Original Love

by J. J. Murray

  Why can’t I think up a title for my own damn book? My mind floods with possibilities. I could steal from Byron: All That’s Best of Dark and Bright. Too long. Maybe something from John Milton: Darkness Visible. No. Short enough, but who likes or even reads Milton anymore? Besides the Methodists, I mean. I Am the Lighter Brother? No. Might offend fans of Langston Hughes. Something biblical? The Light Shineth in Darkness? I add the next part of the New Testament verse: “and the darkness comprehended it not.” Not good for reviews. Coleridge: Into That Silent Sea? I’m not exactly an ancient mariner, though I definitely have the albatross around my neck, a seafaring father, and a ghost ship to go to. No. Too vague. I could be trendy and use a Stevie Wonder song title like “I Wish” or “Ebony Eyes.” It is, after all, about Ebony and me, mainly in 1976. Ebony and Me? It rhymes at least. Simply E? No. A reviewer could give E an F. Licorice Gumdrops? The Girl with the Perpetual Tan? No. Too Judy Blume. It has to appeal to adults.

  I give up and list three (Henry would be proud) stream-of-consciousness possibilities:

  Working title(s): Shades of Gray, Under the Waves, Promise

  The first might be too moody, the second too vague, the third…I’m sure it’s been used before. Gray Promises? Promises in the Shade? Promises Under the Waves? Gray Shades of Promises Under the Waves? That’s silly—and exactly ten syllables. The word “promise” has to be in there somewhere. I delete what I’ve written and type:

  Working Title: Promise(s)

  I rename PRU7.doc and save it as Promises.doc. Something will come to me. And if it doesn’t, I’ll just buy the marketing department a couple rounds of margaritas.

  Chapter four’s notes certainly look promising:

  Spring 1976: America’s Bicentennial

  *general life with a single father

  *R.L. Simpson (mention Wonder Years?)

  *general madness (announcements, one-way halls, rumors)

  *bus rides with Ebony

  *Ebony in Mr. Amadou’s crowded room

  *reading notes

  *Ebony in Mr. “Sneer’s” art class

  *trip to Hecksher Park

  *drawing Ebony

  *Lots of firsts

  I slide in the second CD of Songs in the Key of Life, which begins with “Isn’t She Lovely,” scroll down to a blank page, and begin.

  Chapter 4

  Two hundred years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, written by slave owners who wouldn’t wise up for “four score and seven years,” 1976 was supposed to be a red, white, and blue banner year to help America forget that Southeast Asian “police action,” that hotel in D.C., that clumsy unelected president, and that little oil crisis in the Middle East that had folks lining up at pumps to curse odd numbers on even days.

  On Long Island, Levittown’s Island Trees School District banned Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The Fixer by Bernard Malamud, and Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver because these critically acclaimed books were considered racist, filthy, sacrilegious, and un-American.

  A banner year, indeed.

  These events didn’t concern Peter Underhill at all. He was too busy enjoying his new life, his increasing freedom, and the pursuit of his own happiness to notice.

  Unfortunately, Peter had to live with the Captain. Except for Saturdays when the Captain could be induced into a “whiskey sour sleeper,” and Sundays when he and the Captain would skip church to sail or work on the Argo, Peter was on perpetual lockdown when he came home from school.

  The house had always lacked joy, but now it was completely joyless, and I walked around waiting for some unknown doom to do me in. I could hear the ticking of the fireplace mantel clock from anywhere in the house, a house more a grave than a home, the night weighing it down, the only joyful sound the rain drumming on the roof above my bed.

  “Do your homework,” the Captain would say from his La-Z-Boy. “Dinner at eight bells.”

  So until eight bells (6 P.M. to regular people), Peter did his homework, sketched the woods, and wrote notes to Ebony that he secreted in a small hole in the wall of his closet.

  “Chow!”

  Heavily salted meat, peppery potatoes, and “How was school?” greeted Peter every evening. “Okay” was his only response.

  The rest of the evening, Peter watched his father drink himself into a stupor, no sleeping powder needed, as they watched a Zenith 19-inch color TV, two aluminum-foiled antennae shooting off at odd angles depending, according to the Captain, on the barometric pressure outside.

