From then on I was treated as someone talented at art. But I had been as prepared for her to be as dismissive of the whole counterfeit pastiche as she had once been of the horizon lines, the vanishing points, and the basic forms that, now hidden behind layers of gouache, had made that pastiche draftable.
Our science teacher was also an artist. Some years before, he’d married the woman who had been my teacher in the five-year-olds, magically changing her name (I never quite understood how) from Rubins to Robus.
If both last names had not been initial-R trochees, I probably would have understood the process. But for me, it was a transformation, rather than a replacement, and thus remained mysterious.
Hugo, as we called Mr. Robus, had a sculpture—Woman Washing Her Hair—in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. I had pleaded to have him as my homeroom teacher (“to be put into his House,” in the school’s idiosyncratic jargon), and, with my friend Robert, I had been. In a way, Gwenny was too much a total surround for me to think of her as a favorite teacher—though she was certainly my most influential. But the title of favorite went to Hugo. He didn’t look in the least like John Nagy. He was clean shaven. When he taught, he always wore a white shirt and, usually, a tie. If the lab, with its wooden tables, glass-cased cupboards, and chrome gas jets, was warm, sometimes he left his sports jacket off. Whenever I came physically near him, I always thought of (but never once mentioned) Woman Washing Her Hair. Yet the little electric lights, the single-pole/double-throw switches, and the voltmeters and ampmeters Hugo taught us to wire up, the Lyden jars and Bunsen burners he taught us to operate, the test tubes, retorts, and pipettes he showed us how to fill and empty to precise measure, were all he ever spoke of. For me he was a scientist, and when I was around him, that’s what I wanted to be, too.
Oh, maybe, like Hugo, I’d have something in a museum somewhere, or a novel that you could buy in a bookstore, or a concerto that, while I was working with a hydrogen bubble chamber in an atomic lab someplace, was, even that same evening, being performed by a major symphony orchestra.
But science was my center.
Robert was among my best school friends—often my very best. Blond and round faced (yes, the strawberry custard confection), he was an inveterate nail biter and a general oddball. He tended to become splutteringly overexcited about things, and in many ways he was an immature and, often, an awkward boy. An early motor difficulty, which had caused him to clutch his pencil or pen in both hands when he wrote or to steady one hand with the other when he pointed at something, had settled into a slight clumsiness, most of the time unnoticeable. And he was as goodhearted a friend as you could want. Freddy the Pig books had been our early shared enthusiasm. Now it was Heinlein’s science fiction juveniles and amateur electronics. Our friendship dated from our first weeks together in the five-year-olds, when, on the first day of school, Robert had been the object of some truly vicious teasing. Sometimes I would pull away from him, but when I had been betrayed by Jeff or bullied by Jonathan (and Robert’s and my friendship had survived its own betrayals), Robert was whom I came back to.
In Robert’s penthouse apartment, just a block down from the school, a year before we got our own, I saw my first television set. The show we watched that evening was Burr Tillstrom’s Kukla, Fran and Ollie.
Then, a few months later, we were on television—together!
It was a cowboy show, where three or four children sat around on a corral fence, while, for five minutes at the beginning and five minutes at the end of the program, the chapped and Stetsoned star talked about the ancient Republic Pictures serial that filled the bulk of the airtime. Robert’s mother had arranged it and was to take the two of us to the studio. Robert wore jeans and sneakers, as we always did at school. But in light of my public appearance, Mom had sent me in that day in a suit and tie. As we didn’t have a TV yet, she didn’t know what the other kids on the show usually wore—and certainly wasn’t about to let me tell her: “But Mom, it’s a cowboy show—”
“Just because it’s a cowboy show doesn’t mean you can’t look nice. You put on your tie, now!”
At the studio, the director’s assistant, a young woman in a purple blouse, slacks (not that common on women in the ’50s), and glasses, frowned at me, then told me to take off my suit jacket, in order to “dress me down.” Then someone said I’d have to put it back on, since my white shirt, even with the jacket covering most of it, would glare. (More than anything else, TV was responsible, during the ’50s, for the ascendancy of the Oxford blue shirt.) They asked me to take my tie off. I did; and decided they were really nice people. Then they opened my shirt collar as wide as they could under my tightly buttoned-up suit coat—and gave me a ten-gallon hat to make me look “more informal.”
Several times my mother had taken me to see radio programs. Although I’d been disappointed that the shows were not really acted, but simply read out from sheaves of flimsy paper by ordinary men and women standing around on an empty stage, one had been in a full-sized theater with balconies and the other in a hangar-like space that had seated at least three hundred. But this was a one-camera show, done live, in a studio only a hair’s breadth bigger than our bathroom at home. In his soiled white shirt, the cameraman chain smoked (like my father), and when I asked, “Won’t his cigarette smoke get in front of the lens and make it cloudy?” the assistant laughed and said, “If his cigarette bothers you, I’ll ask him to put it out. He’s not supposed to be smoking in here, anyway.”
“No!” I said, abashed at not being taken seriously. “It doesn’t bother me! I was just wondering about the camera, that’s all!”
