Riding with the Ghost

by Justin Taylor

Barbara and George met in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and were married at eighteen and twenty years old, in 1943. It was a Wednesday-morning ceremony, performed in the rabbi’s living room. George left soon after to serve in the Pacific theater. They had three children: Ronni in 1948, Larry in ’52, and Francine in ’59. They moved around Long Island a bit, but the kids grew up primarily in a town called Merrick. George, during most of these years, was a traveling salesman. Siding and kitchen knives were two of his steadiest products. Barbara was a full-time homemaker, but it was a difficult home to grow up in. “My parents didn’t do ‘kid things,’ ” Ronni told me once. “If they took us to the movies it was because they wanted to go to the movies, some movie they wanted to see and we were just there. Frankly, they didn’t ever seem like they really liked having kids.”

  For people of that generation, and especially for Jews after the war, the question of whether to have children was no question at all. It was simply what you did after you got married, and so it seems entirely possible to me that George and Barbara did want children, though less out of any innate parental instinct than as part of the generational urge to resist our attempted eradication. And it may also have been the case that, as a first-/second-generation immigrant couple, they saw two or three children as part of the middle-class American life that they envisioned for themselves, a dream that ultimately eluded them. “They never had any money,” Ronni told me. “They got by, but they never had anything.”

  My childhood memories of their home are of a place where there was nothing for a kid to play with, where a certain silence prevailed, broken only by the occasional (inevitable) screaming match. In this regard, my experience was probably right in line with that of my father and my aunts when they were young.

  In the spring of 1969, just after Larry finished his junior year of high school, the family moved to South Florida, which in those days was still a hopelessly Podunk place to live, especially for a teenager long accustomed to taking the train in from Long Island to Manhattan, alone or with friends, to see a baseball game or just to go exploring. I don’t know why the Taylors moved to South Florida, though I assume it was for George’s work. But I know that Larry hated it there. He told me countless times that he regarded the move as one of the major traumas of his life.

  His hurt was compounded by the fact that a close friend’s parents had offered to take him in for his senior year so that he could stay in Merrick and graduate with his class. He begged for permission to do this, and Barbara granted it. Here’s the way he always told it to me: “I’d made all my arrangements, I’d told everyone I was staying, I was packed up. And she had promised.” Then as the move date loomed, she changed her mind—or perhaps had never meant to let him stay to begin with and had simply told him that he could so he would stop asking. “She said to me, ‘What are you, stupid, you think I’d let you do that? I never promised you anything.’ Like none of it had ever happened.”

  Barbara also took the move as an opportunity to throw out several boxes of Larry’s baseball cards and back issues of Mad magazine. He remembered the details on every lost card, and when I went through my own card-collecting phase, in the early 1990s, he would sometimes browse my Beckett guide and muse over how many tens of thousands of dollars all that so-called junk was now worth. He was able to save about a shoebox’s worth of cards, and one stack of issues of Mad. Characteristically, he kept both the cards and the magazines in mint condition. They sat at the back of the closet in the master bedroom of the house where I grew up. With the Beckett guide, we priced the cards that he had kept, and though they weren’t worth what, say, the vanished Mantle rookie would have been, they were worth something. But he never sold them, ostensibly for fear that they might be worth more later; really because he couldn’t bear to part with them. Eventually the baseball card market collapsed. The Mad magazines were never worth anything, except as a window into what had passed for avant-garde comedy on Long Island in the mid-1960s. When I was around ten or eleven years old, I read them all.

  Larry may have hated Florida, but he made friends there, some of whom he stayed close with for long enough that I have memories of them: Zach and Sharlien, Marsha and Charlie, and Mark Starkman—who would in time become Larry’s college roommate, and then my uncle. Before long he grew comfortable and (though he hated to admit it) came to think of South Florida as home.

