Excerpt from “Look, I’m Gone” by James Howard Kunstler

The Amazon Summary:

“November, 1963, the week before Thanksgiving. Twelve-year-old Jeff Greenaway, recently exiled from Manhattan to Ponsonby Hall, a New Hampshire prep school “for boys who behaved badly,” wins big in a clandestine poker game. The next day, President John F. Kennedy is murdered in Dallas. The Ponsonby boys are sent home early by train for the holiday — and the president’s funeral.

Back at home with his parents on East 79^th Street, and restless over the tragic events playing out on TV, Jeff ventures out into the city on his own, an explorer in the underbelly of Times Square and its colorful denizens. He falls hard for the teenage ingenue Kathy Kaine, star of the Broadway hit The Wayward Family Singers, who lives unsupervised in the historic Bomoseen Hotel uptown. It’s a first romance for him, but not for her.

Unable to swallow the official story about JFK’s assassination, he stakes out the Russian Mission to the United Nations on 68^th Street and Park Avenue, taunting the KBG goons who guard the entrance until Ambassador Zorin himself takes Jeff for a mind-bending ride into Central Park to explain how the world really works.

Throughout his week of romance and international intrigue, Jeff becomes immersed in the world-changing novel, The Catcher in the Rye, and is finally driven to run away from the city, determined to meet J.D. Salinger, the book’s reclusive author, who he finds back in New Hampshire — not far from Ponsonby Hall. As a blizzard sweeps through the state, “Jerry” Salinger is trapped in his farmhouse kitchen debating Hindu religion with Jeff Greenaway, a disciple of Salinger’s own troubled, epic creation, Holden Caulfield.

Set against the crackle of AM radios, Times Square dives, backstage Broadway, Park Avenue penthouses, and the uneasy hush that followed November 22, 1963, Look, I’m Gone is a razor-witted, big-hearted coming-of-age tale that captures the very moment America — and one smart-mouthed boy — lost their innocence. The novel seamlessly blends historical fiction, social satire, and teenage rebellion into an unforgettable journey from the Gothic rituals of prep-school to the vibrant, yet perilous, streets of mid-1960s Manhattan.”

The Excerpt:

Early in the story, Jeff is at large in Times Square, a little while after Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas. . . .

Note: For some reason, Substack formatting doesn’t permit paragraph indents.

. . . .

Jeff exited the park at 59th Street and stopped to pet a horse hitched to one of the carriages lined up there awaiting tourists. The driver up on his bench said the mare’s name was Ruby, after a nip from a half-pint bottle of Old Overholt stashed in the pocket of his grimy greatcoat.

“Ruby!” Jeff squawked. “Gawd.”

“Yeah, she’s a gem,” the driver said.

“Didn’t you hear? The guy who shot Oswald, his name is Ruby.”

“What! Oswald got shot now?”

“Yeah. Just an hour ago.”

“What in the Jeezus Christ . . . ?”

“At police headquarters in Texas. It was a mob guy named Ruby, they said.”

“This country’s gone bananas.”

“You’re telling me,” Jeff said. “They showed it right on TV, live. Oswald’s dead.”

“Dead, fer chrissake!”

“Anyway, she’s a nice horse.”

“Yeah,” the driver said, reaching for his bottle again. “She’s a gem. Jeezus.”

Jeff bought a paper sack of roasted chestnuts for a quarter from the pushcart in front of the Pulitzer Fountain, vacant this fateful afternoon of the young lovers and shutterbugging tourists usually found there.

“Didja hear? They shot Oswald now,” he informed the vendor, a shriveled figure with a wrinkled, sooty face stuffed into a hat with three furry flaps on it. Jeff was puzzled as to how the front flap worked. How were you supposed to see? The vendor mumbled something back in an incomprehensible dialect from the Carpathian outlands of Europe.

