The End of Innocence
The End of Innocence is George Leonard's just-published novel, a fictional memoir available in Kindle format on Amazon. If you enjoy this sample chapter, buy the book.
Chapter 1 — How Denny and I met Mr. Snow
Dr. Heydorff was my elementary school’s principal, a small, utterly benign man, who looked alarmingly like Hitler, down to the watery eyes and the Chaplin moustache. To add to the resemblance, he ill-advisedly wore a small Tyrolean hat, which sported a stunted feather. He was universally known—to the adults as well as to children—as Our Feathered Friend. Denny and I met Mr. Snow when Dr. Heydorff, to punish us for coming to school in a rowboat, barred us from the school bus for two weeks,
A rowboat, you ask?
Yes. With police cars waiting for us and my parents sobbing because they thought I had been drowned.
Long Island’s South Shore had not been built up yet, back then, in 1956. It was still a place Tom and Huck would have loved: salt marshes, long fingers of marshy land which twisted for miles out into the Great South Bay. The narrow waters between those fingers were our canals. My home canal was called The Whaleneck Canal. Imagine, in the twentieth century, being able to say that you had a “home canal!” I was speechless when I stepped out of the car from Brooklyn and discovered where I now lived.
Since my elementary school, Pondside, was on the next canal over, and I had read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, my immediate fantasy was to play hooky from the big yellow school bus in the morning, and to build, like Tom Sawyer, a raft. I would sail it up the canal that was across the street from my house, out into the Great South Bay, around the point of land that divided my home canal from the Kettle Lake Canal and then sail triumphantly up to Kettle Lake and Pondside School, for all the kids to see. Take a raft to school! When I had lived back in Brooklyn, I had read with awe about Huck and Tom stealing rafts and sailing them down the Mississippi.
Now I lived on the water too—and then that morning at the school bus stop, a tough-looking local kid I barely knew, Denny Armstrong, said to me, “Kid!” and took me down the block to the canal. He lived at the marina at the tip of our home canal, the child of “baymen” as the clammers and professional fishermen were known. Those kids hated us new kids from the City. I was eleven, Denny was thirteen—but we were both in Mr. Snow’s class because I had skipped a grade, and Denny had been left back.
There below me on the canal was an old rowboat. He climbed down into it.
“Kid,” he said with an evil grin. “You want to—row to school?”
He waved for me to come—my own Huck Finn, as I instantly thought of him, waving for me to join him.
I was a bookish child, and to tell the truth, I had been looking for someone like Denny who would initiate me into this different kind of life: real life. Leaping out of my books into real life, I leaped into the boat beside him.
“No!” Denny cried out in alarm. I’d almost capsized us.
“Sorry!”
Staggering about in the heaving boat, I saw this business was much trickier than I’d pictured it, reading Huck.
“Is this your boat?”
“Hocked it. Kid, can you row?”
After some failed experiments, Denny generously set himself to row. Though I was just dead weight, he didn’t want to try this alone. It was too dangerous. I got my balance and sat up front. I had to separate my feet and keep them up on each side of the boat, there was so much water leaking into the old thing. Where he had gotten it, I didn’t know. Later I would learn that the baymen tied worn-out hulks like this next to the docks, the way the Japanese leave rusty old bicycles at train stations, and anyone who cared to, could push it out in the middle of the canal to do a little crabbing or fishing.
But bicycles can’t sink. We were using this discarded tub for a real journey.
Denny rowed us out onto the Whaleneck Canal and down the wooden-walled lane of water, the old houses rising majestically over us on each side. Here the canal was still bulkheaded, and had been for three centuries. The canal was twice as wide as a street, and then, as we headed for the Great South Bay, the houses ended and it widened yet again. Denny rowed manfully. He had been rowing for half an hour, and we had gone over a mile, taking on water, me bailing with a rusty coffee can from under the seat. Out here the canal was bordered only by the ancient reeds, which flanked us on sandy cliffs. I was sorry I couldn’t help him row but I didn’t know how. I found I even had to grip the sides of the boat for balance, the creaking old boat trembled so.
