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  • Tossed Pennies, and: Trio for Weldon Kees
  • David Ray (bio)

Tossed Pennies

A Brandenburg concerto comes on the fm, and anyone these days can afford this modest luxury, but when my new classmates the second week of October lugged their receivers, turntables, and varied speakers up the stairs into their dorm rooms I was sick with envy, but helped them carry up box after box, and I saw that their record collections included every kind of music plus poets like Dylan Thomas and e. e. cummings, and my favorite up until then, the Vermont curmudgeon Robert Frost, who hated stone walls.

More than all the recordings of Beethoven and Bach—or the blue Shirley Temple dish a playmate back home had once used for his dog— I lusted after the red lp of Dylan Thomas reading his poem for his thirtieth birthday, its wild energy echoing down the dorm corridor.

It seemed unjust that classmates should own so much and I so little. Except for a few of us on partial scholarships that could supplement our part-time jobs, these freshmen were products of the best prep schools [End Page 159] in the nation, and nothing could be more certain than that they would wind up as professors, politicians, bankers, or any career of their choice.

One, a thin, nervous freshman named Bertram, who always sucked on a meerschaum, settled into a tworoom suite modeled on Oxford or Cambridge, quarters appropriate for C. S. Lewis or E. M. Forster. No matter. To me all this display was wealth beyond comprehension even by my almost panoptic envy. I could and can list a hundred reasons my motley classmates had been blessed beyond my wildest dreams. For decades afterward I considered it a matter of karma, not just their fortune in choosing the most loving of parents.

And, to be sure, I had yet other reasons. Not one of my new classmates, I learned, had ever lived in a shack with an earthen floor or missed a single meal or stared into the dark while a storm almost made good its threat to wash my sister and me down the hill. And yet in my restless, envious memories I am still fond of these dorm mates who thought me unworthy of their friendship. I mourn what was not. I dream of how those days might have been. I see the names of those classmates in bookstores and in movie credits and on tv, and I have learned of their suicides. [End Page 160]

One afternoon Bertram, who aspired to be a psychiatrist, invited me up to his suite and pointed to a large box he had been unpacking, books bound in green linen. “They just arrived from Blackwell’s in Oxford,” he said, “TheCollected Works of Sigmund Freud. But don’t bother to help, I can shelve them later. Why don’t you just lie down there on the treatment couch and I will psychoanalyze you. I try to get in as much practice as I can.” He was still a freshman but in a hurry.

I declined what might have been the cheapest and most effective treatment I have had since, for by age two, a mere toddler, I had been sentenced to a lifetime of therapy, though no one would then have guessed at such an inevitable future— far preferable, however, to an asylum, suicide, or prison. Or so it is often said.

Yet poor Bertram, like many doctors, had problems of his own and was later arrested for solicitation in a New York subway. I am not a homophobe, and thus make no judgment, and had I been on the jury I would have voted for acquittal, regardless of the charge or the evidence.

Late on some evenings my classmates would head out to 63rd Street or 55th for beer and pizza and as they left they tossed a few pennies at me as I sat trying to catch up on my studies. One of the group would ask if I wanted [End Page 161] to come along, and another—more the alpha—would override the invitation, saying, “Leave him alone, he never has a dime.”

I seldom...

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