When school ended in June, I still couldn’t escape my melancholic thoughts. Five years of practice and striving and what did I have to show for it? Zilch. Bupkis. A big, fat goose egg. The question now was how to fill the void.
To keep my mind occupied, I signed up for two summer teams—one in the local Rec League, and the O’Connell Post American Legion squad, a hand-picked all-star team composed of the best seventeen and eighteen year olds on the peninsula. Playing Legion ball was a step up in competition from high school. If I was good enough to make this team, then why in the hell wasn’t I good enough for Kerchman?
Right around that same time, I began hearing rumors again that the Dodgers might soon be leaving Brooklyn. Just the thought of it made my stomach churn. It was a double whammy—too much to absorb all at once.
In the spring of ‘57 the newspapers reported that Walter O’Malley had peddled the Dodgers’ minor league parks in Fort Worth and Montreal for a million dollars apiece. He assured the fans and press that the money would go toward operating expenses for a proposed new ballpark—a domed stadium in downtown Brooklyn, above the Atlantic Avenue Long Island Railroad station.
At first I thought it was a P.R. stunt—a front office maneuver designed to drum up more interest in the team. Major League baseball teams didn’t just up and abandon their cities, especially New York, where baseball was practically a religion.
Why would the Dodgers leave? Why now, right at the height of their success? For the past ten years Brooklyn had had one of the best records in baseball. Only two summers before they’d won their first World Series title. Wasn’t this precisely what the head honchos had been aiming at for the past five decades?
And what about the millions of fans who’d suffered through the heartbreak collapse of ‘51? What about the succession of excruciating Series loses to the Yankees? And all of the dog seasons in the 20s, 30s and 40s—when the Dodgers were the sad-sack losers of the National League? How could the team brass ignore the fans’ loyalty and devotion? I thought about Donna’s warning of a year ago, when she chided me for caring so much “about a team of professional athletes.”
To add still another piece of bad news to the mix, I learned from my mother that my father’s sales commissions had fallen off drastically. Translation: I needed to bring in some money to help out at home. Normally I’d already be working by now. But in the last few weeks I’d been too busy sulking and feeling sorry for myself. There were mornings when I didn’t even want to get out of bed.
I supposed I could fall back on Neiman’s Pharmacy. But the thought of it was so demoralizing. I was too old to be pedaling my ass all over town for minimum wage and twenty-five cent tips. If I could have driven the pharmacy’s car, it might have been another story. But at seventeen you can’t drive inside the city limits without a supervising adult, and that would have been even more embarrassing than riding the bike.
I was still pondering what to do, when one night after Legion practice Ronnie Zeidner approached me with a curious proposition. It seems there was a last minute opening for a senior counselor at Grove day camp. One of Zeidner’s prep school buddies had just backed out because his parents were sending him on a tour of the French Riviera. There was no irony in Ronnie’s voice when he told me about it.
As far back as grade school, Zeidner and Rob Brownstein were the two guys in our neighborhood who commanded the most respect. They were the best athletes in our crowd. Both came from wealthy families. Even before they went to prep school, they carried themselves with an air of assurance and poise, like characters right out of The Catcher in the Rye or an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.
My main contact with them was through baseball. That was until I started receiving those camp post cards in which Ronnie and Rob boasted about their escapades with the jc’s across the lake. I’d wondered at the time why they were sending them to me. When it came to girls and dating, those guys were lifetimes ahead of me.
While I was throwing hundreds of baseballs at my garage door, spending Saturdays at Ebbets Field, and playing summer league ball, the popular guys were hanging out at the beach, showing off and flirting with girls. At night they went to parties and out on movie and bowling dates. Some were already driving their parents’ cars and having sex with their girlfriends—or so the rumors went.
Now that I had some free time, it slowly began to sink in. I was only a year away from college, and I’d never even been in love, and except for a brief fling with Ellen Wiseman in the spring, I’d never had a real girlfriend. What’s worse was that my only sexual encounter had been an embarrassing disaster.
Zeidner’s offer, then, had come along at just the right time. If I took the day camp job, I’d be around girl counselors all summer. Maybe I could make up for some of that lost time.
The first few days of camp I hung around on the fringes—just like I used to do at dances and parties. But this time I was sizing up the situation, looking for a safe opening or a welcoming invitation—neither of which were forthcoming. At the daily staff meetings I stood back and watched the coalitions form. God knows, I’d had a lot of practice being on the outside looking in.
