Charles Troob

Breakfast

by

by Charles Troob

For Richard Hogan, 1936-2017

He filled the kettle
ground the beans
found a chunk of butter
in a corner of the fridge

selected a scarf
from the stack heaped on a closet hook
swirled it around his neck

chose a jacket to go with the scarf
and the shirt and the boots
and the ratty jeans

checked the mirror
made a few adjustments
added another scarf
said “O-la”
sailed out the door

then crossed the street
to charm the women at La Bergamote—

returning with fresh rolls…

and perhaps a croissant

Charles Troob adds: My dear friend Richard Hogan encouraged everyone to be creative. He loved my writng, and always asked me to read it aloud to him.

Wisteria

by

by Charles Troob

Wisteria encloses our yard on three sides
Tendrils poke through fence slats
thick ropy stems burrow underneath

A foot or two in from the property line
a vine shoots up from the soil
Every half inch or so it spews out
a cluster of leaves—five pairs
and one more on the end
in mindless replication
then marches on
seizing every opportunity to take hold and climb

A few weeks ago I found wisteria poking
under the fence, then twisted around a seven-foot
false cypress in stranglehold from base to top
I snipped it at the base
spent a quarter hour unraveling
ten yards or so of green vine
and tossed it in the street
for village compost

If the neighbors joined
eradication might be possible
but invasion to me is decoration to them
Next door an arbor supports wisteria a foot thick
Late May it blooms in grapey clusters
the scent heavy
as if to show up the graceful lilacs
that open on Mother’s Day and quickly fade—
like Mama Rose in Gypsy
taking the stage after her daughter’s star turn
blowsy overripe
unlovable but a life force

Charles Troob attends Sarah White’s weekly poetry group. Occasionally he gets lucky and something good comes out.  Enjoy!  


			


					
			





	

					

				
Two Tales from the Barnyard
		

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by Charles Troob


Thin Pig


Algernon was the pick of the litter, frisky and lithe, but even as an infant piglet he spent little time at his mother’s teat.   Later, as his siblings gathered around the swill buckets, he went hunting for heirloom grains–teff, quinoa, farro–and leafy greens. When Anastasia the sow fretted, Algy said to her, “Mom, I’m not scrawny, I’m svelte.”  He grew pink and lean.


A Department of Agriculture rep came to inspect the farm.  “Is that really a pig?” he asked.  “He looks like a seal with a snout and four trotters.”  When the farmer told him about Algernon’s finicky eating habits, the rep roared with laughter and sent a text to the White House nutrition initiative.


Algernon was sent on a series of inspirational visits to junior high schools.  A camera team gave him a screen test, and within a week Algy made a video with Miss Piggy, “Kisses sweeter than swine,” which went viral.  Simon Cowell assembled a new group, Portion Control:  Algernon was the lead, backed by a whippet and a ferret.  They were booked for Royal Albert Hall in Summer 2017.


Meanwhile, in between public appearances, Algernon went from farm to farm to tell other pigs that they would live longer if they kept the pounds off.  Anastasia warned him not to be reckless, but he was on a crusade.  One day an angry meatpacker fired an AK-47 at him and it was all over.   His soul ascended to hog heaven.  His carcass was donated to the Harvard School of Public Health.  His hide was tanned and made into a replica of the Deflategate football, and is now in the Smithsonian.


MORAL:  IF YOU MARCH TO A DIFFERENT DRUMMER, EXPECT TO GO OUT IN A FLOURISH OF TRUMPETS


Why the Chicken Crossed the Road—Twice


At the age of six months, a plump little pullet, I proudly extruded my first eggs.  Hours later they were gone from my nest.  I asked old Henny Penny what had happened.  She snickered, “Hey, birdbrain, didn’t you know?  We’re industrial producers, not moms.”


I was devastated to learn the facts of chicken life. Still, I wanted to save my gene pool from the frying pan.  For that, there was no time like the present.  I ran to the far corner of the barnyard and squeezed through the fence.


With the farm behind my tail, I was facing a dusty road.  On its other side I saw tall grass and arching purple flowers.  Butterflies danced over the waving stalks.  A bright future beckoned.  I strutted across the ruts and gravel, and slithered into the meadow.  The air was suffused with heavenly scents, not chicken shit.


