A Creature of the Times

Brotherless and sisterless, I grew up on Long Island in a room haunted by an old oak that spoke the disturbing language of wind‑scraped leaves on nights when I couldn't sleep. The room was situated on the second floor of a house, the first floor of which was patrolled by a crippled woman in a wheelchair. A somber man in black suit moved in and out of the rooms speaking nicely of God and morosely of the world's ecstasies. He was a good man, just as the woman was a good woman. I was a little boy and loved them. I took it for granted that our household and the lower‑middle‑class neighborhood of which it was a part were the models against which all other households and neighborhoods should be judged. I took this judging idea seriously. At school, when my classmates and I were forced to hide under our desks as part of air raid drills that were necessary (the teacher told us) because the Russians hated Jesus and wanted to destroy America, I trembled with judgmental loathing for everything that was unfamiliar to me. A good little Christian, I abhorred the unholy. It was the late 1940s and early 1950s, a time, as my mother regularly informed me, to denounce Satan in all his forms and to wage war against his Dark Empire. Somehow that empire was the world out there, the one just around the corner, the one in somebody else's house, the one lurking in the shadowy doorway of the Brass Rail Bar not far from Macaruso's barbershop. It was a world in which little girls had slits, not penises. A world in which blacks boogie‑woogied to a tribal beat no decent person would dream of liking. A world in which Mrs. Irrgang, drinking coffee with my mother in our kitchen, spoke in awed tones of strange people like darkhaired Lolita, a Puerto Rican who, while screaming I love freedom I love my country, had fired a gun in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Why would someone do such a thing? I wondered.

I had seen a picture of this Lolita in the New York Daily News.

She was a bad lady. But pretty.

They put her in jail.