It didn’t take long to see what the pecking order was. At the top of the pyramid were the head counselors—all high school seniors. These guys all went to prep school or Five Towns high schools like Lawrence and Hewlett. Zeidner and Brownstein were easily the top ladies’ men. While most of us underlings rode the camp buses to work, they took turns driving matching candy-apple red ‘57 Chevy convertibles that the other guys called “pussy wagons.”
One step below them were the head counselors like me who attended public high schools. The jc’s, all fifteen and sixteen-year-old girls, were another notch lower, and at the bottom were the waitresses and kitchen staff—high school freshmen and sophomores. The male counselors all referred to them as “fair game.”
At the top of the girls’ food chain were three attractive and classy high school juniors from Woodsburg, the most exclusive village in the Five Towns. They were cheerleaders at Hewlett High, and each one had her own car. Their parents belonged to the Hewlett Yacht Club and to El Patio, a trendy Atlantic Beach cabana club.
I was immediately taken with them. Even in ratty camp T-shirts and cut-offs, blonde and well-tanned Linda Price, Joanne Morse, slender and elegant, and sexy, kinetic Julie Rabin all looked and carried themselves as if they’d just stepped out of a teen fashion magazine. Like Ronnie and Rob, they epitomized the privileged and exclusive milieu I was so ambivalent about.
I couldn’t tell which of the three I was most drawn to. They were all prototypes of the unattainable girls I’d been dreaming about since grade school. That they seemed so far out of reach only added to their mystique. How could I even hope to attract their attention?
When I asked Ronnie and Rob what they knew about the three, Rob said, “Don’t get your hopes up. They’re strictly off limits.”
I should have known better than to ask.
Zeidner and Brownstein loved to parade their entitlement. They’d acknowledge the likes of me, but only so long as I was content to remain in their orbit. If I deferred to them, then every so often they’d allow me brief glimpses into their privileged world—like those post cards, and now this job. Guys like them cultivate devotees, if only to reinforce their own perceived superiority. In my desperate state, I was all too willing to comply.
Come to think of it, I’d always had a tendency to subordinate myself to those who had more power or stature than I did. Back in sixth grade I let Elaine Hirsch and Alice Rosen humiliate me at the Beth El dance. In seventh grade I played disciple to Manny and his boys. And I let those two girls from the yearbook staff intimidate me. A year ago I allowed Donna to dictate the terms of our relationship, and for three years I’d willingly done Kerchman’s bidding. The price you pay in that tradeoff is the loss of your integrity. Yet, here I was doing it again.
From the beginning of summer league I’d channeled my anger and disappointment into pitching. When you think you have nothing left to prove and nothing to lose, it’s a lot easier to let go of your restraints. So in those early season Rec games I was more assertive than I’d ever been before. Whenever a hitter crowded the plate, I’d buzz the ball right under his chin. If I sensed any fear, I’d brush him back again and then snap off an outside curve ball or a low slider.
That summer I pitched better than I ever had—especially whenever I faced my now ex-high school teammate Andrew Makrides. It was well known in local jock circles that Makrides was one of the best young pitchers on the peninsula. Coaches and players talked about him as a potential big league prospect. That’s why I’d always taken a special pride in out-pitching him. But this time, I had even more incentive. Next season he was certain to be one of Coach Kerchman’s top three starters.
In early July, my team, the Wavecrest Democratic Club (a.k.a., “The Donkeys”), beat his team, the Guardians, 2-1, to win the first-half championship. But I didn’t see it as a payback or a vindication. Andrew and I always had a mutual admiration for one other. He was one of the few guys on the high school team who’d showed me any respect.
“You were a cool customer out there, Mike,” Andrew said after the game. “Who do you think you are, ‘Sal the Barber’?”
He was teasing me. Sal Maglie had been an old Dodger nemesis. His nickname was “Sal the Barber” because of his penchant for “shaving” the corners of the plate, as well as for brushing hitters back. Maglie was also known as a “gamer.” He was the pitcher who Leo Durocher gave the ball to whenever the Giants needed to win a big game. So I took Andrew’s remark as a compliment, of sorts.
The only place where I felt aggressive and confident was out on the mound—more so now than ever before. When I was pitching well, I could erase that sorry image of myself as the short, chubby kid who the popular crowd shunned or overlooked. As a result, I relished the opportunity to surprise the skeptics who didn’t think I had the goods. But put me in the middle of a social gathering—a party or a dance—and I was paralyzed with self-doubt.
