knewIf she was no longer branded as Merry Levov by her stutter, she was marked unmistakably by the eyesWithin the chiseled-out, oversized eye sockets, the eyes were hisThe tallness was his and the eyes were hisThe tooth she was missing had been pulled or knocked out
She looked not at him when he retreated to the door but anxiously all around her narrow room, as though in his frenzy he had battered most brutally the harmless microorganisms that dwelled with her in her solitudeLittle wonder that she had vanishedLittle wonder that he hadThis was his daughter, and she was unknowableThis murderer is mineHis vomit was on her face, a face that, but for the eyes, was now most unlike her mother’s or her father’sThe veil was off, but behind the veil there was another veilIsn’t there always?
“Come with me,” he begged
“Merry, you are asking me to do something that is excruciatingly painfulYou are asking me to leave borse gucci

Jerry just told their father to fuck off; Dawn was driven almost crazy by him; and Sylvia Levov stoically and impatiently endured him, her only successful form of resistance being to freeze him out and live with the isolation–and see more of herself evaporating year by yearBut Marcia took him on as the fool that he was for still believing in the power of his indignation to convert the corruptions of the present into the corruptions of the past
“So what would you want her to be instead, Lou? A cocktail waitress?” Marcia asked
“Why not? That’s a job
“Not much of one,” Marcia replied”Not one that would interest anyone here
“Oh?” said Lou Levov”They’d prefer what she does instead?”
“I don’t know,” said Marcia”We’ll have to poll the girlsWhich would you prefer,” she said to Sheila, “cocktail waitress or porn star?”
But Sheila was not about to be engulfed in Marcia’s mockery, and with eyes that seemed to stare past it and right on through to the chloe paddington handbag egotism, she gave her unequivocal replyThe Swede remembered that after Sheila had first met Marcia and Barry Umanoff here, at the Old Rimrock house, he had asked her, “How can he love this person?” and instead of answering him as Dawn did, “Because he’s a ball-less wonder,” Sheila had replied, “By the end of a dinner party, everybody is probably thinking that about somebodySometimes everybody is thinking that about everybody
“Do you?” he’d asked her”I think that about couples all the time,” she’d saidAnd yet this wise woman had harbored a murderer
“What about Dawn?” Marcia asked”Cocktail waitress or porno actress?”
Smiling sweetly, exhibiting her best Catholic schoolgirl posture–the girl who makes the nuns happy by sitting at her desk without slouching–Dawn said, “Up yours, Marcia
“What kind of conversation is this?” Lou Levov asked
“A dinner conversation,” Sylvia Levov replied
“And what makes you so blase?” he asked her
“I’m not blase\ I’m costume jewelry chanel listening
Now Bill Orcutt said, “Nobody’s polled you, MarciaWhich would you prefer, assuming you had the choice?”
She laughed merrily at the slighting innuendo”Oh, they’ve got big fat mamas in dirty moviesThey, too, appear in the dreams of menAnd not only for comic reliefListen, you folks are too hard on LindaWhy is it that if a girl takes off her clothes in Atlantic City it’s for a scholarship and makes her an American goddess, but if she takes off her clothes in a sex flick it’s for filthy money and makes her a whore? Why is that? Why? All right–nobody knowsBut seriously, folks, I love this word ‘scholarship’ A hooker comes to a hotel roomThe guy asks her how much she getsShe says, ‘Well, if you want blank I get a three-hundred-dollar scholarshipAnd if you want blank-blank I get a five-hundred-dollar scholarshipAnd if you want blank-blank-blank–’”
“Marcia,” said Dawn, “try as you will, you can’t get under my skin tonight
“Can’t I?”
“Not tonight
There chanel classic flap was a beautiful floral arrangement at the center of the table”From Dawn’s garden,” Lou Levov had told them all proudly as they were sitting down to eatThere were also large platters of the beefsteak tomatoes, sliced thickly, dressed in oil and vinegar, and encircled by slices of red onion fresh from the gardenAnd there were two wooden buckets–old feed buckets that they’d picked up at a junk shop in Clinton for a dollar apiece–each lined gaily with a red bandanna and brimming with the ears of corn that Orcutt had helped her shuckCradled in wicker baskets near either end of the table were freshly baked loaves of French bread, those new baguettes from McPherson’s, reheated in the oven and pleasant to tear apart with your handsAnd there was good strong Burgundy wine, half a dozen bottles of the Swede’s best Pommard, four of them open on the table, bottles that five years back he had laid down for drinking in 1973–according to his wine register, Pom-363 chanel reporter bag mards laid down in his cellar just one month to the day before Merry killed DrYes, earlier in the evening he had found 1/3/68 inscribed, in his handwriting, in the spiral notebook he used for recording the details of each new purchase1/3/68″ he had written, with no idea that on 2/3/68 his daughter would go ahead and outrage all of America, except perhaps for Professor Marcia Umanoff
The two high school kids who were doing the serving emerged from the kitchen every few minutes, silently offering around the steaks he’d cooked, arranged on pewter platters, all carved up and running with bloodThe Swede’s set of carving knives were from Hoffritz, the best German stainless steelHe’d gone over to New York to buy the set and the big carving block for their first Thanksgiving in the Old Rimrock houseHe once had cared about all that stuffLoved to hone the blade on the long conical file before he went after the birdLoved the sound of itThe sad inventory of his domestic lady dior bag bo

