Q3, 2019

Mickey was never one to hide his feelings. So I discovered the first time we met. It was the fall of 1959.  He was a fourth-year student in a five-year engineering program at Columbia College. I was a very green freshman of 17.  I’ll never know whether it was random matching or administrative perversity that brought us together. But for the better part of a year we were roommates sharing a single room with one bunk bed, two desks and one window. It would have been a mismatch even without the WASP- Jewish divide. But Mickey let me know he had a problem with me from day one.

It wasn’t subtle. ”Hello J” - he said as he introduced himself- “I’ve got the top bunk and the desk near the window. I like it quiet – I’ve got a lot of work and not enough time.”  I didn’t argue.  In those first few months, I don’t recall Mickey ever calling me by my actual first name- or last name, for that matter.  “Hello J” became the default greeting every time I entered the room.  I was made to understand that it was humiliating for Mickey just to have me around.

It didn’t bother me as much as it should. Perhaps it was because my life was too crowded with new experiences. It took me only a few weeks in chemistry class to realize that my mother was never going to be able to say - my son the doctor. The city beckoned. A dozen subway stops downtown and you were at the Village with its dark-lit coffee shops and poetry readings. Go eastward and slightly uptown and you’re at Washington Square where you could hear speakers on rostrums rail against the exploitation of workers. Take the BMT instead of the IRT and you were in Harlem and in walking distance to the legendary Apollo Theater. Between time spent in the library and forays into the city, I was almost never in my room.

And then there was the campus. Mid-20^th century Columbia College was split into two parallel social worlds. If you were a bright young man from the deep south, you could seek shelter in the gentile enclaves of Sigma Chi and assorted secret societies and never have to socialize outside your white Christian tribe. This was Mickey’s path and it had worked - until now. But you couldn’t reasonably feel disempowered as a Jewish male in the class of ’63. The richness and sophistication of New York City as a Jewish milieu were everywhere on display at Columbia from the exuberant outspokenness of my classmates to the ubiquity of Jewish professors at the top of their game. Maybe it was because of this cultural dominance that Mickey’s taunts didn’t cut deeper.

But there were other reasons as well.  One night Mickey returned late after I was already asleep in the bunk below. He climbed into the upper bunk and then tossed around so restlessly that the entire bed started shaking. Before I could second guess myself, out came “What are you doing up there? Burying your bone?” And then suddenly he was still and there was a long moment of silence.  Followed by – laughter - one of the longest full bodied laughs I’ve ever heard. That was the moment when I stopped thinking of Mickey as just a bigot.

That wasn’t the only shift. Mixed in with the name-calling was a kind of offhand solicitude. Mickey took it upon himself to teach me the ropes. Teaching me how to smoke a cigarette – how to hold it - how to flick the ashes - how to blow smoke circles - how not to be put off  by your coughing at the first puff - how to relax and inhale and let the smoke fill your lungs and enjoy it. Smoking in the late 50’s was a sign of coming of age. It was a lesson that I learned all too well and it would take another 22 years to unlearn it.

Getting laid – in the parlance of the times - was another necessary ritual on the road to manhood. Mickey quickly concluded - accurately I might add - that I was callow enough to require some remedial assistance. He set me up with an ex-girlfriend who became my one and only date that first year.  But even a sympathetic and willing older woman of 21 couldn’t break through the awkwardness of a pimply 17 year old.

Then a few months before the end of term, Mickey moved out. Just before he left, he gave me advice to be less friendly and trusting.  Was this an oblique way of warning me to watch out for people like him?

I didn’t shed many tears after Mickey left. But I didn’t celebrate either. It took me a while not to feel abandoned. But not too long - as I came to relish the benefits of unencumbered space.

Two years later – by now a veteran undergraduate myself - I was walking along Amsterdam Avenue and our paths crossed. Mickey was with a young, dark-haired woman and he stopped and said he’d like to introduce me to his fiancée. He added that she was Jewish.  And then his face stiffened - he first looked down and then slowly lifted his head so that he was looking directly at me and said - “I want you to know I’m sorry for all the things I said to you.”  I had no problem being gracious. Whatever anger I may have experienced had subsided long before.  That administrative gaffe that brought us together I realized had more to do with Mickey’s journey than my own.

Richard Weisman