Jeff moved on, munching the chestnuts. They tasted like little potatoes with a sweet edge. He remembered years ago when he thought they were revolting, but with age he’d acquired a liking for them. The great emporiums along Fifth Avenue were closed: Bonwit, Tiffany’s, Saks. The Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center was already up on the little alley between 49th and 50th, decked out in gigantic, shiny red and gold glass balls, but the golden statue of Prometheus looked down on the empty ice-skating rink. Jeff had never seen the city so desolate. Surely there must be some signs of life over on Times Square, he thought.

He was right, it turned out. No sense of decorum came between the president’s casket on view in the Capitol Rotunda two hundred miles south and the many businesses avid for dollars in what was politely known as New York’s Theater District. The blush had come off that rose in the decades since the archetypal sailor boy gave a Hollywood kiss to a young gal he hadn’t even been introduced to there on V-J Day. These days, the district’s seediness was a kind of attraction in and of itself.

A joke shop that Jeff had patronized many times when he still resided at home was open for business at 49th Street and Seventh Avenue, next to the Skee-Ball parlor. He went in and perused the various practical joke offerings: plastic ice cubes with insects embedded inside, the whoopie cushion, joy buzzers, disappearing ink. Being frugal, like his father, he made only one purchase: a “disguise kit” that contained several fake mustaches, fake scars with gory stitch holes, and black plastic eyeglass frames without any lenses. He paid the dollar-ninety-five entirely in coins, immediately broke open the cellophane, and selected a bushy brown droopy mustache styled in the manner of Grover Cleveland.

“Have you got a mirror?” he asked the cashier, a small, round-shouldered, middle-aged gent who reminded him of Mr. Mole in The Wind in the Willows.

“Naw,” the man said. “You want it on? Gimme. I’ll put it on ya.”

Jeff leaned in over the counter. The cashier peeled off the backing and stuck it on Jeff’s upper lip. “There. You’re all set.”

“How’s it look?” Jeff asked.

“I’d never know it was you,” the man said.

“How about now?” Jeff said, putting on the eyeglass frames.

“Now especially. I wouldn’t guess in a million years.”

“Hey, did you hear? Oswald got shot.”

“Yeah, yeah. I heard. Couple of bums, both of ’em. I see bums like them day in and day out here. This country is turning into Bum Central. Sometimes lately I’m a little sorry I fought for our side in the war.”

“Whose side would you fight for then? The Nazis or the Japs?”

“Neither. They was both bum outfits. I’da gone on the lam. I’da took off for the North Woods or something.”

“I’m on the lam,” Jeff said.

“Yeah, what from?”

“From the North Woods,” Jeff said.

“Waita minnit . . . What were you doing up there?”

“I can’t tell you. You might turn me in.”

“Naw. Not me. I ain’t a snitch. C’mon.”

“I was at a reform school in New Hampshire.”

“Jeezus, that really is the North Woods. What’d you do to get sent?”

“Nothing. I mean, it’s a long, boring story.”

“Anyway, they’ll never find you now, kid, the way you look. I can hardly recognize you.”

“Yeah, well, I better get going.”

“Good luck out there. It’s a jungle.”

Once outside, Jeff checked himself in the window of the Skee-Ball parlor. Indeed, he looked like an entirely different person: a mature midget, a somewhat sinister presentation, he thought, having acquired a horror of midgets and other misbegotten persons that one encountered not infrequently on Manhattan Island. The temperature was dropping and a stiff wind blew uptown on Seventh Avenue. Jeff clutched the lapels of his blazer together. He wished he’d remembered to bring a muffler.

The famous lights of Times Square blazed in the late autumn afternoon’s crepuscular gloom. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was playing at the Criterion. He had no desire to see a comedy that was obviously trying too hard to sound funny. Smoke rings billowed out of the Camel cigarette billboard a couple of blocks down. The giant piggybacked signs for Castro convertibles and Beefeater gin pulsated like electric tombstones across Seventh Avenue. He turned the corner on 47^th seventh Street to get out of the wind for a little while and at once confronted a door with a strangely enticing sign behind the glass. “Dreamboat Landing,” it read. “Girls, Girls, Girls . . . 25 cents a dance. 2nd Floor. Gentlemen welcome.”

