American Pastoral
Let's remember the energy. Americans were governing not only themselves but some two hundred million people in Italy, Austria, Germany, and Japan. The war crimes trials were cleansing the earth of its devils once and for all. Atomic power was ours alone. Rationing was ending, price controls were being lifted; in an explosion of self assertion, auto workers, coal workers, transit workers, maritime workers, steel workers laborers by the millions demanded more and went on strike for it. And playing Sunday morning softball on the Chancellor Avenue field and pickup basketball on the asphalt courts behind the school were all the boys who had come back alive, neighbors, cousins, older brothers, their pockets full of separation pay,cheap ghd straighteners, the GI Bill inviting them to break out in ways they could not have imagined possible before the war. Our class started high school six months after the unconditional surrender of the Japanese, during the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history. And the upsurge of energy was contagious. Around us nothing was lifeless. Sacrifice and constraint were over. The Depression had disappeared. Everything was in motion. The lid was off. Americans were to start over again, en masse, everyone in it together. If that wasn't sufficiently inspiring the miraculous con
clusion of this towering event, the clock of history reset and a whole people's aims limited no longer by the past there Was the neighborhood, the communal determination that we, the children, should escape poverty, ignorance, disease, social injury and intimidation escape, above all, insignificance. You must not come to nothing! Make something of yourselves!
Despite the undercurrent of anxiety a sense communicated daily that hardship was a persistent menace that only persistent diligence could hope to keep at bay; despite a generalized mistrust of the Gentile world; despite the fear of being battered that clung to many families because of the Depression ours was not a neighborhood steeped in darkness. The place was bright with industriousness. There was a big belief in life and we were steered relentlessly in the direction of success: a better existence was going to be ours. The goal was to have goals, the aim to have aims. This edict came entangled often in hysteria, the embattled hysteria of those whom experience had taught how little antagonism it takes to wreck a life beyond repair. Yet it was this edict emotionally overloaded as it was by the uncertainty in our elders, by their awareness of all that was in league against them that made the neighborhood a cohesive place. A whole community perpetually imploring us not to be immoderate and screw up, imploring us to grasp opportunity, exploit our advantages, remember what matters.
The shift was not slight between the generations and there was plenty to argue about: the ideas of the world they wouldn't give up; the rules they worshiped, for us rendered all but toothless by the passage of just a couple of decades of American time; those uncertainties that were theirs and not ours. The question of how free of them we might dare to be was ongoing, an internal debate, ambivalent and exasperated. What was most cramping in their point of view a few of us did find the audacity to strain against, but the intergenerational conflict never looked like it would twenty
years later. The neighborhood was never a field of battle strewn with the bodies of the misunderstood. There was plenty of haranguing to ensure obedience; the adolescent capacity for upheaval was held in check by a thousand requirements, stipulations, prohibitions restraints that proved insuperable. One was our own highly realistic appraisal of what was most in our interest, another the pervasive rectitude of the era, whose taboos we'd taken between our teeth at birth; not least was the enacted ideology of parental self sacrifice that bled us of wanton rebelliousness and sent underground almost every indecent urge.
It would have taken a lot more courage or foolishness than most of us could muster to disappoint their passion ate, unflagging illusions about our perfectibility and roam very far from the permissible. Their reasons for asking us to be both law abiding and superior were not reasons we could find the conscience to discount, and so control that was close to absolute was ceded to adults who were striving and improving themselves through us. Mild forms of scar ring may have resulted from this arrangement but few cases of psychosis were reported, at least at the time. The weight of all that expectation was not necessarily killing, thank God. Of course there were families where it might have helped if the parents had eased up a little on the brake, but mostly the friction between generations was just sufficient to give us purchase to move forward.
Am I wrong to think that we delighted in living there? No delusions are more familiar than those inspired in the elderly by nostalgia, but am I completely mistaken to think that living as well born children in Renaissance Florence could not have held a candle to growing up within aromatic range of Tabachnik's pickle barrels? Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an extraordinary extent? Has anywhere since so engrossed you in its ocean of details? The detail, the immensity of the detail, the force of the detail,
the weight of the detail the rich endlessness of detail surrounding you in your young life like the six feet of dirt that'll be packed on your grave when you're dead.
