New Moon (39 page)

But how did I trick myself into some sort of confluence of time inversion and telekinesis, into scrying both cards and psychic energies?

I think it was the same as how Fabian did it: from trying to be a good storyteller and therapist while telling myself that that’s
only
what I was doing. I didn’t consider that I was consulting auras and picking up higher-dimensional waves: the mindstuff described in the books, the supernatural heat Chuck had demonstrated in class. I thought I was following instruction booklets in the same protocol as building model airplanes or playing Monopoly, with a dash of science-fiction theatricality cum Freudian melodrama thrown in. Then the cards flowed like Atlantean cinema, and pictures arose in a teenage fool’s mind.

There is another thread here, and it will take some backtracking to capture. When I was thirteen years old, a new brand of soap called Zest debuted with a flurry of television ads that showed people bathing in waterfalls amid orchestral crescendos. A voiceover described “the Zest feeling”—a whole different kind of sudsing action that made you downright ecstatic:
“For the first time in your life, feel really clean.”

I was curious what it would be like to wash with something other than our house brand, Camay, so I convinced my parents to buy me a bar. After unwrapping its parchment, I held a marbled bluish-green amulet like a Babylonian bar imprinted with runes.

When I scrubbed myself with Zest that night in the shower, I became as exuberant as the people in the ads. The soap felt liberating, slaphappy. I couldn’t identify the precise source of its energy; it wasn’t the foaming action, but there
was
something rhapsodic about it—perhaps its subtle fragrance, vaguely like Queen Anne’s lace and other wildflowers. (Of course, this was good old, innocent bathing, hearkening back to satyrs in waterfalls and shaving-cream sprees; it had nothing to do with my later erotic digressions.)

When my spirits needed a lift thereafter, I took Zest into a bath or a shower and, as I got the suds in under my arms and between my toes, I was transformed.

I told my Horace Mann friends about Zest, but to a one they laughed, and the few that tried it reported nothing special (as they had presumed). Although I knew it was ridiculous to ascribe joy to a bar of soap, I still suspected that they were missing something:
They are not letting themselves feel it.

For months thereafter I looked forward to baths and showers. I
used Zest to get myself happy, to bust out of melancholy. To my mind I had discovered something important that my peers were either too uptight or too snotty to admit, something major and magic about the world: the Zest feeling.

The following summer I packed a few bars in my camp trunk and showed the jade ovals to bunkmates. At Chipinaw we showered together, so I got a chance to watch the soap in action. No one in my bunk experienced the Zest feeling, or anything at all, but they mercilessly spoofed it with dances and paroxysms that left them writhing in fake ecstasy on the moth-littered stone. I blushed but was undeterred.

I continued to feel the ebullience of Zest. A shower with its lather made me less homesick. It turned the Chipinaw sky bluer, its flowers deeper yellow and orange. I flew across the outfield with uncommon grace.

A natural proselytizer, I kept touting Zest. Yet from bunkmates I continued to evince blank looks and loony cutting up. I insisted they were wrong. So they sought an outside expert, our counselor.

He took their side. “There is no Zest feeling,” he said. “That’s what ads are supposed to do—convince you to buy things. It’s all in your imagination.”

If it hadn’t been the fifties, if America had privileged sacred practices over recreational meaninglessness, if we had been initiated into some sort of inner life instead of being told it didn’t exist, then he might have been able to report: “The imagination is a powerful tool by itself; it can turn ordinary things into magical ones and unleash boundless love. We each have the power inside us to be happy and experience miracles every day. We have an innate quotient of generosity and the desire to serve others.
And that capacity is contagious.
”

He would have encouraged me to find the source of the Zest feeling in myself, in the native beauty and wonder of the world; to cultivate and spread Zest’s compassion, even to practice a better poetry than Zest, as Wordsworth did, as Buddha did: the “visionary gleam,” “splendour in the grass,” “empty essence, primordially pure.” Not a soap, but a measureless radiance beyond summer breezes, in a night ablaze with stars, as we sang Taps, swaying and bundled
together in the void. Our counselor might have invited me to turn Zest into art or prayer. Instead we earned little felt stripes to sew onto the arms of our Chipinaw jackets: red for arts and crafts, blue for religion, white for service, yellow for sports, green for nature cabin. Zest was
all
of these.

