Luminous Airplanes (8 page)
All through the winter that followed the summer of
Man and Woman,
I dreamed of seeing Yesim naked again, and when spring came I was in an erotic frenzy. I was a year closer to manhood, and I imagined Yesim as having made even more progress toward maturity. What wouldn’t we be able to do, once I had woken her from her enchanted sleep? I’d discovered masturbation that year, and if that was what
that
felt like, I imagined that lying with Yesim would be something completely unearthly. With strange courage I asked my mothers to send me to Thebes the day after school ended, and to my surprise, they agreed.
Man and Woman,
I dreamed of seeing Yesim naked again, and when spring came I was in an erotic frenzy. I was a year closer to manhood, and I imagined Yesim as having made even more progress toward maturity. What wouldn’t we be able to do, once I had woken her from her enchanted sleep? I’d discovered masturbation that year, and if that was what
that
felt like, I imagined that lying with Yesim would be something completely unearthly. With strange courage I asked my mothers to send me to Thebes the day after school ended, and to my surprise, they agreed.
“If you want to see your grandparents so badly, of course we’ll send you,” Celeste said, as though it had been my diffidence, and not theirs, which kept me in New York, some years, until the beginning of July.
I got on the Trailways bus triumphantly, and when my grandmother picked me up in Maplecrest (the bus didn’t stop in Thebes), I was so excited that I couldn’t speak. This worried my grandmother, and when we got home she called my mothers. “You sent him too soon!” she said. “He doesn’t want to be here!” I can only imagine what my mothers replied. I wasn’t there: I’d already dropped my bag and run across to the Regenzeits’.
Mrs. Regenzeit was on the phone, but she motioned for me to sit down, opened the refrigerator, took out a bowl of twilight-purple eggplant and set it on the table. “I don’t give one sheet about that,” she said, opened a drawer and handed me a fork. “He should know better than to listen to such stupid things. Yes, goodbye.” She hung up the phone forcefully.
“Is Yesim home?” I asked, my mouth still full.
“Yesim? Yes, she is here. But I don’t think she is alone.”
I climbed the stairs, my stomach light with nervousness, and knocked on Yesim’s door.
“Come in,” Yesim said, and I went in, and found her sitting cross-legged on a pillow, and across from her, seated on a pillow also, a girl with long brown hair which fell across her face as she leaned forward to play an Uno card. “Oh, it’s you,” Yesim said. “I didn’t know you were coming back.” The other girl sat up and parted her hair just a little, revealing a skinny nose and a gleaming brown eye. “This is Matilda,” Yesim said. “She’s my best friend.” Both of them giggled, as though to suggest that they had become best friends by virtue of a long and humorous adventure, over the course of which their other, non-best friends had one by one been killed off.
“Who’s winning?” I asked.
“She is,” Yesim said, as I could have seen for myself from the few cards that remained in Matilda’s hand.
“Can I play?”
Matilda looked at me with horror, as though I were a biology experiment from which she had been excused for ethical reasons.
“Not now,” Yesim said, and with a grunt of satisfaction, played the Wild Draw 4 card.
“You bitch!” Matilda shrieked. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.”
I backed out of the room and pulled the door closed quietly, no longer a prince, only a palace eunuch, dismissed and fearful for his head.
Downstairs, Mrs. Regenzeit beamed at me with full consciousness of what I might be feeling and asked, “You like that?” Meaning the eggplant. I nodded. “Good. Now listen, I need your help.”
Kerem was in trouble, she told me. Soccer had made him popular and popularity had turned him into a hoodlum. “He used to have good friends, people like you who make good marks in school and read books, but now his friends put safety pins into their pants. One of them has shaved part of his head, not the whole thing, and now Kerem is talking about doing that too.” Mrs. Regenzeit did not know what would be next, whether it would be drugs or crime or what people did when they had hair like that. “We try to talk to him,” she said, “but in his head there is only the terrible music he listens to.”
“Do you want me to talk to him?” I asked.
“No,” Mrs. Regenzeit said. “What could you tell him that we did not say?” She stabbed the air. “I want you to work with him on the computer.”
This, Mrs. Regenzeit explained, was their latest and maybe their last hope for Kerem, a computer they had ordered from a catalog, which might get him interested in science and mathematics. The computer came in a kit, the whole family had labored long to assemble it, Mr. Regenzeit had given up many hours of work, and finally they’d hired an engineering student from Rensselaer Polytechnic to finish the job. Now it was working, but would it work?
“You’re a good boy,” Mrs. Regenzeit said. “Help him to take an interest in this computer.”
Kerem came downstairs, rubbing his eyes and scowling. In the last nine months he had become skinny and pointed and his curly black hair stood on end with the support of some glistening goo. He looked like Spencer Bartnik, a social pariah in my class at the Nederland School for Boys who was renowned for his frequent and disruptive midclass nosebleeds.
