Murray, Harry, Jordan (1992 mosaic)
Most people thought of Murray as a hopeless social freak--handsome, witty, intelligent, and an intensive conversationalist, but, nevertheless, without purpose or direction. Of his style of life the kindest observation that could be made was 'dissipated.' After all the years that I have not seen him or learned anything about him, there may still be the possibility that he is grinding away as a harmless bureaucrat waiting for his pension. Or, he may have died from AIDS.
Once, in the early 60s, we were having coffee in Greenwich Village, he told me about seeing Rex Harrison in Washington Square Park walking with two beautiful women hanging from each of his arms. How alive, debonair, and poised Harrison appeared to him. Such a man, he confessed to me, was to be envied.
If only he too could be like Harrison at 60, as he now views him in his early 30s.
At first I was surprised to hear such a shallow view of a life, but then I realized how consistent it was with his attempt to grapple with some of the severe choices he had to now make at this stage of his life.
Harry was another story. After a troubled youth, he had managed to prove his worth as a university sociologist. Once when I visited Coney Island in the late 60s his mother who was working at the Half Moon Hotel shouted to me from the Hotel, "He has made Stanford."
We all respected him for his academic accomplishments. Shortly after his mother's Half Moon Hotel Stanford announcement, I spent a day with him in Coney Island, on the boardwalk where we ate giant hot egg rolls from a Chinese food vendor. I can still see the egg roll steaming out of Harry's mouth and I marvelled at the gusto with which he devoured the hot egg roll.
However, I felt that his "do good ism" was still cankered over by an unrelenting egocentricity which he carried over from his earlier Narcissistic days.
All three of us had strong adolescent desires to see American capitalism somehow change for the better.
That did not happen.
For the early '90s when I wrote this sketch, it appeared that the polarities of capitalism and communism had been temporarily resolved by a Pax America supporting a world economy. American capitalism grew by leaps and bounds each day. Politics based on Marxism of any variety became remote, futile, and even ridiculous
World politics and movements in the early '90s are on such a novel scale as to defy the simplistic Marxian dialectics from the 1940s thru to the 1960s. The term Post-Modern says it all.
Those of us who have held radical views (like Jeremiah Wright) have been catapulted into our own self-seeking orbits. For us, the "Coney Island Friends," there is no longer a common denominator.
