I had a happy childhood with the professors. At the heart of the bubble were the Gardens and the Gardens gave the bubble a heart. I was raised in enchantment, safe from harm, cocooned in liberal downtown silk, and it gave me an innocent courage even though I knew that outside the magic spell the world’s dark windmills awaited the quixotic fool. (Still, “the only excuse for privilege,” my father taught me, “is to do something useful with it.”) I went to school at Little Red and to college on Washington Square. A whole life contained in a dozen blocks. My parents had been more adventurous. My father went to Oxford on a Fulbright, and after he finished, with a British friend in a Mini Traveller, he crossed Europe and Asia—Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India—back in that earlier-mentioned Jurassic era when dinosaurs roamed the earth and it was possible to make such journeys without losing your head. When he came home he had had his fill of the wide world and became, along with Burrows and Wallace, one of the three great historians of New York City, co-author, with those two gentlemen, of the multivolume classic Metropolis, the definitive history of Superman’s hometown where we all lived and where the Daily Planet arrived on the doorstep every morning and where, many years after old Supe, Spider-Man took up residence, in Queens. When I walked with him in the Village he pointed out where Aaron Burr’s place once stood, and once outside the movie multiplex on Second Avenue and Thirty-Second Street he told me the story of the Battle of Kip’s Bay, and how Mary Lindley Murray saved Israel Putnam’s fleeing American soldiers by inviting the British general William Howe to stop his pursuit and come to tea at her grand home, Inclenberg, on top of what would come to be known as Murray Hill.
My mother too had been intrepid in her fashion. When she was young she worked in public health with drug addicts and subsistence farmers in Africa. After I was born she narrowed her horizons and became first an expert in early childhood education and eventually a psychology professor. Our house on Sullivan Street, at the far end of the Gardens from the Golden mansion, was filled with the pleasing accumulated clutter of their lives, threadbare Persian rugs, carved wooden African statuary, photographs, maps and etchings of the early “New” cities on Manhattan Island, both Amsterdam and York. There was a corner dedicated to famous Belgians, an original Tintin drawing hanging next to a Warhol screen print of Diane von Furstenberg and the famous Hollywood production still of the beautiful star of Breakfast at Tiffany’s with her long cigarette holder, once known as Miss Edda van Heemstra, afterwards much beloved as Audrey Hepburn; and below these, a first edition of Mémoires d’Hadrien by Marguerite Yourcenar on a small table next to photographs of my namesake Magritte in his studio, the cyclist Eddy Merckx, and the Singing Nun. (Jean-Claude Van Damme didn’t make the cut.)
In spite of this little nook of Belgiana they did not hesitate to criticize their country of origin when asked. “King Leopold II and the Congo Free State,” my mother said. “Worst colonialist ever, most rapacious setup in colonial history.” “And nowadays,” my father added, “Molenbeek. European center of fanatical Islam.”
In pride of place on the living room mantelpiece sat a decades-old, never-used block of hashish still wrapped in its original cheap cellophane packaging and stamped with an official Afghan government seal of quality bearing the likeness of the moon. In Afghanistan in the time of the king the hashish was legal and came in three price-and quality-controlled packages, Afghan Gold, Silver and Bronze. But what my father, who never indulged in the weed, kept in pride of place on the mantel was something rarer, something legendary, almost occult. “Afghan Moon,” my father said. “If you use that it opens de third eye in your pineal gland in de center of your forehead and you become clairvoyant and few secrets can be kept from you.”
“Then why have you never used it,” I asked.
“Because a world vissout mystery iss like a picture vith no shadows,” he said. “By seeing too much it shows you nossing.”
“What he means is,” my mother added, “that, (a), we believe in using our minds and not blowing them, and, (b), it’s probably adulterated, or cut, as the hippies used to say, with some dreadful hallucinogen, and (c), it’s possible that I would object strongly. I don’t know. He has never put me to the test.” The hippies, as if she had no memory of the 1970s, as if she had never worn a sheepskin jacket or a bandanna or dreamed of being Grace Slick.
There was no Afghan Sun, FYI. The sun of Afghanistan was the king, Zahir Shah. And then the Russians came, and then the fanatics, and the world changed.
But Afghan Moon…that helped me in the darkest moment of my life, and my mother was no longer able to object.
And there were books, inevitably, books like a disease, infesting every corner of our shabby, happy home. I became a writer because of course I did with those forebears, and maybe I chose movies instead of novels or biographies because I knew I couldn’t compete with the old folks. But until the Goldens moved into the big house on Macdougal, diagonally across the Gardens from ours, my post-graduation creativity had been stalled. With the boundless egotism of youth I had begun to imagine a mighty film, or a Dekalog-style sequence of films, dealing with migration, transformation, fear, danger, rationalism, romanticism, sexual change, the city, cowardice, and courage; nothing less than a panoramic portrait of my times. My preferred manner would be something I privately called Operatic Realism, my subject the conflict between the Self and the Other. I was trying to make a fictional portrait of my neighborhood but it was a story without a driving force. My parents didn’t have the doomed heroism of properly Operatic-Realist leads; nor did our other neighbors. (Bob Dylan was long gone.) My celebrated superstar-African-American-movie-director-in-a-red-baseball-cap film studies professor haughtily said after reading my early screenplays, “Very prettily done, kid, but where’s the blood? It’s too quiet. Where’s the engine? Maybe you should allow a flying saucer to land in the goddamn Gardens. Maybe you should blow up a building. Just make something happen. Make some noise.”
I didn’t know how. And then the Goldens arrived and they were my flying saucer, my engine, my bomb. I felt the excitement of the young artist whose subject has arrived like a gift in the holiday mail. I felt grateful.