Old Neighborhood Read Online Free Page A

Bronx.
    She went with me on my under-$5 dates, a category in which I was a true expert—try Czechoslovakian folk dancing. She told me I was intelligent and took me to her apartment when Flo was off on her own affairs. This was the actual actual, in a bed with an adjoining bathroom that had perfumed soap. What passed for a hot time in the old days, rubbing up against girls in hallways, heavy petting in the living room, worrying if the parents would wake up, all that was the activity of a much younger man.
    Fanny and I did not survive the school year. During Easter vacation she went with her mother to Palm Beach, Florida, and returned in the midst of an affair with a senior from Dartmouth.
    “Why Dartmouth?” I said, wounded.
    “It was just one of those things that happened between two people,” she said. “I’m sorry, Steve, I like you a lot.”
    “Well, I think I loved you,” I told her before hanging up, which was a highly romantic remark, as well as highly conditional, implying that I was not certain, and in any case, it was past tense.
    “One can’t always be successful in these matters,” I said to Jerry on one of our walks through the neighborhood. “This is a valuable learning experience.” What I really wanted was to learn nothing from it and just be with her.
    My senior year was ending and my business career was due to begin. My mother began to leave copies of Fortune and The Wall Street Journal on my bed with key passages underlined so I could gain an edge on the future. I had decided that advertising was the most interesting of the fields of business I had been exposed to, I did not know of anyone in the neighborhood who worked in advertising, the field was not within the social context of the neighborhood. This was very appealing to me, to be the first, a truly sophisticated person. I made a selection of advertisements I had written for the college paper, took advertisements out of magazines and wrote what could be the next installments in those campaigns, creating a portfolio for myself. “I’m going into advertising,” I said to Carla Friedman’s mother. Carla was the girl I was seeing, a junior from Hunter College who did not “let” when I dated her briefly in high school and did not “let” now. She was very smart, though, and we went on cultural dates together, such as anthropology lectures at the Museum of Natural History and dance recitals by Pearl Primus.
    “Advuhtising, that’s nice,” Carla’s mother said. “Ya hear that, Sol? Davie here is going into advuhtising.”
    “Stevie, not Davie.”
    Sol looked up from his coverage of the Dodger game, which he was watching in his sleeveless undershirt.
    “Zoomar lens,” he said. “Brings ya right in there.”
    These people, my background—I would be getting as far away as possible from all that by being in advertising. At twenty-one I had decided the most dazzling job in the world was to be an advertising copywriter downtown and write the travel advertisements that appeared in Esquire magazine, cultivated people sipping cocktails in elegant settings. I would look advertising and talk advertising and be advertising and the rich boys from colleges like Yale and Dartmouth would have nothing on me. I would pass in their world. I would get out of the neighborhood.
    After preparing my portfolio and resume I took a serious step toward integrating myself into corporate life. I bought a gray hat in a Madison Avenue store. “The Advertising Man,” the hat was called. I wore it downtown as I made the rounds of employment agencies. In my hat, at twenty-one years of age, I must have looked like a tall Toulouse-Lautrec.
    Arthur, Jerry and I tried to see each other, but with Arthur at college in Boston we were restricted to school vacations. We established a ritual of getting together whenever Arthur came into town for Chinese food at the Lu Wong Chinese restaurant on Fordham Road. This was one of the tonier Chinese restaurants in the Bronx in