He went inside the vestibule. Music emanated from somewhere upstairs. The stairway was wallpapered with movie posters from before the war featuring men kissing women. The stairs creaked as he ventured up. The only door on the second floor was wide open. Inside was a large room that had started its life decades ago as a rehearsal studio with a sprung hardwood floor for Flo Ziegfeld’s chorus girls. A mural on the longest side wall with no windows depicted a night scene of a steamboat landing framed by live oaks dripping Spanish moss, with fresh-faced beauties dressed in antebellum crinolines, carrying parasols, sashaying down the gangway to waiting gentlemen.

The actual live human scene within the room was a bit more prosaic: three couples danced listlessly to a recording of Bing Crosby singing “Cabin in the Cotton.” Four other women sat in attitudes of boredom in chairs along the wall under the steamboat mural, smoking cigarettes, filing their nails, reading a paperback. As Jeff stepped in, one of them bestirred herself to put down her book and come over to him. At five-foot-one, she was almost his own size. She wore a shimmery gray-green shift that made Jeff think of a mermaid. Her brown hair was a short bob, with bangs.

“Dance fella?” she said with a cockeyed smile, more pronounced on the left side.

It hadn’t occurred to Jeff that he’d be put on the spot like that. He had no idea what to do.

“That’s a quarter in advance,” she said.

“Can I just watch for while?”

“This ain’t the Polo Grounds,” she said, referring to the home of the brand-new New York Mets baseball club. One thought rang through Jeff’s mind: get with a girl. That was the phrase that the older boys at Ponsonby used incessantly in their bull sessions: get with a girl. He’d gotten with a girl only once before, and only slightly, Wendy Waldbaum, a classmate at Public School Number 6, whom he stole a kiss from deep in the mummy’s tomb exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art one spring lunch hour before school ended for the year. That was before he turned twelve the following fall and got shipped off to Ponsonby.

“You ever dance with a girl?” she asked.

“No.”

“Gimme a quarter. I’ll teach you. You gotta learn sometime. Might as well be now. Come on.”

He dug a quarter out of his pocket and she put it in a little sequined purse on a long string over her shoulder.

“Okay, here’s how you do it. This is called the box step. Real simple.”

She put his right hand behind her back and seized his left.

“How’s that feel?”

“Okay,” Jeff said. In fact, it felt better than just okay. Her back was warm and the flesh of her flank area was yielding beneath the dress. She smelled good too. It electrified him. She began slowly swaying, just side to side, easily.

“See, we’re dancin’,” she said, and snapped her gum. “Okay, now do the same thing forward and back. There you go.”

“Am I doing it right?”

“Perfect. Now make the steps like you’re outlining a square box on the floor. Great! You got it! You’re a quick learner. How old are ya?”

“Uh, sixteen.”

“The heck you are.”

“Sure I am.”

They went around the box without speaking.

“If you’re sixteen, you’re gonna grow up to be a midget,” she said.

“All right. I’m twelve,” he admitted.

“Whatcha doing in disguise?”

“How can you tell?”

“Those glasses you’re wearing don’t have any glass in ’em, and I’d say the mustache is fake too.”

“They’re probably not meant to be seen up this close.”

Her face was indeed quite close to his. He could feel her breath, which also smelled sweet, like lilacs. She was rather pretty, he thought.

“How old are you then, if I may ask?” he inquired.

She smacked his shoulder with the hand that had been reposing on it.

“No, you may not. You’re not supposed to ask a lady that, silly.”

The song ended. She dropped his left hand. Almost immediately another number came up. Artie Shaw’s version of “All the Things You Are,” a foxtrot.

“’Nother dance?” she said. “You really need more lessons.”

“In a jukebox you get three plays for a quarter,” Jeff said.

“Yeah, but this ain’t a jukebox. You get a live girl here. So, pony up. Anyway, your pocket’s jinglin’ and janglin’ like the Good Humor truck. Whaddaya doing with all that change?”

“I won quite a bit of money in a poker game,” Jeff said.

“Where’d you do that?”

“At school.”

“They allow gambling? What kind of school is that?”

“Kind of a reform school. They don’t call it that, but everybody there is a screwup.”

“What’d you do to deserve that?”

“Bunch of things.”

“Like what?”

“You’re not supposed to ask a kid that,” Jeff said. “It’s embarrassing.”

“Well, you look like a high-class kid, suit jacket an’ all. It must be a high-class reform school. Say, that book I’m reading is about a screwup kid who runs away from school.”

“Sounds like the story of my life,” Jeff said.

“Yeah? You should read it. I’m bored with it. All this kid does is complain and screw up. I’ll give it to you. Now, come on, pony up another quarter and I’ll show you the foxtrot. Every young man should learn the foxtrot.”

That dance was a bit more complex for Jeff. Step, step, side, stop, and so on. In the process of looking down at his feet, he could not fail to notice the twin mounds of her bosom jiggle and heave at the neckline of her shift. She was quite developed, he noticed.

“Are you payin’ attention,” she asked as he misstepped for a third time.”

“Sorry. I was thinking about President Kennedy.”

“Ain’t it tragic,” she said. “Who would want to kill such a nice man. And handsome too! Talk about your dreamboat.”

“The Russians,” Jeff said.

“The Russians are the worst,” she said. “The landlord of this joint is always coming in looking for free dances with us and we have to show him a good time. Mr. Kokokavich. They call him Koko. It fits. He’s like a gorilla. He has BO and his breath stinks. He don’t even tip. My boyfriend, Angelo, says one day he’s gonna shove him down the stairs.”

“Jeez, he could kill the guy. They could send him to the chair.”

“I know. He’s got a terrible temper, Angie. He busted me in the kisser once.”

“What for?”

“I was mouthin’ off. I mouth off a lot, can’t you tell?”

“What’s he do, this Angelo?”

“Grown-up stuff,” she said. “You wouldn’t want to know.”

“You could get a better boyfriend. You’re real pretty.”

“Aw, you’re real sweet,” she said and pulled Jeff so close to herself that he could feel her bosom on his breastbone. “If you weren’t a child, I’d take you home with me, show you what makes the world go ’round.”

“Want to go out for dinner? I can take you out for dinner. I’m loaded. We could go to Lindy’s. It’s just up the street.”

“What do you know about Lindy’s?”

“My parents go there all the time.”

“They must be well-off, your parents. They bring you along?”

“Sure, a million times. My father’s an attorney? They have corned beef and turkey à la king. Come on, I’ll take you.”

Meanwhile, the song ended and another came right on: Ella Fitzgerald singing “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.”

“Naw, you’re sweet, kid, but I’m on until eight and then Angie’s pickin’ me up. He ain’t all bad. But you’re right, I could probably do better. Well, now you’re officially an expert dancer. Want to try another one?”

“They’re expecting me home,” Jeff said. “I have to go.”

“Come back another time, kid. I’ll teach you the jitterbug. Then you’ll be all set for life.”

“Okay. What’s your name?”

“Uh, Yvonne,” she said.

“Really?”

“Yeah, sure. What’s yours?”

“Uh, Elston Howard,” Jeff said, borrowing the name of the Yankees’ MVP catcher.

“Well, a pleasure dancin’ with you, Elston. Hey, wait a second!” She tripped lightly across the room and returned with the book she had been reading. “Here, the story of your life.” It was a paperback copy of The Catcher in the Rye.

Jeff was stunned. “Jeez, I’ve been meaning to get this. All the guys at school are reading it. Hey, thanks.”

“I like you better than him, the kid in the book,” she said. “And you’re a good learner too. Now lemme give you one more lesson before you go. In a joint like this you’re supposed to tip a lady at the end.”

“Oh, Jeez, excuse me.” He dug into his pants and handed over five more quarters, which, he had noticed, was exactly the retail price printed on the book’s back cover.

She beamed her cockeyed smile and said, “You’re a real gentleman, for sure, Elston. Come back again some time.”