  In truth, it was his mother’s betrayal that scarred him, not the fact of having to relocate. But he could not separate these ideas in his mind, and so for the rest of his life it was all but guaranteed that a lighthearted anecdote about adolescent hijinks in South Florida would, sooner or later, wend its way around to mourning for the lost paradise of Merrick, Long Island. This is a story I have heard a hundred if not a thousand times.

  Larry graduated from high school in 1970. His parents thought college was pointless, a waste of money, and refused to help him pay for it. George wanted Larry to join the family business, though it’s unclear what exactly this might have meant. The Taylors, during these years, got by (as Ronni once put it to me) on “this and that.” For a while they had a table at the flea market, selling hunting knives, brass knuckles, and other random stuff you might find at a sporting-goods store or a pawnshop.

  Larry lived at home, worked part-time, and put himself through Broward Community College. Around the time he finished his associate’s degree, George had a heart attack and was unable to work for a year. Larry put school on hold and supported his parents and his younger sister, Francine, then in her teens, by getting a job in a door factory doing intense manual labor. Some days his job was to lift fire doors onto and off of a conveyor belt; other days he sprayed the fire-retardant polystyrene core into their hollow bodies with a hose.

  Meryl and Mark Starkman had also been forcibly relocated to South Florida from New York (Rosedale, Queens), and their mother—my grandma Lorelei—took the move hard. Lorelei was inconsolable for years, writing several times a week to her sister back in New York, my great-aunt Ellen, detailing her hatred for Florida, while her husband worked long hours and the kids raised themselves. Meryl was an indifferent student but artistic: She could draw, paint, craft, and design and sew her own clothes. “It was just so hot in the high school,” she told me once. “This huge concrete sweat shack that didn’t have any air conditioning. You’d just fall asleep if you went there, so it was like, why even bother, you know?”

  The Starkmans lived in Southwest Miami, an hour’s drive from where Larry lived, in Hollywood. He was introduced to Mark through their mutual friend, Zach, whom Larry had known back in New York and reconnected with in Florida. Larry would drive down to see Zach because he didn’t know anyone else. As it happened, Zach lived down the block from Mark and Meryl. Mark, Zach, and Larry became a tight-knit trio, the center of a group that Meryl remembers now as simply “the guys.” “They hung out at each other’s houses, including ours, so that’s how I came to know them. This would have been ’72 and ’73. Me and some of my friends, we were sophomores or juniors then, and we started hanging out with the guys, who were mostly undergrads at either University of Miami, Miami Dade Community College, or Broward Community.”

  Even though he’d dropped out of school to work at the door factory, Larry found time to tutor Meryl in math. It was a working-class romance, like something out of a Springsteen song. As a reward for passing a difficult test, he took her to see the movie Cabaret, which he later came to describe as their first date. Meryl, however, is a bit more equivocal: “We weren’t seeing each other exclusively, but we must have been seeing each other somewhat regularly, and it progressed.”

  Mark had skipped a grade in high school, and so by this time he was finishing his BA. He applied to law school at the University of Florida and was accepted. With George healthy enough to work again, Larry was able to return to school. He applied to UF as an undergraduate and Mark and Larry moved to Gainesville together in the fall of 1973. Meryl fini
shed high school in 1974 and was accepted to the Fashion Institute of Technology, which took her back north to New York City for the 1974–75 school year. She visited Larry and Mark at UF before she left, and Larry visited her a few times while she was in New York. They were on and off during this time, and each dated other people, though in later years he preferred not to acknowledge the break (or whatever it was), focusing instead on the eighteen-hour drives he’d taken to New York as proof of his dedication—how he hadn’t stopped to eat or sleep. He hadn’t stopped for anything but gas.

  He studied business and completed his BA in 1975. He applied to the law school but was not admitted, so he moved back to South Florida and into his parents’ house. Meryl decided to transfer from FIT to Miami-Dade Community College for the second year of her associate’s degree, at least in part to be with him, though instead of moving in together, she too moved back in with her parents. “I was planning to go back to Florida after school,” she told me. “So why not finish there? It made sense to me. But I had no idea at the time that FIT was such a superior school, or what a degree in fashion from MDCC would mean.”

