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If you went out the door of our house and looked west, there was a block of middle-class South Shore Long Island “white flight” homes. In them lived businessmen, contractors, a fireman. It was a mix of education levels and tastes. On their 120-by-100-foot lots, these properties seemed generous and appealing to Brooklynites like my dad. Whereas our neighbors’ homes were covered in antiseptic aluminum siding or traditional shingles, our house featured the more urban-style asphalt siding, in a dulled and cracked forest green. The house seemed to sag, a slight bulge here and swelling there, perhaps from dampness or some compromise in the framing underneath. All of the white-painted trim was peeling. The windows were dressed with cheap curtains on tension rods, all graying for need of washing. The pitted driveway was stained from unintentionally expelled automotive fluids. Some neighbors parked a small boat in their yard or planted a garden. Looking at our house, though, you got the feeling that Marjorie Main might come out on the porch and slap Humphrey Bogart across the face.
Directly across the street from our house was a public nine-hole golf course. I walked through a hole that had been cut into the fence and stepped out onto the snowy plain. My lifelong worship of winter and snow was born on these walks. Heavy snowfall is a great homogenizer in making everything pretty. Even our uncared-for house looked slightly more charming, if only for that day.
The golf course divided the neighborhood essentially in half. Streets with Native American names like Pocahontas, Seneca, and Seminole were labeled east and west. The course was called Peninsula and sat directly across Sunset Road from our house on West Iroquois Street. Before any talk of climate change, you’d swear it snowed more on Long Island then. The sun would come out after a big storm and shine on the frozen surface, creating a crème br?lée–like crust on top of acres of powdery snow. Walking across the golf course property after a grand snowfall was like stepping in and out of a series of buckets. Lift your leg straight out, extend, then punch your boot through the icy veneer. Up, out, down. Repeat, repeat. A walk that might have taken ten minutes across grass took thirty. However, a walk that took me along a plowed street was neither as adventurous nor as beautiful. I wanted to feel piercing wind lashing my face. I wanted to walk across this field because it was pristine and white and no one was there. I could talk to myself all I wanted.
In summertime, the golf course was our Hole-in-the-Wall, a sanctuary within which neighborhood kids drank their first beer, smoked their first joint, or had their first fumbling romantic consummation. And, above all, we played ball here for hours and only the darkness could send us home. We played baseball and football games in their seasons. We held the occasional pitch-and-putt golf matches in July and August, when the days were longest and we were guaranteed an hour of fading light after the staff of the club had gone home. The men who ran the place had names like Ferdie and Tiger and Frenchie. If we jumped the gun and attempted, too early, to whack a seven iron toward the third green that ran by our house, one of these guys would come rattling toward us in a golf cart, screaming and cursing. As we got older, they got older and their protests grew to sound more like pleas. When my brother Daniel eventually grabbed a bag of clubs and entered the modest clubhouse to play the course as an eighteen-year-old legitimate, paying customer, it was as if Butch Cassidy had walked into a bank to open a checking account.
The town of Massapequa had a couple of thumbs of land that pointed out into the Great South Bay. Like on much of Long Island’s South Shore, canals had been dug to create more waterfront property. They were 1950s developments with names like Bar Harbor, Harbor Green, and Old Harbor Green. Our area was called Nassau Shores, or just “the Shores” by the locals, and it was the least of these areas, in terms of real estate value. The other waterfront communities were zoned so that their kids attended the town’s original high school, Massapequa High School, giving them a small but discernible boost of prestige. Older residents called it “The High School,” placing it above its crosstown counterpart, Berner High School, which my siblings and I attended.
My dad taught at The High School, and there had been a suggestion that we could go to the school where my dad taught, as other teachers’ children had done. But my dad thought it might be too much for us (and I’m sure for him) if we all spent day and night under the same roof. So my dad taught at The High School, and we went to Berner, the more working-class and, in some ways, less desirable of the two. When I looked over my dad’s school yearbook every spring, I noticed that The High School seemed to have more of a polish to its efforts. Berner had a Drama Club. The High School had “Masque and Muse.” The High School had an “It’s Academic” team, aimed at scoring an appearance on the old TV game show. Its faculty adviser, my dad’s best friend, Arnie Herman, often laid out his own money to pay for supplies so that the kids had a shot to get on television. The High School’s sports teams dominated their league, until eventually Berner’s football team beat them in a game that was the final word in their crosstown rivalry that I was there to witness during my junior and senior years. Whereas Massapequa High School looked like a postcard suburban public school, Berner looked like a hastily financed annex, built to handle the overflow of a rapidly growing community. Berner was a concrete battleship of a building, with very few trees and little character.