The Book of Air and Shadows

when I am with her the average passerby gives us unfriendly looks, as if I were an abducting perve.
    As for character, unlike her mother, Imogen is a perfect Narcissus; all others exist but to worship her and if not, watch out! She is an athlete-a swimmer of some talent-and wants to be an actress, an ambition I support, for I consider her unsuited for any other life. I believe she gets this tendency from me. When I was in high school in Brooklyn, a teacher told me that I had a good voice and that I should go out for drama, and I did and got the part of Telegin in
Uncle Vanya
, a small role, but like all Chekhov roles it can be made memorable. I suppose that they no longer do Chekhov in Brooklyn public high schools, but then they did, along with many other cultural activities that are no longer possible in this current age of brass. Telegin is called Waffles in the play because his face is pocked, and mine at sixteen was a mess too. My big line was “I have forfeited my happiness but I have kept my pride.” Naturally, I fell in love with Gloria Gottleib, who played Sonia and who didn’t know I was alive, etc., but the interesting thing was that even after I was offstage and even after we’d done our three performances in the orange-juice-smelling auditorium, I still felt inhabited by Telegin, and this was wonderful to me, that a made-up person created by a man long dead could in a sense displace my own personality.
    I should mention here that until I appeared in this thing I had been a miserable figure, too obscure even to be a butt of mockery. It is relatively easy to disappear in a large urban high school, but I had special reasons for becoming one with the tan tiles of the wall. I was a Catholic kid with a Jewish name and a Nazi grandfather in a school where the aristocracy was intellectual and almost entirely Jewish, plus Izzy the Book, was not unknown to the tabloids at the time as oft indicted, never convicted. I lived in terror of someone (i.e., Gloria Gottleib) making the connection. On top of this, my brother Paul, two years older, was a thug. He announced this, as thugs did then, with the black leather jacket and the collar up in back and the duck’s ass hairdo. Being a nonentity was preferable to being famous as Paulie Mishkin’s brother. At some level I knew that I was protected by his ferocious aura from the light bullying that would’ve been my fate otherwise. Paul insisted that when I got pounded, which was fairly often, the pounder would be him only. The worst fight I ever saw when I was growing up was Paul taking out two guys from a well-known street-fighting gang who had mugged my lunch money on the way to school. He used a brick.
    These obsessive images. That’s not what I want to write down at all, although perhaps it’s significant that after this fight, and Paul’s suspension from school as a result, was when I started serious lifting. I resolved not to have to depend on him to stick up for me, and further, I supposed that if I became a moose I could avoid fights. Little did I know.
    In any case, after
Uncle Vanya
I made a terrific ass of myself by more or less staying in character perpetually, wearing an antique brocade vest I found in a junk shop, speaking with a slight accent, pretending to have to reach for an English word, mumbling in what I imagined sounded like Russian. I became somewhat more popular, as amusing lunatics sometimes do, and I began to get invitations to high-end parties thrown by the popular Jewish girls. The next play we did was
Romeo and Juliet
and I was Mercutio. The fit with him was much better than with Telegin, for to fill the harmless air with witty nonsense, strike antic poses, and absurdly die seems glorious to the young; nor is it o’er taxing to speak, like this, in rich and flowing iambs, till all about you wish you dead. For the teenaged boy playing Mercutio the hard part is to speak the dirty stuff without cracking up, all that business about pricks in act I, scene iv, for example, may be even harder than doing a convincing job as Romeo. As for Juliet…you know, speaking as an IP lawyer, I would say that Shakespeare’s famous powers of invention do not show well in the matter of plots. All but two of the plays are ripped off, sometimes blatantly, from prior sources; and it was a good thing for him they didn’t have copyright in those days. We go to hear his plays for the language, just as we go to opera for the music; plot is secondary in both,