I was in paradise–until snack time.  It took forever to dig up a worm.  There was nothing to drink.  And soon I would have to build my own nest.  It dawned on me that this escape business needed a bit of planning.  I crossed the road a second time and headed for home.


Before I could say ”E-I-E-I-O” a cock with gorgeous amber feathers was on top of me.  We fluffed around for a while.  “Who are you,” I said, “and why haven’t I seen you before?”


“I just got here,” he replied.  “Farmer Francine brought me in as a change agent.  My name is Pecker.”


I couldn’t get enough of that big guy.  He sure changed me.  Dreams of a different life flew right out of my head.  As for motherhood–I’m having too much fun to sit and brood.


MORAL:  A JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND MILES STARTS WITH A SINGLE STEP, AND ENDS AT LUNCHTIME.


 


These were written for the IRP Writing Workshop study group.  One week’s assignment was to write a fable:  “Thin Pig” was the result.  Another week posed the question, “Why did the chicken cross the road?”  


 


 

			


					
			





	

					

				
Everyday Magic: A Memoir
		

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by Charles Troob


In the early 1970s, when preparing to teach in elementary school, I was introduced to the work of Jean Piaget.  His essays deal with how children develop a cognitive understanding of the world.  For example, Piaget observed that a small child couldn’t see—even after repeated demonstrations– that a tall thin beaker and a short fat one may hold the same amount of water.  A few years later the child gets this concept quite easily.   Piaget theorized that children go through cognitive stages, and he speculated that this is partly due to biological constraints—a six-year-old brain has wiring that is more complex than the wiring of a four-year-old, and can support more elaborate thinking.


I was skeptical about that brain wiring stuff. Based on my own experience, it was no surprise that children take years to see the world as adults do.  Much of what grownups think of as common sense is miraculous to a child.


I taught myself to read when I was three.  By the time I was five I chatted with adults in grown-up language.   But daily life continually astounded and perplexed me.   Light bulbs went on when you hit a switch. The refrigerator made cold air.  Birds and airplanes stayed aloft.  A needle in a phonograph record sent music to a speaker, and a radio played sounds that traveled through the air.  None of this made sense, though it seemed to be true. I read a story in which a bean became a mile-high beanstalk.  Was this a fantasy or was it possible?  It did seem improbable—but really, no more unlikely than that a seed in my grandmother’s garden turned into a radish or a zinnia.


So if Piaget’s children—he first observed his own kids– failed to understand that water can assume many shapes, I wouldn’t rush to conclude that they had immature brains or logic.    Maybe this property of liquids is just an example of everyday magic that a child must see many, many times to accept as true.


Here are two memories of how I struggled to distinguish the possible from the impossible, the true from the false.


In many stories someone is brought to a new place by entering a door—or going down a rabbit hole.  In the game of Clue, two secret passages let you cross the board in a single move.   Did such things exist in the real world?  I wasn’t sure.  Near our apartment a highway tunneled under Queens Boulevard.   In the tunnel a sign on a door said “passage to Union Turnpike.”   I used to wonder what would happen when you went through that door.  You were transported to Union Turnpike, but how?  Only years later did I realize there was a staircase to the roadway above.


I was amazed to find out that four times three equals three times four–and that this is not just a coincidence but a rule: seven times five equals five times seven, and so on.   I’d put out four rows of three pennies.  Then I’d shift them into three columns of four pennies.  Then I’d shift them again.   As four threes become three fours before my eyes, I sort of got it, but I didn’t really believe it.  I did this over and over, just to confirm that the world hadn’t changed and this mysterious fact was still true.


I suspect that most children don’t much worry about stuff like this, but to me it was very important to learn about the “real” world in which adults lived.  I was weak and awkward.   Other kids might push their way through life with force and bluster—I would depend on knowledge, not my useless body and timid spirit.