I knew I’d have to reinvent myself if I were to have any chance of impressing those Woodsburg girls. I’d have to display the same kind of chutzpah and assurance that I possessed when I was pitching. And what better opportunity than now? Nobody at Grove day camp—except for Ronnie and Rob—had had any previous dealings with me. So far as those girls were concerned, I was an unknown quantity. And that’s just the way I wanted to keep things for a while.
For the first few days of camp, I spent a lot of time getting to know my co-counselor, Steve Katz. Something began to spark when we started commiserating about our high school coaches. Steve was a junior on the Lawrence High basketball team, and he was still waiting for his chance to play. I was in the same bind, I said, with my baseball coach. But I didn’t mention that I’d just quit the team. I didn’t know this guy well enough to trust him yet.
Shortly after that, we started up what would become a daily ritual. Just before reveille each morning, we’d take off our shirts, shoot baskets on the camp’s makeshift court, and make small talk. We knew we were also out there to show off—to impress the girls and let everyone know that we were jocks.
At seventeen, both of us were in the best shape of our lives. Steve was about five ten, with short blonde hair and a lithe, wiry build. He was proud of his physique—almost vain about it. I was more tentative, but I readily followed his lead.
In the previous six months I’d become much less self-conscious about my physique. My chest had filled out, my stomach was tight from doing sit-ups, and my legs were strong and firm from all those years of running on the beach.
Each morning, just after the last bus pulled in, the girl counselors, jc’s, and kitchen staff all walked past us on their way to the locker room. To attract their attention, every few days we’d challenge Ronnie and Rob to a game of two-on-two. Some mornings we managed to draw a pretty good crowd of staffers and kids.
Those games quickly turned into fierce competitions—a lot of pushing and shoving and flying elbows. To Steve and me, that court became a kind of proving ground. We cast ourselves as the scrappy underdog kids from public high schools, and we were going to vindicate ourselves by taking on the privileged preppies who we envied and disdained.
It wasn’t long before we became close allies. We both had similar backgrounds—not fully middle-class or blue collar poor. Lawrence High was an upscale Five Towns school, but Steve’s parents lived in the low-rent district. Their house, a run-down old clapboard, was situated right across the railroad tracks that divided Lawrence from Inwood, the only working-class village in the Five Towns.
Another thing that drew me to Steve was his swagger and savvy with girls. I also knew that he had a connection of some kind to the Woodsburg trio, because I saw all four of them get out of a car together on the first day of camp. I was dying to ask, but I didn’t know how to bring it up.
I imagine he knew what I was thinking anyway, because one morning when we were shooting around Steve casually mentioned that he was going steady with Annie Lieberman, the fourth member of the Woodsburg clique. I tried to hide my excitement. Since the first day of camp, I’d been trying to find some pretense that would allow me to talk to even one of those three. Now it looked like I had a possible “in”—a direct line to these previously unapproachable girls.
For the next few days I fired one question after another at Steve. At first, I was worried that he’d think I was too much of a snoop. But the more I asked, the more forthcoming he was. According to Steve, Linda was the self-proclaimed jock of the group. In his opinion, she was something of a show-off. Joanne was “the brain, the intellectual.” And Julie was what Steve called a “provocateur,” a social operator.
Each day he fed me another piece of information. Linda and Joanne were dating Ivy League college guys, he said. And last summer Julie had made it a point to let all her friends know that she was going steady with the Long Beach High basketball ace, Larry Brown. Before long, I knew all about the girls’ dating histories.
Steve was having a good time playing off of my curiosities. You could see that he relished his role. I wasn’t sure why he was deliberately trying to demystify the three girls, and, it surprised me that he was so forthcoming about his own relationship with Annie. They’d been sleeping together on the sly, he said, for nine months.
He talked about it with an edge of pride in his voice, as if what he had going with Annie was something he took for granted. It had always confounded me that some of the most well-bred, sought after girls were suckers for guys like Steve and Manny. Their attraction seemed to derive from a practiced indifference, an attitude that said, “Don’t mess with me. I’m bad.” It was the kind of reckless pose I admired but was never able to bring off.
