as the obvious challenge to live at least into the first year of the next one must be overwhelming indeed.)
Still, it is a remarkable experience to accumulate years hand-in-hand with the society in which you live. And it’s most interesting, I think, for those of us born, as Jack and I were, during a time when the world was on the verge of being completely upended. Born in the first year of the ’50s, we, along with every other citizen of the planet, were about to be plunged headlong into a period of extraordinary change that none of us could have foreseen.
The year Jack and I left the single digits and reached the magical age of 10, the adult population of the world had its attention fixed first on Fidel Castro, the charismatic yet worrisome Cuban leader whose willingness to purchase oil from the U.S.S.R. was causing more than a few sleepless nights in Washington, and later the spectacle of a sickly Richard Nixon debating fresh-faced John F. Kennedy in the first televised presidential debate. For those of us just completing our first decade, the year’s highlights were somewhat less historic, although to us just as memorable. For Jack and me, it culminated in meeting Chief Halftown, the star of our favorite daily television series, at the Buster Brown shoe store one perfect Saturday afternoon. After an hour’s wait in line we came face-to-face with our hero and he presented each of us with a personally signed photo and made us honorary members of his tribe. For weeks, we went nowhere without the eagle feathers he’d given us as tokens of our brotherhood, and we talked endlessly of leaving our terminally boring neighborhood and joining the chief and his painted braves in their secret western encampment.
The world seemed to only get more and more fantastic, with each passing month bringing new adventures for two boys with few worries. We felt like Tom Swift, whose encounter with the Visitor from Planet X and battles with the Asteroid Pirates I read aloud to Jack in all their dramatic glory as soon as I could check each new book out from the library, the two of us safe inside the fort we constructed—badly but proudly—from scraps of lumber my father picked up for us. Jack, in turn, perfected his impersonation of Roland, the pale vampire host of Philadelphia’s own Shock Theater, which we watched religiously during sleepovers in the family room of his house. “Good night, whatever you are,” Jack would intone ghoulishly, imitating Roland’s trademark line as the credits rolled for The Creeping Hand or whichever spine-tingling movie we’d just watched. A makeshift cape over his shoulders, he would advance upon me in my sleeping bag, eyes widened in a hypnotic stare. I obliged by feigning enchantment, maintaining my composure until Jack’s teeth were almost grazing my neck, at which point we would both collapse in hysterical shrieks, pleased beyond words.
Those are the mile markers of that time for me, those seemingly small memories that have remained in the files of my mind while others have been discarded. The events more commonly noted on official time lines—the Bay of Pigs invasion and the resulting days of fear, the shooting of the first person trying to cross the Berlin Wall, the death of Marilyn Monroe—were things I heard my parents talk about. To me, they happened in another world, not the one I lived in, and therefore were of no consequence.
The exception, perhaps, was the launching of the first man into space. What boy—what child—isn’t captivated by the magic of the stars? Who among us hasn’t stood gazing up at bodies whose silver light reaches us from millions of miles away, and wondered what secrets are cloaked by the darkness of frozen, swirling galaxies? Even now, waiting for Sam to finish his last voiding of water before bed, I sometimes stand in the yard beneath the spreading arc of night and imagine the worlds beyond worlds waiting to be discovered.
In the summer and fall of 1960, Jack and I spent hours discussing, with the unparalleled wisdom of 10-year-olds, the possibilities that awaited the first men to penetrate the vastness of the cosmos. NASA, created only two years before, could have benefitted greatly from the rich science of our boyish imaginations, if only they’d known we were available to them. Sadly undiscovered, we nonetheless outlined the dangers, enumerated the possibilities, and created, based on our knowledge (gleaned primarily from comics and the aforementioned Tom Swift novels), the best course of action for the lucky pioneers of the last frontier. When, on April 12 of 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, we celebrated his victory over gravity with Pepsi-Cola drunk from appropriately missile-shaped bottles and a recreation of the event in our very own Vostok I made from three O-Boy lettuce cartons and copious amounts of aluminum foil purloined from our mothers’ kitchens. While our parents murmured unhappily about the Soviets’ early lead in the space race, we knew only that Gagarin had fulfilled our dreams, and was therefore worthy of becoming our hero.
He held the position for less than three weeks, when we unceremoniously dethroned him for our country’s very own Alan B. Shepard. This time our relieved parents threw a backyard cookout in celebration of America’s success. Rechristening our ship Freedom 7, Jack and I gloried in the power that was NASA, lying side by side in the cramped confines of the boxes and soaring together toward the moon while our fathers drank beer and our mothers dished up potato salad and hot dogs. We dreamed of one day being chosen to lead the charge to Mars, or Venus, and promised one another that we would do it as a team. Afterward, we dashed around the yard holding sparklers bought for the Fourth of July but broken out early. Spinning them in crackling circles of silver and gold, we were two comets hurtling with carefree abandon on dizzying trajectories through the early spring evening.
The friendship of boys is a powerful and mysterious thing. To the observer looking in from the outside, it may appear little more than a social contract, and to some extent it is. Boys, especially when young, form friendships based on nothing more than the proximity of their houses, a mutual appreciation of a sporting team, or even a shared enemy. Ask an 11-year-old boy why his best friend is his best friend, and you’ll likely receive a shrug and an “I don’t know” in response. Ask the same question of an 11-year-old girl, and the reply will be not only heartfelt but built around an extensive list of thoroughly-explored reasons.
Despite the seeming simplicity of the bond between boys, the core of the relationship is as complex as any advanced mathematical proof. Even the boys themselves may not understand why it is they seek companionship with one another. “I don’t know” is, in fact, an honest answer. Rare is the adolescent boy who will look at you and, with measured tones, say, “I guess he’s my best friend because when I’m with him I forget about all of the millions of self-doubts and insecurities I have. Oh, and even though I don’t really understand it, knowing that he likes me makes me feel good about who I am.”
Jack and I were no different. We gave little thought to what we were to one another. We just knew that we were best friends, even if we had yet to define what that meant. And we were to have two more years of innocent bliss during which things just were, without reason or motivation. But a funny thing happens in the twilight time around 13. The skin of boyhood begins to feel a little too small, and the soul starts to itch as it expands and the body follows. As legs grow too long for the pants of youth and wrists extend beyond the cuffs of shirts that fit only a week before, the world takes on strange new shapes, as if only now are the eyes coming fully into focus. Seemingly overnight, what seemed safe and familiar is revealed as foreign and filled with perils.
We were no exceptions to this rule. As 11 turned to 12, and 12 to 13, the very molecules of our bodies rearranged themselves. Voices deepened, muscles thickened, hair and new scents burst forth from beneath skin suddenly teeming with mysteries. Changing for gym class, we and the other boys stole anxious glances at one another, searching for evidence that we were not alone. This, in turn, gave rise to new anxieties as we began to compare and contrast the shifting geographies hidden beneath our clothes. Seeing someone further along in the process of adulthood made us question our own progress, filling our minds with a host of doubts and imagined failures.
I say “we” because I have the benefit of looking back with the surety provided by more than half a century of life. Almost certainly we were, to a boy, in the throes of agony caused by the machinery of previously-dormant gonads thrown into production, of glands and ducts dripping intoxicating elixirs into our blood that turned us mad and betrayed us in terrible ways. It is the rare boy who escapes the deliciously malevolent torture of becoming a man, and although nearly unbearable at the time, the end results are almost always worth the hardships.
And so we suffered in 1963, alone but