But my greatest, silent astonishment there was that the desert background which, on Robert’s television only the night before, had stretched infinitely far behind the length of corral fence, with a couple of cactuses standing among distant dunes and sagebrush, was only painted cloth, a foot higher than the star’s head, and with a sag along the top! The whole desert (not to mention the prop fence before it) was not as wide as Robert and I laid together, toe to head!
But the very bright lights were already on.
Already we were more or less positioned.
My next surprise was one that has surprised me all over, every time I’ve been on a talk show or guest interview since: the unruptured continuity from non-air time to air time.
We four kids had been on monitor for fifteen minutes now and had gotten used to it. (Or would never get used to it: the other boy, who’d come with his father, kept staring back and forth from the TV screen in the studio corner to the camera in the middle of the room, unable to understand why, when he turned to look at himself, his image on the screen looked away, so that he could never get his screen self to look directly at his own face.) Standing beside the camera, wearing earphones and a green, open-necked shirt, dark as the sea, the director gave all his attention to his clipboard.
Only the red light coming on above the camera lens told us that the studio had changed from a cramped cell with flaking gray paint on the walls and a very shiny clock with a red second-hand jerking about it above the door, to a dream presentation vaster than Arizona and replicated unto gray thousands. It was a transition wholly without emotional weight, thoroughly technological, hidden within some nacelle of wires and timed to a clock in another room we couldn’t see.
In the same voice with which he’d been asking us if we were comfortable, was I secure on the rail there, if the party dress of the girl who sat beside me was caught under her leg (“No sir! It’s fine!”), the star in his chaps and cowboy hat said, as though he were continuing to talk to us or to people like us who, for some reason, weren’t quite there: “Well, boys and girls, it’s good to see you all back again. This evening, as our guests, we have Billy and Suzy and Bobby and Sammy . . .”
I’d never heard anyone call Robert “Bobby” before. And I loathed the name “Sammy.” Yet, before the metallic lights like white-hot holes in the walls, in almost no time he was sayi
ng (in the same voice in which he’d been addressing uncountable ghost children), “All right, that’s all there is to it. For now, anyway. Or at least for the next fifteen minutes.”
The red light was off.
The dream was on hold—or had switched beyond us to another of its infinitely malleable, endlessly linkable segments.
“You can get down. Just don’t go too far, so we can all get back together for the closing part of the show.”
Suzy (if she was any more “Suzy” than I was “Sammy” or Robert was “Bobby”) climbed down from the fence. I got down too. Billy was still staring from camera to monitor. Robert just jumped. “Can we go watch the movie now?”
“Aw . . . !” The star leaned back and folded his large, clean hands before his silver buckle, as though this were the single sadness in his generally joyful job. “I’m sorry! But that’s done from an entirely different building, way over on the other side of town. And we aren’t hooked up to that cable. But we’ll be back on the air in just a while . . .”
I took off my ten gallon hat and looked for the director’s assistant to give it to. She was at my elbow a moment later. “Don’t you want to keep that,” she said as I turned to her, “till the show’s over?”
* * *
Though my family did not yet have a TV, the Hunts, who lived in a cramped apartment on the second floor in the building next door to our private house, did. (Their daughter, Laura, a girl six months older than I, was supposed to be “engaged” to me, so ran the joke among the other black children along the Harlem block.) Dad and Mom and my sister were all going over there to watch.
Robert’s mother stopped in with us at a coffee shop after the show and we got hamburgers. So we didn’t get back to my house till about seven.
“What in the world happened to your tie?” Mom demanded when I walked in.
“I’ve got it on . . . ?” I looked down at myself in conscientious bewilderment. (How carefully I’d knotted it again before the mirror above the sink in the studio’s blue phonebooth of a bathroom.)
“But you didn’t have it on the show!”
And I was surprised all over: I actually had been on television! Thousands of people really had seen me!
“They made me take it off,” I said, wondering now if it wasn’t really me who’d made the suggestion. What was it they’d said about the glare from my shirt? Maybe I’d just looked silly in a suit and an open collar . . . But Mom seemed to think it was more funny than not. And when Dad came upstairs from the ground-floor funeral parlor, he didn’t say anything—maybe he hadn’t actually gone over to the Hunts’ and seen me . . . ?
A year or so later Robert provided me with the most sexually exciting few hours of my childhood.
I had met Robert’s father a few times. A physically vast, gray-haired man, the elderly and successful Scotsman was notably senior to his German-American wife. Then, one year, just before school started, my mother put down the phone to tell me: “Aunt Kay just told me that Robert’s father died this summer! That’s so sad for his mother. And the boy, too. He’s had such a rough time.” She meant Robert’s motor problems that had, by now, all but vanished and whose faintest lingerings I never noticed anymore.
When I saw Robert again in school, I was a little scared for the first minutes, wondering if his having a dead father would make him any different. But he looked just the same as before. And soon—almost—I’d forgotten it.