He rowed and rowed. We passed the shacks and pier at the canal’s end. “I live there,” Denny puffed. “Smith’s Fishing Station.” I saw the sweating back of his neck, and I felt the wind hit us broadside as we turned the mouth of the canal and the wind blew up from the Great South Bay. We shipped a wave. I threw out my arms for balance. It was a miracle we weren’t drowned right then. Far across the waters, I saw the point of Land’s End Island, and then beyond that, beyond the endless reeds and marshes, I saw the prim, copper-green point of the Jones Beach Water Tower rising, tiny on the horizon, fifteen miles away. And, my arms extended for balance as if I were flying, feeling Denny rowing for all he was worth, my heart soared out of me toward the Tower and I fell in love with the Marsh. I was as happy as any kid on Earth.
And even happier, later. How can I describe the moment when we sailed up the Kettle Lake canal, three hours late, before the astonished eyes of the kids in their classrooms at Pondside School. We heard shouting and saw all the kids running to the windows to see us. We had been reported missing and there were police cars in front of school. We’d never thought of the disturbance it would cause when two children vanished from an elementary school bus stop into air. They’d already checked our home canal, thinking we might have been playing while we waited for the bus and had fallen in, but by that time we were out in the Great South Bay. When we pulled up the Pondside School’s canal—Denny gasping, rowing with blistered hands, me bailing with my coffee can, both of us soaked from waves and spray—and the kids in the classrooms started cheering, yelling that we weren’t dead, but had rowed a boat to school—
There have been a few successful moments in my life; but I have never been as “famous” as I was, in that small childhood world, after that. And Denny with me. Kids I didn’t even know would come up to me, months later, and say, shyly, “Kid. You’re the kid that took the boat to school. I saw you.”
We were Bert-n-Denny after that. People said our names like they were one name. We were best friends.
The adventure with the boat had started it, but we stayed Bert-n-Denny for more fundamental reasons. Opposites attract. He was my missing half, my “Huck,” in all the satisfying ways I had dreamed of when I’d read Tom Sawyer and, like every boy who ever read that book, wished I could find a Huck to be my best friend. Denny went with hunters in the fall to carry their dead ducks and skin dead rabbits, and he had no parents. Denny lived with “Aunt Peg” at Smith’s Fishing Station, he was allowed to wear jeans to school, he owned a machete, the tip of one little finger had gotten frostbite and been removed. He had a cousin who was pregnant but she wasn’t married, last year he’d helped grownups drag out the frozen body of an eeler who had fallen through the ice on the Bay. He was an enthusiastic thief.
Perfect.
I, on the other hand, was exactly what Denny wanted. I was, by any kid’s standards, a learned man. I knew every way Superman had tricked Mr. Mxyzptlk back to the Fourth Dimension, that Cornelius Coot had founded Duckburg. I was an authority on horror movies and could name entire casts, right down to Maria Ouspenskaya, who played the Gypsy Woman opposite Lon Chaney Jr. in The Wolfman. My loving father told me a Fu Manchu bedtime story most nights. I retold the stories to Denny, who had no Pop to tell him stories; and who borrowed my father, through me. As we walked through the reeds, Denny whacking the heads off with his machete, he listened with his mouth open as I chanted how Fu Manchu was under arrest and wearing handcuffs and trapped in the back of the squad car—then he bit the top off his ring and gas came out—and all the policemen in the car passed out!—but Fu Manchu, before he could pass out too, quickly sucked the antidote from his other ring—and so he escaped! Denny listened in awe, and I learned something too. I was a natural story teller.
For risking our lives, scaring our parents to death by not taking the bus as we were supposed to, we were, by some logic I still don’t understand, suspended by Dr. Heydorff from riding the bus for two weeks.
Instead Denny and I began riding our bikes to school in the morning. Since, traveling by land, we had to ride around several canals to get to the one that Pondside School was on, we arrived long after the school bus had deposited the other children.
That was how, one morning, Denny and I discovered Mr. Snow.
At about eight twenty-nine—one minute before the final bell rang—when all the kids playing statue tag and saluggi had abruptly vanished inside, and only Denny and I were pulling in through the back parking lot, we saw a strange blue foreign car which looked as if it were diving into the ground (a “Citroen,” I later learned) fly up the drive to school, aim at a space on the far wall and knife straight for it, going forty miles an hour. The first time, Denny and I almost fell off our bikes in shock watching what we assumed was going to be a car crash.