From this point of view mathematics was particularly satisfying and promising.  Even a small child can see that grownups depend on numbers.   Money is exchanged, food is weighed, cars have speedometers and odometers.   Best of all, arithmetic gives you definitive answers you can count on.  I was thrilled to learn the rules for “carrying” in addition, “borrowing” in subtraction, and that marvelous complicated engine called long division.  When I got to plane geometry in tenth grade I was dazzled by the strange theorems and even more by Euclid’s system for proving them.


Though I soaked up book learning and schoolwork like a sponge, one thing troubled me greatly.   How would I put all this knowledge to use?  What other kinds of skills were required to be effective in the real world, and how did you acquire them?  I often asked older people this question.  The only answer I ever got was, “Experience.”   This was obviously true, but no answer at all.


*****


Throughout my adult life I have remained fascinated by the relationship between thinking and doing, knowledge and action, theory and practice.   And my need to learn about things in advance—to have a map of the terrain before venturing out—evolved into a talent for making sense of data, for diagnosing problems, for streamlining work processes and creating new systems.  For any job that could be described as “analyst” or “planner” or “evaluator” I was a natural.


As for the other parts of making things happen—I was not a natural at all.     Only with many years of “experience”–and training—did I begin to learn to supervise, negotiate, make tough decisions, and deal with crises.


But I did learn all these to some extent.  By the time I retired I was somewhat less perplexed and amazed by life in the real world than I had been as a little boy.


 


Charles Troob wrote this for an IRP study group in Guided Autobiography.  Many thanks to David Grogan, the coordinator, and to the other participants, who gave so much of themselves in this remarkable journey.

			


					
			





	

					

				
Car Stories From the Writing Workshop, Spring 2016
		

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Road Trip


by Lisa Cristal


I had finally convinced my husband, Bruce, that we were responsible adults.  We could stop inheriting old clunker cars and buy one that we could take care of for many years.


The black shiny Toyota Avalon was a sensible, highly rated car that would accommodate our growing children. We splurged and added a sunroof. We loved that car.


A week after purchase it was time for our first road trip. Our two small children fidgeted and fought most of the drive while Bruce accustomed himself to the nuances of a new car.  We were on the last part of the highway, within 10 minutes of our destination, when suddenly out of the corner of my eye I saw a brown blur shoot out of the woods and charge toward the driver’s side of the car.   The impact pushed us off the road.  Looking up through the sunroof I saw the deer catapult over the car. Bruce tightly steered the car and righted us onto the road.


Our daughter asked where Bambi went.  “To find his mother,” I replied. Unfortunately, her older brother said that he saw the deer fly over the roof of the car. “Yes, “I said, covering, “but I saw him scamper away.”


Actually, Bruce had seen the deer twitching by the side of the road.  We stopped at a general store to report the accident. Bruce got out to inspect the damage.  The entire front of the car was smashed in and covered in blood and hair. Our son asked why daddy was kicking the pole of the payphone and yelling. “Stay in the car,” I ordered. “He is just trying to kick off the mud on his shoes.”


We fixed the car but it was never the same. We hated that car.


I spent my  entire career writing non-fiction and decided to go outside my comfort zone and take Writing Gymnastics. The support and provided by class members has allowed me to discover the great pleasure  of writing fiction.


 


Beryl


by Elaine Greene Weisburg


Our first car, bought for $200 soon after we were married, was a used pre-war English Standard—a right-hand drive, two-seater, rag-top convertible. My husband named her after a current English movie character and we pronounced it English style: BED-ul. It was a source of entertainment as well as transportation. Even the kids in the street where we parked enjoyed it. We could tell that they played in the car at night and we assumed they used it as a stage set for pretend games, but they never harmed it. Anyway, we couldn’t lock them out because the two windows were Isenglass, set into a canvas surround that snapped into the snazzy low-cut doors.


I suspect some alarmed phone calls took place between our two sets of parents but neither set offered us a real car, so we enjoyed Beryl for a few years till we were expecting a baby. Then we sold her for the price we had paid. By that time the transmission was shot and we had to get the neighborhood boys to push us down the hill for the engine to start.