Our mavens thought they had better stuff than Zest, but all they offered were patches and slogans, soporifics and zest-killers, games reduced to their lowest denominators: mirth that wasn’t mirth, play that was hardly playful, prayers that earned no god.

Of course, not only couldn’t my counselor have said such things but, if he had, none of us would have believed them. So, the guy succeeded in setting me straight. He made me ashamed of my gullibility. The Zest feeling went away. I became cynical and modern again. After all, it
was
just soap.

I didn’t buy any more Zest. Every now and then I came upon a bar at someone else’s house, tried it, and, despite myself, felt a glimmer of the old Z jubilation—but I dismissed it as my impressionability.

The next year I read two books in English class that raised my consciousness about suggestibility and the relation between puffery and products. Their author, Vance Packard, a pop sociologist, scoped out seductive influences in ads—the subliminal messages behind icons that make us want to buy things. Borrowing ideas from his book
The Hidden Persuaders,
I decoded a series of Old Gold cigarette ads for my English term paper that spring, showing how the placement of objects in each still life associated the product with either pleasure or success. The particular campaign I chose ran in
Life
and
Look
and involved little cameos as if rendered by Dutch masters. Each put a pack of Old Gold among personal items like an astrolabe, an expensive watch, a bottle of brandy, pearls, a fountain pen, a denim jacket, etc.

Of course, I had hung out at Robert Towers Advertising long enough to know that my stepfather’s agency didn’t design subliminal art. They were into straightforward spiels—postcard landscapes and chic designs, “classics,” Bob declared. He would go through the Sunday
Times,
find one of his, and crow, “Look at that layout. It’s Johnny Mercer; it’s Rodgers and Hammerstein; it’s Hemingway.”

He insisted that I was reading things into Old Gold ads, that the point of the advertising business was to show something opulent and attractive—no one hid symbols in layouts. “Richard, you don’t need the Vance Packards of the world to make effective ads. Lose that bum!”

But I assumed he was too small-time and regional to do the really advanced stuff.

Being in midtown, he was able to deposit a carbon of my paper onto the desk of the Old Gold guy at a nearby agency. A week later he reported the man’s response.

“He said it was a good piece of work for a high-school student. Your teacher should give you an A, and he’ll have a job waiting for you when you finish college; but he also said to tell you to forget the subliminal crap. It’s a load of malarkey.”

A mere year after my flirtation with Vance Packard, Chuck Stein introduced the poetry of Charles Olson in our creative-writing class, then read aloud “The Moon is the Number 18,” setting on the table before us the blue-and-yellow matching trump with its crayfish emerging from a stellar pool, baying wolves and twin battlements on either side of a winding mountain path, a lunar face dripping golden embers.

I felt a different joy from the intoxication of Zest: a celestial event showering worlds with hermetic particles—a lot heftier than soap suds. This was truly “old gold”: a matrix of living minerals as well as a splash of primal manifestation.

The naked horned couple chained blindly to a half-cube in The Devil, trump fifteen, bat-winged beasts, became comely Lovers in a garden in the sixth trump, the Satanic figure suddenly a smiling angel, the cube now whole—but only once they realized the chains about their necks were loosely hung. Whether to be in heaven or languish in hell was their choice, just as Zest had been my choice to throw off the shackles of America, to convert my gloom into happiness—to accept a subconscious field of operation. In the seventh trump, that same male and female pair became black and white Sphinxes bowing before the Charioteer of the Earth’s first temple under a curtain of stars heralding the birth of the Symbol
and advent of human society.

The cards didn’t go away like soap. They matured in me and gave me a sense of my own existence. Zest returned and stuck this time and, even better, I was able to transmit it to others by laying down the deck and telling its stories.

The tarot understood sadness and love, romance and destiny better than I did. It turned crises into opportunities. It showed me that I was
never not
among sacred things. It anointed me a lay Hierophant, a doyenne of Pentacles, a hero on a grail, a psychotherapist beyond portfolio, always, even when riding the subway, when playing left field or studying for a math exam. It gave an ordinary boy an esoteric alphabet and a way to glimpse the hidden universe. It made me serious and worthwhile to myself.