The Citroen went into the space and stopped dead, two inches from the wall. We made sure we were there the next morning to see if it happened again. It did. After that, it became a ritual: our late arrival and the Citroen’s. Every morning, it aimed at the wall going forty miles an hour and stopped two inches from disaster. Denny and I would nod: how close to the wall Mr. Snow took it! Only we knew Snow did that every morning. He was doing it before he realized we waited to watch him; he did it for himself, not for us. But gradually he accepted us as his fans.
We would stand, respectfully, beside our bikes. Mr. Snow would unwrap his long form from the car, either pretending not to notice us or naturally oblivious. He never said anything, we never said anything. He pulled out his books and shambled off to the building, Denny and I letting him pass. We fell in step behind him. After a few weeks, I even walked behind Mr. Snow copying his footsteps—I had only done that once before, and it was with Pop.
Inside the school Snow rarely got past the Principal’s Office before one of the two elderly secretaries called out, “Morning, Mr. Snow!” He would come to and stare at them; then—Snow wore a huge, rumpled black felt hat—he would lift his hat off grandly and say, “Ladies.” He had a rumbling deep voice and what sounded to me like an English accent. “La-dies....” The two old ladies would smile. When at the PTA meeting it was learned that I was assigned to Mr. Snow’s class, my mother teased my father afterward, sighing that Snow had “blue eyes to die for.”
Most mornings, before Mr. Snow had shambled up the new wing to his classroom, Miss Underhill or one of the other “Miss” teachers would be in the hallway for some reason, if only just to say “Good morning!” I noticed when ladies talked to Mr. Snow they held their chins raised. When they changed position talking to him they didn’t start or stop abruptly, they sort of glided from pose to pose. And they smiled enough to make you sick.
Snow would enter our Sixth Grade class and the class would wait: Snow would take off his coat and throw it at the teacher’s coat tree. He would always miss. He would let it lie. He would let it lie till lunch.
Mr. Snow carried his books slung in a plain blue cloth bag over his shoulder—like a dark laundry bag. The class waited: Snow suddenly whirled the bag by the strap and slammed it onto his desk with a crash. He had arrived. The day had begun.
Snow would sigh, rub his weary blue eyes with the heels of his long, trembly hands, and still standing, blink and nod at the class. Whoever was Class President that week (everyone had to be elected once) would get up, face the flag thumb-tacked above the blackboard, put hand on heart and lead the class in the Pledge of Allegiance. The Boy Scouts saluted like soldiers; the Jehovah’s Witness kid sat and yawned; Snow stood, wobbling slightly, long thin hand by his heart, looking out the window and mumbling something, while the class droned.
I would stand, reciting the formula, hearing the muddled echo of all the other classes down the green-tiled hall at all different places in the Pledge, looking at Mr. Snow’s strange gaunt figure. He was tall but broken-looking, like a busted scarecrow. He had long hands that trembled sometimes in the morning, piles of straw-colored hair, and faded blue eyes—a sad color. He had terrible bags under his eyes. His thick pale hair was so tousled and long it went over his ears. He had started cutting it that way, Mr. Snow once said, when he was in school in England.
But most intriguingly—at least for me—Mr. Snow used to be a priest. This was 1956. Being a priest was like being commanding officer in a great army. He had been a Jesuit but something happened and he quit. Since it was war time, and he was no longer a priest he went in the Navy. Everyone knew he had fought in the Pacific—his name and his ship were with the other vets on the giant bronze WW II scroll in front of the Whaleneck Library—but that question (“Why did you quit being a priest, Mr. Snow?”) Snow waved off when we asked him.
Kids will ask anything.
After the pledge, Mr. Snow would hand out the National Enquirer for us to read. When we were in fifth grade we had had to read My Weekly Reader or the equally pompous Junior Scholastic. But Snow handed out tattered copies of the Enquirer, Confidential! and other such scandalous pulp, saying, “I don’t care what you read as long as you read.”
He was on to something there! We devoured those stories, though the vocabulary was far more difficult than My Weekly Reader: “extra-marital,” “homicidal,” “voluptuous,” “carnal,” “pulchritudinous,” and the like. When we took our first-quarter reading exams, Mr. Snow’s class always trounced every other in the district. I could spell “mutilated,” “exhume” and “penitentiary.” (I could even have spelled “risqué” and “chorine,” the favorite companion of Senators, but they never asked.)