I still remember an encounter one rainy summer night on Sag Harbor’s Main Street. My husband was at the wheel and Dave, his former roommate, was sitting next to him. I was folded up on a narrow back ledge meant for luggage—your cricket bats and such—when a police officer stopped us about a sputtering tail light. He approached the left side and Dave obligingly snapped open the window. The officer asked to see Dave’s driver’s license. Dave respectfully replied, “But Sir, I am not driving.” Nobody laughed, the officer looked over at my husband and mumbled “Have it fixed” and quickly left us. Then we cracked up.


Elaine Greene Weisburg (under her first two names) worked as an editor at Seventeen, Esquire, House & Garden, and House Beautiful, spending two decades each at the latter two publication. Voices helps her keep her hand in. 


 


Rainbow of Cars


by Sara Pettit


I’m the least knowledgeable person about cars you can find. Being a born New Yorker my family never owned a car but we all got Driver’s Licenses so we could have ID’s to cash checks. My inability to tell one car from another made it impossible for guys to impress me with their wheels when I went on dates..


When I finally did get a car it was a Dodge Omni. The only car on the market at the time worse than the Omni was the Yugo. I would drive the car around East Hampton where the Honda of East Hampton was a De Lorean or a Porsche. I had a nifty little bumper sticker on the back that said, “My Other Car is a Piece of Shit also!” You can see I like to irritate the Hamptonites.


About 5 years ago I took a trip to Cuba and being a visual person I was overcome by the beauty of the Cuban cars. Most cars were from 1960 or earlier and they were in a rainbow of colors that rivaled any floral bouquet I’ve ever seen.


For two weeks I stood at stop lights all over Cuba and photographed cars. When I got back to New York I showed them to a gallerist who invited me to have a one person show and I was invited to become a member of the gallery on the basis of my Cuban car photographs.


These cars were a tribute to the ingenuity of the Cuban people who kept them running and in perfect condition. Never in my wildest imagination did I think I would be fascinated by cars and that they would give me entrée into the New York City art world..


I spent most of my life as a textile designer and artist. It is through the IRP that I discovered my interest in writing. I look forward to my writing classes and the challenges they set for me.


 


Oldsmobile


by Charles Troob


My Grandpa had a boxy two-tone Oldsmobile 88. It seemed weightier than Dad’s series of Buicks–but maybe this was just the secure feeling given by Grandpa’s methodical driving, along with the comfortable odor from years of loving use. He would take a grandson or two out to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, to watch the coming and going at the LIRR trainyard. With Grandma we would go to Jones Beach in the off season to take in the salt air. My first Sunday school was in Kew Gardens. Grandpa would proudly drive me there, then pick me up and take me to their house in Jamaica for the afternoon.


In time the house was sold and my grandparents moved to an apartment not far from us in Forest Hills. Grandpa would regularly drive over to bring us Grandma’s chicken soup or borscht, her brownies or cupcakes–or just to say hello. Sometimes they would drop in together after an hour with family and friends at the cemetery off the Interboro Parkway.


In 1970 I left graduate school and moved back home. That summer Grandpa admitted to feeling poorly and was rushed to the hospital. A few agonizing weeks later he was dead of cancer. The ancient Oldsmobile was passed on to me. In September I started a day job at a public school in Bedford-Stuyvesant and an adjunct college position in the west Bronx. I tooled around the outer boroughs, enveloped by Grandpa’s kind spirit, ignoring the worsening tailpipe fumes.


On my way into Manhattan one evening I was stopped at a tollbooth and told that the car was not welcome in the Midtown Tunnel. The next day, at a junkyard near Shea Stadium, Dad and I sadly said goodbye to Grandpa a second time.


I am grateful to the IRP for making me write something each week — and for providing a receptive  audience.


 


Car Ride, 1945


by Lorna Porter


Nestled in a drowsy state, I hear the purr of motor and feel my sister’s leg stretched along mine. We have a wool blanket sprawled over us.


She lies on her side with her head at the other end of the back seat from me. I am propped with a pillow against the arm-rest on the door. Lights flash rhythmically through the dark car, yet I am drifting softly.


Kate is seven and I am six, on a long drive that has lasted all day from Connecticut to Pennsylvania. In front, my mother may be asleep, and surely my two-year-old sister, Emily, is asleep on her lap. My father drives silently against the night air.  Briefly, my mind sees me as a bunny down a snug hole with my bunny family.