That spring vacation, for the first time, Robert invited me to come up to his summer house. (April’s cruelties, as Chaucer knew, have a certain thread of generosity woven through them.) His family had a farm outside New Paltz, and his mother—who’d gone back to work as a nurse in a hospital—would drive us up there.
Our own family’s summer place in Hopewell Junction was a small affair. But it was sort of a farm—at least for several years my father had grown a field of corn behind it. We had a dozen acres of woods. And one summer Dad had raised a matte-black coop of chickens and, another, stilted up five feet from the guano-splatted ground and walled with octagonal wire, a house full of turkeys.
But what Robert’s mother (us in the back seat of the station wagon) finally pulled up to was, after our two-hour drive, a sprawling three-story farmhouse, with an even more sizable barn set off from it. There were several fields, a forest, a sloping lawn, and even a pond on the property. There were a number of cows, some ducks, and a rambunctious dog, who lolloped out of the barn to leap on and lick all over us as we got out of the car. His name was King, after the dog on the Sargeant Preston of the Yukon radio show, Robert explained. Robert and I both listened to it each week at home (a booming, slightly anglicized baritone, which meant Canada in the 1950s: “On, King! On, you huskies . . . !”), along with Superman, The Green Hornet, and The Lone Ranger—television was still, at that time, an expensive novelty more than anything else.
How the farm was managed when Robert and his mother weren’t there, I don’t recall. But the system of live-in hands and visiting caretakers was explained to me satisfactorily enough at the time.
That first afternoon, Robert’s mother had to drive into town. A little later, the hand who was about had to go off in his own car. Being left alone fit in perfectly with a plan I’d had in mind for some time now.
Though Robert was my friend, he was not a part of the pre-adolescent afternoon sexual carryings-on I engaged in in the showers of our school basement after swimming. That circle of initiates included Raymond, Wally, Vladdy, and—sometimes—Jonathan. There was another tall boy in our class, Arthur, another bully, who knew something was happening and, when Jonathan wasn’t there to tell him to get lost, would occasionally barge naked into our gray marble changing booth and threaten to tell: the menace from Arthur far outweighed any threat from the Phys. Ed. teacher or his assistant—who simply wanted to stay as far as possible from the wet, naked, screaming, towel-snapping Sixth and Seventh Graders.
But I couldn’t see why Robert wouldn’t like it as much as the rest of us. Awkward as he was, though, I decided it would probably be better if I broke him in myself before I brought him to the others. These sexual explorations were carried on almost wholly without words—only partially because of Arthur. So you had to know what to do, or at least be able to figure it out without making noise.
When, once, Arthur finally did confront our regular Phys. Ed. teacher with an accusation, the t-shirted man put his hands on his hips, looked at the tall, belligerent boy, and, with a contemptuous jerk of his head, asked, “How come you’re so interested in stuff like that? Nobody likes squealers—about anything. But you keep on talking about this kind of stuff, somebody’s going to start wondering why you’re so curious and concerned about it all . . .” which left the boy surprised, silent, and probably confused.
But the rest of us were miraculously off the hook.
Today I suspect this was just our gym teacher’s (wholly homophobic) way of dealing with a situation he’d probably encountered many times in ten or fifteen years of teaching athletics.
But more recently, a male history teacher had been temporarily assigned to supervise the afternoon swim activities, and, wandering through the labyrinth of marble-walled shower and changing stalls, he must have overheard something, so waited outside ours for a good five or ten minutes, listening. Finally, still in his bathing suit, he stepped around, where three of the five of us had completely abandoned ours, and announced nervously: “What you’re doing is sick!” He was a tall, sunken-chested man, who never looked very happy. “You know, that’s very sick, now. I should report this. You just don’t understand how dangerous what you’re doing is. This is much more serious than you think—you don’t understand it. What you’re doing is very sick . . . !”
We froze in naked guilt. Then Wally, the most aggressive of us, suddenly declared, mockingly: “Well, I think you’re sick!” Then he let an ululating hoot, that ended in a kind of grunting, idiot laugh. Was he returning the intimidation to the teacher the way our gym coach
had done with Arthur? Wally was the class clown anyway and, probably from nervousness, had simply blurted the most outrageous thing he could think of. Still, maybe he had some notion that moving our actions from the simply sinful into the truly insane—certainly the effect his words, wail and cackle had on me—might, somehow, save us. The history teacher blinked, said nothing, then—suddenly—walked away. And for the next anxious week, I wondered if we were to be punished. But in the end there was no more fall-out from his discovery than from Arthur’s. And so, after a hiatus of three or four days, we resumed.
But this was why you had to be on your toes to join in. And had to be quiet. On your toes was not the place Robert ordinarily stood—unless he had some coaching. But he was a smart kid and learned quickly. This country visit, now we were alone on the farm, seemed as good a time as any for me to start him out.
Our shoes and socks off, we were wandering around the grass. We’d been told we weren’t supposed to go into the livestock part of the barn barefoot. So we didn’t. But I started horsing around with Robert. Wrestling together on the hem of a haystack, I made a couple of grabs for his crotch. Once I got my hand down his baggy corduroys and made tickling motions between his legs.