Snow had invented any number of inspired teaching tricks like that, in every subject. Mr. Snow had a gift. Nobody ever disputed that, even after the disaster. To this day I remember certain historical events and dates through the risqué mnemonic jingles Snow composed, and I suspect my classmates still do too.
We would read; Snow would try, hands shaking, to make some coffee. Nobody bothered him. He wouldn’t be awake for another half hour. He would go in the coatroom and shut the door behind him. Sometimes he came out with his little round sunglasses on. Fluorescent lights gave Mr. Snow headaches. Sometimes he taught us wearing both his round green sunglasses and his beat-up felt sun hat.
In general, we kids greatly approved of Mr. Snow. It was obvious that he thought rules were made for other people and that living well was a matter of avoiding as many of those rules as possible. We shared that view. There were some kids who didn’t like any teacher, period; but most of us thought Snow did well, for an adult. We had confidence that whatever rules he asked us to follow were the minimum needed to keep us from braining each other. We were eleven or twelve and calmly accepted ourselves as selfish, lazy and greedy. Had he been weak, we would have been scared: we knew we couldn’t take care of ourselves. We wanted rules, but the minimum. So did he.
He never courted our favor or tried to be pals. Grownups were another species and did not make good pals, even Snow. He was remote, in fact, and sometimes seemed to be in another world. But when he taught us he cared passionately that we learn, and we liked his concern although we did not share it.
Most mornings we read our National Enquirers and Confidentials contentedly until Snow was awake. Today I read,
“I Looked At My Baby—
And a Voice Said,
‘START EATING!’”
Snow sat, getting down his coffee. Every time he took a sip he closed his tired eyes and winced; he kept his eyes closed while he swallowed it, shuddering slightly, as if listening for it to work.
There was a tap at the door. Our Fifth Grade teacher, Miss Underhill, poked her bright red hair in. “Birdsall?” she said, brightly. She crooked her finger for him to come, in a way that hurt your teeth to watch, tipping her chin and flipping her hair to the side.
Mr. Snow blinked his weary blue eyes and, ever courteous, staggered to his feet. The class made a low noise, like small animals that see their master threatened. She was bothering Snow before he was awake. We looked at Miss Underhill: we didn’t like her. She sparkled back at us, uncomprehending. He was too out of it to know she was designing, but we knew.
“Lucille,” he said courteously, in his rumbling Englishy voice, and wandered into the hall behind her artful finger.
Mom had said Snow had eyes “to die for.” That meant these damn women wouldn’t leave him alone, I thought. And then, with a fraternal pang, I thought of Cathleen Delaney.
Cathleen Delaney was a thin fair girl with freckles and straight reddish-blonde hair. She didn’t go to our school. She was a Catholic Girl who went to St. Barnabas—the Catholic school shared a bus stop with us. She was a year older than I was. Last spring she started walking home from our bus stop five paces behind me calling, “Bastard! Ass!”
I was amazed. Girls never cursed! Not in the Fifties. And especially not Catholic Girls. Cathleen had always been kind of wild, for a girl—she had played stickball with us in the street, even got into a slapping fight with Carol Ziegler once—but still!
The third day Cathleen Delaney did it the novelty had worn off. Now this was an Age of Clarity—that will recur in this story—and there was an unwritten Code that governed all behavior in those days, very specific. A girl could hit a boy—and they did—but the Code said a boy could not hit a girl. So I picked up a stick from the road and sort of shoved her. It turned out to have road tar on it that got on Cathleen’s dress and it was her favorite dress or something. She ran home sobbing. Mom and Pop were afraid they would expel me and put me in “continuation school.”
It got that serious because I’d been legally expelled before. When I first came to Whaleneck, I was the youngest in the class, nearly the smallest—and the Class Brain. I saved myself by giving Miss Underhill a pot of poison ivy, by smashing a window with a hammer when someone gave me the finger through it, and so forth, to save myself from what kids did to Class Brains. Being expelled for a day was a small price to pay for that, in my estimation.