  * * *

  —

  Larry had an artistic streak himself. He liked to read and was an eloquent writer. He didn’t have spare credits (or tuition money) to spend on electives at UF, but he somehow squeezed in an introduction to photography course. He loved everything about it, from theories of composition to geeking out over gear, from working in the darkroom to the magic of seeing a personal vision turn into something tangible that you could share. It was his all-time favorite college experience and made him into a lifelong shutterbug.

  Though he never learned to play an instrument, he loved listening to music and going to concerts. He saw a lot of shows at Pirates World, a theme park that had opened in Dania, Florida, in 1967. Pirates World had always staged occasional concerts, but in 1971—when Larry was nineteen years old and still living in nearby Hollywood—they started booking rock bands in earnest. (They were attempting to compensate for revenue lost to a certain mouse-mascotted park that had just opened in Orlando and drawn away their customer base.) I know that Larry saw Wishbone Ash, Three Dog Night, Ten Years After, the Moody Blues, Humble Pie, and the Guess Who, all of whom played that year. I wouldn’t be surprised if he also caught Deep Purple, Jethro Tull, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Pirates World went out of business in 1975.

  A born skeptic and typically a reflexive cynic, Larry nevertheless had a childlike awe, maybe even a religious reverence, for the strange combination of abandon and control that allowed a charismatic singer to draw and manipulate the attention of an audience, to serve as both its leader and its avatar, facilitating an experience that was at once individual and collective. It was incredible to him that some stranger’s lyrics could speak not just for you but through you and maybe as you; how you could throw your whole self—voice box and consciousness, body and spirit—into this totally other person, the one who was on the stage or your home stereo or your car speakers, and lose yourself in the music, and then, at the far end of all that otherness, somehow find yourself, more truly and more strange.

  This is an admittedly grandiose—indeed, borderline delusional—way to describe a crowd of ’70s teens hollering along to “American Woman” or “Aqualung.” And yet it’s what Larry felt, at least some of the time; often enough to keep him coming back for more. He craved that catharsis, even if in some ways it scared him as much as it exhilarated him. He sometimes wondered what it would be like to be the singer on the stage instead of one of the thousand people singing along in the crowd. But that wasn’t going to be his life, and he knew it. He wanted something stable and lucrative, white-collar, so he wouldn’t struggle the way his parents always had. The law had been his first choice, but he took the rejection from UF’s law school as definitive, and never reapplied there or anywhere else. He decided to become a stockbroker.

  * * *

  —

  Meryl and Larry got married in 1977. They bought a one-bedroom condo in a new apartment complex that Meryl’s father’s company had had a hand in building. Among their new neighbors was another young married couple: Norman and Jeanette, who were practicing Modern Orthodox Jews. Meryl had not grown up in a remotely religious household, but her brother had been bar mitzvahed and she’d been part of the Jewish youth organization B’nai B’rith. The Taylors hadn’t been religious either, but they kept up some of the traditions and customs: They cleansed the house for Passover and held a seder, which George led; they went to services at the high holidays and fasted on Yom Kippur. Like Mark, Larry had been bar mitzvahed. Jeanette’s religiosity was therefore neither wholly foreign nor familiar to Larry and Meryl, but it intrigued them. They began to explore their heritage as a living thing: a faith practice. I’m not sure that they were “believers” in the most literal sense of the word (they did not, for instance, join a synagogue or refrain from work on the Sabbath), but they got in the habit of lighting the Shabbat candles before Friday-night dinner and for nearly three years they kept a kosher home, with separate sets of dishes for milk and meat, and a separate set of separate sets of dishes just for Passover.