“Good morning, Kerem,” Mrs. Regenzeit said sweetly.
I wanted to ask him a thousand questions. Finally, timidly, I asked if he was going to soccer camp again this summer?
“Football,” Kerem said. “The name of it is football. It’s only Americans who call it soccer.” Unbidden, he explained to me that last August he’d met an English assistant coach named Billy, who had demonstrated to him the superiority of all things English, and, incidentally, turned him on to punk rock. “He got me started on the Pistols, right.”
“If you say so.”
“That wasn’t a real question,” Kerem said. “You just say
right
at the end of a sentence, right.”
right
at the end of a sentence, right.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Right,” Kerem said. “Let’s go upstairs.”
England had invaded Kerem’s bedroom, and brought with it disorder and the smell of feet. A big Union Jack hung over his bed, and opposite it a poster of Sid Vicious, who also looked like Spencer Bartnik, and who was, according to the poster, dead. Then full-color photographs of soccer players, or
footballers,
as I was supposed to call them now, razor-cut from imported magazines, ruddy men who seemed to be all tendon, caught in midleap, grimacing, as though they were keeping themselves aloft by force of will. The bed was covered with clothes and the remnants of more than one meal. I asked Kerem if that was where he slept. “Naw.” He pointed to a sleeping bag that lay unrolled by the window. “I’m squatting.” He steered me to the desk, where a gray box waited inertly: this was the computer, the last hope for his salvation.
footballers,
as I was supposed to call them now, razor-cut from imported magazines, ruddy men who seemed to be all tendon, caught in midleap, grimacing, as though they were keeping themselves aloft by force of will. The bed was covered with clothes and the remnants of more than one meal. I asked Kerem if that was where he slept. “Naw.” He pointed to a sleeping bag that lay unrolled by the window. “I’m squatting.” He steered me to the desk, where a gray box waited inertly: this was the computer, the last hope for his salvation.
Computers belonged, at that point, more to my imaginary world than to the world I shared with other people. Computers were
2001
and
Forbidden Planet
; they were big, blinking cabinets, sinister friends who did what you wanted to but couldn’t, like causing the New York subway to trap your enemies in perpetual darkness, or could but didn’t want to, like math homework. They looked nothing like the Heathkit H88 on Kerem’s desk, a gray box like a bulbous TV set, devoid of lights and switches, an appliance that was no more exciting in appearance than my grandmother’s microwave oven, and considerably less exciting than her electric toothbrush, which, with its rocket-ship styling and brightly colored interchangeable heads, its three speeds and warm rechargeable battery, seemed truly to announce the beginning of a new era. But this computer was real.
2001
and
Forbidden Planet
; they were big, blinking cabinets, sinister friends who did what you wanted to but couldn’t, like causing the New York subway to trap your enemies in perpetual darkness, or could but didn’t want to, like math homework. They looked nothing like the Heathkit H88 on Kerem’s desk, a gray box like a bulbous TV set, devoid of lights and switches, an appliance that was no more exciting in appearance than my grandmother’s microwave oven, and considerably less exciting than her electric toothbrush, which, with its rocket-ship styling and brightly colored interchangeable heads, its three speeds and warm rechargeable battery, seemed truly to announce the beginning of a new era. But this computer was real.
“Check it out,” Kerem said. He switched the machine on, and on the gray screen, underneath a pennant for Manchester United, green words appeared and vanished, leaving only a prompt,
>
the beginning of the beginning. The Heathkit H88 was intended more for serious hobbyists than for recreational users, and came with no software other than a BASIC interpreter and a game, intended to demonstrate the computer’s capabilities, where letters and numbers appeared near the top of the screen and fell slowly downward; you had to type each one on the keyboard before it reached the bottom, or you lost. Kerem played a game, then I played. It was too easy at first, then, as the letters speeded up, it became too hard. Only a machine could have kept up after the third or fourth round.
“It’s stupid,” Kerem admitted, “but look at this.” He typed,
>10 PRINT “FUCK YOU!”
>20 GOTO 10
>RUN
and an unstoppable column of insult flickered up the screen. That was power. It didn’t matter that it was a tiny, ineffectual kind of power that would strike no fear into the hearts of my enemies nor save me from any trouble; all that mattered was that the gray box was in our camp. It did what we wanted without questioning; our power was, in the first instance, power over it. We taught the box new obscenities, and had it shout them over and over at the top of its lungs, until Kerem’s mother called him down to dinner.