But Mr. Snow saw through the act. One big reason I became devoted to Snow was that he knew how to save my face. When I finished class work ahead of everybody else, Snow shouted “Bert! Out! Go to the library!” as if I had done something wrong. I got to slouch out of class exchanging smirks with the guys. Even the hoods—the locals like Denny whose parents were baymen and potato farmers, and who resented us new City kids—even they nodded approvingly. “BERT! OUT!” And I clomped out, all defiance.
Then I sat by myself in the library and read in peace. I even wrote little research papers on cool things like guns, which Mr. Snow solemnly accepted and read.
But when I poked Cathleen Delaney with the tar stick I wasn’t in Snow’s class yet. My parents feared the worst. Dr. Heydorff had to call Father Flynn, the Jesuit headmaster, and promise he would personally handle the little hooligan who had defiled a Nice Catholic Girl, whose parents were pillars of the congregation. However, in Dr. Heydorff’s office, when the Question was put to me and I told Our Feathered Friend exactly what Cathleen had been doing—trailing me for days, saying dirty words—he and my parents just looked at each other. And tried not to smile! And—I have said Dr. Heydorff was kind—he immediately ended the meeting and absolutely nothing happened to me.
“Why did everybody smile?” I asked Mom when we were driving home.
She blew out her cigarette smoke in exasperation. “It means she likes you.”
“Likes me! She called me a—“
“She doesn’t know what to do about you. She’s a year and a half older than you, Bert.” She took a heavy drag on her cigarette. “Shush! Don’t bother me, you’ll understand when you’re older.”
For the last six months Cathleen had been under orders from her Church and family and Dr. Heydorff to ignore me at the bus stop, which she did ostentatiously; though I now regarded her with astonishment and distaste. Mom was wrong: I already understood Cathleen very well. Cathleen Fiona Delaney was nuts.
I felt no more than that as yet. Cathleen was a year and a half more mature than I was. I’d been let into first grade eight months ahead of time and I should now have been in fifth, not sixth. When my little brother, “Bub,” was born with all his problems—the problems started with his hip and his neck, then came the speech problems—they gave me an IQ test and jumped me into First Grade, to let Mom have time to take Bub for his speech therapy. That was the genesis of my problems: the youngest, the smallest and the Class Brain.
So I felt a brotherly pang for Mr. Snow, watching Miss Underhill jerk him around. These damn girls wouldn’t leave you alone.
I went back to the Enquirer, and read a fascinating and cautionary article about a skydiver eaten by starving birds. Last year in Miss Underhill’s class we’d moped through My Weekly Reader stories. Once I asked her, “Miss Underhill, what is ‘jute’ anyway? And ‘guano’?” That these unspellable little places down south exported. The kind of places you’d see on Disneyland, that the cartoon parrot would talk about. The one with the accent and the rattles he shook. Jose Carioca. “Our Neighbors to the South,” Miss Underhill always called them with this sparkling smile when she talked to us kids.
After she delicately explained what “guano” was (batshit!), I said, “Why do I have to know that?”
“You’ll find it useful when you grow up, Bert” she twinkled.
I was deeply insulted. Miss Underhill thought that when I grew up I would have such a horrible life I would need to know what batshit was? It was offensive.
“I want to habituate you to reading,” Mr. Snow would say, tossing us the Enquirers. “I want to addict you, give you the habit of reading every stray moment of your lives.” And it was true, the Enquirers lay around all day and many kids were now hooked reading the stories, (“Baby Born with Cat’s Face,” “I found Hitler in Georgia”)—anytime they finished a lesson early. The vocabulary, I repeat, was richer than My Weekly Reader’s, though skewed toward terms descriptive of torture and lust. But Mr. Snow meant to drive home a second point to us, which I have found valuable all my life. “Read it, it’s all lies,” Mr. Snow said. “You’re not too young to learn to disrespect print. You must never believe anything just because you see it in print.”
After Miss Underhill released him, laughing her laugh “like the jingle of tiny silver bells,” Mr. Snow had to start his coffee ritual all over. Without speaking, I slipped a tattered Uncle Scrooge I had finished reading onto the corner of Snow’s desk. Together with the Enquirers circulating in the room, were dozens and dozens of comic books. We were being “habituated to reading every stray moment” of our lives.
