Crossing California Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  November/December 1979

  WASSERSTROM - Jill

  ROVNER - Lana

  WILLS / SILVERMAN - Muley

  WASSERSTROM - Michelle

  ROVNER - Larry

  WILLS / SILVERMAN - Peachy Moskowitz

  WASSERSTROM - Charlie

  ROVNER - Ellen & Michael

  WILLS / SILVERMAN - Deirdre & Carl

  December 31, 1979

  WILLS / SILVERMAN - Deirdre & Carl

  ROVNER - Ellen & Michael

  WASSERSTROM - Charlie

  WILLS / SILVERMAN - Peachy Moskowitz

  ROVNER - Larry

  WASSERSTROM - Michelle

  WILLS/SILVERMAN - Muley

  ROVNER - Lana

  WASSERSTROM - Jill

  1980

  WASSERSTROM - Jill

  ROVNER - Lana

  WILLS/SILVERMAN - Muley

  WASSERSTROM - Michelle

  ROVNER - Larry

  WILLS / SILVERMAN - Peachy Moskowitz

  WASSERSTROM - Charlie

  ROVNER - Ellen & Michael

  WILLS / SILVERMAN - Deirdre & Carl

  January 20, 1981

  WILLS / SILVERMAN - Deirdre & Carl

  ROVNER - Ellen Leventhal & Michael

  WASSERSTROM - Charlie

  WILLS / SILVERMAN - Peachy Moskowitz

  ROVNER - Larry

  WASSERSTROM - Michelle

  WILLS / SILVERMAN - Muley

  ROVNER - Lana

  WASSERSTROM - Jill

  Glossary of Selected Terms

  Acknowledgements

  The Story Behind Crossing California

  Teaser chapter

  Questions for Crossing California

  Acclaim for Crossing California

  “Adam Langer has given us a teeming, hilarious, ambitious, and almost blindingly vivid portrait of a very particular Chicago at a very particular time. . . .

  . . . But the book is really about what it’s like to survive a couple of years of adolescence. Langer gets just right the constant awareness of social station that marks this horrible period of life. While that experience has a ring of universality to it, Langer is just as good at nabbing the specific cultural arcana of the time. I can think of no other book that so captures the experience of being young just as Reaganism dawned . . . an acerbic, eye-rolling acceptance of the perfect hell of being a teenager. Here is a novel that has all the outward trappings of the autobiographical, if we presume that Langer grew up in this time and this place. Instead of sinking into himself, instead of illuminating only his own experience, Langer has taken his astonishing wealth of memory and research and used it to create a whole roster of comic, heartbreaking, convincing characters. The details seem almost infinite and encompass Judaism, high school drama clubs, rock and roll, public radio, sexy preteen party games, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and cigarette brands, always beginning and ending with Langer’s inexhaustible infatuation with Chicago geography. In West Rogers Park, on either side of California, Langer has created an entire world.” -NEWSDAY

  “Chicago in the seventies comes vividly to life in this unusual novel. The larger social upheavals are the understood context for the upheavals in the lives of the colorful quirky characters of Crossing California.” -SARA PARETSKY

  “[A] slice-of-life study, but what a heaping slice it is . . .

  . . . Langer drills to the core of people—five gifted teens and their clueless elders in 1979-81 Chicago—as deeply as Jonathan Franzen did in The Corrections. Langer deploys a photographic memory and deadpan wit as he juggles the bat mitzvahs, feuds, and hookups of ten major characters from either side of the class boundary of California Avenue during the Iran hostage crisis. He begins and ends with the halting romance of two awkward geniuses: Jill Wasserstrom, who lost her mom to cancer and takes refuge in extremist politics, and Muley Wills, a poor African-American kid who declares his love for Jill by making films. But it’s Jill’s sister, budding actress Michelle, who steals the show, ruling scene after hilarious scene with her acid tongue. Like the author, she will dazzle you with her smarts.” -PEOPLE

