Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

by Sanford D. Greenberg

  Other times, the assault on our study sessions was more direct. “Sanford,” Arthur would chime in, “shall I play you a song? Would you like that? I think a little tune is just the thing to pick up our spirits. Reading is good for the soul, but you know, I think music is good for the soul, too. What do you think, Sanford? Try this on; tell me how it suits you.”

  Then he would play his guitar. People would start coming into our room. Jerry would stop work and come over. Arthur had a terrific voice. He was serious about his studies, but his music was hard to ignore. I had taken up drums and had managed to bring both my trumpet and the drums to the dorm room. Each night, while Arthur would sing and play the guitar, I would sing with him, play the drums, and deejay as well. Full of ourselves, confident of our prodigious talents, we made a record together. Rock and roll was ours. (Years later, on the occasion of a major birthday of his, I presented Arthur with a copy of that recording.)

  Fall in South Harlem. (That’s the location of Columbia, though it was seldom mentioned by real-estate brokers or the university’s recruitment corps.) It was usually still warm and humid. We would open the windows wide so there would be nothing between the room and the sky. Sweat would start on our foreheads. Sometimes the sky would darken and we would know it was about to rain—we could smell it, as if something was issuing from the concrete. At first there would be no other sounds; then we would hear the rain hit the ground, even from our fourth-floor room. It was almost as if the city had paused. We would go to the window to watch the rain, to see people running for cover as if they were being shelled, holding newspapers or books over their heads.

  In the winter, snow would bring a deep silence, as though the city was made not of iron and concrete and glass but of something soft and pliable. We often opened the window for fresh air, and heat would billow from our convection units. And then it would start to really snow. Giant clumps would begin piling up on the sidewalks and the window ledges. Arthur would come sit on my desk, maybe not saying anything, just looking out the window, his thin body twisted in order to see.

  One day when we were studying the Parthenon, Arthur said, “Sanford, now this is something. This is something I would like to see. I think we should go. We should plan a trip.” He tapped the textbook.

  “Well, a trip requires money,” I replied. As a scholarship student, I needed jobs to augment my funds. I worked as a waiter at my fraternity, and at home during the summer I was a truck driver, steering a long flatbed filled with bales of old clothing on the two-lane back roads between Buffalo and Jamestown, New York. I had also worked as a door-to-door salesman for the Fuller Brush Company. I was planning to work as a camp counselor during the coming summer.

  “Yes, of course you would need money, Sanford. I realize that. Lots of money. But I can save over the summer. You can save, too. You won’t need much money at camp. You’ll eat for free. Maybe you’ll need walk-around change, but otherwise they take care of everything. And then next year, we can go. What do you think?”

  I thought it was unlikely, but who was I to spoil his pleasure? “I think it’s a great idea. I think we should do it,” I said.

  “It’s just strange that something could be around so long,” he said, “and we still talk about it thousands of years later. There are so few things like that in the world.” He sounded distant at times like this, his thoughts seeming to drift into him from far outside of himself. “If you’re going to become an architect,” he continued, as though talking to himself, “then you have to consider whether the work you’re going to do will last. It’s the same for artists. There are other professions like that, but not many. Doctors, for example, know their work won’t last because all their patients will eventually die. It’s a noble profession, but still—there’s always that.”

  “Hmmm,” I said. It was clear he was having trouble with the idea of what the worth of his life as an architect would be. I could not quite figure out why.

  “I’m sure you’ll do something memorable,” I said.

  “That’s not it, Sanford,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s not that—it’s not about vanity, necessarily. I mean, it is and it isn’t. It’s about having something that stops time for a bit. We’ll finish this year. You’ll go off to be a camp counselor. Maybe we’ll really go to Europe or Greece or wherever. [We did, though not to Greece.] We’ll graduate. You’ll go to law school. I’ll go to architecture school. We’ll stay in touch, but it’s hard. You’ll get married. You’ll have kids. This is just an example. I’m not blaming you. It’s just to show how fast things go. But who’s to say we’ll stay in touch? Even with our friendship,” he concluded.

  I did not understand what he was getting at. His face was reddening. He took this subject seriously—surprisingly so, I thought. “Well, who says we won’t stay in touch, Arthur? That’s crazy. We’ll probably even end up living here. Where else would we live? We’ll hang out all the time. It’ll be great.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Of course.”

  “Still,” he said, tapping the page showing the Parthenon, “I can’t do something like this.”

  “They don’t make them like they used to.”

  “Sanford, I’m being serious. I mean, architecture school. Is that what I want to do?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You can do that. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be you, Arthur.”

  I think this lifted his spirits some. But not all the way. He was such a different kind of guy. He was genuinely agitated over that picture of the Parthenon. It was not merely a picture to him, as it probably was to many of our classmates. Something like that might have been more than just a picture to me as well, but I was never moved to the same extent as Arthur—meaning all the time, deeply, irrevocably, even painfully.

  “So what if we don’t know everything right this moment?” I said. “We’re still young.” This was a lie. It mattered a great deal to know. In fact, it was everything to us.

