Becoming a writer, c. 1964 (Part 4)

Last of four articles about the author's years as a Brandeis undergraduate in the early 1960s.

I came back senior year with a beard.

Adele and I had dated the rest of the spring. We had spent a weekend together over the summer. In the fall, she was living at home and taking statistics at Boston U. for psych. grad school. We dated until November, when an old boy friend got out of the army and wanted to marry her. She wanted to give it a chance. I couldn't argue. I hadn't enough of an idea where my life was going to offer marriage to anyone.

Well, I argued, but it did no good.

I went into Park Square with Mick Magyar, whose girl friend had broken up with him, and got drunk to the Lilly Brothers at The Hillbilly Ranch. I stopped going to class, slept until noon, went drinking with Mick or Tim O'Cullinan or Tank Nonnanucci. I skipped out to Mardi Gras with Tim. I got caught in a girls' dorm with Tank and made social probation. I joined the lacrosse team because hitting people with sticks seemed a good idea.

I relished my emerging hoodlum persona. (Being a hoodlum at Brandeis was easy. You only had to be taller than five-eight, drink beer and hang out with gentiles.) At parties, I leaned against walls, scraping off the labels of Miller's quarts, awaiting a replacement girl-of-my-dreams. I told myself I was soaking up valuable experiences. I was having a heart-broken good time.

A nice Jewish boy

The only thing was, I wasn't writing. The only other thing was that, by the standards of writers I admired"“ Algren, Hemingway, Lowry"“ I had nothing to write about, never having shipped out on a freighter or shot a lion or experienced DTs . Withal, I was still a nice Jewish boy, whose family was less enthusiastic about his wanting to be a writer than it had even been about his beard.

"Go to law school," said my father. "You can write in your spare time."

"Go to law school," said my Uncle Murray, to whom I had gone for a sympathetic ear. Uncle Murray was said to have slowed his advancement through the public school system by his commitment to "principles," but now he warned me against hurting my mother.

The final "only thing" was that, while going to law school meant selling my soul (by Brandeis standards), not going to school somewhere meant I'd be spending two years doing push-ups at some redneck sergeant's whim. So I took the LSATs.

Judgment from Princeton

I had celebrated our basketball team's opening night 20-point loss with a drunk that had me up vomiting at four, six, eight and ten. I came out of the shower at noon— wet, cold, hung-over— and Mick handed me my mail.

I tore open the envelope from the Princeton Testing Service. I saw a 70 on the green paper. Shit, I thought, mediocre again. Then I saw this grid.

"You're shaking," Mick said.

"I think I got a 99," I said.

That changed the situation. Maybe the people at Princeton knew more about me than I did.

This view was only somewhat shaken by my appointment with an assistant dean of admissions at Harvard Law School. I had hoped to convince him that my grades in writing courses captured my worth more accurately than the rest of my transcript.

"I am so tired," he said, "of you C+ people waltzing in here with your pitiful 99s."

I added Penn, Northwestern and NYU to my list.

A chance encounter

Christmas break, at the Holiday Festival in New York, I ran into Stanley Kessler. We had met at summer camp in 1956. Stanley had been the basketball star (every camp had one) and I the tall, skinny, uncoordinated kid with glasses (every camp had one of me, too). He had overlooked my tendency to clang layups off rims because of my knowledge of sports trivia and our shared passion for rock 'n' roll, and we had become friends.

(His favorite song was "Pledging My Love" and mine "Speedo," which measured the gap in our levels of sophistication. Stanley had made out with more girls than I had spun bottles at.)

Because we lived in different neighborhoods and he was a year older, we saw each other infrequently; but we'd kept in touch. He'd become a starting forward at Central High in Philly, where he had once out-rebounded Earl Proctor and out-scored Howie Turnoff. He had graduated from Penn and was in his first year at its law school.

Stanley was also philosophically inclined. At camp, he had clued me into one of life's truths: How good you had to be to be good. He had illustrated his point with our counselor, Hal Weitz. Hal had been All-Public at Lincoln High. Now he couldn't even start for Yale.

"How'd you do on your law boards?" Stanley asked. I told him.

"Penn'll grab you," Stanley said. He punched my arm. "It'll be fun."

Adele, available again

Every few months I ran into Adele, when she was visiting Beverly. There was still no one I could talk to the way I talked to her. There was still no one who spoke to me the way she did. Each time, I thought, Maybe she'll go out with me.

But, no.

My last attempt was after a Ralph Ellison reading. The army guy hadn't worked out for Adele. Neither had statistics. Just when my hopes had revived, she told me she was going to San Francisco to study with the author Mark Harris. Do you know how far away San Francisco was in 1964? At Penn State, where I visited friends on party weekends, the hippest guy on campus was a Negro called "Coast" because he'd been there. When Richie Lieberthal, a guard on our flag football team, told us he was going to Stanford Med School, everyone assumed he must not have gotten into Flower.

I told Adele I was thinking of Penn.

She told me if I wanted to write, I would.

At lacrosse practice, I slammed the butt end of my stick into Dusty Mizrahi's belly. "C'mon, asshole," I said. "C'mon." ♦



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