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embarrassment, especially since she was the brightest one in the family; they all owned identical Knabe baby grands, but she was the only one who could play, at which they affected amusement. Each time I called to announce the birth of a child of mine, my father’s first anxious question was “Is it dark?” The racist implications angered me, but by then, from the clan’s reaction to me and to my mother, I had long known the meaning of rejection, the kind that hits you when you’ve walked into a room and haven’t even said anything.
    It may be that even if half consciously, we choose our personalities to maintain a certain saving balance in the family’s little universe.Kermit, three years my senior, I early on paired with our father as a force for order and goodness. With his blue eyes and fair skin he so resembled the old man, while my dark mother and I were linked not only in appearance but in our unspoken conspiracy against the restraints and prohibitions of reality. If I came up from the street and announced that I had just seen a policeman on roller skates, she would stand amazed and ask for more details, my father would frown slightly as he tried to keep from laughing, and Kermit would roll his eyes ceilingward, scandalized by such horse-shit.
    And of what importance, I have so often asked myself, is any of this absurdity, not only in my life but in anyone else’s? It is simply that the view from the floor, filled though it is with misunderstandings, is also the purest, the matrix whose content is so difficult to change later on. The impact of things seen and heard from the carpet is red-hot and returns with a far greater shock of truth when recalled because those visions are our very own, our private misunderstandings of reality shared by no one else, and are thus the soil of poetry, which is our freedom to alter mere facts. From misunderstandings, more than from anything dutifully learned out of respect for culture, the threads unwind that spin the uniqueness of each artist’s vision, promising implicitly to remake the world all new. Unknowingly, almost from the beginning, I have sought to reconstruct my life, becoming my brother from time to time, my father, my mother, putting on theirs and others’ forms and faces in order to test the view from angles other than my own. And incidentally, it sometimes took years before I could painfully strip myself of such disguises and find myself again. In a word, at the very time we are most vulnerable to impressions, we are least able to avoid outrageously misjudging what they mean. At a minimum, therefore, life will never lose its mystery.
    The mystery, for example, of what made me decide that my position was second base. Somehow I came to make this choice, just as one day I would “decide” I was a playwright. Second base was “me,” while Kermit was a pitcher and a track man. These identities had a fate behind them, were inexorable, came down from on high. I have to wonder what other elements of my being I chose, took off the rack, for no good reason. Why did Kermit nearly always fall just a step or two before the finish line in the Central Park races we were constantly running? The crowd of boys from the row of apartment houses facing the park on 110th Street was cheering him on, his powerful legs were pumping along at a good steady pace,and just as he spread out his arms, down he went and lost. What choice of his lay behind this? Was it unrelated to his volunteering for the army in World War II and as an infantry captain finding himself carrying a man on his back for hours in zero weather until they could reach an aid station, while his own toes were freezing and becoming gangrenous? Whence come these fateful images that might lose a man his feet, or his life—or be your salvation if he happens to be near when you need saving?
    Kermit was always a good man to have around at such times. But his pathological honesty