I wanted more. By the end of that first day Kerem and I reached an understanding that seemed brilliant to us at the time, although it had disastrous consequences for me later on: I would teach myself to program the computer, and Kerem would take the credit. I wouldn’t have known where to start, but the Heathkit came with a book of programs you could type in to play games, perform calculations, or sort a list of names in alphabetical order. Even the shortest program was many dozens of lines long, and stayed in the computer’s memory only until you switched the power off. If you wanted to run it again after that, you had to retype the whole thing. The work was excruciating, endless, monastic, exalting. If I typed a line wrong, the only way to correct my mistake was to type the entire line again; if I didn’t catch it right away, the Heathkit would bide its time, then ambush me with a syntax error when I tried to run the program. The screen was tall enough to display only twenty lines at a time, which meant that I had to check my work in tiny increments, looking for a typographical error that was sometimes to be found in the book itself.
I worked in Kerem’s room while he slept, twisted up in a torn t-shirt, on a sleeping bag by the window. After a couple of hours he woke up. He looked around the room and sighed, as though the people who were supposed to take care of the décor had once again let him down.
“I fucking hate America,” he said.
“Too bad you live here,” I said, nettled.
“It
is
too bad, mate. I’m getting out as soon as I can. America is full of racist hicks.”
is
too bad, mate. I’m getting out as soon as I can. America is full of racist hicks.”
“Where are you going?”
“London.”
“They don’t have racists in London?”
“You’d better believe they don’t.” Then, reconsidering, Kerem said, “Or if they do, they get their asses kicked by redlace skinheads.”
I didn’t believe him, but I couldn’t refute him either. Kerem stalked to the bathroom; I heard him pee, then water in the sink. When he came out, he pulled on the jeans he’d worn the night before and we went downstairs.
“Morning, Mum,” Kerem mumbled, forgetting that he was supposed to have been awake for hours.
“You have a good lesson?” Mrs. Regenzeit asked.
“Really good,” I said.
Kerem agreed that I was making progress. He jogged down the hill, kicking at rocks, dodging the invisible members of the opposing team. I went home. At dinner I listened impatiently as my grandfather read us the news from the
Catskill Eagle.
Eastern Gas was laying a new main in Ashland; police had chased a group of suspicious youths out of the cemetery; meanwhile the library was selling unwanted books to raise money for its new reading room. I helped my grandmother clear the table and wash up, then I went to the Regenzeits’. Kerem was listening to a tape he’d made off the radio, Dave Stein’s show from WCDB. He paced around his room, looking for something, a sock, a leather wristband.
Catskill Eagle.
Eastern Gas was laying a new main in Ashland; police had chased a group of suspicious youths out of the cemetery; meanwhile the library was selling unwanted books to raise money for its new reading room. I helped my grandmother clear the table and wash up, then I went to the Regenzeits’. Kerem was listening to a tape he’d made off the radio, Dave Stein’s show from WCDB. He paced around his room, looking for something, a sock, a leather wristband.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“None of your business.”
“Did you ever go to the cemetery?”
Kerem glared at me. “Mate,” he muttered, “stick to the box.”
He found what he was looking for and climbed out the window; the rubber cleats of his
football boots
shushed down the garage roof.
football boots
shushed down the garage roof.
I was afraid that Mrs. Regenzeit would discover our trick, but she never did. She must have wanted badly to believe that the computer was working, that Kerem was working. How she believed! Sometimes, when I came over in the morning, I’d hear her talking on the phone about her son, the whiz kid. All of the signs that she’d read formerly as meaning that Kerem was in trouble now meant that he was a genius. He had messy hair, he wore the same clothes day after day, he didn’t speak much, but on the computer he was something! I think Mrs. Regenzeit believed he was the equal of the young Bobby Fischer, or the boy in Florida who could solve any Rubik’s Cube in a minute flat. I didn’t mind that Kerem’s genius was all my doing, because I got to listen to his music: Minor Threat and Murphy’s Law, the Dead Kennedys, the Circle Jerks, a live Sex Pistols recording that had been copied and recopied until Johnny Rotten’s call to the faithless was practically lost under the hiss of tape. I shared his secret. What was better, what was even better, Kerem passed on to me a portion of the adoration he was getting from his parents. He was the
whiz kid
, but I was the Wiz. One night he took me with him, down to the steps of the public library, which were broad, deep and secluded. I met his friends, a boy named Eric with a shock of red hair and protruding ears; a girl named Shelley who had made her skirt by cutting up a sweatshirt and sewing it back together. Kerem introduced me as his mate from New York City, and Shelley and Eric drew long hollow breaths.
whiz kid
, but I was the Wiz. One night he took me with him, down to the steps of the public library, which were broad, deep and secluded. I met his friends, a boy named Eric with a shock of red hair and protruding ears; a girl named Shelley who had made her skirt by cutting up a sweatshirt and sewing it back together. Kerem introduced me as his mate from New York City, and Shelley and Eric drew long hollow breaths.
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