It is
all subliminal
—that is, latent and iconic. The world is a giant, uninterpreted tarot in which a bar of soap can also be a Star.

Of course, I am getting ahead of myself, confiding news I came to decades later. But those were its seeds. Their crucible was the dream of a chemistry set interpreted by a Village doctor. They were raised to the next exponent by a tarot deck from the Basement of the Occult in the same Village. Their true gestation is unknown, beyond my lifetime.

After so many years Horace Mann was ending. I was now an elder in the temple that First Formers were entering as mere tykes. It was hard to believe I had been recruited into the cult so young—the current denizens of Pforzheimer Hall looked like third-graders.

The reign of A’s was over—their mirage no longer fooled me—and I found it impossible to work with the same dauntless spirit. In fact, I didn’t understand how I had done it for six long years since dinner at Tavern on the Green.

I had changed, but the school hadn’t. In English we went from
Hamlet
to the rage of Timon of Athens and his banquet of stones. In history I imagined Clinton a kind of Timon as he dragged us through the Industrial Revolution at breakneck speed, threatening and slandering us in comparison to seniors of other years. This wasn’t just his standard performance; he was appalled by our
uncritical enthusiasm for mysticism, our lack of respect for school tradition, our sloppiness and longish hair, the rowdiness of the Senior lounge, and what he termed our “insolence” as typified by Alpert’s public outbursts and Stein’s campy satires. Recently Chuck had stood blocking the way to Chapel, stomping like Rumpelstiltskin, as he tore dollar bills to pieces and threw them at astonished underclassmen, proclaiming that money was the source of all evil.

“The worst class ever, hands down,” he declared. “I had hoped for better than wise-asses and smart alecks for our seventy-fifth-anniversary year.”

He wasn’t prescient enough to see the counterculture—almost no one was. For we were mere pikers compared to what was coming down the road just behind us.

Mr. Metcalf threw plenty of baseballs in those final months. He too thought we were an embarrassment to tradition—unrepentant slackers. I looked for some concession or relief to acknowledge our journey from Caesar to Cicero to Vergil, to ratify our tour of duty, but it seemed as though he wanted only to rush us through as many stanzas as possible before we got away for good.

I peaked at midterms, after my acceptance at Amherst. At that point I got A’s in Latin and English and an A+ on the famous senior history exam, said to be the hardest test in the school. I had mastered the chronicle of the world up through the French Revolution and then written like a demon for two hours.

Mr. Clinton extolled me as one of the best he had ever had. He made out my desperate scrawl, the clock outracing my mind-splay, as I check-listed Robespierre, the Jacobins, and doomed figures through Thermidor to the guillotine, all in the last five minutes (and a stolen forty-five seconds before a ruler snapped in front of me). It was a mere list because I had budgeted my time poorly and expended too much on other questions, but Clinton had written, “Outline style excellent!” Wow, I couldn’t lose.

When we returned from Christmas holiday for our last term, I hung out with a group from Westchester who played hockey on a
frozen pond Fridays after school. It was my baptism in the sport, and I adored the live action with its rhythms, the aesthetics of each actual score through the busy slot (like in so many of Jonny’s and my made-up games). Ice hockey captivated me in a way that soccer never had.

Each ball or quoit (with its shape and role in the sport to which it gives rise) determines the mood and tenor of its caper. Footballs, tennis balls, basketballs, ping-pong balls, even shuffleboard disks weave energy fields, and to me suddenly none were as delectable as the chaotic scrum cast by a small flat cylinder of rubber ricocheting on ice. Piles of coats formed the two sides of the goal, and missed shots rolled across the pond toward infinity.

Having played only with tin men, I was unskilled at stickhandling. I could race but I couldn’t dribble or shoot. I tried to control the puck when it came my way, kicking at it with speed skates as it rolled behind me. I never managed to advance through clusters of opponents before someone parted me from my prize.

For that whole winter we tried to get hockey sanctioned as a PE sport, a difficult proposition at a school without a rink. Our hopes were based on the fact that there was a facility visible from the El, only a few blocks down Broadway. We spent months going through formal procedures … a signed petition … finally a faculty sponsor willing to accompany us there and ref our games—we found a young newcomer who had played in college.