Photographs of My Father. Paul Spike
cook their own meals. Ray and Alice just maintain the place. They don’t care much for the hostelers.
Alice is dark and small, with long hair over her shoulders, wears glasses most of the time, but without them she is beautiful. She is in her twenties and quite a bit younger than Ray. Alice gives Steve, Rick and me a kind of combination mothering-sistering-cockteasing which is nice. She loves to cook and makes huge, tasty meals.
There are tons of oysters, fried in crispy batter. When you break into them, they melt into gobs of succulent shellfish in your mouth. The beer is icy and bitter. For dessert (Alice is too much!), there is strawberry shortcake with homemade whipped cream.
We are all going into town after supper. Jack Elliot, a cowboy singer from Brooklyn and an old pal of Woody Guthrie’s, is singing at a folk music cafe. Ray and Alice have never seen him. But Steve knows him. Arlo Guthrie, Woody’s son, goes to Stockbridge and is a friend of Steve’s, of everybody here except me.
Half the Stockbridge School students play the guitar and sing, and the other half are learning how. Steve is very serious about music. He writes his own songs and plays a big Gibson guitar with real finesse. He also, just like everybody at Stockbridge it seems, holds Arlo in a little bit of awe.
On the way into town, we get Ray to stop by a liquor store. While we wait in the car, Bill—who looks old with a scruffy beard though he is really only sixteen—goes inside and purchases booze. His choice turns out to be a quart of premixed screwdrivers, vodka and orange, which goes down like sticky-sweet soda. By the time we arrive at the club, we have chugged it all. Heads spin in a “high” which is still new enough to marvel at.
Jack Elliot is about Ray’s age. Short and stocky with a weatherbeaten face, cowboy jeans and boots, a cowboy Stetson on his head. He sings with alternating humor and seriousness, lots of gusto, makes reticent little jokes between songs, songs like “Diamond Joe” and “Sowing on the Mountain.” When he finishes his first set, the little club goes haywire with enthusiasm, he grins and doffs his hat, then sneaks out to find a drink. They only serve coffee and coke in this cafe.
Sharing the bill with Jack Elliot is a jug band called The Charles River Valley Boys. In a couple of years they will become famous under the name of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. Now we listen—stomachs full of oysters, salad, strawberries and screwdrivers—to the guitar, mandolin, and thumping washtub bass. Somebody sticks a kazoo in his mouth and soon the audience is banging on tables and singing.
On the way back to the Hostel along the midnight roads of the island, Steve has a stomachache from the screwdrivers. Ray is raving about Jack, what a great guy he seems like, so much fun, so relaxed. Alice is talking about Fritz, the tall, spaced-out-looking cat who played the washtub bass. Ray gets a little jealous at this. But then Steve starts singing, and we all join in:
Sowing on the mountain,
Reaping in the valley.
You’ve got to reap
Just what you sow.
We keep singing this chorus, with Steve and Alice alternating on the verses, like:
God gave Noah
The rainbow sign,
God gave Noah
The rainbow sign,
No more water.
The fire next time.
Before we know it, Ray is pulling up outside the dark hostel. We tiptoe past the dormitories full of snoring hostelers and upstairs to our rooms. Steve goes out in a second, but I linger in my thoughts, unable to sleep. Suddenly, a noise. Strange noise, like a cry but muffled and quick. Mercy’s cry. She and Bill are making love on the other side of the thin wall. I am a virgin. I have a crush on Mercy. The noise again, the undertone of moving bedsprings. Steve mumbles sleeptalk into his pillow. Lord, I want her. Downstairs, the bicyclists snore in rows of cots. I want some girl to sleep with all night, to love, to make that noise.
We only stay at Alice’s “restaurant” for ten days. Steve goes straight from the Vineyard to Fire Island, where his parents have a summer house. I go back to Tenafly. But after a couple of miserable days, flee again. Steve has invited me to spend August at his house.
Ocean Beach is one of fifteen or so towns strung like beads on the thin strand of the island. It is a family community where mother and kids spend the summer and Daddy commutes on the weekends. There are no cars, so people go shopping with children’s wagons. The ferry slip on Friday night is a madhouse of red wagons, harried and lonely wives, and restless five-year-olds waiting for Daddy to step off the boat in his suit and soaked shirt, having rushed early from the office to catch the 4:30 train from Pennsylvania Station.
Steve hangs around with a slightly older crowd. We have long hair, wear white sailing jackets, jeans and bare feet. At night we smoke a little pot and sit around the main square. Sometimes we sneak into one of the bars and order a few drinks. During the afternoons we lie on the beach, mess around in town, or take out one of his cousins’ boats. They live on the bay, while Steve’s house is by the ocean.
After a week, I find a girlfriend named Liza. She is tall with olive skin and black hair, large breasts that stun me when I catch their full weight in my palms under her sweatshirt. We lie in the moist sand of the night beach and duck under the probing headlights of dune taxis. Liza is my age and lives in the city. She goes to Stuyvesant High School, is Jewish and very smart. We don’t talk much. Our routine is to meet around nine o’clock in the main square, then walk around the darker paths holding hands, exchanging bits of non-information about our day. Until the time comes to veer suddenly onto the beach. I am a little surprised that Liza seems to want this detour as much as I do. And more surprised when I meet no resistance as my hand fiddles with her bra. But grateful when her fingers touch me on my tight jeans. If I try to go below her waist, she grabs my hand and locks it like a vise to her belly. As soon as I sigh defeat, she lets me return to where I belong, polishing the rubies on her breasts.
August passes slowly. Fine with me, I’m in no hurry to discover what The Keaton School will turn out to be. One morning the phone rings and then Steve’s mother is standing in the doorway, It is very hot in the beach house. “Your father’s on the phone,” she says. I stretch naked under the thin sheet. His mother was once the top model in America. There are framed magazine covers all over the house, covers full of his mother’s face, blonde hair, elegant figure. Now she stands in a yellow jersey and white shorts looking down at my bed. She and Steve’s father are separating. She told this to Steve three days ago. “Okay,” I say. She leaves and I jump into a bathing suit and go out to answer the telephone.
“How is everything? Having a good time?” he asks.
“Sure.”
“Listen, do you remember I told you about this demonstration in Washington—the march which we’re helping to sponsor?”
“Yeah. I wanted to go.”
“Do you still want to go? How about Steve?”
“We both want to go, Dad.”
“Great. You guys can carry the banner for us then.”
“What does it say?”
“Just National Council of Churches.”
“How are we going to get down to Washington?”
“You can fly down with me the day before.”
A week later in the airport, some guy in sunglasses, with a seersucker jacket slung over one shoulder, asks the ticket clerk in front of us, “Where can a man get a can of beer around here?” The clerk sends him to the airport bar. “Did you see that guy?” my father asks.
“You mean the asshole with the beer can?” I say, in my true cynical style.
“That was Paul Newman.”
“The