B-b-blown to b-b-b-b-bits all for the sake of the privileged people of New Jersey leading their p-p-peaceful, s-s-secure, acquisitive, meaningless 1-1-1-little bloodsucking lives!”
Conversation #30 about New York, after Merry returns from staying overnight with the Umanoffs”Oh, they’re oh-so-liberal, B-b-b-b-Barry and MarciaWith their little comfortable b-b-bour-geois life
“They are professors, they are serious academics who are against the warDid they have any people there?”
“Oh, some English professor against the war, some sociology professor against the warAt least he involves his family against the warThey all march tugu-tugu-tugu-togetherThat’s what I call a familyNot these fucking prada borse c-c-c-cows
“So it went all right thereI want to go with my friendsI don’t want to go to the Umanoffs at eight o’clockWhatever is happening is happening after eight o’clock! If I wanted to be with your friends after eight o’clock at night, I could stay here in RimrockI want to be with my friends after eight o’clock!”
“Nonetheless it worked outYou didn’t get to be with your friends after eight o’clock but you got to spend the day with your friends, which is a lot better than nothing at allI feel much better about what you have agreed to doAre you going to go in next Saturday?”
“I don’t plan these things y-years in advance
“If you’re going in next Saturday, then you’re to phone the Umanoffs beforehand and torebki louis vuitton let them know you’re coming
Conversation #34 about New York, after Merry fails to show up at the Umanoffs for the nightYou made an agreement and you broke itYou’re not leaving this house on a Saturday again
“I’m under house arrest
“What is it that you’re so afraid of? What is it that you think I’m going to do? I’m hanging out with f-friendsWe discuss the war and other important thingsI don’t know why you want to know so muchYou don’t ask me a z-z-z-z-zillion fucking questions every time I go down to Hamlin’s s-s-storeWhat are you so afraid of? You’re just a b-b-b-b-bundle of fearYou just can’t keep hiding out here in the woodsDon’t go spewing your fear all over me and making me as fearful as you tas hermes and Mom areAll you can deal with is c-cowsWell, there’s something besides c-c-c-c-cows and treesPeople with real painWhy don’t you say it? Are you afraid I’m going to get laid? Is that what you’re afraid of? I’m not that moronic to get knocked upWhat have I ever done in my life that’s irresponsible?”
“You broke the agreementThat’s the end of it
“This is not a corporationThis isn’t b-b-b-b-b-b-b-business, DaddyEvery day in this house is like being under house arrest
“I don’t like you very much when you act like thisI don’t like you either
Conversation #44 about New York”I’m not driving you to the trainYou’re not leaving the house
“What are you going to do? B-barricade me in? How you going to logo dolce

