only time I took credit for work not entirely my own.
A year or two later, I wrote an essay on the topic, “I Speak for Democracy.” The American Legion awarded first, second, and third place prizes. First prize was a check. A girl won that. The second-place winner was given the choice of two ten-inch LPs, a recording of Ray Anthony’s big band or vocals by Nat King Cole. He chose Ray Anthony. The principal then called me to the stage and joked that I had no choice but to accept the Nat King Cole LP. That’s what I would have chosen anyway. The students in the auditorium laughed. That was okay with me; I loved making people laugh.
My twelfth-grade teacher was in her last year before retiring. Harriet Kline was the most inspiring of teachers. She taught an awareness of the multiple styles of excellent writers through the centuries of British and American literature. What I remember most were the essays of Elizabethan author, Sir Francis Bacon, and the opening passage of Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities. Doing what Mrs. Kline called “aping,” another writer’s style, I wrote an essay, “On Scouting,” in Bacon’s style. I got an A-plus. What I most admired in Dickens’ style was his parallel structure:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Strunk and White, in their influential small booklet, The Elements of Style, advocate short sentences. It’s impressive mastery of the English language to have one sentence comprised of a long series of complete thoughts without losing control or producing unintended fragments and comma splices.
Mrs. Kline thought I was the best writer in her 1954–’55 classes and wanted me to be given an award at graduation but was told by the administration that there was no such award. I settled for being inducted into the National Honor Society and the National Thespian Society, the latter despite my weak acting and directing skills.
One of the essays I wrote for Mrs. Kline was a first stab at an autobiography. It was largely about my parents’ hard struggle as immigrants to this country, land of opportunity. She gave the essay an A-plus.
The literary high point of that senior year was reciting and acting out the witches’ scene from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
After that year, I never tried to copy any of the many great writers I would come to admire, but my appreciation grew for both luxurious, extensive, descriptive work and more concise, laconic, muscular work. In classical American literature, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, and Faulkner might be at one pole, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and J. D. Salinger at the other pole.
3
Superman
I would venture to guess that many of us old-timers, when we were young whippersnappers, imagined all the things we wanted to be when we grew up. Sure, some kids already knew what they wanted to be: doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers, professional athletes, or just anybody rich. Some of us boys growing up in the 1940s idolized cowboys killing Indians, now so politically incorrect. Today I might root for the Indians. Cops catching hardened criminals, though we might have admired the moxie of some wily gangsters. Sharp-shooting American soldiers mowing down Japs and Nazis, clearly evil people for whom none of us would have felt any sympathy. I imagined I could be like the comic strip character, Clark Kent, a bumbling, awkward guy like me, magically transforming into the awesomely powerful flying machine known as Superman, a comic book invention of two Jewish writers, nebbishes with vivid imagination.
Well into adulthood, I had dreams that I was Superman. The catch, however, was that my dreams turned into nightmares. I would fight off two or three bad guys, but out of nowhere, they were joined by a horde of others all jumping on me. I would then try to fly off a nearby cliff but, upon launching my muscular body into the air, my red cape failed. I crashed, and all the bad guys were again on top of me. When I woke up in a cold sweat, I was relieved to be alive and once again the very ordinary Clark Kent.
In real life, my greatest skills lay in my writing ability. I dreamt I would one day write the great American novel or a work of nonfiction that the literary world would welcome and award me some measure of fame. Although that never happened, I was recognized in a very modest way for my research and books on the black American author, Richard Wright, and the popular culture singing comedian, Jimmy Durante. One was dead serious about the social problem of racism; the other was a nonpolitical master of raucous humor. Still, the image of Superman continued to have its allure.
Superman sought to protect the innocent from those who would perform evil acts. He was, for me, a one-man army when conventional forces failed. Sometimes evil appeared insidiously clever and more exciting than good, but unlike in the real world, in Superman’s world, evil forces always lost. I hoped in some small way, I could do good, even if more like Clark Kent than Superman. After all, Clark Kent was a newspaper reporter, a writer like me.
4
Something I Never Told Anyone Before
In The Wiz, the excellent Broadway musical reworking of the classic film, The Wizard of Oz, there’s a number that piles up negatives in a very effective way of saying “No!” “Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News.” Well, I could say “Don’t nobody never ask me to do nothing that nobody don’t need to know.”
If I’m asked to reveal a deeply buried secret, I’d better lie. If there’s something I don’t want known, there probably is a good reason, so why should I jump into hot water now and get scalded? Torture me, and I’ll make up the most creative lie like I was a friend of E.T. and came with him from another planet but stayed when he returned home.
I could say that in the most recent of several reincarnations, I was Rin Tin Tin, courageous German Shepherd silent film movie star, not likely some human great like Aristotle or Napoleon, nor a villain like Rasputin or Benedict Arnold, but maybe an insignificant street sweeper in Pompeii before Mount Vesuvius demolished the city in 79 AD If I’m in line for still another reincarnation, I’d like to request of the Powers That Be that I’ll be allowed to rest in my grave. My spirit is exhausted from inhabiting so many bodies of men and dogs, plus, who knows, even a turtle or a sheep.
The truth, if you really must have the truth, something I never told anyone before, is that I’m transgender and born in Reykjavik to Icelandic parents who disowned me after settling in Fargo, North Dakota.
5
Naked or Nude
My father, Marco, as a bachelor, took artful black-and-white photographs, many of lightning strikes across the summer sky, some of individual flowers, some of trips with friends to Niagara Falls and the Catskill Mountains. The best of these he mounted in a loose-leaf scrapbook on black pages and poetic descriptions in white ink. When he was courting my mother, he set up a timer so he could join her in “love photos.” These too found their way into his scrapbook with comments like “love calling.”
When I was in high school, I looked through his collection, surprised to see that he also included photos of Baby David. Then life got too complicated for my father, and he threw out photography equipment like paper stock and chemicals, putting his camera in a closet unused and forgotten. Included in the discontinued scrapbook were several