There is no greater safety in life than having our entire family held close in this humming embrace. No one else in the world exists and no one in our family will ever be apart or alone. The heavy metal of our sturdy Packard is a tank like the soldiers have and we are a little  army headed for home. Dad will get us there.


I enjoy the weekly writing exercises and critiques that the IRP writing workshop has provided for many years now.


 


Wheels


by Tom Ashley


One of the great perks when I was elevated into a management position was a new car when I became the head of sales at Turner Broadcasting. I had owned some great cars in the past. After all, I was from Detroit. But the idea of having a nice new car with gas, insurance and repairs fully covered was a big-time bonus.


I was provided with a list of several dealerships with whom we were doing business and took the weekend to shop. Turner didn’t care what it was, but it had to be fairly large for taking clients to lunch, dinner and sporting events. I settled on the biggest Pontiac Grand Prix ever made, jet black and equipped with the largest engine on the market. It was fully loaded with every imaginable option: air conditioning, tape deck, sun roof and it even had a device to listen to, not watch, all of the local television stations. That baby could fly. Other than flooring the accelerator, I took great care of that machine. It was washed every week and it glistened to the point that I could comb my hair in its hood reflection.


About nine months into my job I pulled into my regular spot next to Turner’s. His red Ferarri was nowhere in sight. In its place was a Toyota. I figured Ted was out of town and Vera, his long-suffering secretary, had parked in his space. Wrong.


He must have seen me entering the building as he screeched, “[author, author], come on in here.” In I went. “[author], those A-rabs have us by the balls and are starting to squeeze hard.” He rambled on about an oil embargo, then, cutting to the bottom line, I was told to head over to Voyles’ Toyota, turn in the Grand Prix and pick up my new car. I don’t know if you recall those early Toyotas, but this was not my happiest moment. I was pissed as I drove off Voyles’ lot in a pea-green, stick-shift, AM-radioed, roll-up-windowed deathtrap. My lawnmower had a larger motor.


A few months later I arrived at the office simultaneously with Turner who was driving a new Lincoln Continental. After my, “What’s this, Ted?” he informed me, “[author], I got to thinking how valuable my life is and how my children should not be put at risk. Driving around in that Toyota was far too dangerous…for me.”


“Are you telling me your life and your kids are more important than my life and my children?”


A week later I had a new Grand Prix.


Taking many study groups and writing over the years at the IRP has been a growing and stimulating process. In college I dreaded my writing courses. I LOVE them now.


 


Cuba and Cars 


by Carmen Mason


I was going to Cuba in 2009. I had a list of items we could take to its struggling people, mainly pencils, notebooks, candies. I’d learned from friends these would be immediately sold for a quick profit so I packed a lot, but then I also decided on some baseballs and half a suitcase of professional pliers, hammers, Allen wrenches, screw drivers, tweezers and packets of nails, screws, nuts, bolts, coils of wire, crazy glue, work gloves and flashlight visors.


Once in Cuba, we drove to a small house in a run-down barrio. The grandmother of the family — living under one low and metal-patched roof –- was boiling strong tangy coffee in a battered pot. The kitchen cabinets were makeshift; the beds and sparse tables and chairs like ones resting in the decaying lots of the South Bronx.


The Castillo family was shy but smiling. Senior Castillo shook our hands and lead us from room to room, then out into his dusty, struggling garden. And there it was: a bright green Chevy Bel Air parked next to a table of taped-up hammers and awls, plastic scraps and broken parts.


On our way to the Castillos we’d cheered, even shouted ‘holas’ out the bus windows to the proud drivers of a Ford Mustang Dodge Challenger, two Daytonas, and a Plymouth Superbird – all 50’s or 60’s models. Now we were close-up to Senor Castillo’s 1957 four door sedan. He opened the hood lovingly. Inside were the intricate connections of tubes and wires and obviously jerry-built substitute parts body-fillered in place.