And united us not merely in where we came from but in where we were going and how we would get thereWe had new means and new ends, new allegiances and new aims, new innards–a new ease, somewhat less agitation in facing down the exclusions the goyim still wished to preserveAnd out of what context did these transformations arise–out of what historical drama, acted unsuspectingly by its little protagonists, played out in classrooms and kitchens looking nothing at all like the great theater of life? Just what collided with what to produce the spark in us?
I was still awake and all stirred up, formulating these questions and their answers in my bed–blurry, insomniac shadows of these questions and their answers–some eight hours after I’d driven back from New Jersey, where, on a sunny Sunday late in October, at a country club in a Jewish suburb far from the futility prevailing in the streets of our crime-ridden, drug-infested childhood home, the reunion that began at eleven in the morning went ebulliently on all afternoon longIt was held in a ballroom just at the edge of the country club’s golf course for a group of elderly adults who, as Weequahic kids of the thirties and forties, would have thought a niblick (which was what in those days they called the nine iron) was a hunk of schmaltz herringNow I couldn’t sleep–the last thing I could remember was the parking valet bringing my car around to the steps of the portico, and the reunion’s commander in chief, Selma Bresloff, kindly asking if I’d had a good time, and my telling her, “It’s like going out to your old outfit after Iwo Jima I left my bed and went to my desk, my head vibrant with the static of unelaborated thoughtI wound up working there until six, by which time I had got the reunion speech to read as it appears aboveOnly after I had built to the emotional peroration culminating in the word “astonishing” was I at last sufficiently unastonished by the force of my feelings to be able to put together a couple of hours of sleep–or something resembling sleep, for, even half out of it, I was a biography in perpetual motion, memory to the marrow of my bones
Yes, even from as benign a celebration as a high school reunion it’s not so simple to instantaneously resume existence back behind the blindfold of continuity and routinePerhaps if I were thirty or forty, the reunion would have faded sweetly away in the three hours it took me to drive homeBut there is no easy mastery of such events at sixty-two, and only a year beyond cancer motorcycle balenciaga surgeryInstead of recapturing time past, I’d been captured by it in the present, so that passing seemingly out of the world of time I was, in fact, rocketing through to its secret core
For the hours we were all together, doing nothing more than hugging, kissing, kibitzing, laughing, hovering over one another recollecting the dilemmas and disasters that hadn’t in the long run made a damn bit of difference, crying out, “Look who’s here!” and “Oh, it’s been a long time” and “You remember me? I remember you,” asking each other, “Didn’t we once
“Were you the kid who” commanding one another–with those three poignant words I heard people repeat all afternoon as they were drawn and tugged into numerous conversations at once–”Don’t go away!”and, of course, dancing, cheek-to-cheek dancing our outdated dance steps to a “one-man band,” a bearded boy in a tuxedo, his brow encircled with a red bandanna (a boy born at least two full decades after we’d marched together out of the school auditorium to the rousing recessional tempo of Iolanthe), accompanying himself on a synthesizer as he imitated Nat “King” Cole, Frankie Laine, and Sinatra–for those few hours time, the chain of time, the whole damn drift of everything called time, had seemed as easy to understand as the dimensions of the doughnut you effortlessly down with your morning coffeeThe one-man band in the bandanna played “Mule Train” while I thought, The Angel of Time is passing over us and breathing with each breath all that we’ve lived through–the Angel of Time unmistakably as present in the ballroom of the Cedar Hill Country Club as that kid doing “Mule Train” like Frankie LaineSometimes I found myself looking at everyone as though it were still 1950, as though “1995″ were merely the futuristic theme of a senior prom that we’d all come to in humorous papier-mache masks of ourselves as we might look at the close of the twentieth centuryThat afternoon time had been invented for the mystification of no one but us
