A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE: TEENAGE BOYS AND LOVE PART 1

This article from the New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/22/fashion/seeking-to-help-boys-keep-their-friends.html

caught and riveted my attention. It brought back memories of almost 60 years and these memories are sharp and clear, yet they are unarguably modified by the soft suasions of looking backward.

My family, consisting of my mother, aunt, younger brother and I lived in an upper middle class high-rise apartment in Forest Hills on Long Island, New York. Sid Caesar from the “Show of Shows” walked through our neighborhood on his way to the subway almost every day.

We lived on the 16th floor and in the apartment directly above us lived Norman Levy. He and I were both freshpersons in Forest Hills High School and we began to walk to school together in the morning, a distance of about 10 city blocks.

Norman's parents owned a small, very busy bookstore in Times Square across the River in Manhattan. The bookstore was open into the wee hours of the night and when I stopped by either Norman’s mother or father was behind the cash register.

During the summer the windows of the two apartments were open and through the open windows Mrs. Levy could easily be heard screaming at her tiny, passive husband and her movie star, good-looking son, threatening to jump off the balcony to her death in the street below.

I am sure that Norman knew that I knew of his mother's fulminations but that information remained unspoken between us.

I would typically leave for school in the morning about an hour before the school opened. I was good friends with Otto, the school maintenance person and he would let me through the door to my empty classroom where I would do my homework (I never brought schoolbooks home) read the New York News and the New York Times and leave the newspapers for Mr. Bovin, a shop teacher, who was our home- room guardian.

Norman and I were very close. Our relationship was a calm oasis in a turbulent sea. We were, as the New York Times article sensitivity says, best friends, and were “both repositories and guards for our most private feelings.” While young teen-age girls would have spoken to each other about feelings and emotions, the code between young boys is altogether different. We respected our silences and saw them as nonjudgmental and soothing. If we had spoken our feelings toward one another it would've come across as awkward even clumsy. Norman’s support of me was unspoken but I knew it was there.

Mrs. Levy strongly objected to my ringing the buzzer downstairs to their apartment as I left early for school and forbid Norman to hang out with me. I felt both betrayal and sadness over what happened.

Norman did very well in high school although we ignored each other when we crossed paths in the school corridors. He went on to Bowdoin College, a well known small Liberal Arts College in Maine, where he majored in acting and ended up as an understudy in Leonard Bernstein's Broadway production of West Side Story and proceeded to fall madly in unrequited love with Chita Rivera, the star of the show. This information was passed on to me by Norman as we kept in contact with one another as the years passed. I remember that I asked him for a favor and that he invited me to his wedding.

As for me, I experienced a sharp break in friendship bonds and experienced both sadness and loneliness until girls discovered me one half years later and filled in the gap.

Brolove has definitely been a development for me and I firmly believe that these emotions of loss are directly related to my deep love for my younger brother who died suddenly at 44 years of age the day after we had our only quarrel.

I trust that this story represents my belated gratitude for what Norman gave me.