There were no complications on the physical separation, but what about the mental one, to sever the phantom connection whereby if Reggie stubbed his toe, I cried out in pain, and vice versa? The moment of my psychic release was occasioned by Liza Finkelstein's eighth-grade roller-disco party in the spring of '83.
IT WAS BAR MITZVAH SEASON
, a good time to be alive by any measure, but particularly for die-hard finger-food aficionados like myself. As my friends underwent their time-honored initiation rituals, I experienced my own coming-of-age, culinary-wise. I had led a rather sheltered life with regards to bite-sized snacks, having only messed around with Mini Hot Dogs, La Choy Egg Rolls, and other lovelies of the Preheat To 350 school. The racy, catered pleasures of the full-tilt, bank-busting, don't-you-love-me bar mitzvah were a revelation. I remember marveling at the silver hors d'oeuvres trays as they dipped and flitted through the air like flying saucers out of a
'50s sci-fi movie, bearing alien life forms I had never reckoned, messengers of gustatory peace and goodwill. Chicken teriyaki on skewers, Swedish meatballs squatting in brown pools, all manner of dipping sauces in dark and gluey abundance—it was dizzying, and that wasn't just the thimbles of Manischewitz talking.
I was used to being the only black kid in the room—I was only there because I had met these assorted Abes and Sarahs and Dannys in a Manhattan private school, after all—but there was something instructive about being the only black kid at a bar mitzvah. Every bar or bat mitzvah should have at least one black kid with a yarmulke hovering on his Afro—it's a nice visual joke, let's just get that out of the way, but more important it trains the kid in question to determine when people in the corner of his eye are talking about him and when they are not, a useful skill in later life when sorting out bona-fide persecution from perceived persecution, the this-is-actually-happening from the mere paranoid manifestation. “Who's that?” “Whisper whisper a friend of Andy's from school.” “So regal and composed—he looks like a young Sidney Poitier.” “Whisper whisper or the son of an African diplomat!”
Eventually I'd have some company when the occasional R&B band showed up to drag themselves through the obligatory Motown retrospective, with the inevitable “Super Freak” thrown in… as Liza Finkelstein, grim and silent, squashed her place setting in her fist and cursed us all. Her parents were civil rights lawyers, not that I knew what that meant, except that it compelled Liza to blurt out “My parents were there!” on that one day a year when a teacher mentioned the March on Washington. Her parents respected all races, colors, and creeds, unless that creed was their own. According to some lefty calculus they had concluded that the traditions of their faith were bogus, and consequently Liza was going to have to wait a while before entering the world of calligraphic invitations and their little guppy RSVP envelopes.
Rebellion trickles down. Liza's “My parents were there!”s diminished in enthusiasm year by year, to be true, but I think it was bat mitzvah season, with its exuberant pageantry and lovely haul of
presents, that puckered her to new pouty extremes. To be so exiled. It came to pass that one bright spring morning our hippie English teacher Mr. Johnson mentioned the March on Washington and the assembled of Homeroom 8B instinctively turned to Liza to hear her declaration for the last time. Perhaps we were feeling sentimental. We'd be in high school in a few months, split up after being together—some of us—since pre-K. This was a milestone, and we waited for Liza to give us what we needed. The moments piled up. A suspicion or fear that Liza might not provide her necessary service began to creep across the room in the same way that, gently, menthol cigarette smoke crept from under the door of the teachers' lounge. My eyes fell to her checkered New Wave knee-high socks, and I thought, Liza's not New Wave. Then she sneered a “My parents were there,” rolling her eyes and kicking her feet out into the aisle between desks. Liza didn't need the whole bat mitzvah treatment. She was a teenager in that moment.
The Finkelsteins negotiated a settlement whereby the older generation would shell out for a roller-disco party of secular design and execution, and the younger generation would cut down on her use of the phrase “But all my friends” by at least 50 percent. Usually other people's parents scared me, but Mr. Finkelstein always seemed glad to have me around. Sending their daughter to a fancy private school was a betrayal of core values, paying tuition when you were supposed to support local public schools being in traitorous equivalence with eating grapes when you were supposed to boycott grapes. Those days, every nonunionized grape was a tear squeezed out of the eye of a migrant worker's child.
