During all those months of his commercial art apprenticeship, and there were a good many, out of the small allowance or allotment from his pay granted him by his stepmother to defray the expense of carfare and lunch, day in, day out, Jake bought his meals at the Automat. His victuals never varied. At the cost of one dime, his luncheon consisted of a small crock of Boston baked beans and a glass of milk.
Said Jake, as Ira shook his head in admiration at the charcoal sketch of a bust of Zeus Jake had brought home from the academy, “You know what we have to do now? Everybody in the class has to draw an original composition.”
“What does that mean?”
“From our own imagination. No copy of anything. It has to be what we thought up ourselves.”
“Do a pinochle game in the back of Maxie Dain’s father’s store,” Ira suggested facetiously. “Oh, I know, the pool hall.”
“Nah, that’s not imagination.”
“But you’re a shark at pool. Look, doesn’t that long-distance pool-stick rester make a triangle with the pool stick?”
“Yeah, but he’d say it was like a mechanical drawing. You know what I was thinking? I was thinking of a Bowery bum. He’s sitting in a doorway, and he’s dreaming about a stein of beer and a pretzel. It’s like a cloud over his head. The same as some of the Christian holy picture clouds in the Metropolitan.”
There were others of whom a lackadaisical memory retained scraps. Sid Desfor, who lived in the same house Jake did. A gangly, humorous, whimsical youth, and generous too, oldest sibling of three, Sid began an apprenticeship in a photographer’s studio immediately after graduating from public school. The photography studio was across the Harlem River, which Sid had to cross on the El train. And he was always seized by an inordinate desire to urinate as soon as the train crossed the river. Sid appreciated Milt Gross, quoted him often, and considerately cut out the humorist’s column for Ira to read. His father owned the tailor shop on the other side of the street, and Sid twice made Ira a present of a tobacco pipe found in a man’s suit to be altered.
All had spending money on weekends, but Ira rarely — once school began — except for the few coins he could mooch from Tanta Mamie. At Baba’s house, pickings became less and less as aunts and uncles married and went to live elsewhere, in Flushing chiefly. It was less a dreary time in actuality, Ira reflected, than it was in recollection. For he knew that he spent many an afternoon in the fall playing association football, “touch football,” in Mt. Morris Park, in the playing field on the West Side. He had become an excellent punter, and fairly adept at catching the larger, slower-moving football, so he was always in demand when sides were chosen — quite the opposite of his rating in baseball. Hence there must have been some joy during those months following his admission to DeWitt Clinton High School, some joy in the abandonment of the flight and the chase, the shout and touchdown.
But it was as if one had to compel a reluctant memory to acknowledge happy recollection. On Saturday nights, to the music of the Victrola in Izzy Winchel’s living room, the “gang” foregathered there, finding dancing partners with Izzy’s older sister and her friends. Ira had no facility as a dancer, and fought off acquiring any. He didn’t know why. Petrified by self-consciousness, he also detested the music the others reveled in, the triteness of sound, the embarrassing mawkishness of lyric — without being able to put his dislike into words.
Sunday mornings the group usually found itself in the upstairs poolroom on the corner of 119th Street and Third Avenue, on the same level as the Third Avenue El, which could be blamed for spoiling a shot when a train pounded by. A more dreary, stultifying atmosphere than that of the poolroom on Sunday mornings Ira couldn’t recall. Penniless, and hopeless duffer at pocket pool that he was besides, he would sit on a chair against the wall, listen to the crack of pool balls, the patter of players and their epithets, watch his friends strain above the green baize lit up by the low-hanging shaded electric lights, lift cue sticks to slide scoring markers on their wires overhead.
Frowzy, vacuous, dismal. It didn’t occur to him then that these companions-by-default were the first American-born generation of Jews, the bridge between the poor East European immigrants who landed here and the American Jews their offspring became. And his distaste of their pursuits and recreations already indicated an indefinite rejection of the typical path the mass had taken. He was aware only of his own unhappiness, of his misfitting, of not belonging, of his disdainful boredom. And yet, despite his moroseness, sometimes, discontent and apathy at others, he often realized that they made allowances for him, because he did go to high school. Even though he was offish and intolerant, lived, sought to live, in a different world, they were generous beyond his deserts. Sid, especially, chipped in to buy him a ticket to the movies, chipped in for the pastrami sandwich in the delicatessen after the show, even paid Ira’s half of a pool hour to give him a chance to go through the motions.
No. He hadn’t been fair to them, as he wrote in his yellow typescript, when he thought of them in later years, and the injustice of his former attitudes became even more pronounced when he grew old.
One gem stood out in the lusterless setting of his friends’ pastimes: a phonograph record. It had come with the Victrola Izzy’s parents bought: on one side were “Humoresque” and “Angels’ Serenade,” on the other the “Prize Song” from Der Meistersinger, the latter transcribed for violin, and both sides performed by Mischa Elman. The music on one side Ira found transparent, easy to follow and easy to appreciate. The other perplexed him; it seemed disagreeably impenetrable. Over and over again, while the others played pinochle or open poker on Izzy’s kitchen table, Davey Baer whacking a card down with a crack of knuckle on wood, a knack he had learned literally on his ne’er-do-well father’s knee, Ira, with a tenacity born of sheer anomie, played and replayed the “Prize Song”. . until suddenly he understood it! Finally cacophony became deliberately ordered sounds, not just ordinary harmony, but unique sounds and cadences that once comprehended became inevitable, that made a unison of its own. So that’s what they meant when he read about Wagner, when they wrote that Wagner was not only a great composer but an innovator. So that’s what they meant by great music. After a while the music went through your head. It was a different kind of tune, altogether different at first, but it slowly became familiar, and when it became familiar, it sang — in its own way, and yet it was right.
To be entirely faithful to the narrative, this modern aside, written probably in late ’79, ought to be deleted, Ira thought. But it gave an intimate, even touching picture of his life with M, when they were still living in Paradise Acres, a mobile home court in the North Valley of Albuquerque. He had written the fragment soon after he had had his first “total hip replacement”—when the full brunt of rheumatoid arthritis staggered his entire system: