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So, greedily I ate, gluttonously, refusing to...

So, greedily I ate, gluttonously, refusing to curtail for a moment this wolfish intake of saturated fat but, in the end, having nothing like Marcel's luck Let's speak further of death and of the desire--understandably in the aging a desperate desire--to forestall death, to resist it, to resort to whatever means are necessary to see death with anything, anything, anything but clarity: One of the boys up from Florida--according to the reunion booklet we each received at the door, twenty-six out of a graduating class of a hundred and seventy-six were now living in Floridaa good sign, meant we still had more people in Florida (six more) than we had who were dead; and all afternoon, by the way, it was not in my mind alone that the men were tagged the boys and the women the girls--told me that on the way to Livingston from Newark Airport, where his plane had landed and he'd rented a car, he'd twice had to pull up at service stations and get the key to the restroom, so wracked was he by trepidationThis was Mendy Gur-lik, in 1950 voted the handsomest boy in the class, in 1950 a broad-shouldered, long-lashed beauty, our most important jitterbugger, who loved to go around saying to people, "Solid, Jackson!" Having once been invited by his older brother to a colored whorehouse on Augusta Street, where the pimps hung out, virtually around the corner from his father's Branford Place liquor store--a whorehouse where, he eventually confessed, he'd sat fully clothed, waiting in an outer hallway, flipping through a Mechanix Illustrated that he'd found on a table there, while his brother was the one who "did it"--Mendy was the closest the class had to a delinquentIt was Mendy Gurlik (now Garr) who'd taken me with him to the Adams tiffany co earrings Theater to hear Illinois Jacquet, Buddy Johnson, and "Newark's own" Sarah Vaughan; who'd got the tickets and taken me with him to hear Mr Billy Eckstine, in concert at the Mosque; who, in '49, had got tickets for us to the Miss Sepia America Beauty Contest at Laurel GardenIt was Mendy who, some three or four times, took me to watch, broadcasting in the flesh, Bill Cook, the smooth late-night Negro disc jockey of the Jersey station WAATMusical Caravan, Bill Cook's show, I ordinarily listened to in my darkened bedroom on Saturday nightsThe opening theme was Ellington's "Caravan," very exotic, very sophisticated, Afro-Oriental rhythms, a belly-dancing beat--just by itself it was worth tuning in for; "Caravan," in the Duke's very own rendition, made me feel nicely illicit even while tucked up between my mother's freshly laundered sheetsFirst the tom-tom opening, then winding curvaceously up out of the casbah that great smoky trombone, and then the insinuating, snake-charming fluteMendy called it "boner music To get to WAAT, and Bill Cook's studio, we took the 14 bus downtown, and only minutes after we'd settled quietly like churchgoers in the row of chairs outside his glass-enclosed booth, Bill Cook would come out from behind the microphone to greet usWith a "race record" spinning on the turntable--for listeners still unadventurously at home--Cookie would cordially shake the hands of the two tall, skinny white sharpies, all done up in their one-button-roll suits from the American Shop and their shirts from the Custom Shoppe, with the spread collars(The clothes on my back were on loan from Mendy for the night "And what might I play for you gentlemen?" Cookie graciously inquired of us in a voice whose mellow resonance gucci clearance Mendy would imitate whenever we talked on the phoneI asked for the melodious stuff, "Miss" Dinah Washington, "Miss" Savannah Churchill--and how arresting that was back then, the salacious chivalry of the dj's "Miss"--while Mendy's taste, spicier, racially far more authoritative, was for musicians like the lowdown saloon piano player Roosevelt Sykes, for Ivory Joe Hunter ("Whenmost lost my mind"), and for a quartet that Mendy seemed to me to take excessive pride in calling "the Ray-O-Vics" emphasizing the first syllable exactly as did the black kid from South Side, Melvyn Smith, who delivered for Mendy's father's store after school(Mendy and his brother did the Saturday deliveries Mendy boldly accompanied Melvyn Smith one night to hear live bebop at the lounge over the bowling alley on Beacon Street, Lloyd's Manor, a place to which few whites