  He said nothing to this. He looked out the window of our room, then went to his desk. Taking out a black marker, he returned to the window and started to draw on the windowpane. I walked over. He was sketching the buildings across the street. He drew the skyline in perfect detail, a schematic of the city from inside our room. Then he filled in the buildings’ façades, with their windows and ledges. Next he began to draw people: office workers in the buildings, people in the shops, pedestrians on the sidewalks. Men, women, and children. He drew expressions on their faces, happy ones—he wanted people to be happy. He drew patterns on men’s ties and on women’s dresses. He made little lines for the sounds coming from the pigeons in the eaves of gray buildings, lines to express their motion, too, the way they flapped their wings. He drew plumes of heat rising from people who were rushing about, and he managed to show how the people who were standing still were cooler. He drew the clouds. He somehow even managed to draw the stars hiding behind the daylight, and then the shape of the Milky Way on the galactic plain. He drew it all with precision, and in so doing he made as true a rendering as I had ever seen. All that was what Arthur saw.

  “Nice,” I said.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “How are you going to get that off the window?”

  “It’s staying forever.”

  One weekend, Arthur invited me to his home in Forest Hills, in the borough of Queens, to meet his family. I was introduced to his mother, Rose, his father, Jack, and his brothers, Jules and Jerry. Rose offered me some Mallomars, which Arthur knew I loved. I was shown around their home, each brother proudly displaying his room and describing the meaning of the photographs and memorabilia. In one corner of Arthur’s room stood a guitar and, hanging on the wall above it, was a photograph of him and another young man. It was inscribed “Tom and Jerry,” as in the comic-book cat and mouse. I asked Arthur about it. He smiled and said, “Oh, yeah, that’s my friend Paul. We sang together in high school, and we thought it was a catchy name for our duo.
We love rock and roll as much as you do, and we love the Everlys, too. We try to get as close to their harmony as we can.”

  “How did you start singing with Paul?” I asked.

  “Paul lives around the corner. He wrote this song, ‘Hey Schoolgirl,’ and we sang it together and somehow got it released. It did okay. We didn’t make much money, but it was fun.”

  Arthur’s boyhood friend Paul, who was going to Queens College, joined us the next day at lunch. I was struck by the contrast between the two. Paul was shorter than Arthur, his hair and complexion dark; he spoke truncated, staccato sentences in a deep, resonant voice. We chatted about college, its joys and frustrations; about women, their apparent joys and frustrations; and about what the future might hold for each of us. There was no talk of music. However, I noticed that the humor reverberating between Paul and Arthur took the same shape that Arthur had demonstrated in our own conversations—irreverent, odd, caustically imitative, bizarre, and above all, “crooked.”

  Paul, of course, was Paul Simon.

  As much as Arthur was my spiritual guide—and I his—Jerry Speyer was my tutor in more practical matters during our college years: dating, for example. Columbia undergraduate study was for men only back then, but there were various concentrations of college women within close range—at Sarah Lawrence and Vassar and a little farther out at Connecticut College. Barnard, across Broadway from Columbia, was a short walk away, but maybe because it was Columbia’s “sister college,” we tended to think of the coeds there as “the girl next door.” Besides, thanks to Jerry, we had a car at our disposal. His black 1958 Buick wasn’t meant to be a sports car, but Jerry often drove it that way, with a skill that allowed us to reach our destinations quickly albeit with substantial risk to our lives.

  Jerry, who had joined the same fraternity I had, was warm, generous, gregarious. His intensity and powerful intellect were masked by a charming modesty. He was sturdy, both physically and as a friend. But more than most of us, he understood how to enjoy college life, a skill he generously shared with me. Fraternity parties on Saturday nights were exciting. Stunning young women swarmed around us, as I like to recall it, or perhaps it was vice versa. Ample amounts of alcohol, frenetic rock and roll, and loud laughter added to each moment. Unlike many of the partygoers, Jerry was able to drink and dance.

  Because I did not drink, I threw every ounce of myself into dancing. We would occasionally double-date. One evening I learned that Jerry’s date was Miss Paris 1959. I don’t recall how he met her or where. Nor could I believe that I was sitting with him and her. There was my date, of course, though I don’t remember who she was. Drinks were served as we sat on a luxurious banquette at the Stork Club. I fumbled with my glass while trying surreptitiously to glance at Miss Paris. She was not classically beautiful, but I found her to be so attractive that before long I could not tear my eyes from her. Jerry couldn’t help but notice and turned a little sour as the evening went on, but we laughed about it on our way home—all was forgiven.

  As much as his girlfriends stand out in memory, Jerry’s car still stands out more. He loved that black Buick the way you love a brother or a sister. He enjoyed driving around the city, fast and recklessly. He was like that in other ways as well. He would get ready in a flash, shaving and showering and putting on his clothes in no time. He dressed well, so it was always a surprise that he could pull the whole thing off so quickly. He looked clean and sharp, and everyone loved him for it.

  There was one time when he and I took the car out of the city. We were going to visit friends at another college in the sticks, people we had recently met. It was an overnight drive, and he was going outrageously fast. The car was black, the night black, the trees dark. All I could hear was the sound of the tires against the road, and the engine.