  On Mondays, they’d watch Little House on the Prairie. “Now that would be the life,” the Captain would say. “Nothing but God’s green earth under you and a strong, sturdy home you built with your own two hands.”

  Tuesdays brought Baa Baa Black Sheep to the dusty screen, the Captain commenting, “That wasn’t the war I fought.”

  Wednesdays were for Bionic Woman, and the Captain barely spoke, Peter’s mother having had an eerie resemblance to actress Lindsay Wagner.

  The Waltons came for a visit every Thursday, and again the Captain barely spoke, only informing Peter on occasion which one of Peter’s kin drove that rusty Model A or that dusty Model T.

  I never knew why at the time, but now I think the Captain was remembering his own childhood from the Great Depression. That show had to depress the hell out of him, yet he still watched it, saying good-night to the characters, then to me. “Good night, Pete” always sounded so hollow.

  Donny and Marie performed on Fridays. “Look at all them Mormon morons,” the Captain would say. “They keep squirting ’em out, we’ll have us a Moron president one day.” Since Peter was allowed to stay up until ten on Fridays, they watched The Rockford Files together. “That would be the life,” the Captain would say. “Nothing but your own wits, a fast car, and a big gun.”

  From his room above the TV room, Peter could hear the other shows the Captain watched—Kojak, Monday Night Football, M*A*S*H, Hawaii Five-O—but no show gave the Captain as much pleasure as All in the Family every Wednesday night. It was the Captain’s prayer meeting and worship service for the week, Christ on his throne traded for a bigot in an armchair, verses replaced by one-liners, the choir supplanted by Archie’s whining and ranting. The Captain had conversations with Archie, Meathead, and Edith that sounded like responsive readings. He shouted, “Tell it like it is, Arch!” He cursed. He fumed. He ranted. He used every racial epithet known to mankind. All this venomous praise of and for a racist shook the floor under Peter’s bed every Wednesday night, and every Wednesday night Peter’s soul wept for Ebony.

  Yet when Carroll O’Connor later played a Southern sheriff who married a black woman in In the Heat of the Night, the Captain called him a “sellout.” His savior had obviously converted without his consent. In a way, though, my father taught me all the words never to say, all the ignorance never to believe, all the hate never to share. Reverse psychology at its finest. I am one of the few people I know who has next to nothing in common with his father.

  Peter used to creep downstairs to listen to The Tonight Show, and more often than not, the Captain was already passed out. He often found the Captain sleeping in front of test patterns, waving flags, amber waves of grain, and screen snow, but he didn’t turn off the TV.

  “Let sleeping racists lie,” I say.

  In addition to surviving the Captain’s tight ship, Peter also had to attend seventh grade and survive the ravaging waves of puberty at R.L. Simpson Junior High, an absolute tyranny where despots roamed one-way halls and enforced conformity, divergent thought being the surest way to get you exiled to detention hall.

  Each school day began for Peter with one brown sugar cinnamon Pop-Tart and a Flintstones multivitamin chased by a glass of chocolate Carnation Instant Breakfast. He put the other Pop-Tart in his brown bag lunch, which consisted of a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich, a banana, and Fritos corn chips. Thus fortified, he would yell “Goin’ to school, Cap’n” into the TV room and tear out of the house
past his own bus stop and the P-Street Rangers down to Grace Lane to wait for the “yellow submarine” with Ebony.

  I was so obvious with my affection for Ebony. Everybody knew—except the Captain, of course. The guys at my real bus stop would whistle and raise eyebrows, and once in a while Eddie would say something like, “Give her a kiss for me, Peter-eater,” but mostly they smiled and hooted. Ebony was easily the prettiest girl in the seventh grade, and because she was so athletic and therefore “cool,” they envied me. It’s funny, but they actually envied a geek like me when they could have been beating the geek out of me. Instead of putting on interior, cultural brakes as they did, I was flying down Preston Street like a Huffy bicycle without brakes to Grace Lane to be with my girl every single morning.

  Upon his arrival at Ebony’s bus stop, Peter would smile, Ebony would toe the asphalt and laugh, and the other kids at the bus stop would move away from them.

  “What’d you bring me?” she asked each morning.

  He took out the Pop-Tart and handed it to her.

