To my right, chairs sat in a half-circle facing a solitary chair that sat isolated, with its back to the wall. I was just about to get disruptive when Professor Heller rushed in from behind me and clapped me on the back as a greeting. He was wearing the same jacket he’d had on at Howard Johnson’s, with elbow patches, and his glasses had a strip of tape on one hinge. He hustled past me and began glad-handing the others, all white, all prosperous looking, all obviously executives or administrators.
Soon I was sitting in that center chair facing the folks Professor Heller called the committee, meaning the committee that decided who got in. I was flattered that I got to see them, and didn’t know enough to be intimidated. I wasn’t disrespectful; that wasn’t in my nature. Besides, I assumed that since I had failed the test, I was only there because: (A) Professor Heller recommended me; (B) they would like to have a reason other than a poor test score to reject Professor Heller’s choice and this could be it; and (C) I had asked for it.
So no matter things that I might sense
I need to be civil in my own defense.
Sitting in front of these folks seems silly
But I owe it to the Prof to stay chilly
If this is judgment day more’s the pity
That I have to come in here before this committee
I kept wondering about the verdict of this six-person half-jury, and as far as I could figure it, two of them—Professor Heller and the lone woman on the committee—seemed to lean in my favor; three seemed against my admission; and one seemed neutral—the head of the committee, who was politically savvy enough not to want to take a side. That meant, in my mind, I wouldn’t make it in.
Some of the questions were meant to reveal how I would feel about being around people with more money than I had. I explained to them that currently almost everyone that I knew had more money than I did, but that with a good education I might well be able to catch up. My point was that Fieldston students weren’t the only people in a better financial shape than I was.
The questions about how I would feel in the middle of all these kids with money were questions they struggled with. They stood between me and the Fieldston community, Fieldston folks. But they were closer to my financial status than to that of the members of the Fieldston community. They may have been good at whatever they did, teach or administrate or whatever. But they were more like tutors with offices.
One asked, “How would you feel if you saw one of your classmates go by in a limousine while you were walking up the hill from the subway?”
“Same way as you,” I said. “Y’all can’t afford limousines. How do you feel?”
I could hear fear in their voices, and it was really there. They sounded intimidated, not by me but by their surroundings.
And all of their degrees can’t get them on their knees
And their mastery in classes never gets them off their asses
They’re always tiptoeing and elbowing
As loud as ghost whispers and as quick as grass be growing
Their spoiled students must be pampered,
Moving around like snails in amber
Their disciplinary instincts are all the way dead
Smiling at this, patting that one on the head
On fire with midnight sunburns that take root under the collars
But “little lord have mercy” here is worth a million dollars
At a quarter past ten, they decided to break for a few minutes. I confided to the head of the committee that my mother had possibly been hospitalized and that I wanted to make a call. He directed me to a secretary in an inner office. I called Metropolitan Hospital and asked to speak to Mr. William Scott. After a short wait, B.B. came on the line. He sounded winded.
“It’s okay, sport,” he said quietly. “It looks like we’re going to have to bachelor pad it for a few days. Your mother is in a diabetic coma. She’s going to have to take insulin like Sammy. We have some things to discuss, so you need to come down here.”
That was all I needed to know. There was somewhere else I needed to be. Now.
The members of the committee were hovering over their chairs when I got back to the main room.
“Excuse me, lady and gentlemen, I have to say something. I have to go. My mother landed at Metropolitan Hospital this morning. She’s in a diabetic coma and I have to be there with her. I know you folks were having this meeting especially to talk to me, and I appreciate that and want to thank you. But I’m leaving. If you all vote to allow me in here, I’ll appreciate that. If you vote not to let me come, I’ll understand it. But whatever you do, you’re going to have to do it with the information you’ve got so far. I hope it’s enough.”
I turned to Professor Heller.
“Thank you, sir. You did a great deal for me and you stuck with me. I thank you, but I’m about to go see about my mother, okay?”
I didn’t feel like smiling, but the man deserved one. I nodded and acknowledged the other individuals around the room respectfully. Their somewhat stunned faces wore expressions that didn’t know what to be, caught between words, slapped without malice into another person’s reality far from the insulated isolation of their Riverdale routines.
I shook hands with Professor Heller in case it was the last time I would see him. Then I walked out the door of the well-appointed chamber, away from the silver and the china and the cookies and committee. Down the stairs to the door that led to the curving driveway. From there to the Broadway local train. I dropped a token in the slot. I had to get downtown.
13
I suppose I arrived at the hospital before either the doctor or Uncle B.B. expected, because all of a sudden I had walked up to where they were talking outside my mother’s room and stepped between them to look. There was a nurse standing at the head of my mother’s bed adjusting tubes the size of cigars inserted in her throat. There was a surgical cap covering her hair. She was on a gurney with her eyes closed and the small room where she was being treated was filled with the sound of her assisted breathing. The nurse was working in half-light dimness, walking quickly around the gurney, covering my mother carefully with a sheet, and examining every angle and aspect of the connections to a machine the size of a short refrigerator that expanded her chest and cleared her mouth of saliva. She was the color of cigarette ash. She was lucky she was in a coma and couldn’t see herself, because seeing herself like this might have scared her to death.