  “It’s strange to be out here in the country,” I ventured, in part to take my mind off the speedometer.

  “Yeah,” he said. I think he understood what I was getting at. I was feeling philosophical.

  “If we were to die here, it might be a long time before someone came by.”

  “It could be hours,” he said. I was glad he was willing to indulge. And then he was quiet for a while. We listened to the soothing sounds of a good car at high speed.

  “There is a certain thing I want from life,” he said at last. “You know that. It’s hard to put into words. It’s not…I don’t know…it’s like being able to live a full life. To enjoy all the things you want to enjoy and not having to compromise.” I knew what he meant. Or rather, I had my own sense of what he meant.

  “What about you?” he then asked.

  “The same things, I suppose.”

  “Sometime,” he went on, “I worry that nothing will happen. Like, that I’ll go to school and then I’ll get a job and that’ll be it. And I’ll have a wife and kids, maybe, only I can’t think right now about them specifically, because I don’t know who they will be. And that’ll be it. It will just be…satisfactory. Nothing more.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way,” I said, trying to encourage him.

  “I know,” he said, “but what if it is that way, Greens?”

  “So what if it’s that way?”

  “I don’t know. That might not be any good.”

  “Are you happy or sad in that life?” I asked.

  “I’m nothing,” he said. “I just am. It’s not enough.”

  “What would be enough?”

  He thought about this. It seemed as if we were traveling faster than was mechanically possible. Finally, he said, “That’s the question, isn’t it?”

  We did not talk seriously for the rest of the night. We drove on, past fields dotted with giant bales of wheat, almost indistinguishable in the dark. Even as fast as we were going, it was comfortable in the car.

  When I talk about “dating,” I have to clarify that I was going out with other girls recreationally, not for romance. Sue did not, as I had expected, drift away when I went off to college. In fact, our bond became stronger. She would come to visit me in the city, and those visits were frantic and passionate. She would stay in one of the dumpy rooms at the Hotel Paris on West End Avenue at 97th Street. The rooms were like prison cells, the beds like slabs of concrete. The neighboring guests often emitted violent noises. We made the best of it.

  I would take Sue out with my college friends and introduce her around, although I always felt a nagging impulse to be alone with her. She and Arthur hit it off—he loved her because he loved me and knew she made me happy. It was the same with Jerry. We would go on double or triple dates, taking the girls out for drinks and dinner at the West End Grill, although Arthur and I could barely afford it. Sue would ask me about the girl Artie was with, what she was like, where she went to school. Often, I did not have the details; he dated, like the rest of us, but no one girl for long. Dating was not something that drove him. It did drive Jerry, however. Sue and I would marvel at the procession of women he was able to take out: beautiful women, pleasant and well educated.

  When Sue was back home, my fevered thoughts and emotions would find expression in letters that ran something like this:

  As I suspected, you did go out on a date with another guy. An engineering student at the U. of Buffalo. Your letter sounded like a goodbye letter, and it is only this that is sad for me. Not the idea of your going out with another man—though I can’t say that pleases me. Will you be thinking of me every moment when you’re with him? That is what you’re saying, but can it be true? Will there be a moment when you think of him—think him nice, think him handsome, think him decent—the formulary a woman uses to find herself a good man?”

  How Sue bore up under the weight of such insecurity on my part is beyond me. Her letters, by contrast, buoyed me up in a way that nothing else could match. This one, by way of example, was written after she had visited me at Columbia:

  My Dearest Sweetie:

  Well honey, this is the end of a wonderful two weeks; perhaps the most wonderful I have
ever spent. I want to thank you for making me so happy during this time and also, and maybe more important, for being you. Sandy, I think you know what I am going to say now and I will continue to say it until I die. Sandy, I love you. The reason I love you is because you’re you. Sandy, I want you to know that you are all I have ever wanted in anyone. When I think about spending the rest of my life with you, I get a warm glow within me. I think, not only in terms of sex, but as the father of our children, as a friend to whom I can always turn, as a wonderful companion, as a warm, kind and loving person, as a part of me that I never want to lose. Sandy, as I said before, and will perhaps say many times before this letter is completed, I love you…

  No wonder I have saved it all these years.

  Sue gave me an anchor outside the orbit of Columbia—a vantage point beyond parties and professors and the whole rich banquet that had been placed in front of me. My growing interest in politics was another extra-orbital perch, a way to understand not just America as a whole but also how I might fit into the ongoing story.

  I knew from my family’s table talk how important President Franklin Roosevelt had been during the war and how important the overall American effort had been for the Jewish people in Europe. Even as a boy, I sensed President Truman’s steady hand as the turbulent shift to peacetime began (although it was not all smooth sailing for him). “Give ’Em Hell” Harry cared about the working guy—and Buffalo was full of working guys. Then in 1953 General Eisenhower took the helm of a country poised for ever-greater prosperity. The Eisenhower era has subsequently been disparaged as “the silent generation,” as if it were a spiritless wasteland of sorts. Not for me it wasn’t. Ike stood for stability and resolute leadership.