Now the Enquirer was daring, perhaps; but letting us read the comic books, that was the act of a rebel—far more rebellious than one can easily imagine now. Congressional hearings had recently confirmed that comic books led to, I quote, “an evil effect on the minds of young children”: juvenile delinquency, snotty disrespect for authority, and perhaps even atheism. The Catholic Church, then in its full Fifties might, had taken on a crusade against them. Last year, when I was in fifth grade, an older kid rang our bell one Saturday afternoon, Cormac Delaney—older brother to the madwoman, Cathleen Delaney.
He was a fat, pimply-faced Irish boy, his pimples all the redder because his skin was so pale. “I go to St. Barnabas,” that was the Catholic school next to the church, “and I’m in Catholic Action. We’re having a contest,” he recited, “to see who can get the most comics to burn. Comic books have an evil effect on the minds of children,” Cormac rattled off. “Can I have some comic books to burn?”
Before I could shout “Are you crazy?” Pop had shut me up and yanked me downstairs.
“Bert. This kid’s father’s a committeeman in the Dems like me. I told him, sure, send your kid to me. Give him two old comics—wait! Listen!—and I will buy you three new ones. Get it? It’s just politics. No big deal.”
But Pop didn’t understand that to me, burning books was. It was as close as a bookworm like me could come to the concept of sin.
Since Pop and Mom had ambitions in the Democratic Party, and the Dems were hand in glove with the Church on Long Island, our family even had to drive up to St. Barnabas two weeks later, to swell the turn-out for the picnic the Church gave, honoring the virtuous children who had collected the poisonous comic books. Jay Tettemer had collected 109 comics and was named King. Cormac’s sister, Fionnula, was made Queen, to reward their dad, I guess, the big shot. It was all “just politics.”
First they had the picnic, then the St. Barnabas band started playing Onward, Christian Soldiers, and we all marched to an open incinerator where normally they burned the Fall leaves. I saw thousands of comics lying in piles next to the leaves.
The band played and the Sisters started stuffing the comics and dead leaves into the open incinerator. Photographers from Newsday and the Long Island Press were up on stepladders, flashbulbs were going off. When a tall priest poured gasoline on all those beautiful comic books, ruining them, I bit my lip. A line of girls in plaid skirts, led by their Nun, started to sing, in angelic voices, “The Catholic Action Song.” (I’ve helped my memory out with some online research to get the words right):
An army of youth flying the standards of truth
We’re fighting for Christ, the Lord.
Heads lifted high, Catholic Action our cry
And the Cross our only sword.
On earth’s battlefield, never a vantage we’ll yield
As dauntlessly on we swing
Comrades true, dare and do, ‘neath the Queen’s white and blue
For our flag, for our faith, for Christ the King!
Cormac’s sister, Fionnula, wearing a tinsel crown, stepped forward. A priest took over since this was the serious part.
“Do you, Fionnula, representing our students, believe that comic books have caused the downfall of many children?”
She mumbled she did.
He said, “Should we then commit them to the flames?”
She nodded.
“Let us commit them,” the priest said, struggling to get a match lit in the breeze. He got the second one lit, handed it to her, and Fionnula threw it onto the gas-covered pile.
It went up with an explosive roar. She staggered back, scared. Everybody cheered like when fireworks go off. The comic books twisted in the flames, the crowd cheering. The smoke smelled like gasoline. Hot tears burned my eyes.
The Church saw to it that pictures of the bonfire (black smoke twenty feet high) were in Newsday and the Long Island Press. Undoubtedly that prompted Mr. Snow to tell us to bring our comic books to school, and read these tools of Satan in his very classroom as reading education. He always took it close to the wall. Snow even asked us to give him any old comics our parents wanted to throw out. He said he had collected several thousand now; he kept them in wax paper bags to protect them. Pop, when I told him, shook his head, and said, with amusement and not a little respect, “What a character!”
Snow didn’t seem to notice the Uncle Scrooge I put on his desk. He might read it at lunch and thank me. Maybe not. He was that forgetful. It was enough for me that he accepted it.
Because there was much about Snow that gave me hope.
I had pieced together that Snow seemed to spend his life reading, sailing the bay in his boat, and doing exactly what he wanted. He wasn’t, in short, like anybody else in the town, or in my family. My family was tough. Life was a battle that “Gram” (my grandmother) and Pop and Mom enjoyed.