Before we all said goodbye I took out my heavy pack of tools and parts and gave it to him. He opened it hesitantly. Then he fell to his knees and started to weep. His wife rushed to his side, then turned to me and laughed like a young girl.


I was an English teacher of literature for 35 years andI have been writing forever and published here and there through the years. Editing for VOICES has been an added challenge and I am thrilled that I could help our VOICES come into its own. 

			


					
			





	

					

				
Un Amour de Swann
		

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by Charles Troob


 


Held captive by the whims of a faithless lover

I opened an app, found someone available:

brawny and sensual, seductive as all get-out.

I was going to send a message


via the app to Mr. Available

but my heart wasn’t in it.

I was going to send an exquisitely crafted message

perverse and passionate


but my heart wasn’t in it.

I put down the phone and turned instead to Proust

perverse and passionate

on every page of his long, winding text.


I put down the phone and turned instead to Proust,

burying myself in the whims of faithless lovers

on every page of his exquisitely crafted text:

brawny and sensual, seductive as all get-out.




 


This was written for Sarah White’s poetry group.  It’s a pantoum, a strict form in which stanzas are linked by lines which repeat, with some variation.  It was a struggle to put the pieces together until Proust got into it, and then everything seemed to fit.  

			


					
			





	

					

				
The Age of Innocence: A Memoir
		

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by Charles Troob


I


Little children are bundles of energy. Not me. I sat, placid. I had no interest in running around and tired easily. My brain worked overtime, but the message never got out to my body.


Mother didn’t want me to become bookish and weird, and after school she pushed me outside to play. I enjoyed potsy and box ball and the occasional round of tag or blind-man’s-bluff, but the neighborhood boys were into stickball and touch football. I was hopeless at these; my eyes and hands didn’t work together. I was bored and lonely, eager to escape the prison of childhood.


The after-school problem was solved when I was welcomed in the homes of some classmates. Their mothers were glad to have us in the house, playing Monopoly or card games, or just gossiping. We might even go out and throw a ball around. But at school and summer camp there was no getting away from competitive sports, and when we divided up for basketball or softball I felt like a loser. My parents told me to work at it. What did they know? They had strong bodies and magical fingers, which they failed to pass on to me. The summer I was ten my camp promoted a mile swim across the lake. You had to do eighty consecutive laps in the swimming area to qualify. Week after week I pushed myself. I doggedly achieved both goals, but all I got out of it was the grim satisfaction of mission accomplished. I still couldn’t win a swimming race.


Oh, to be an adult, when I wouldn’t be judged by how fast I could run, how far I could throw, how well I could catch. Still, growing up had its own terrors. Would I be drafted? I could never survive Basic Training. Would I learn to drive a car? Would I develop the strength and skill to lift, carry and fix; to be assertive; to protect my wife and children? Would I, could I ever be a real man?


II


After my bar mitzvah I began a second Jewish rite of passage, a year-long series of visits to the orthodontist. One day, waiting for my braces to be adjusted, I picked up Sports Illustrated and skimmed a feature about Charles Atlas, the patron saint of 95-pound weaklings. I found it mildly interesting and looked for the followup article. This one was about the seamier side of physical culture. It opened with a description of Venice’s Muscle Beach, exotic and creepy, and shifted to the subject of “physique” magazines, pretending to high art but catering to an audience of homosexuals.


What was that? I had to read the paragraph twice. Wasn’t this physique stuff aimed at dumb jocks? Why would florists and hairdressers want to look at photos of scantily clad men? Live and learn, I thought, and filed it mentally with my huge store of trivia.


Live and learn indeed. Just a few weeks later a scantily clad man grabbed my attention– in Life magazine! This was a still from Pillow Talk, a split-screen: Doris Day and Rock Hudson were each in bathtubs, chatting on the phone. Where the images met, her raised left foot “touched” his raised right foot. It was the softest of porn, “racy” but acceptable in 1959. Doris was shrouded in bubbles, but enough of Rock was on display—his long glistening leg, his hairy shoulder and arms—to suggest that he had nothing on, with our view coyly shielded by the tub wall. I suddenly imagined myself indecently exposed as I often was in dreams, and I quivered with embarrassment.