The fact that Mr. Finkelstein's daughter had a bona-fide black friend mitigated the situation a bit. Hey, wasn't that why they'd marched on Washington in the first place? The pictures of that day in 1963 are majestic and holy—the black-and-white mosaic of faces and stone, the force of people such that it overwhelms the pool and the monument and wipes the sneer off the face of architectural arrogance. If you were actually there, what did you think when you saw the photographs? The mass of figures was the sheer expression
of human potential, making it possible to kid yourself that you could spot yourself in that sea of people—that's me in this important event, right there, as I was, before all this. It must be possible to fool yourself that you were not lost in the crowd. I had no problem with Mr. Finkelstein.
A roller-disco party was surely an artifact of the post-piñata, pre-intercourse era. Whither all the piñatas of yesterday? In a succession of finely furnished living rooms we took sticks and expressed our lust through an eager fury, assailing the poor piñatas and sending their sad paper fur flapping, their empty bulk wobbling above us, such a grubby mob we were. We needed to get inside there, split the beasts open, see their pink guts burst to loose that clumsy rain of mongrel candies that exist only inside piñatas, the dingy Zimzis, Dolos, and Shrats, sweet shreds that we scrambled after like well-dressed vultures. We wanted different candy now. For some, this period of pre-sexual limbo would be short. Not for me. Which made my inflated sense of self after that time Emily Dorfman asked me to skate with her all the more pathetic.
Emily Dorfman was the tallest person in our class, had been for a while. We called her Spider. Her arms and legs were pale scaffolding propping up her shirts and skirts, and she hadn't yet realized that growing her hair out might cover up the extra vertebrae she seemed to have in her neck—if she were an animal, she'd be nibbling those high-up leaves. While I believed she was the owner of a certain bow-legged elegance, a gangly grace, I had never thought of her as a sex object. We'd shared co-ed bathrooms as youngsters, seen each other's bald parts back in the day, and maybe that had something to do with it. No mystery.
We were on our second or third sugar rush of Liza's birthday party when Emily came over. I hadn't hit the floor that much. The skates were too tight, and I winced through wide, oafish circuits around the rink. I didn't know what size my feet were anymore. My body was having an off year basically, and I was not the kind of person to ask for the right size after I had committed, preferring to stumble around in pain for a couple of hours rather than speak up
for myself. And so. I was standing with the guys over by the Asteroids machine—all of us momentarily between quarters and speculating as to the training regimen of DMZ, the high scorer on the game—when Emily stepped into our circle and said, “Benji, let's go out there. I want to skate.” She slapped me on the back to emphasize the casualness of her proposal.
I looked over at Andy Stern, who was my buddy. We played D&D together, went way back, to
Star Wars
marathons. I remembered he passed notes to Emily for a while in the third grade. Was this okay? Would he take revenge as Dungeon Master? Those days we expressed aggression by siccing orcs, gryphons, and homunculi on each other. Andy Stern scratched beneath his bowl haircut, eyes vacant. What was the big deal? I didn't think of Spider in that way and why would anyone think of me in that way. I said, “Okay,” and we headed out.
It was all pretty innocent, just pals, as we dodged a flotilla of older kids skating together in a gossipy swarm and discovered a comfortable little slipstream on the inside of the track. Then she grabbed my hand and I almost jumped. Her hand was hot and moist. She was sweating a lot. I mention her sweatiness not to raise the specter of glandular aberration but to explain the sympathetic gushing of sweat it roused in my own hand. Guh. Our fingers slobbered over each other. I had been dragging a little behind her on account of my pained feet but I caught up and started matching her rhythm. We swooped past where our friends were hanging out but we didn't look at them. We kept them behind the aluminum rails and far from us. I did not witness any hypothetical thumbs-up Mr. Finkelstein threw my way. As my fingers slid in the grooves between her knuckles, I reckoned that her spidery fingers provided more points of contact than those of our classmates. If you were going to hold hands with someone, this was the hand to hold, volume-wise. My perception burrowed down into those places where our flesh rubbed together. I turned to her, she looked at me and I smiled and lifted my eyebrows, this suave tic. Then it was quickly eyes down again. Too much! I squeezed her hand twice in some kind of
weird code and she squeezed back. And then my other hand occurred to me. It was empty. I wasn't pulling Reggie out of traffic or up out of bus seats so that we wouldn't miss our stop, he wasn't drifting behind me sloshing a cup of soda, he wasn't there at all. This was no threesome, I was alone with someone else. The awareness of my left hand faded and I returned to the little world of sweet contact in my right.
