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A beautiful gay coming-of-age story, set in Savannah, GA, in 1963, the year John Kennedy was killed.
from Chapter One:
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 they do, 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.