Inside the commemorative mug presented by Selma to each of us as we were departing were half a dozen little rugelach in an orange tissue-paper sack, neatly enclosed in orange cellophane and tied shut with striped curling ribbon of orange and brown, the school colorsThe rugelach, as fresh as any I’d ever snacked on at home after school–back then baked by the recipe broker of her mahjongg club, my mother–were a gift from one of our class members, a Teaneck bakerWithin five minutes of leaving the reun-46 ion, I’d undone the double wrapping omega replica watches and eaten all six rugelach, each a snail of sugar-dusted pastry dough, the cinammon-lined chambers microscopically studded with midget raisins and chopped walnutsBy rapidly devouring mouthful after mouthful of these crumbs whose floury richness–blended of butter and sour cream and vanilla and cream cheese and egg yolk and sugar–I’d loved since childhood, perhaps I’d find vanishing from Nathan what, according to Proust, vanished from Marcel the instant he recognized “the savour of the little madeleine”: the apprehensive-ness of death”A mere taste,” Proust writes, and “the word ‘death’ So, greedily I ate, gluttonously, refusing to curtail for a moment this wolfish intake of saturated fat but, in the end, having nothing like Marcel’s luck
Let’s speak further of death and of the desire–understandably in the aging a desperate desire–to forestall death, to resist it, to resort to whatever means are necessary to see death with anything, anything, anything but clarity: One of the boys up from Florida–according to the reunion booklet we each received at the door, twenty-six out of a graduating class of a hundred and seventy-six were now living in Floridaa good sign, meant we still had more people in Florida (six more) than we had who were dead; and all afternoon, by the way, it was not in my mind alone that the men were tagged the boys and the women the girls–told me that on the way to Livingston from Newark Airport, where his plane had landed and he’d rented a car, he’d twice had to pull up at service stations and get the key to the restroom, so wracked was he by trepidationThis was Mendy Gur-lik, in 1950 voted the handsomest boy in the class, in 1950 a broad-shouldered, long-lashed beauty, our most important jitterbugger, who loved to go around saying to people, “Solid, Jackson!” Having once been invited by his older brother to a colored whorehouse on Augusta Street, where the pimps hung out, virtually around the corner from his father’s Branford Place liquor store–a whorehouse where, he eventually confessed, he’d sat fully clothed, waiting in an outer hallway, flipping through a Mechanix Illustrated that he’d found on a table there, while his brother was the one who “did it”–Mendy was the closest the class had to a delinquentIt was Mendy Gurlik (now Garr) who’d taken me with him to the Adams Theater to hear Illinois Jacquet, Buddy Johnson, and “Newark’s own” Sarah Vaughan; who’d got the tickets and taken me with him to hear Mr Billy Eckstine, in concert at the Mosque; who, in ’49, had got silver handbags tickets for us to the Miss Sepia America Beauty Contest at Laurel GardenIt was Mendy who, some three or four times, took me to watch, broadcasting in the flesh, Bill Cook, the smooth late-night Negro disc jockey of the Jersey station WAATMusical Caravan, Bill Cook’s show, I ordinarily listened to in my darkened bedroom on Saturday nightsThe opening theme was Ellington’s “Caravan,” very exotic, very sophisticated, Afro-Oriental rhythms, a belly-dancing beat–just by itself it was worth tuning in for; “Caravan,” in the Duke’s very own rendition, made me feel nicely illicit even while tucked up between my mother’s freshly laundered sheetsFirst the tom-tom opening, then winding curvaceously up out of the casbah that great smoky trombone, and then the insinuating, snake-charming fluteMendy called it “boner music