We were out there forever. How does one measure infinity in a roller rink? You can test the universe by asking questions—how many mirrored tiles on disco balls shooting how many pure white streaks across the walls and floors, how many ball bearings clacking into each other like agitated molecules in how many polyurethane wheels, how many inkblot colonies of bacteria blooming unchecked in the toe-ward gloom of how many rented skates. But let's say this notion of chintzy roller-rink infinity is best expressed by the number two. Two people, two hands, and two songs, in this case “Big Shot” and “Bette Davis Eyes.” The lyrics of the two songs provided no commentary, honest or ironic, on the proceedings. They were merely there and always underfoot, the insistent gray muck that was pop culture. It stuck to our shoes and we tracked it through our lives. Spider and me slogged through the songs, hand in hand. Occasionally seeking each other's faces to trade brief, worried smiles.
Then “Xanadu” came on, murderer. We clomped off the track and rejoined our respective tribes, slouching male and female on opposite walls of the subterranean roller rink, never acknowledging this episode again. What made her step up? Next year we went to our separate high schools, and Emily might as well have been broken down into antimatter because we never saw each other again. Frankly, I took our moment of closeness for granted (this will be a running theme) and if I had known that that was the most girl contact I was going to have for many years, I would have taken a souvenir. Wiped her sweat off my hand with a handkerchief and cherished the hankie as an erotic aid during the long period of self-abuse that was to commence a few months later (initiated by a vision
of a glistening Barbara Carrera in the minor James Bond vehicle
Never Say Never Again
, which featured many water-themed scenarios). Retrieved from its secret hiding place, the uncrumpled hankie, saturated with Emily's sweat, would have added an olfactory component to the visual artifacts I had in my mental files, mostly snippets of Cinemax movies and adolescent sex comedies of the
Makin It–Doin' It–Losin' It
ilk, plus the odd stray tit from
National Lampoon
as I was too afraid to buy
Playboy
. The surface area of her long fingers would have left more sweat than the average eighth-grade hand. I would have huffed that hankie for all it was worth.
The night of the roller-disco party I decided I was in big-boy territory. Other kids in our class were doing more than holding hands, and the fact of other people's greater pleasure was becoming a feature of my reality. Now even I was on my way, having received what I interpreted as an omen of glorious high school–style interaction into my fetid sandbox. Freshman year was going to be great. Reggie wouldn't even be in the same building. I was relieved the day he told me that he didn't want to go to my high school. “I'm tired of being everyone's little brother,” he said. (We have an older sister I haven't mentioned yet—we both bobbed in sibling wake all through elementary school.) Fair enough. I was tired of being everyone's older brother. By the summer of 1985, we were at a time when if someone asked, “Where's Reggie?,” I didn't know. And it was good to say I didn't know.
MY MOTHER SAID
, “We're making good time.” The LIE had stopped slicing towns in half and now cut through untamed Nassau County greenery, always a good sign. Apart from the occasional lump of an office park on the side of the highway, we were in the trees. I slunk back down and tried to claw my way back into sleep. It was hard to get a nice deep sleep going when heading out there—all you could really do was splash around in shallow water—and I endured my usual messy dreams, although the reason for them requires a bit more context:
Before we started staying at the beach house, we used to stay at the Hempstead House, and behind the Hempstead House was a small white wood-frame cottage with dingy yellow trim. At night, spied through the thin wall of trees separating the properties, the light in their kitchen was the only thing alive in the dark, the constant moon of summer. The woman who lived there in the '50s, my mother reminded us from time to time, used to have a fish fry on Saturdays, selling lunches, and legend had it that DuBois came out to Sag once and ate there. I nodded in a show of pride whenever my mother told us this story even though I had no idea who DuBois was. I had learned to keep my mouth shut about things I didn't know when I sensed that I was expected to know them.