My uncle seemed to feel as though I was in danger of that same fate. He was staring blankly into a space unseen by others, focusing on instructions or recovery processes or excuses the doctor was giving for missing my mother’s decline into her current condition. She had been in his office just a week before.
When I stepped past them, I broke into my uncle’s attempt to believe whatever this son of a bitch was lying about. B.B. reached out to bar my advance into the room. I understood that he didn’t want me to see her. He didn’t understand that I already had. I turned away from the two of them and walked a few steps back down the hallway. I could still hear the machine. A tense two or three minutes later, the doctor scurried past me and B.B. was quickly at my elbow. He was an inch or so taller than me, and thirty pounds heavier, but he looked exhausted and appreciably smaller than usual today.
“A ninny,” he spat at the doctor’s shrinking form as the nervous little man departed. I told myself I would never forget the doctor standing in the light of that forty-watt bulb at the bottom of our stairs, sniffing the air like an allergic albatross and hissing “acidosis.”
But we should have known. And I guess the fact that I knew that, was the reason I didn’t chase the little man down the army green hallway and kick his ass like a stuffed toy. I felt too much like kicking my own. I knew the little bird-beaked doctor should have averted this tragedy, but I should have too. And I saw beneath the shallows of my uncle’s expression that he felt the same way I did. As though that lady in the hospital bed there had two men at her elbows whose responsibility was to look out for her, an
d we blew it. We blew an easy one.
Shopping for the family groceries, making that Saturday run, had been one of my jobs since before we moved to New York. Not just for my mother, but for my grandmother before that. It was one of the ways I legitimately earned the two pennies or a nickel Aunt Sissy gave me when her budget expanded to include a cut of meat or some other extravagance from the A&P or another uptown market. Uptown was five or six blocks up Cumberland Street, easier and quicker once I got my red truck bike with a wire basket in front.
In the Bronx, I just looked at restocking the refrigerator and cabinet as my job. My Saturdays automatically included an hour or so of carrying a list and rolling a shopping cart. I knew sometimes as clearly as my mother what we had and what we needed. I not only knew what our regular brands were, but the weekly quantities. In a special week, when something was going on, the six-pack of soda might clone itself on the list. In recent weeks, though, I had regularly brought back two six-packs of soda on Saturday and another one or two six-packs during the week. I wasn’t drinking any more soda than usual. My mother was. I knew now that she had been fighting off dehydration and sugar imbalance with direct deposits of syrup and water.
She had been tired, listless, and dehydrated, and couldn’t figure it out. Uncle B.B. had lived with Aunt Sammy, who’d had diabetes for ten years by the time I stayed with them briefly after my grandmother’s death. I guess it was different being around someone who was controlling the debilitating aspects of diabetes with tablets or injections of insulin. B.B. hadn’t seen the onset of the illness, what their Tennessee neighbors called “sugar diabetes.”
B.B. and I left the hospital and went for hot dogs at Nathan’s, a late brunch B.B. called it. I liked Nathan’s most of the time, but this hot dog was like a rubber cigar. Not happening. My uncle went into “normal” mode, treating the outing like one of our haircut trips or once-a-month movie trips. Those were his contributions to normal, since he was supposed to be a father figure or male role model or some such, to teach me how to cope with things like my mother going into a coma.
“How did your interview go?” he asked halfway through the meal.
It was the first time I’d even thought about what had happened earlier that day.
“Okay, I guess,” I said. “It seemed like they were asking me stuff they already knew, either from Professor Heller or from the long questionnaire you filled out.”
“Just wanted to see if you remembered what lies you told?” he said, trying to crack a smile.
I wouldn’t have been the only one in that room who’d told lies. Or the first one, or even the main one. Sitting in that room with the committee I’d felt like I was at one of those theaters where the actors hold the face of the part they’re playing in front of themselves on a stick. It’s a play that’s not even like a play. You’re not even asked to suspend your disbelief like in an ordinary movie or play. They’re holding the masks in front of them. That’s what the committee hearing had felt like, I realized. I’m sure somebody reviewed all prospective students, but I was willing to bet they didn’t have meetings like mine for the students paying full tuition, meetings where you sat there like a bug under a microscope, pushed and poked, taken like a joke.
When B.B. and I got home, I heard him talking to his sisters and other relatives, bringing everyone up to date. I stayed in my room and he stayed in his, as normal. I could tell he wanted to keep things as close to normal as possible, not making any radical declarations.
Then, around 7 p.m., the phone rang. It was Professor Heller. The first question he asked was about my mother, and the second was about how I was doing.
“Very well, thank you,” I said. “But a hell of a day.”
“I wanted you to know that you’re to be granted a full scholarship.”
Evidently my silence said a great deal to him.
“I really believe that your handling of that call and the way you spoke to everyone before you left was crucial. You handled that very well, with decisiveness and maturity, with the proper attitude concerning priorities.”
