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Show 168 prejudiced against the Commies, so I went over and this older guy sat me down and gave me a political catechism. I failed the test, I couldn't measure up, I just wasn't good enough. So I found another room in one of those houses which look squeezed in between two other houses, with a pious Catholic family, though the mother and one daughter were all that was left. The father was dead or run away, the other kids married, except for the youngest, who was a priest. The mother looked at my rosy cheeks and blond hair, neatly parted, and asked me no catechism. The room was nice but I discovered that the two women always whispered as if someone were asleep or sick or dead, and they always wore carpet slippers. The floors were carpeted, with throw rugs over that, and it was very quiet. Tomb-like. The two women crept silently about their chores, hunched over, and one day when the daughter dropped a pan on the kitchen linoleum it made such a clatter that the house itself vibrated with shock. The landlady added another throw rug in my room. When she started putting throw rugs on top of the throw rugs, I moved out. I had been trying to get into the Ellis Street Co-op, mostly University students, but though I assured them that I was a political radical and an atheist, they were all Jews or Negroes and they looked at my rosy cheeks and blond hair, neatly parted, with grave suspicion, not to say dismissal. I wasn't good enough. They could have taken me as their token WASP or, since they had a fetish for dirt, as a token Clean-Cut Kid, but tokenism wasn't fashionable yet and they only took me because they had an empty room no one else wanted. They needed the rent money. They called me Aby, pronounced Abie, short for All-American Boy. The room was in the basement, about the size of a large closet, though with a lower ceiling. It was damp and filled with age and age's dust, and smelled it. It came with a narrow bed, a chest of drawers, a child's desk |