Perhaps by definition a neighborhood is the place to which a child spontaneously gives undivided attention; that's the unfiltered way meaning comes to children, just flowing off the surface of things. Nonetheless, fifty years later, I ask you: has the immersion ever again been so complete as it was in those streets, where every block,mulberry handbags, every backyard, every house, every floor of every house the walls, ceilings, doors, and Windows of every last friend's family apartment came to be so absolutely individualized? Were we ever again to be such keen recording instruments of the microscopic surface of things close at hand, of the minutest gradations of social position conveyed by linoleum and oilcloth, by yahrzeit candies and cooking smells, by Ronson table lighters and venetian blinds? About one another, we knew who had what kind of lunch in the bag in his locker and who ordered what on his hot dog at Syd's; we knew one another's every physical attribute who walked pigeon toed and who had breasts,burberry outlet, who smelled of hair oil and who oversalivated when he spoke; we knew who among us was belligerent and who was friendly, who was smart and who was dumb; we knew whose mother had the accent and whose father had the mustache, whose mother worked and whose father was dead; somehow we even dimly grasped how every family's different set of circumstances set each family a distinctive difficult human problem.
And, of course,insanity workout dvd, there was the mandatory turbulence born of need, appetite, fantasy, longing, and the fear of disgrace. With only adolescent introspection to light the way, each of us, hopelessly pubescent, alone and in secret, attempted to regulate it and in an era when chastity was still ascendant, a national cause to be embraced by the young like freedom and democracy.
It's astonishing that everything so immediately visible in our lives as classmates we still remember so precisely. The intensity of feeling that we have seeing one another today is also astonishing. But most astonishing is that we are nearing the age that our grandparents were when we first went off to be freshmen at the annex on February 1, 1946. What is astonishing is that we, who had no idea how anything was going to turn out, now know exactly what happened. That the results are in for the class of January 1950 the unanswerable questions answered, the future revealed is that not astonishing? To have lived and in this country, and in our time, and as who we were. Astonishing.
This is the speech I didn't give at my forty fifth high school reunion, a speech to myself masked as a speech to them. I began to compose it only after the reunion, in the dark, in bed, groping to understand what had hit me. Despite gradations of privation and privilege, despite the array of anxieties fostered by an impressively nuanced miscellany of family quarrels quarrels that, fortunately, promised more unhappiness than they always delivered something powerful united us. And united us not merely in where we came from but in where we were going and how we would get there. We 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 preserve. And 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,lulu lemon, drug infested childhood home, the reunion that began at eleven in the morning went ebulliently on all afternoon long. It 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 herring. I wound up working there until six, by which time I had got the reunion speech to read as it appears above. Only 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 routine. Perhaps if I were thirty or forty, the reunion would have faded sweetly away in the three hours it took me to drive home. But there is no easy mastery of such events at sixty two, and only a year beyond cancer surgery. Instead 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,cheap true religion, 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 coffee. The 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 Laine. Sometimes 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 century. That 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 colors. The 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 baker. Within five minutes of leaving the reun
ion, I'd undone the double wrapping and eaten all six rugelach, each a snail of sugar dusted pastry dough, the cinnamon lined chambers microscopically studded with midget raisins and chopped walnuts. By 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 apprehensiveness of death. "A mere taste," Proust writes, and "the word 'death' . . [has] no meaning for him." 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, any thing, 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 Florida a 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,tory burch shoes, so wracked was he by trepidation. This was Mendy Gurlik, 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 comer 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 delinquent. It was Mendy Gurlik (now Garr) who'd taken me with him to the Adam 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. B., Billy Eckstine, in concert at the Mosque; who, in '49, had got tickets for us to the Miss Sepia America Beauty Contest at Laurel Garden. It was Mendy who,louboutin, 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 WAAT. Musical! Caravan, Bill Cook s show, I ordinarily listened to in my darkened bedroom on Saturday nights. The 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 sheets. First the tom tom opening, then winding curvaceously up out of the casbah that great smoky trombone, and then the insinuating, snake charming flute. Mendy 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 church goers in the row of chairs outside his glass enclosed booth, Bill Cook would come out from behind the microphone to greet us. With 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 phone. (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,hermes bags, Lloyd's Manor, a place to which few whites other than a musician's reckless Desdemona would venture. It was Mendy Gurlik who first took me down to the Radio Record Shack on Market Street, where we picked out bargains from the 19 cent bin and could listen to the record in a booth before we bought it. During 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 school. Regardless 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, "Caldonia, Caldonia, what makes your big head so hard? Rocks!" He sang it, as he blissfully proclaimed,toms, "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 offensive. Here 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 restaurate

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