Page 117 - WhyAsInY

anDries HuDDe, We salute tHee
forehead resting on his arm, looking down, riveted by the book on his lap. I was impressed.
I remember when Joe told me that he had learned about a book where the author used little punctuation and set out what went through a man’s mind when he was seated on a toilet, and also what went through his mind during what we understood as sex, something that was begin- ning to be the object of intense curiosity for us. It turns out in the latter case that (maybe as usual) it was a woman, not a man, who was doing the thinking and that it was probably not during sex, but no matter. I was fascinated, and the book, which Joe told me was called Ulysses, became somewhat of an obsession for me. Of course, the copy that I somehow got hold of at the time was incomprehensible from the first sentence on, and, try as I might, I could not locate the sex in it. As I got older, I would read all about it and try it many times (Ulysses, that is), with comprehension improving with each attempt. For whatever rea- son, I made my third attempt at reading it while continually riding the subway to visit my mom in Kings Highway Hospital after she suffered her heart attack at Windows on the World. Ulysses was only one of many books that Joe would tell me about or recommend: A Canticle for Liebow- itz, which Joe recommended when we were in high school, and A Catcher in the Rye, which he recommended while we were still at Hudde, spring to mind. (For years, it was impossible to attempt to write anything fic- tional without automatically speaking in the voice of Holden Caulfield.) I actually read a few of Joe’s recommendations, certainly those two. More important, I learned from Joe that reading was a good thing, although, in truth, I never thought of myself as a reader until deep into my adulthood.
What I didn’t learn from Joe—what I noticed all by myself in junior high—was that the girls were starting to look different. I also noticed that, at least in the beginning of junior high, I was not. (This would also set me apart from a whole new class of boys, those who had already grown, some of whom were seen as very tough, had slicked-back hair, and actually smoked cigarettes, packs of which they folded into the short sleeves of their tee shirts; these boys were known alternately as
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