Color Snapshot: Girl, Paris, 1968 [For RitaGB]

Since I'm in a confessional mode ("Blimey, mate," the girls would say, "you're always in confessional mode"), I thought I would tell you folks about the night I spent in bed with the naked 17-year-old girl. No, she wasn't this girl. I'm not sure who this girl is, though I think we might be related, sort of like Obama is related to Richard Nixon. I think this lovely young woman might be the daughter, or the grand-daughter, of my grandmother's half-sister, but I'm not sure. My mother took this picture and I wasn't along on this trip.

 

But anyway, back to the naked girl. I know I have this reputation, here on the internets, but sadly, alas, you must believe I have rarely lived up to it. Only once, in all the course of time, have I ever been in bed with a naked (or clothed) 17-year-old girl, and that was the youngest girl I ever was in bed with. Maybe she was from Canada. Probably she was from Canada. Anyway, I was a good bit younger than I am now, so at least it wasn't quite so dirty-old-mannish.

 

I was in the graduate writing program at the University of Arkansas. I thought, and I'm not going to pull any punches here, that I was hot shit. There were many other excellent writers there who just as well could have thought they were hot shit, but probably my head was more swelled up than theirs. (One of those people who might have thought that they were hot shit is my buddy Joe Jackson, who has a book coming out from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux soon. You should buy it.) Anyway, one of the last people to get there that semester (the new program enrollees came in early so they could get a head-start, learning the introductory comp that they would be teaching to in-coming freshmen) was this fellow we'll call Aaron Rabbinowitz. Aaron got there late, and he took a room in a motel. And he just stayed in that motel for the whole school year. I myself could not have done that. At least I guess they came in every day and made his bed.

 

I don't want to stereotype, but Aaron looked like a guy who just came in on the last boat out of Cracow. He looked fresh from the shtetl. He was short, he had a long thin face and a hawk nose and hooded brown eyes, and long stringy hair. Seems like he wore a coat everywhere, like a long coat, like a western bank robber. I may be making that part up.

 

Anyway, I thought I was a smart guy. Aaron really was a smart guy. His stories were polished and complete and mature in a way that mine certainly weren't. Aaron could talk knowledgeably about the story of ideas. Our professors did not like the "story of ideas," but Aaron could tell you why they were wrong. In fact, every day after workshop, Aaron would tell me just exactly where the Uncles (we called our main writing teachers, Bill (William) Harrison, Jim Whitehead, and John Clellon Holmes, the Uncles) had been wrong. Aaron had read everything (I had read a mere fraction of his reading list). He'd read the Russians, of course. He'd read all the major Americans. He'd read all the Jewish writers, Singer, Bellow, Malamud, Roth, the other Roth, all those guys.

 

Aaron seemed to know everything, and he had an opinion about everything. Here's how smart, how observant, Aaron was. You'd be talking about someone, some other smart person. Maybe they would be getting ready to do something or say something, and you didn't know what it was they were going to do or say. And Aaron would say, "here's what he's going to do," or "here's what she's going to say." And then that person would do or say what Aaron said they were going to do or say. That's how smart he was.

 

And of course he was a very funny guy. I'm sorry that I'm not going to be able to get him being funny down on the page, but trust me, he was funny. Maybe his funny was a little more involved, not so much the one-liner kind of funny. I'm sure he was one-liner funny too.

 

So I hung out with Aaron. I didn't have a kitchen that first year, so I ate out every night, and so did he. So we'd hang out and talk. At the end of the spring semester, Aaron says, "heh, what are you doing this summer? We'll go to Saratoga, we'll rent an apartment, and we'll hang out there." And that's exactly what we did. We got this two bedroom apartment in this old house that was pretty close to the track, and close enough to Yaddo that you could go over there and walk around in the gardens. I really didn't know too much about Yaddo. Now I know that it was at least as good a place to get laid as it was to write anything, but I only knew that famous writers had spent time there then.

 

Of course, I was supposed to be writing, that summer. I doubt if I ever did write much of anything.

I actually had a girl I'd met back in Fayetteville towards the end of the spring semester, and I wrote to her, and she wrote back, and sent me little drawings. I could have had a great time if I'd stayed in Fayetteville.

 

 

Done