  “Cinnamon again?” She took a bite, a couple of crumbs clinging to her lower lip. “And it’s cold. When y’all gonna get a toaster?”

  “The Captain doesn’t believe in them,” Peter said.

  “What’s to believe in?”

  “He says white bread shouldn’t be brown.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I’ll try to have him buy chocolate fudge next time.”

  She broke off a piece and stared at it. “I like chocolate vanilla cream better.”

  “Okay. I’ll have to get him to buy those.”

  She chiseled off some icing to get at the cinnamon filling, licking that filling with her pinkish tongue.

  That girl was such a tease. I was lucky we had a long bus ride to Simpson so my erections would go away. I wonder if she ever knew why I put my books flat on my lap as soon as I sat down.

  Peter looked away, but it was too late. His tan Levi’s corduroys were already getting tighter.

  “I wrote you a note,” she said.

  Peter turned to her. “I wrote you one, too.”

  “You draw me a picture?”

  Peter nodded.

  “I drew you one, too. Just make sure you get your note into my locker before homeroom, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  And in this way, Peter and Ebony communicated throughout the day. Phone calls after school were out of the question, and they only shared two classes together, one crushingly crowded (geography), the other intensely competitive (art). Thus, they “spoke” to each other throughout the school day by sliding notes into the vents of their lockers, lockers they shared with friends who were sworn to secrecy. Any other time, they merely talked to each other with silent smiles and shy giggles.

  On bus rides to school, they barely spoke, each too afraid to be overheard by anyone who might turn “Did you do your homework for Mr. Amadou?” into “I wanna do you at your home” for the Simpson rumor-mill, a malicious institution and fact of life that routinely turned hangnails into heart attacks, hand-holding into quintuplets, and a single cold sore into mononucleosis before homeroom even began.

  R.L. Simpson, which would later be immortalized on the TV series The Wonder Years, was an ancient collection of bricks, worn staircases, and narrow hallways where teachers wrote up any student going the wrong way down a one-way hall. Each Simpson day began in homeroom with a gong-like bell, the Pledge of Allegiance, and a lispy reading of the day’s lunch menu: “Kwispy carroth, kwunchy tater toth, and Thalisbury thteak.”

  Ebony and Peter attempted to sit near each other in Mr. Amadou’s room, but it was difficult. Thirty-five seventh graders filled the room, half in dilapidated desks, the other half strewn around the room on the floor or perched on the window ledges. Mr. Amadou, a short wiry Greek with a handlebar moustache, had to stand on his desk to teach, often spinning a 1950s-era globe like a basketball on his finger, his hands flapping, his fingers pointing behind him to a chalkboard full of notes.

  “Is everybody here?” he’d ask as he counted heads. “Tell me who’s not here.”

  But very few kids skipped Mr. Amadou’s class, mainly because he was so easy to get off the subject whenever food was mentioned.

  “Oregano!” he would yell. “This is the key to good food. Not just for Italians, no! Oregano is for Greeks like me. Garlic is for Greeks like me. No black olives—yecch! Green olives, goat cheese not mozzarella, lamb not beef. You come to my house, I make you hate your mothers for the tasteless food they serve.”

  In a class packed like sardines, we talked of food. I especially liked Mr. Amadou’s “International Food Day,” when each kid would bring a dish representative of his or her culture. I brought shepherd’s pie, and Ebony brought greens to go with egg rolls, pasta, Jamaican pies, borscht, and Mr. Amadou’s famous unending Greek salad.

  Whenever Mr. Amadou was safely on another “Greek food is king!” tangent, Peter would read Ebony’s daily note to him. Her notes were never of the “how are you, I am fine” variety. Ebony wrote straight to the point in perfect cursive using code words whenever necessary in case the note fell into the wrong hands. She gave him advice: “Clean your nails every once in a while and brush your teeth longer!” She told riddles she got from Bazooka Joe wrappers: “What do you call an undersea cab driver? A crabby!” She listed her favorite songs: “Sweet Thing” by Rufus (featuring Chaka Khan), “Boogie Fever” by the Sylvers, “Get Up and Boogie (That’s Right)” by the Silver Connection. She gave plot summaries for all the shows Peter was unable to watch: Good Times, Sanford and Son, and The Jeffersons.