  “We were curious, and it was really interesting,” Meryl told me. “To learn how to do all this, and what it’s supposed to mean.” The spell was broken, ironically enough, by a visit from Jeanette’s mother, who refused to eat off of Meryl and Larry’s dishes, because they had been “made kosher” through ritual purification (and ten cycles in the dishwasher) but had not been “originally kosher.” As she served this woman dinner on a paper plate, Meryl realized that she was never going to be Jewish enough in some people’s eyes no matter what she did, and that these rules didn’t make sense anyway, which meant that all the hassle was for nothing. Four sets of dishes for two people? They moved on from Judaism to health food, traded prayers and candles for tofu and carob. Before long, they got tired of that too.

  * * *

  —

  Dad’s older sister, Ronni, had gotten married in 1969 and moved to Richmond, Virginia, for her husband, Bill, to attend medical school. Ronni gave birth to her first son, Michael, in 1973, and her second son, Adam, in 1974. The marriage soured and Ronni moved to Florida permanently the same year that Meryl and Larry wed. Michael and Adam would have been four and three years old. There are boxes’ worth of photographs, slides, and home video memorializing the time that my parents spent with their nephews throughout the late ’70s and early ’80s. “My kids definitely regarded Larry as a father figure,” Ronni told me. I know that he regarded himself the same way.

  Spending time with the boys made him feel needed and useful. He had a lot of love to give, and though I’m not sure whether he knew it (he certainly wouldn’t have said it the way I’m about to say it), he was a person who needed to receive a lot of love as well. He cherished every trip to the park and the video arcade or the movies or the water slide, relished every baseball thrown and math worksheet agonized over. This is one reason why I wasn’t born until 1982, though my mother has also told me that for a long time Dad hesitated to start a family. He feared repeating the mistakes his own parents had made, and he was worried about money. I believe he was also worried about shirking his obligation to Michael and Adam. What if they felt abandoned? What if he didn’t have time for them anymore? I don’t have concrete proof of this, but my theory is corroborated by something my mother said when I asked her about the six-year age gap between me and my sister, Melanie.

  “Dad was scared to divide his attention. His own parents were so unloving, such cold people, just totally uninterested in their children. He always swore he would never be like that, and he wasn’t. He told you he loved you all the time and he always took your concerns very seriously, a lot more seriously, to be honest, than we maybe should have. We were the parents, but you always got to have an opinion and sometimes a vote, and most families just don’t work that way. He loved you so much he worried he w
ould love another kid less, or that if he didn’t then that meant he’d have to love you less. It was very hard for him to see that he’d just have more love and attention to give, even though we both had always planned on two if not three kids. He kept saying, ‘I’m not done with this one yet.’ Kidding, of course, but also not. He probably would have kept hesitating forever and you’d have been an only child but I finally put my foot down.”

  * * *

  —

  Throughout the late ’70s and early ’80s Meryl had worked in garment factories in Hialeah, making use of her skill as a clothing designer while Larry tried to establish himself as a stockbroker. It didn’t go well. He had an incredible head for numbers and an intuitively sophisticated grasp of the market; the only problem—as literally everyone who ever knew him seems to have warned him—was that his quick temper made him ill suited to a profession based on glad-handing and schmoozing. He had no personal Rolodex on which to draw and wasn’t good at showing deference to his bosses either.

  The first office that hired and trained him closed shortly after he started working. He was reassigned to another office within the company, but was let go shortly thereafter, in part because he refused to promote the subpar stocks that the company wanted the brokers to push to their clients, which meant he was always at loggerheads with his manager. He tried selling insurance; he dabbled in Amway. His in-laws offered to pay for night school if he wanted to study law after all: He said no. In August 1979 he applied to the management training program at 7-Eleven. Though rated a “satisfactory candidate,” he never worked for 7-Eleven, so the only reason I know this is because he kept a copy of his personnel-evaluation form, which is downright disturbing in its accuracy, which may be why he kept it.

  SUMMARY ASSESSMENT: Mr. Taylor is very bright. He is assertive and competitive. He is a reflective and in-depth thinker. He enjoys analyzing problems. However, he should not over-analyze them at the expense of timely actions. He tends to be overly critical of people in general. He may have difficulty working cooperatively and he can be quite disagreeable when he wants to be.