Whether it was conscious or not, I began to look at Steve as a kind of mentor. Aside from his swagger, I was drawn to his unbridled, almost childlike enthusiasm. If there was such a thing as a connoisseur of girls, he was it. He studied their mannerisms and analyzed their behavior with the same kind of passion and intensity that I brought to baseball.
As a rule, I’d been too self-conscious, too ashamed to let other guys my age know about my inexperience and my fear of girls. I didn’t want to risk the sarcasm and ridicule. Whenever I’d talk to a guy about girls or sex, it almost always turned into an uncomfortable competition. Up until now, my only confidante was my friend Carole. For years I’d been looking for a guy like Steve to help guide me through my confusions.
I trusted Steve because so far he hadn’t tried to use my naiveté against me. And when he discussed his own sex life, he didn’t act like he was rubbing it in or trying to make me feel inferior—the way Ronnie and Rob did. My biggest worry was that I’d grant him too much power over me, the way I’d done with Manny back in junior high.
Midway through the summer, Steve and I were out shooting baskets, as usual, when the buses pulled in. It was two days before the night of the staff beach party. All week it had been troubling me that I hadn’t gathered the courage to approach any of the three girls.
The early morning sun was already heating up the court. Even with our shirts off, we’d already started to break a sweat. As the staff started to shuffle by, I spotted Julie, Joanne, and Linda coming up the path. They were swinging their lunch bags and chatting away. Just as they were passing the court, they turned and looked at us. My mouth went dry. I kept on shooting baskets and talking to Steve, pretending not to notice them. When they moved up the path, I heard what sounded like a wolf whistle, followed by a chorus of high-pitched voices.
One of them said, “Pretty sexy, you guys. You oughta be in the Charles Atlas ads.”
The blood rushed to my neck and face. When I turned, I saw them pointing their fingers at us and giggling. I suddenly felt exposed and shamed. It reminded me of that awful sixth grade dance.
“What was that all about?” I asked Steve.
“They think you’re cute,” he said. “It’s their way of letting you know it.”
His reply seemed too flip. Was this a set-up that the four of them planned? A way of making me look foolish?
He must have seen the look on my face, because he dropped the basketball and started to explain. He’d gotten a ride home with the girls the night before, he said, and all three pumped him for information. His story seemed way too contrived. I was becoming even more suspicious.
“They were asking me if you have a girlfriend, where you’re from, where you go to school, where you live—that kind of stuff.”
I wanted to believe that he was telling the truth, so I decided to test him.
“How come you didn’t tell me all this before?”
“I was going to, later on.”
I still wasn’t buying it.
“What did you tell them?”
“That you were taken. That you had a girlfriend.”
“But, it isn’t true. Suppose one of them asks me?”
“What are the chances of that?” he laughed. “You’re not exactly Mr. Personality, you know. You haven’t said a word to any of them since camp began.”
Steve shook his head, like he was scolding a kid brother for not picking up his toys.
“Look, you need to lose this attitude,” he said. “They’re interested in you, okay? Handle it. It’s no big deal, believe me.”
He paused for a long moment and grimaced. He seemed more amused by me than exasperated.
“Why me?” I said, fishing for reassurance. “They can get any guy they want.”
He softened his tone. “That’s just the point. I know those girls. They’re convinced that every guy on the planet has the hots for them.”
“I’m not following you,” I said.
“They have no idea that you’re afraid to talk to them. They think you’re not interested.”
“Look, he went on,” warming to the task. “Don’t flip out just because they’re rich and popular. Guys like us are trophies to them. They think we’re either rocks or juvenile delinquents.”
I’d thought about this before, but it was reassuring to hear it from someone more practiced and confident than I was. Steve now had my full attention.
“It doesn’t hurt that we’re athletes, either,” he offered. “They’re cheerleaders. What does that tell you?”
Everything he’d said made sense. It was like I was seeing it for the first time, though. I checked the impulse to tell him how grateful I was for his advice. There I was, putting myself in the subordinate role again.
“Look,” he said, “Julie didn’t pick Larry Brown because of his good looks or money. You know what I’m saying?”
It’s funny how just a little bit of reinforcement can shift your point of view. At the afternoon staff meeting I thought I caught all three girls staring at me and giggling again. This time, it gave me a tiny morale boost. And a glimmer of hope.
After the meeting, Steve and I hung around to devise a scheme for Saturday night’s beach party. I’d been worrying all week, thinking about the humiliating dances and mixers I’d gone to. The awkward sparring, the small talk, the popular crowd pairing off with one another, while I’d invariably end up alone or with some other loser.
