A Southern coming-of-age gorgeous novel by Perry Brass, set in the sultry setting of Savannah, GA, in 1963, the year of John F. Kennedy's murder, when civil rights was setting the country on fire, and a new community of gay men was coming of the shadows to claim an identity of their own. Here's a short excerpt from King of Angels. Read it to hear the poetry in the story.
Part One: In The Beginning
Somehow or another, it all begins here.
It’s only right that I should tell you about my beginnings. My name is Benjamin Rothberg and I grew up by the water in Isle of Hope, a sunburned marshy suburb about fifteen miles from downtown Savannah, Georgia. The natives call it “I’ll-a-’ope,” with the same kind of stretched-out, lazy-sounding vowels you hear in words like “calliope.” Still, it was the most ravishing name in the world, the Isle of Hope. You head out on a twisting curlicue of a road to where the marshes and rivers soak into each other and dense hammocks of palmettos watch over the sea grasses with their salty-sweet stink of oysters, shrimp, catfish, and turtle shells. I grew up there with my younger sister, my mother, and my father, a salesman and a Jew. To me even at an early age, the two seemed indistinguishable: Jew. Salesman. The fast-talking Jew who never really stands still in one place and lives off his own spew of words becomes a salesman. What else could he do? What else could theydo, since they were never to-the-land born?
My father was short, Mediterranean dark, and chunky, you might say, but good-looking in a distinctive, large-featured kind of way. He had dark, thick wavy hair and eyes like opaque disks of cobalt-blue glass, the sort found in old Roman ruins, that pulled you in and warmed you, and went well with his tanned skin. Dark glistening hair grew on his chest, legs, feet, and arms. It appeared like the curling leaves of anthracite-black field flowers on his hands, up to the first joints of his fingers. A lightning field of pure electricity seemed to swim around him. Men were drawn to him not simply because he could talk more than they could (any fool could do that), but because he listened as hard as he talked. My mom was almost too ridiculously his opposite: all fine length, with beautiful, streaky, ginger-ale blonde hair and long, smooth arms and legs. She’d been athletic and habitually stayed in motion, which bothered my father, who was kinetic enough to need to some kind of balancing gravity around him.
When I was very small, tired, and on the verge of tears, he would squat down, look at me with his intense blue eyes, and nod. “Yeah, Benjy,” he would say. “That’s the way it is. You need to go to sleep now.” Or, “You need to stop doing this, and act like a big boy. Like a mentsh.”
And I would. I’d stop, not because I was scared of him as solid as he seemed—certainly next to my mother—but because I wanted to be a part of him, an extension of him really, because he was the most amazing thing I’d ever known.
He would hold me in his gaze with the pure tension of his attention, and now I, too, was swimming around him, with all of that lightning-bright electricity. It’s difficult to say how much you love a father when you’re that tiny, or even later, when you’re maybe seven or eight. He can eat you like a dinosaur or an ogre out of a fairytale, or hold you like a cleft in a mountain supporting a small sapling tree. I felt held like that when he was near me. He had a smell, too, I can’t forget. Men smelled then of perspiration, salt, liquor, unfiltered tobacco, and the profound, lingering scent of their hair that absorbed the smoke of winter log-fires and the earthy mist of summer nights.
I remember his smell distinctly, from when he took me on his lap and taught me how to read at the age of five. I’d been trying to figure out words, and my father said, “Why should he have to wait till school?” So he taught me how to sound each letter out phonetically, and group them together into words and then short sentences. I picked up reading almost immediately, making him very happy. By the beginning of the third grade, I could read on a sixth grade level and was already bored with primary school books; I was bumped up to the fourth grade in the local public school. The problem, then, was to keep how smart I was hidden from the other kids, because they made fun of me.
He was known to us as Robby and Robby was always the name my mom, Caroline, called him. I think he’d actually invented it some time back when he was a kid up North. He didn’t tell me a lot about his childhood, but Robby was his goyishename, the one he used socially and for business in the South. He used Leon, the name he’d been given at birth, with other Jews, almost automatically falling into it; my head would fairly spin when it happened. Out of the dense cobalt of his eyes, his smile would seem suddenly more real. Hidden delicious parcels of medieval-sounding, melodious Yiddish and even more fragrant, ancient Hebrew would spring out into his vocabulary; his voice reverted to a richer, special “Leon” timbre: younger, deeper, more flexible, sometimes softer; as if the words were incantations from some hidden source, siphoned from a secret life, that of the distant Sephardic Jews to whom he at various times alluded with pride—“the realnobilityof the Jews,” he called them—now pouring openly, simply, through him as Leon.
Still the Robby voice was the one I knew mostly, and when without warning the Leon voice would appear, I’d get anxious. What had happened to Robby, my daddy, the man who had taught me to read as he held me on his lap?
If they were having a serious conversation and I happened to be there, and she was buzzing around like a mosquito, he’d say, “Caroline, can’t you just stay in one farkakteplace for a sec and listen to me?”
Mom would stop, cock her beautiful blonde head, look quizzically at him, and smile that smile—half Mona Lisa, half spy from another world—that never really let anyone know exactly what she was thinking.
“OK. Robby. If that makes you happy.”