  One year later, she even told me, start to finish, the entire eight-day plot of the miniseries Roots, what the Captain called “Coons taking over the TV.” From that moment on until his dying day, the Captain refused to watch ABC. “I’m down to two American channels now,” he once told me.

  From these notes, which were never romantic and always included an original sketch of Ebony’s world—misty mountains, lonesome fields, bitingly accurate caricatures of teachers—Peter learned all about Ebony’s family, and much of what he learned broke his heart.

  Her father William was a POW-MIA—either a prisoner of war or a soldier missing in action in Vietnam. The back bumper of her mother’s Pinto was plastered with “POW-MIA: Never Forget” and “POW-MIAS Never Have A Nice Day” bumper stickers. William was “supposed to be home by Christmas when I was six,” according to Ebony, “but he never came home.” Candace, Ebony’s mother, refused to take down the Christmas tree, which was fortunately artificial, posting it in a window of their Brooklyn apartment, then setting it up in front of the picture window of their Grace Lane house to “guide Daddy home.”

  Besides Candace, who Ebony said looked like “Angela Davis and Foxy Brown with a touch of Diana Ross only she can’t sing a lick,” only Aunt Wee Wee lived with them. “Aunt Wee Wee is crazy, trust me,” Ebony had written. “She hasn’t been out of her room since I was seven, and her farts are so loud and heavy they tap you on the shoulder.”

  An Uncle Jerry, Candace’s brother, visited every Sunday afternoon, but he was “on his way to West Germany to protect us from the Russians,” so he wouldn’t be around much more. Other than an odd assortment of “Afros and bell-bottoms”—Ebony’s code phrase for Candace’s many friends from Brooklyn who made the commute in Olds Cutlass Supremes and Buick LeSabres to Huntington—life was pretty quiet in the Mills’s Grace Lane Cape Cod.

  One day in mid-March, in addition to including a breath-taking self-portrait, Ebony dispensed with the code entirely:

  Peter:

  I know I said not to use real names, but we’re getting pretty good at this. At least I am. When are you going to learn to write in cursive? You write in chicken scratch, and I’m not a chicken farmer.

  And what are you doing drawing my hands? They aren’t that pretty. You should be paying attention to Mr. A. instead of drawing my hands. You want to go nowhere in this world?

  Ma
ma’s going to be out when I get home from school. I have the key. Aunt Wee Wee won’t bother us. She’s usually taking a nap when I get home from school. I want to show you something in my room. Let me know if you can come over. Let me know before lunch.

  Ebony

  That note scared the shit out of me. Her self-portrait stole my breath, and she had captured herself perfectly. I used to look through National Geographic to determine which part of Africa her ancestors were from, and I decided that they had come from either Ghana or Cameroon. Ebony disagreed, of course, and said she was an American from Virginia, and “What you doin’ lookin’ at African women’s titties?” That day I sat in Mrs. Gianinni’s Spanish class with shaking hands trying to write one word—“okay”—in cursive on a piece of paper, but it was hard to write because my hands were threatening to sweat off. Ebony had asked me into her inner sanctum, her sanctuary, her refuge, her scriptorium and studio, and she was going to show me something. Every sexual thought a thirteen-year-old can have rolled through my head that day while Mrs. Gianinni, an Italian with a bad beehive, rolled her r’s. “Donde esta la puerrrrrrta? Bueno, Juan. Donde esta la pizzarrrrro? Muy bien, Juanita…”

  Peter’s imperfect cursive response—“Dear E: Okay”—made Ebony smile from across the crowded cafeteria where she ate her lunch with other shy girls, and when they ended their day in Mr. Nearing’s art class, neither could stop smiling at the other.

  “Today, my young artistes, we will leave these pedantic confines for the freedom of the park,” said Mr. Nearing, alias “Mr. Sneer.”

  Mr. Nearing was, in a word, different. Mark said his dad said that Mr. Nearing was “light in his loafers.” Eddie, who had never even met Mr. Nearing, called him a “fag.” Mickey only shrugged his shoulders and said he was an artist who lived in the woods like Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau. Peter and Ebony, however, saw Mr. Nearing as a referee and judge, the final arbiter as to who was the better artist—and Ebony was clearly Mr. Nearing’s favorite.