But Steve’s plan calmed me down. He would run interference for me. The only thing I’d have to do was follow his lead.
“It’ll be a two-minute hit and run,” he said “Then we’ll both be out of there like a cool breeze.”
When I woke up the next morning, I was looking forward to the party with almost as much anticipation as if I was preparing to pitch a ball game.
That night, everyone sat around the fire, roasting marshmallows and singing “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” and a bunch of other dumb camp songs. After an hour, I started getting fidgety. Finally Steve gave me the “let’s go” sign, and we started to walk over to the fire pit where the three girls had congregated. I made certain not to look over at them, but every step I took made me feel more self-conscious and uneasy. I was thankful it was so dark.
Without any small talk, Steve introduced me. Then he quickly said something about the two of us having a previous commitment. Right as we were leaving, he turned back and said, “Why don’t we all get together at the picnic next Friday, right after the softball game.”
I thought I saw Linda the jock nod in agreement. To sweeten the offer, Steve promised he’d invite Annie to come along. Before they could respond, he nodded in my direction and we took off.
It was his idea not to hang around at the beach party. It would go better, he said, if the girls saw me first on my own turf, doing what I did best—which was, of course, playing ball.
“Think of it as having home field advantage,” he laughed.
How did Steve become so shrewd, so fearless? You had to have a lot of balls to make this work. If I’d have dreamed it up on my own, I’m sure I’d have already bailed out by now.
On Monday morning, Steve added one more wrinkle to the plan. He wanted my “phantom girlfriend” to show up at the picnic on Friday.
“It’ll make you look even better,” he said.
I tried to talk him out of it. But he’d been right about everything else. No matter how improbable the whole thing seemed, I decided to go along with it.
The phantom, girlfriend idea took root the previous week, when I was whining about my lousy luck with girls. To gain some sympathy, I’d told Steve the story of my recently failed romance with Ellen Wiseman.
Just before Memorial Day weekend, my friend Carole had brokered another blind date for me, this time it was with Ellen, who she described as a cute, brainy sophomore from her Advanced Geometry class.
On first impression, Ellen looked like the epitome of the “sweet old-fashioned girl” that Teresa Brewer was singing about that spring. She had shoulder-length sandy-blonde hair, deep blue eyes, a pale complexion, and an angelic smile. The way she dressed made her look much too staid: flair skirts, loose cardigans, and lacy blouses, which, I later found out, hid a shapely, alluring figure. But when I met her, Ellen could have passed for a choirgirl. Not exactly my ideal. With my track record, though, I couldn’t afford to be choosy.
We seemed like such an improbable match. On our first few dates, she was so demure and reserved. When I finally pressed her, I found out that Ellen was class valedictorian in junior high, she’d been an exchange student in France, and she was already aiming for a scholarship to Vassar or Wellesley.
I was ambivalent about her. She seemed too straight-laced and aloof. Yet she was enthusiastic about me. She went along with all my suggestions. I took her to a jazz club, a foreign film, and a Dodger game. She came to one of my summer league games, and she even seemed amused when I went off on one of my half-cocked rants about Kerchman, or some riff about the Dodgers. It was a heady feeling to be the one who was setting the agenda. It was what Donna must have felt like when she was running the show with me.
But it still troubled me that Ellen was so reticent to talk about anything personal. Every time I’d ask who her friends were, what kind of boys she liked, who she’d gone out with before me—she’d change the subject.
The big surprise was that when it came to making out and petting, Ellen took the lead. It disarmed me, of course, and made me reconsider all my preconceptions. Once we got started, we were grabbing each other every chance we got. I continued to feel ambivalent, though. Ellen was so much the opposite of the popular girls I was enamored of. Yet I loved the idea that she had a crush on me. For the first time, I wasn’t waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It all changed on a balmy evening in June when we went to the beach to watch the fireworks display. Everything about the setting was exotic: the salty ocean aroma, beach fires burning in the distance, muted strains of music from portable radios, waves lapping on the shore, and the sporadic pop-pop-pop of the multi-colored flares that intermittently lit up the beach and the water.
One thing led to another, and we ended up on Ellen’s blanket making out under the boardwalk. We started necking, then quickly moved to petting. The night, the music, the fires, the waves, the fireworks—everything fell away. I’d been dreaming about this ever since that time in junior high when I found out that Manny and Cindy were making it under the 116th Street boardwalk.