other than a musician's reckless Desdemona would ventureIt was Mendy Gurlik who first took me down to the Radio Record Shack on Market Street, where we picked out bargains from the 19-cent bin and could listen to the record in a booth before we bought itDuring the war, when, to keep up morale on the home front, there'd be dances one night a week during July and August at the Chancellor Avenue playground, Mendy used to scramble through the high-spirited crowd--neighborhood parents and schoolkids and little kids up late who ran gleefully round and round the painted white bases where we played our perpetual summer softball game--dispensing for whoever cared to listen a less conventional brand of musical pleasure than the Glenn Miller-Tommy Dorsey-inspired arrangements that most everybody else liked dancing to beneath the dim floodlights back of the schoolRegardless of the dance omega seamaster de ville tune the band up on the flag-festooned bandstand happened to be playing, Mendy would race around most of the evening singing, "CaWonia, Caldoma, what makes your big head so hard? Rocks!" He sang it, as he blissfully proclaimed, "free of charge," just as nuttily as Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five did on the record he obliged all the Daredevils to listen to whenever, for whatever refractory purpose (to play dollar-limit seven-card stud, to examine for the millionth time the drawings in his Tillie the Toiler "hot book," on rare occasions to hold a circle jerk), we entered his nefarious bedroom when nobody else was home And here now was Mendy in 1995, the Weequahic boy with the biggest talent for being less than a dignified model child, a personality halfway between mildly repellent shallowness and audacious, enviable deviance, flirting back then with indignity in a way that hovered continuously between the alluring and the offensiveHere was Dapper, Dirty, Daffy Mendy Gurlik, not in prison (where I was certain he'd wind up when he'd urge us to sit in a circle on the floor of his bedroom, some four or five Daredevils with our pants pulled down, competing to win the couple of bucks in the pot by being the one to "shoot" first), not in hell (where I was sure he'd be consigned after being stabbed to death at Lloyd's Manor by a colored guy "high on reefer"--whatever that meant), but simply a retired restaurateur--owner of three steakhouses called Garr's Grill in suburban Long Island--at no place more disreputable than his high school class's forty-fifth reunion "You shouldn't worry, Mend--you still got your build, your looks He did, too: well tanned, slender, a tall narrow-faced jogger wearing black alligator boots and lady dior a black silk shirt beneath a green cashmere jacketOnly the head of brimming silver-white hair looked suspiciously not quite his own but as though it had had an earlier life as the end of a skunk "I take care of myself--that isn't my pointI called Mutty"--Marty "Mutty" Sheffer, star sidearm pitcher of the Daredevils, the team we three played on in the playground softball league, and, according to the biographical listing in the reunion booklet, a "Financial Consultant" and, too (unlikely as it seemed when I remembered that, paralyzingly shy of girls, babyfaced Mutty had made pitching pennies his major adolescent diversion), progenitor of "Children 36, 34, 31Grandchildren 2, 1"--"I told Mutty," Mendy said, "that if he didn't sit next to me I wasn't comingI had to deal with the real goons in my businessDealt with the fucking MobBut this I could not deal with from day oneNot twice, Skip, three times I had to stop the car to take a crap "Well," I said, "after years and years of painting ourselves opaque, this carries us straight back to when we were sure we were transparent "Is that it?" "Maybe "Twenty kids dead in our class He showed me at the back of the booklet the page headed "In Memoriam "Eleven of the guys dead," Mendy said" Two from the Daredevils Utty was Mutty's battery mate, Bert played second baseAnd both in the last three yearsI get it every six months since I heard about UttyYou get the test?" "I get it Of course, I didn't any longer because I no longer had a prostate "How often?" "Every year "Not enough," he told me "You been all right though?" he asked, taking hold of me by the shoulders "I'm in good shape," I said "Hey, I taught you to jerk off, you know that?" "That you did, omega usa Mend

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