To get to WAAT, and Bill Cook’s studio, we took the 14 bus downtown, and only minutes after we’d settled quietly like churchgoers in the row of chairs outside his glass-enclosed booth, Bill Cook would come out from behind the microphone to greet usWith a “race record” spinning on the turntable–for listeners still unadventurously at home–Cookie would cordially shake the hands of the two tall, skinny white sharpies, all done up in their one-button-roll suits from the American Shop and their shirts from the Custom Shoppe, with the spread collars(The clothes on my back were on loan from Mendy for the night “And what might I play for you gentlemen?” Cookie graciously inquired of us in a voice whose mellow resonance Mendy would imitate whenever we talked on the phoneI asked for the melodious stuff, “Miss” Dinah Washington, “Miss” Savannah Churchill–and how arresting that was back then, the salacious chivalry of the dj’s “Miss”–while Mendy’s taste, spicier, racially far more authoritative, was for musicians like the lowdown saloon piano player Roosevelt Sykes, for Ivory Joe Hunter (“Whenmost lost my mind”), and for a quartet that Mendy seemed to me to take excessive pride in calling “the Ray-O-Vics” emphasizing the first syllable exactly as did the black kid from South Side, Melvyn Smith, who delivered for Mendy’s father’s store after school(Mendy and his brother did the Saturday deliveries Mendy boldly accompanied Melvyn Smith one night to hear live bebop at the lounge over the bowling alley on Beacon Street, Lloyd’s Manor, a place to which few whites other than a musician’s reckless Desdemona would ventureIt was Mendy Gurlik who first took me down to the Radio Record Shack on Market Street, miu miu clutch where we picked out bargains from the 19-cent bin and could listen to the record in a booth before we bought itDuring the war, when, to keep up morale on the home front, there’d be dances one night a week during July and August at the Chancellor Avenue playground, Mendy used to scramble through the high-spirited crowd–neighborhood parents and schoolkids and little kids up late who ran gleefully round and round the painted white bases where we played our perpetual summer softball game–dispensing for whoever cared to listen a less conventional brand of musical pleasure than the Glenn Miller-Tommy Dorsey-inspired arrangements that most everybody else liked dancing to beneath the dim floodlights back of the schoolRegardless of the dance tune the band up on the flag-festooned bandstand happened to be playing, Mendy would race around most of the evening singing, “CaWonia, Caldoma, what makes your big head so hard? Rocks!” He sang it, as he blissfully proclaimed, “free of charge,” just as nuttily as Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five did on the record he obliged all the Daredevils to listen to whenever, for whatever refractory purpose (to play dollar-limit seven-card stud, to examine for the millionth time the drawings in his Tillie the Toiler “hot book,” on rare occasions to hold a circle jerk), we entered his nefarious bedroom when nobody else was home
And here now was Mendy in 1995, the Weequahic boy with the biggest talent for being less than a dignified model child, a personality halfway between mildly repellent shallowness and audacious, enviable deviance, flirting back then with indignity in a way that hovered continuously between the alluring and the offensiveHere was Dapper, Dirty, Daffy Mendy Gurlik, not in prison (where I was certain he’d wind up when he’d urge us to sit in a circle on the floor of his bedroom, some four or five Daredevils with our pants pulled down, competing to win the couple of bucks in the pot by being the one to “shoot” first), not in hell (where I was sure he’d be consigned after being stabbed to death at Lloyd’s Manor by a colored guy “high on reefer”–whatever that meant), but simply a retired restaurateur–owner of three steakhouses called Garr’s Grill in suburban Long Island–at no place more disreputable than his high school class’s forty-fifth reunion
“You shouldn’t worry, Mend–you still got your build, your looks
He did, too: well tanned, slender, a tall narrow-faced jogger wearing black alligator boots and a black silk shirt beneath a green cashmere sac dolce gabana ja