That issue of Life disappeared, but I found other compelling images of nakedness and exposure. In a book of photojournalism, a man walked through rainy Amsterdam wearing only a hat to protest the Nazi takeover. The scene was tragic and gray, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off that bare ass. I was riveted by an LP album cover with muscular marble gods from Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel. (It never occurred to me to take out the record and listen to the Beethoven concerto.)


In a Manhattan subway arcade I spotted a small magazine with a revealing cover photo and the odd name of Grecian Guild Pictorial. This had to be one of those “aesthetic” physique journals I’d read about. I furtively thumbed it: pages of young men in elaborate poses, some in togas, some just wearing a black patch on a string. How self-conscious and silly they looked, and how intently I stared at them. The faces and bodies didn’t interest me much. My eye was held by the private areas, the butt and the barely covered crotch. Each time I went into the city I’d check out this newsstand on my way home. Then I came upon a string of second-hand magazine shops on Sixth Avenue where I could linger for an hour and sample more widely.


At Forest Hills High School I became aware of hall marshals and gym teachers with beefy builds and glowering faces. Their menacing aura aroused me as I slinked by them. And the next summer there was a new waterfront director at camp, more fullback in build than swimmer. He strutted in tight bulging trunks, a whistle dangling on his massive chest. I got up the nerve to check out the clothesline next to his bunk. His damp jockstrap was there, just as I had hoped. (Did I touch it? I don’t remember.) Then a few days later I was chatting with a counselor as he dried off from the shower. Unexpectedly he dropped the towel and lit up a cigarette. In one continuous motion—he was the fencing coach, and very graceful—he stretched out on his cot, long and lean, every inch on display. It was hard to keep up my end of the conversation.


III


I was fourteen, just dimly aware of the stirrings in my groin, with little conception of sexual desire. My older brother happened to ask one day, “When you like a girl, don’t you want to get close to her and touch her all over?” “No,” I said, a little puzzled. This seemed to be the wrong answer, and it got me thinking. Maybe this new fascination with the exposed male body was a sign of homosexuality, as the Sports Illustrated article implied. But the bare breasts in Playboy also got me worked up, if not quite as much. Besides, I wasn’t effeminate in dress or tastes or behavior, or particularly interested in the arts. I liked some girls a lot, even if I didn’t want to squeeze them, and I had never had anything like a crush on a boy or a man. I had rushed to see Pillow Talk, but it didn’t make me a Rock Hudson fan.


In that era one heard about “adolescent homosexuality,” a transitional period of same-sex exploration, endemic in boarding schools. Maybe that was it. I might be entering a phase, one that I would outgrow with my baby fat. How could I learn more about this “phase”?


My parents had given me a talk a year or two earlier, after they heard me refer to someone as a “fairy.” They told me not to use that offensive word. All sorts of men and women were attracted to others of the same sex, including a number of famous people. Legendary friendships–David and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias–were probably homosexual pairs.


Still, open-mindedness is one thing, full acceptance quite another. If a homosexual person ever visited us I was not aware of it. Mother chatted fondly about her hairdresser Jackie, who trusted her enough to introduce her to his “boyfriend” Mike. Dad worked with classical musicians, some of whom were homosexual or bisexual. But in their circle of friends nearly everyone was Jewish and a parent and still married to their first spouse. And they took for granted that their three sons would end up just like them. So bringing my questions to Mother or Dad was unthinkable. There would be a melodramatic response and an all-consuming search for a “cure.” Life as I knew it would come to an end. As for my schoolmates, we never talked about sex, or anything close to it. Besides, I never confided in them. Any real secrets stayed within the family.


Needless to say, there wasn’t much information on the subject in the local public library. But Krafft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis was conveniently on our bookshelf, studded with fascinating material. Unfortunately it didn’t speak to my particular question. I wasn’t much interested in what homosexuals did, just whether I’d become one, and Krafft-Ebbing was not a developmental psychologist. So his gory detail about perversions just whizzed by me. Only one item made a strong impression: an account of a man who put a handkerchief in his axilla (his armpit), and used it to wipe the face of women he wanted to seduce.


