“So what if we don’t know everything right this moment?” I said. “We’re still young.” This was a lie. It mattered a great deal to know. In fact, it was everything to us.
He said nothing to this. He looked out the window of our room, then went to his desk. Taking out a black marker, he returned to the window and started to draw on the windowpane. I walked over. He was sketching the buildings across the street. He drew the skyline in perfect detail, a schematic of the city from inside our room. Then he filled in the buildings’ façades, with their windows and ledges. Next he began to draw people: office workers in the buildings, people in the shops, pedestrians on the sidewalks. Men, women, and children. He drew expressions on their faces, happy ones—he wanted people to be happy. He drew patterns on men’s ties and on women’s dresses. He made little lines for the sounds coming from the pigeons in the eaves of gray buildings, lines to express their motion, too, the way they flapped their wings. He drew plumes of heat rising from people who were rushing about, and he managed to show how the people who were standing still were cooler. He drew the clouds. He somehow even managed to draw the stars hiding behind the daylight, and then the shape of the Milky Way on the galactic plain. He drew it all with precision, and in so doing he made as true a rendering as I had ever seen. All that was what Arthur saw.
“Nice,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said.
“How are you going to get that off the window?”
“It’s staying forever.”
One weekend, Arthur invited me to his home in Forest Hills, in the borough of Queens, to meet his family. I was introduced to his mother, Rose, his father, Jack, and his brothers, Jules and Jerry. Rose offered me some Mallomars, which Arthur knew I loved. I was shown around their home, each brother proudly displaying his room and describing the meaning of the photographs and memorabilia. In one corner of Arthur’s room stood a guitar and, hanging on the wall above it, was a photograph of him and another young man. It was inscribed “Tom and Jerry,” as in the comic-book cat and mouse. I asked Arthur about it. He smiled and said, “Oh, yeah, that’s my friend Paul. We sang together in high school, and we thought it was a catchy name for our duo. We love rock and roll as much as you do, and we love the Everlys, too. We try to get as close to their harmony as we can.”
“How did you start singing with Paul?” I asked.
“Paul lives around the corner. He wrote this song, ‘Hey Schoolgirl,’ and we sang it together and somehow got it released. It did okay. We didn’t make much money, but it was fun.”
Arthur’s boyhood friend Paul, who was going to Queens College, joined us the next day at lunch. I was struck by the contrast between the two. Paul was shorter than Arthur, his hair and complexion dark; he spoke truncated, staccato sentences in a deep, resonant voice. We chatted about college, its joys and frustrations; about women, their apparent joys and frustrations; and about what the future might hold for each of us. There was no talk of music. However, I noticed that the humor reverberating between Paul and Arthur took the same shape that Arthur had demonstrated in our own conversations—irreverent, odd, caustically imitative, bizarre, and above all, “crooked.”
Paul, of course, was Paul Simon.
As much as Arthur was my spiritual guide—and I his—Jerry Speyer was my tutor in more practical matters during our college years: dating, for example. Columbia undergraduate study was for men only back then, but there were various concentrations of college women within close range—at Sarah Lawrence and Vassar and a little farther out at Connecticut College. Barnard, across Broadway from Columbia, was a short walk away, but maybe because it was Columbia’s “sister college,” we tended to think of the coeds there as “the girl next door.” Besides, thanks to Jerry, we had a car at our disposal. His black 1958 Buick wasn’t meant to be a sports car, but Jerry often drove it that way, with a skill that allowed us to reach our destinations quickly albeit with substantial risk to our lives.
Jerry, who had joined the same fraternity I had, was warm, generous, gregarious. His intensity and powerful intellect were masked by a charming modesty. He was sturdy, both physically and as a friend. But more than most of us, he understood how to enjoy college life, a skill he generously shared with me. Fraternity parties on Saturday nights were exciting. Stunning young women swarmed around us, as I like to recall it, or perhaps it was vice versa. Ample amounts of alcohol, frenetic rock and roll, and loud laughter added to each moment. Unlike many of the partygoers, Jerry was able to drink and dance.
Because I did not drink, I threw every ounce of myself into dancing. We would occasionally double-date. One evening I learned that Jerry’s date was Miss Paris 1959. I don’t recall how he met her or where. Nor could I believe that I was sitting with him and her. There was my date, of course, though I don’t remember who she was. Drinks were served as we sat on a luxurious banquette at the Stork Club. I fumbled with my glass while trying surreptitiously to glance at Miss Paris. She was not classically beautiful, but I found her to be so attractive that before long I could not tear my eyes from her. Jerry couldn’t help but notice and turned a little sour as the evening went on, but we laughed about it on our way home—all was forgiven.
As much as his girlfriends stand out in memory, Jerry’s car still stands out more. He loved that black Buick the
