Growing Up in Manhattan

Part 1: Saturday Short Story

Sachs married too young, in haste, and for the wrong reason. Maybe in some cases twenty works, but if your head’s in the clouds, reality becomes too much of a workout. The bride was only seventeen but already more mature than him. Gladys was a sweet-looking red-haired girl, bright, serious, eager to get going with her life. Why she was in such a rush, who knows, but along comes Sachs with his artistic ambitions and grab bag of pipe dreams, and suddenly there’s a spark. Or they imagine there’s a spark. Meanwhile, two weeks after getting her high school diploma, Gladys Silverglide improves her silly-sounding name to Gladys Sachs. Her new husband, Jerry, gave his parents a farewell hug and bolted from their apartment into a match that worked just fine for about a week, and then the Titanic started taking water and began to slowly list. 

Sachs was raised in Flatbush in several lackluster rectangles on the ground floor of a ten-story red-brick apartment building named after a patriot. The Ethan Allen. He thought a better name for the place, given its grimy exterior, drab lobby, and drunken super, would be the Benedict Arnold. His parents were selectively observant Jews. His father, Morris, ate bacon and pork outside the home but taught his young son strictly that it was God who created the world in six days. Sachs quipped that maybe if he took a little more time, he could’ve gotten it right. As far as his parents went, their son’s sense of humor was seen as a birth defect. His mother, Ruth, was an angry woman who elevated kvetching to an art form. Both parents fought relentlessly and loudly, so bitterly and nastily that Sachs joked to his friends their fighting had inspired Picasso’s Guernica. He couldn’t wait to get out, move across the bridge that spanned the East River, and take up life on the isle of Manhattan. He had been in love with Manhattan since he was a small boy and saw in the movies how New Yorkers lived. Like the seventy million other Americans who grew up in the 1930s and the early 40s and fled from their misery into film palaces, Sachs got his education from Hollywood’s celluloid fairy tales. The result was that the Manhattan he fantasized was not the true Manhattan but one fabricated by MGM, Paramount, Fox, and the brothers Warner. 

Sachs’s father was a tailor at Howard Clothes, which meant he was one of those crotchety homunculi with the thin, square, white crayon who was trotted out to mark off cuffs or let out trousers on some lard bucket who insisted he was still a thirty-two. Morris Sachs compared his job unfavorably to rat poison and told whoever listened that if he could only catch a break, he was destined to achieve great success in business. Still, he remained a man who never rose above a thimble. His wife, Ruth, a perpetually charmless woman who looked like she flew by broom, resigned herself to her husband’s forty a week and seemingly took pleasure at family gatherings certifying his perennial status as a nonentity. Jerry, the precocious son, dreamed of the day he could live in a chic Manhattan apartment with his version of Katharine Hepburn or Carole Lombard. The fact that he was in love with Katharine Hepburn from The Philadelphia Story and Tracy lived in Philly and not Manhattan did not faze him. Manhattan symbolized a way of life, even if it was in Philadelphia, and he wanted it to be his. He talked with Gladys about his dumping college and of his ambition to write plays. She found his dreams feasible and romantic, and after a year of teenage dating, certain that love conquers all, both kids signed aboard the Titanic, set sail from Flatbush, and headed directly toward the iceberg of marriage. 

Sachs worked at a theatrical agency in the mailroom, and Gladys worked at a real estate office days and went to City College nights to become a teacher. He wrote until midnight, struggling to emulate his idols, Chekov, Shaw, and the great O’Neill. It would be a long day’s journey indeed from the mailroom to Long Day’s Journey or Pygmalion, but his aims were commendable and not commercial. As in the movies he was nourished by, he and Gladys would struggle at first, overcome serio-comic problems, and laugh away their troubles. At the fade-out our hero has a great hit on Broadway, and the couple lives in a penthouse on Park Avenue with a white telephone. Well, not exactly. Their actual apartment was, of course, anything but a lavish duplex on the Upper East Side. It was a crammed single-room walk-up on Thompson Street. It was cozy, it was artsy, it was Greenwich Village. It augured well for a budding artist and his young wife, except for one thing. The chemistry was bad. He had failed chemistry in high school, and now he was having trouble with it again. For one thing, there was not much they agreed on, and the most trivial annoyances morphed into shouts and tears. Not that Sachs raised his voice, but she had a redhead’s temper. To be fair, when Gladys had liked the concept of being married to a writer, she hadn’t bargained for a moody, work-obsessed, chronically depressed misanthropist whom she felt put so damn much emphasis on sex. They had had a certain amount of premarital intimacy, and she had always been amicable and cooperative, though her desire never equaled his. He naively assumed when they got married the real action would begin, but it was starting to dawn on him that lovemaking was just not that high on her list of priorities. The imprimatur of wedlock did not give her license to emerge and turn into an imaginative acrobat consumed with lust. But the bedroom was just one battleground. Try as he did, Sachs could not get interested in her friends and their provincial ambitions to teach, to have babies, to get a kiln. She, on the other hand, could not fake any enthusiasm for the special things that gave him pleasure: jazz music, Ogden Nash, Swedish movies. Her anecdotes lacked good payoffs, and his wit went unappreciated. And yet none of these glitches were apparent in the year they were going out. Or perhaps they were simply two unworldly students, itching to leave home and start calling the shots, who swept the red flags under the rug. His mother warned against the marriage and wanted him to finish Brooklyn College, hoping he’d wind up filling prescriptions. She was not a voracious reader like her son and didn’t know from his gods, Chekov or O’Neill. She hoped he’d follow in the footsteps of Mister Rexall and Mister Walgreen. She had nothing against Gladys and saw her as a nice, sensible girl with her feet on the ground. “So what does she need to race pell-mell into marriage?” she said, “especially with a dropout who now will never amount to a row of pins.” 

via SkyHorse Publishing https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781956763294/zero-gravity/