In retrospect, an interest in the aphrodisiac properties of the male armpit was not a good sign.


IV


My last two years of high school were golden. I excelled in all my honors classes, and my classmates began to treat me like a star. My family had moved from a cramped apartment into a sturdy brick house, where every room was bright and comfortable. Now that we had plenty of space, my mother welcomed my friends. She shmoozed with them and kept plenty of food and drinks around. Only a few blocks from the high school, the house became a gathering place and I a gregarious host. The shy little boy was long gone.


Senior year was a victory lap. First in my class, admitted to Harvard, I was voted “Most Likely To Succeed,” which amused me, since I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I spent a lot of time with a girl I’d known for many years. She sang, played the guitar and cello, wrote poetry, planned to be a medical researcher. I was taken with her spirit and her brain, and at the end of the year we had one formal date–with a few polite kisses–before she went off for the summer to dissect mice and rabbits in Maine.


My body was changing. I was already a few inches taller: I was losing my baby fat. Perhaps my quirk would recede. I was still only sixteen—sex with a woman was years away. With any luck, when that time came I would be able to perform. And if worst came to worst, I could always go to a therapist… Why worry about it?


V


What was I trying not to worry about?


To me there was nothing “wrong” about two men having sex with each other. It seemed odd-the bodies weren’t built to fit-but how could a harmless physical act be immoral? Still, to perform the dirty deed—and get caught at it—was taboo, scandalous, dangerous. If this were my fate, I faced a life of secrecy and deception. My grandparents could never be told. My parents would feel it as a blow to the gut. And what would happen to the adoring children and wife and friends—the only future I wanted? Many homosexuals did get married, I knew. But how did you do that? Did you “cheat” or did your wife know what was going on? Who made the rules? Why would any sensible woman agree? In Europe, it was rumored, mistresses and lovers were common—but even if that were true, we were in the U. S. A.


I couldn’t envision a love affair with a man, much less a life with one. Men just didn’t evoke those kinds of feelings in me. I’d never had an intense and trusting friendship-the chemistry was never there. Besides, the boys and men I admired weren’t the ones that attracted and confused me, it was the he-men with their broad shoulders and meaty biceps. I didn’t want to get to know them better, I just wanted them to—what? Smile at me? Tell me I was man enough for them? I couldn’t connect the dots and give a shape to my obsession. It was troubling and arousing to be near someone who oozed virility; anything more, anything else was counterintuitive. I had no conscious desire to be embraced by a man, and certainly no interest in getting to second or third base. What did you put where, and why? (Later on, when I overcame my terror of being found out and had my first physical encounters, I had to be shown what to do, like being taught to smoke a joint.)


How could my happy world-my enviable future-be turned upside down by something so nebulous?  Was it really possible that I would become a confirmed bachelor who hadn’t met the right girl? How lonely and pathetic! I crossed my fingers and put it out of mind as much as I could.


VI


I was stranded in a place where such awesome questions could hardly be asked, much less answered. So I kept my own counsel and embraced each day’s challenges. What I didn’t know was that the crisis, when it came, as it inevitably did, would make me into a man.


 


Charles Troob wrote an early version of this piece for the Art of Writing study group. Thanks, IRP, for your encouragement and advice.

			


					
			







	

					

				
At Starbucks
		

			 by  		

					

			
			

				
by Charles Troob


Near the corner of Doubt and Trust

a dangerous intersection where boys playing stickball

are routinely knocked down by speeding garbagemen

turning left without signaling

I saw a woman on her bicycle texting intimations

of the apocalypse to her broker–

or so I fantasized, from the tense but beatific way

she clutched her iPhone while pedaling.


I was sitting in the Starbucks on Trust.

I’d gone there to ponder

that morning’s disinformation and to digest

the falafel I’d purchased off a truck with

a sticker saying, “We all eat the same food,

so why can’t we get along?”

It sat in my stomach with the over-roasted coffee

answering its own question.


She took a right on Doubt and sped away.

I wanted to run after her

but I had this poem to finish

while my gut settled itself.


Charles Troob wrote these for Sarah White’s poetry group. Occasionally he gets lucky and something good comes out.  Enjoy!