Ellen and I kept at it, but at the instant when it seemed there’d be no turning back, she jumped up, shook the sand out of her hair, and sat cross-legged, Indian style on the blanket.
“We have to talk,” she said.
All I could think of was that it’s happening again: the old game of who’s in charge of sex. Turns out that there was a boyfriend—at Andover—a guy she characterized as smart but unimaginative. Too preoccupied with school and college applications, she said. Even in my super-agitated state, I knew what that meant. He wasn’t paying enough attention to her. That’s why she was here with me.
He was from a rich family in Hewlett Bay Park. At sixteen, he was already driving his own T-Bird and traveling abroad with his parents in the summers. His future was mapped out. When he graduated from college, he’d go to med school and later take over his father’s Park Avenue Orthopedic practice. They’d been going steady, it seems, for three years; and of course everyone expected them to get married after college.
Had this been a movie, it would have been a funny scene. But I was furious with her. And mad at myself for getting chumped again. My stomach was hollow. I stood up to leave. Ellen pulled me back on the blanket. She was under a lot of pressure, she said. Didn’t know how to break up with this guy. Both sets of parents agreed they were made for each other, and so on.
What it came down to was that she just wasn’t ready to betray the boyfriend. She was asking me in her typically indirect way if I wouldn’t mind being the “other guy” just for a while, until she got her priorities straightened out. I said I’d think about it. I wasn’t happy about any of it, of course. But under the circumstances, I had to admit that it was not an unreasonable request, because the truth was that neither of us had a good enough reason to cut the other one loose. We were both using each other to bolster our confidence.
When I finished the story, Steve said, “You’re not in love with her, right? And you’re not screwing her? Means you’re in the driver’s seat.”
“So how come it doesn’t feel that way to me?”
“She owes you big time. And don’t kid yourself, she knows it. Ask her to the picnic and tell her why.”
Just like that? What was I getting myself into? The whole thing was turning into an elaborate production. I told Steve I was too embarrassed to ask Ellen to do it.
“I bet you an egg cream she won’t say no,” he said.
Never second-guess an aficionado. Steve knew how all of this worked. Just as he’d predicted, Ellen was all too willing to participate.
The whole routine was more complicated than I’d ever imagined. All I could do was shake my head in wonder. The gamesmanship here wasn’t a lot different from the kinds of tradeoffs I used to make with all three of my coaches.
What transpired on Friday was surreal. For the entire day—the game, the picnic, and the evening—I was in “the zone.” The ball game itself was like a dream fantasy. Steve and I, and Ronnie and Rob were the co-captains for our respective teams. That was incentive enough to want to win the game. We each picked five other staff members and two of the oldest campers. Partly on intuition and partly by design, I picked Linda Price to be our tenth player. I knew she was competitive, and I could tell from watching her swim and pitch to her group that she was a good athlete. I also knew that choosing Linda wasn’t going to hurt me any—with either her or her two girlfriends.
I was so keyed up that I couldn’t even sit on the bench between innings. I coached third base and never once looked up at the kids, staff members, or the parents in the bleachers. I stayed alert to every nuance and detail on the field, all the while imagining that Joanne and Julie were watching every move I made.
On the field and at bat I played fully on instinct. I anticipated every ball hit to me at short, I got three hits, and I hit the game winning home run, a long fly ball that carried over the fence and landed in the swimming pool. Even the last play of the game couldn’t have been better scripted. Linda made a running catch of a fly ball with the tying run on third base. That hunch, too, had paid off.
When the kids and staff came streaming out of the bleachers, Julie and Joanne gave Linda a hug. Then all three of them hugged Steve and me. My stomach was flip-flopping. Steve had known all along exactly what he was doing.
Just before the picnic started, Julie asked if Steve and I would pose for a picture. I was glistening with sweat and still in a state of mild euphoria.
“Take off your shirts, you guys,” she said. “I’ve wanted to take this picture all summer.”
“I bet you have,” Steve whispered to me under his breath. He squeezed my arm as if to say, “She’s the one. Go for it.”
Julie circled her lips with her tongue and pointed her Brownie box camera at us. Next, she posed us individually—Steve first, then me. As we changed positions he whispered, “She’s using me to get to you.”
I tried to act composed, even nonchalant. But I was so flushed, I could hardly stand still for the picture. So this is what it feels like to be pursued.
