Friday, September 5, 1969.

Still in his high school years he dreamed of prose, of a book . . . in which

he could place, in the form of hidden explosive clusters, the most
astounding things of all he had managed to see and ponder.

—Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago.

I was fifteen years old and a junior at Philadelphia’s academically

elite Central High School, which at that time had an all-male
admissions policy. Central, the nation’s second oldest public
secondary school, founded in 1836, requires exceptional grades
for enrollment and is one of the top ranked public high schools
in the United States. To succeed at Central a student has to be
committed to study. My father, who was bright but academically
undisciplined in a hundred ways, had attended the school but
quit in the tenth grade.

In junior year I took a chemistry course that had a lab component

on Friday afternoons. September 5 was the first lab class of the
school term, and so began my entry into the ordered world of the
laboratory and its accouterments inclusive of pipettes, Bunsen
burners, and florence flasks. Chem lab offered the opportunity
to expand my understanding of how the inner realm of an
element’s atomic subparticles determines the interplay, or
chemical reactions, of observable substances. On this first day of
the practicum, our teacher, Mrs. Fischer, mindful of the
exploratory proclivities of teenage boys, admonished students to
respect the chemicals we’d be working with. She offered the
cautionary tale of a student who had ripped off a half pea of
highly reactive sodium from chem lab, placed it in his pants
pocket and later, the small lump of metal ignited in his slacks,
having come in contact with the boy’s perspiration.

I recall two students in the class: Perry Rubenstein and Mark

Pearlstein. I was acquainted with Pearlstein. We lived near each
other and sometimes traveled the same bus to and from school. I
was a sullen teenager and Pearlstein had once said to me: “You’re
not exactly Joe Social.” Pearlstein ended up becoming a lawyer.
Rubenstein went on to become a high-profile art dealer in New
York, where he owned the famed Perry Rubenstein Gallery. An
incident that occurred months later during the week of March 30,
1970 made a lasting impression. On about Thursday of the week
following Easter recess, Mrs. Fischer, noticed that one of the
students had not been to class all week. “Where is Rubenstein?”
she inquired. “I haven’t seen him all week.” One of Rubenstein’s
buddies spoke up: “He went to Florida for spring break and he
couldn’t get transportation back.” Mrs. Fischer commented
sarcastically, “some people have a nice life.”

My father used to tell a story. In the early 1940s, at the beginning

of World War II, my father—then in his early thirties—lived with
his older, married sister, Ella Klein, in a house on Oxford Street
in North Philadelphia. In those years, my father was what Jews of
previous generations might have called a luftmensch, an
impractical person who had no visible means of support. He
decided to take off for a few weeks’ relaxation to Miami Beach,
Florida where he led a dissolute existence gambling and going to
the racetrack. Some people have a nice life. Upon his return to
Philadelphia, his sister, Ella, handed him a letter from the
government with the infelicitous salutation: “Greetings!” It was a
draft notice. When he finally showed up at the draft board, so my
father recounted, an officer bawled him out: “We were trying to
get in touch with you! We had no idea where to contact you!
Don’t you know you were supposed to give us a forwarding
address? You needed to keep us informed about your
whereabouts!” The way my father used to tell the story, I sensed
he was acutely stung by his experience at the draft board.