14
My mother quickly adjusted to being a full-fledged diabetic and went back to work. She had been moved to a desk job in the Housing Authority and spent her days at the Amsterdam Houses on 61st Street. She claimed it was not a bad change.
Our refrigerator held a tray of insulin. She had learned how to measure out her doses and inject herself with a needle. She made me watch the process one day, from how to jab yourself in a fingertip with a short silver needle and put a drop of blood on this paper that turned colors to tell you how much medication to take, to shooting herself in the hip and swabbing the injection point with alcohol. Then she came over to me with an orange and a fresh needle.
“You need to know how to do this,” she said half-seriously.
She knew that when it came to being brave the world did not turn to me. I declined the opportunity to squirt some water into an orange right then. I told her I appreciated the vote of confidence, but that I was concentrating on her not needing me to do any injecting. She laughed and told me that even her brother would do it and he was definitely an old scaredy-cat. I told her that my fear took precedence because it was young and had to be nurtured. We laughed some more. My mother knew good and damn well there was no chance of my using the works. I had a thorough needle phobia.
By the time I started at Fieldston that fall, in September 1964, my mother and I had also moved to the Robert Fulton Houses—in other words, the projects—down in Chelsea, living on our own in a two-bedroom place on West 17th Street between Ninth and Tenth avenues. The project buildings covered five square blocks and were the center of a regeneration of that section of Ninth Avenue, with a small town’s worth of barber shops, bodegas, pizza shops, record stores, and clothing stores. I quickly learned I was a minority within a minority—the neighborhood seemed to be 85 percent Puerto Rican, 15 percent white, and me. I did what I could to blend into Little San Juan without trading in my connection to Black America or the Temptations.
The good news was that the rent for our new apartment was seventy-three dollars per month; the bad news was that what would have been a twenty minute ride from our old place to Fieldston would now take at least an hour each way and involve switching trains. I had to take the train two hundred and thirty blocks uptown to reach school.
One look around the campus was enough to remind me how expensive the school was. The classroom buildings seemed to be held together with interlocking stones, like medieval castle walls. The green lawns looked as though they were trimmed with scissors. There was a new gym with glass backboards and room for two full-court games side-by-side. There was also a well-kept quarter-mile oval track and a manicured football field separated by a fence from a soccer pitch. The stage in the auditorium could handle full-scale productions for five hundred viewers. There was a split-level art building for painting beneath skylights that always let in a lot of natural light.
Music classes were taught in a cozy tower room you reached by climbing a spiral stone staircase above the auditorium and the student recreation room with its vending machines and ping-pong tables. There were three pianos in the building: an upright for the theater stage that was available only when there was no class being held, another one in the music room up in the tower, and, in a separate room next to the auditorium, a beautiful Steinway. It was an absolutely marvelous instrument. And not only was it the best piano around, it was the one that was almost always free and thoroughly accessible. Unfortunately, it was also the one the music teacher, Mr. Worthman, had established a rule against playing. Since I was the main one playing the kind of music Mr. Worthman objected to, I felt he might as well have called it “the no Gil rule.”
Mr. Worthman headed the music department and the glee club. He reminded me of one of the villains from the Spiderman comics I read. He had the same hooked beak, the same pale complexion, and most of all, the same horseshoe of white hair around a light bulb shaped bald spot. We were
opposites in appearance and in musical taste. But while I would never have tried to shut down his choral group, he showed more than mild disapproval of my music. He hated it.
The first time I played the Temptations on the Steinway, when I had just arrived on campus, the wild dancing made enough noise to raise professor Worthman from his crypt. He arrived in the music room to see it looking like a dance hall. I was just starting into a Stevie Wonder tune when I got busted.
I felt like there was something personal going on between Mr. Worthman and me. Nobody could remember exactly when the “hands off the Steinway” rule had been posted, but I somehow connected it to something unreasonable and attributed the whole fabrication to Mr. Worthman. Maybe it had something to do with the songs I was writing; maybe it was because I performed around school with other students but never joined the glee club. If all else failed, I could always play the it’s-’cause-I-come-from-the-ghetto card, though that didn’t seem to apply to Mr. Worthman—he didn’t seem to care that I was from the ghetto.
You have options when you decide something is unfair. You can say to hell with it and play anytime and anywhere you see fit in open defiance of the rules. You can challenge it legally and carry it all the way to the Supreme Court—or the high school equivalent. Or you can pick and choose your times, hit and run, try to avoid a showdown. I did that.
I opted for a melodic form of guerilla warfare, floating in and out with stealth and style. I mixed in a little black magic so that my fingers would be quicker than Mr. Worthman’s eyes. I used clock management, and stopped playing just before and just after lunch, when my classmates had a few minutes to watch me get in trouble. I stopped doing all the flamboyant finger snappers from the radio. I stopped playing requests for the latest top ten tunes by the Beatles and Rolling Stones, any of which would bring in a dozen unwanted singers. I stopped doing tunes that would inspire kids to unreasonable facsimiles of the dances from the new TV shows like Shindig and Hullabaloo.
The Last Holiday Page 8