Neither we, nor the South Shore, were elegant. You may think of Long Island as the Great Gatsby and all that. That was the North Shore, far away. We Jews and Italians coming out to the South Shore had just climbed into the lower middle class, from places like Bath Beach, Bedford-Stuyvesant; I was from the very same block on Clinton Hill where a rapper named Biggie Smalls later sold his dope. Once I came home from school to find Mom and Pop squinting into what looked like little red plastic salt shakers with white plastic bottoms, that my grandma, “Gram,” had just mailed up from Miami Beach. These were tiny slide viewers.
“Omigod!” Mom said. “It’s Mother!”
Pop burst out laughing.
“What’s she wearing?” Mom said, horrified.
“Bra and panties?”
“They’re red!”
“Let me see!” I shouted.
“Louie!” she said, outraged at Pop, who had begun laughing hysterically. When he really laughed he got this high-pitched giggle through his old busted boxer’s nose and it made my little brother Bub and me laugh to hear him. “Aw, let him!” he gasped, handing his viewer to me. Mom blew a plume of cigarette smoke at the ceiling, angry.
I got it pointed at the light. There was a picture of Gram inside, smiling, wearing a red bra and panties. She had her hand behind her hair.
“Gram looks okay,” I said, puzzled.
“Must be for her gentlemen friends,” Pop offered Mom through his giggles. He opened the letter that had come with the photos—and took out a fifty dollar bill! Pop picked up the letter. “Listen! Gram says to her new friend, ‘Phil! Give me money to do my hair!’ He’s on the phone with his broker, peels her off a fifty without even looking. She buys a Toni Home Color Kit for two bucks, goes to the ladies room at the Fontainebleau Hotel, does her hair in the sink, and sends us the fifty!”
Gram had helped buy us our new house, which was in the wonderful salt marsh not because the marshes were fancy, but because, in 1956, they were not. My new home, Whaleneck, wasn’t even Levittown—Whaleneck was an affordable Levittown. Levittown’s great success ten miles to our north had prompted our canny builders to use new dredging technology to suck the mud off the floor of the Great South Bay and spew it in great pipes onto some “useless” wetlands they had bought up cheap, converting them into real estate; then we, in our regiments, were plopped on top. Suddenly even Brooklyn could afford Long Island!
So Whaleneck was Levittown-On-the-Marsh, with mosquitoes and vicious green horse flies, whose bite actually drew blood. The better homes lined the canals; while cheaper ones like mine began across the street on the still quaking, draining mud. Go down a foot in your garden and you found rotting cherrystone clams. The whole development smelled like low tide; so that to this day the stink of mud and marsh to me is intensely nostalgic. It smells like home.
We weren’t fancy, we were straight outta Brooklyn. Pop had been part of the wave of Jewish prizefighters during the Depression, before Grandma made him go to law school. I grew up on Friday Night Fights, Benny Leonard stories, on Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom flicks on TV. We didn’t use the N-word because Joe Louis was the Liberal Jewish idol. (“Bert! Imagine how Joe Louis would have felt if he heard you say that word!”) Pop’s guard, and therefore mine, was based on Joe’s classic stance. My first present had been boxing gloves, and the first home movies we had were of Pop and me sparring, of Pop kneeling, teaching, of me punching at Pop’s hands. I had to sing a song about boxing for company. It came from the movie, Carmen Jones, a black version of the opera Carmen. The bullfighter song was changed to a boxer’s song;
“Stand up and fight!
“Until you hear the bell!”
I looked forward, without enthusiasm, to a grim life of standing up and fighting until I heard the bell. Pop and Mom and Gram actually enjoyed the Battle of Life, as Pop called it.
But now there was Mr. Snow! He didn’t fight, he was completely odd—yet people respected him. He had “blue eyes to die for.” He wasn’t rich—but he seemed perfectly happy. Maybe Pop and Gram’s way wasn’t the only way to live? He even collected comic books. A bookworm, like me. He was completely strange and he was getting away with it.
I too wanted to be strange and get away with it. I didn’t want to stand up and fight until I heard the bell. And I had been ashamed of myself for that.
But now—there was Mr. Snow.
And not only that. Mr. Snow revealed to me the lure of a new kind of power, different from Gram’s and Pop’s. A power I thought I might too someday possess.