Later on, Ellen showed up at the picnic wearing a pair of skintight white shorts and a form fitting red halter top. All afternoon Ronnie and Rob followed her everywhere she went. I was laughing to myself, knowing they’d be all over me with questions on Monday morning. Even Steve, who’d brought Annie with him, hung around the food table flirting with Ellen. She thrived on the attention. And why not? It was her reward for going along with our scheme—the quid pro quo Steve had had in mind all along.
Before the picnic was about to break up, I grabbed Ellen’s hand, marched up to the three girls, and proudly introduced her. I watched them coldly eye her up and down. Ellen didn’t even flinch. She was playing her role to the hilt. The day had already gone way beyond my expectations, but there was more to come. As we were all packing up, Steve volunteered to drive us to Cairo’s. This was going to be a real treat. Cairo’s had even more of a mystique than the State Diner. I’d heard so much about it that it had assumed almost mythical stature in my imagination. Cairo’s was located in the roughest part of Inwood. The owners, Teddy and Frank, were rumored to have Mafia ties. On weekends, Five Towns studs and Far Rockaway jocks took their girlfriends there “to be seen.”
The restaurant itself was an unimposing storefront, the ground floor of an old restored clapboard house. You could smell the aroma of wood fired pizza as soon as you got out of the car. When we walked through the foyer, it was like entering an exclusive inner sanctum. The dining room was just past the bar, to the left. It was brightly lit and alive with the hum and buzz of animated dinner talk. The small, square tables, most of them two and four tops, were draped with standard red and white checked tablecloths. Each one had a wicker Chianti decanter that served as a candleholder. Dozens of framed black-and-white photos hung on the polished, knotty pine walls—pictures of former Lawrence and Far Rockaway High athletic heroes, and autographed photos of celebrities who’d visited the restaurant.
When we arrived, Julie, Joanne, and Linda were comfortably ensconced in their natural habitat—holding court at a center table, smoking, laughing loudly, and drinking beer. They were decked out in white linen pants and gauzy see-through tops. All three were surrounded by a knot of preppy looking cabana boys who had on white ducks and Topsiders with no socks. They each had a V-neck sweater draped around their El Patio T-shirts. All of them—the guys and the girls—looked like they’d just gotten off their parents’ yachts.
As we passed their table, Steve and Annie stopped to talk. I made sure to catch all three girls’ eyes before giving them a perfunctory wave. Later, when Ellen got up to go to the bathroom, I caught the El Patio guys eyeballing her. She did look sexy. For a second, I felt a twinge of desire. Maybe I was making a big mistake.
All evening the three girls kept turning around and shooting glances in our direction. I even heard one of the El Patio guys imploring Julie to invite us over to the table. For that one evening, everything was working right.
All weekend I was worrying about what to do next. Which one should I ask out? How should I go about it? If I asked one, how would the other two feel? Then, I stopped myself. How presumptuous it was to think that all three were interested in me.
Steve had no such hesitations. “Go out with all of them and then decide.”
Of course he’d say that.
“I’d never have the balls to ask all of them out,” I told him. But I was being partly disingenuous. The seed had already been planted.
On Wednesday, just before free swim, Steve whispered, “Before you do anything, check out the girls’ locker room.”
I couldn’t concentrate for the rest of the afternoon. I waited until all the cars and buses had begun to fill up before I let myself into the locker room. It was dingy and dank, and it reeked of wet towels and stale perfume. I pulled the string above the bare light bulb. Taped just above one of the lockers was the photograph that Julie had taken of me last Saturday. I stood there, transfixed. Was it really me? The guy in that picture had a jet-black flattop, a trim waist, tapered hips, and tightly muscled thighs. It was me, all right. But it wasn’t the image I saw every day when I looked in my bedroom mirror.
It was one of those fleeting, serendipitous moments where you see yourself exactly as you’ve always wanted others to see you. It was such a shock because I’d lived for so long with the opposite image of myself, the one that had been imprinted on my psyche since I was a kid. Looking at that photograph was like seeing a hologram, a mirage that could vanish or shift at any moment.
I remember the precise moment that Julie took the photo. She was kneeling on one knee, looking up. That’s why the broad-chested guy in the picture looked so tall and lean. I noticed for the first time that he had a confident, almost cocky look on his face.
I knew right then that I’d better take advantage of the moment. How likely was it that I’d ever see myself in this light again?