Welcome to my first blog

What do you think war is? War is an extremeIt isn’t life out here in little RimrockNothing is too extreme out here
“You don’t like it out here anymoreWould you want to live in New York? Would you like that?”
“Of c-c-c-course
“Suppose when you graduate from high school you were to go to college in New YorkWould you like that?”
“I don’t know if I’m going to go to collegeLook at the administration of those collegesLook what they do to their students who are against the warHow can I want to be going to college? Higher educationIt’s what I call lower educationMaybe I’ll go to college, maybe I new cartier watches won’tI wouldn’t start p-planning now
Conversation #18 about New York, after she fails to return home on a Saturday night”You’re never to do that againYou’re never to stay over with people who we don’t knowWho are these people?”
“Never say never
“Who are the people you stayed with?”
“They’re friends of Sh-sherry’sFrom the music school
“I don’t believe you
“Why? You can’t b-b-b-believe that I might have friends? That people might like me–you don’t b-b-b-believe that? That people might put me up for the night–you don’t b-b-b-believe that? What do you b-b-b-b-b-b-b-believe in?”
“You’re chanel handbag 2.55 sixteen years oldYou cannot stay over in New York City
“Stop reminding me of how old I am
“When you went off yesterday we expected you back at six o’clockAt seven o’clock at night you phoned to say you’re staying overYou said you had a place to stay
“But you can’t do it againIf you do it again, you will never be allowed to go into New York by yourself
“Says who?”
“Your father
“I’ll make a deal with you
“What’s the deal, Father?”
“If you ever go into New York again and you find it’s getting late and you have to stay somewhere, you stay with the Umanoffs
“The Umanoffs?”
“They gucci bookbag like you, you like them, they’ve known you all your lifeThey have a very nice apartment
“Well, the people I stayed with have a very nice apartment too
“Who are they?”
“I told you, they’re Sh-sherry’s friends
“Who are they?”
“Bill and Melissa
“And who are Bill and Melissa?”
“They’re p-p-p-people
“What do they do for a living? How old are they?”
“Melissa’s twenty-two
“Are they students?”
“They were studentsNow they organize people for the betterment of the Vietnamese
“Where do they live?”
“What are you going to do, come and get me?”
“I’d like to know where they liveThere prada bags cheap are all sorts of neighborhoods in New YorkSome are good, some aren’t
“They live in a perfectly fine neighborhood and a perfectly fine b-b-b-b-building
“Where?”
“They live up in Morningside Heights
“Are they Columbia students?”
“They were
“How many people stay in this apartment?”
“I don’t see why I have to answer all these questions
“Because you’re my daughter and you are sixteen years old
“So for the rest of my life, because I’m your daughter–”
“No, when you are eighteen and graduate high school, you can do whatever you want
“So the difference we’re talking about here is two chanel white watch ye

Of all I did during that year, it was this, I think, that she appreciated most of all. Perhaps it was the steadiness I provided, or maybe it really was the result of my efforts over the last few months, but whatever it was, I began to notice occasional displays of newfound warmth from Jane. Though they were infrequent, I savored them desperately, hoping that our relationship was somehow back on track.

Welcome to your brand new blog at Edublogs.

To get started, simply log in, edit or delete this post and check out all the other options available to you.

Also, please consider becoming an Edublogs Pro User – you can remove ads from yours and 50 other student blogs (which also get extra themes and mobile blogging), upload up to 5GB or audio, video and every other sort of content and access great features under your ‘Plugins’ menu.

And you get premium email support and over 30 extra cool themes too.

Pro users are what keeps Edublogs running and providing free blogs for education, so give it a go today

For assistance, visit our comprehensive support site, check out our getting started with Edublogs guide or stop by The Edublogs Forums to chat with other edubloggers.

You can also subscribe to our brilliant free publication, The Edublogger, which is jammed with helpful tips, ideas and more.

And finally, if you like Edublogs but want to be able to simply create, administer, control and manage hundreds of student and teacher blogs at your school or college, check out Edublogs Campus… it’s like Edublogs in a box, all for you.

Thanks again for signing up with Edublogs!