  “What is exciting about Crossing California is not merely the scope of Adam Langer’s literary ambitions, but the generous ways in which he fulfills them. A work of unusual mastery, compassion, insight, and wit.” -GARY SHTEYNGART

  “Crossing California is so rich in the vitality of life that it includes a glossary of terms, which is itself far more interesting and evocative than are many other novels entirely. I suggest you cross whatever streets and avenues are necessary to get to a bookstore and pick up your copy of Crossing California.” -GENE SHALIT, NBC TODAY SHOW

  “[A] brilliant debut . . . Chicago produces a mix of intellectualism and naturalism like no other city, and Langer has obviously fed on that. His steely humanism balances the corruptions of ego against an appreciation of the energies of its schemes, putting him firmly in the tradition of such Chicago writers as Bellow and Dybek.”

  -PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “An extraordinary cast of vivid characters . . .

  . . . This is a novel of such heartfelt audacity that this reviewer feels lucky to sing its praises. [Langer’s] commitment to his cast, including the city of Chicago, is extraordinary. Three of his leads—Jill, Lana, and Muley—are in eighth grade as the novel opens, but there is never a hint of snideness or condescension as Langer details the juvenile conflicts and timeless passions in their lives. His memory of that era, American and adolescent, is unnerving and his touch is unfailing. He provides these kids what their parents cannot: unsparing attention and enduring compassion.”

  -THE OREGONIAN

  “No one escapes the wit or wrath of Adam Langer’s satire of Chicago families in the late 1970s.”

  -THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

  “[A] wonderfully confident novel. Chicago’s California Avenue is where wit and ingenuity meet the heart and soulfulness of Jewish-American fiction.” -STUART DYBEK

  “Adam Langer knows Chicago. He also knows American history, Jewish tradition, family function and dysfunction, and pop culture. Crossing California is a sweeping Pynchonian/Salingerian/ Rothian epic that proves beyond all else that Adam Langer knows about the sputtering human heart. Crossing California is a classic.”

  -GEORGE SINGLETON, AUTHOR OF THE HALF-MAMMALS OF DIXIE AND THESE PEOPLE ARE US

  “Chicago native Adam Langer’s dazzling debut novel follows three families’ friendships, affairs, and personal discoveries in this snapshot of America at the end of a turbulent decade. Langer’s story is powerful and amusing; he has created a world that is ultimately recognizable in its portrayals of the ironies, heartache, and joy of day-to-day life.” -CHICAGO TRIBUNE

  “Adam Langer’s novel is a triumph of wry observation and merciless insight . . .

  . . . Adarkly comic, even bravely comic view of lust and loss, doubt, faith, and social yearning. An amazing debut by a terrifically talented writer.” -ELINOR LIPMAN, AUTHOR OF THE PURSUIT OF ALICE THRIFT

  “Amazing... Crossing California is a coming-of-age tale . . . filled with comic elements, a deep sense of realism and a deft touch at character development. . . . [It] signals Langer as a novelist well worth following.” -ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

  “Langer’s funny, hyperdetailed, super-sized, circa 1980 debut is not about the state of California but rather California Avenue, the dividing line in Chicago’s Jewish Rogers Park neighborhood between working-class and professional enclaves. With an anthropologist’s eye, Langer depicts diverse households in distress and transition on both sides of the avenue as he chronicles the comings-of-age of a group of smart-mouthed, free-spirited, and creative teens. The many-stranded plot evinces deep empathy for teens and a love for pop culture and involves everything from the Iran hostage crisis to masturbation, bad rock and roll, racism, a bat mitzvah, eroding marriages, and dirty tricks at the high school, neighborhood newspaper, and a teen radio show. [Langer’s] novel is smart, affectionate, and uproariously entertaining.” -BOOKLIST

  “[An] ambitious debut novel . . . delightful and knowing.”

  -THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER

  “[A] precise, impressively vast slow pan over the middle-class Jewish denizens of the Chicago suburb of West Rogers Park.”

  -NEW YORK MAGAZINE

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004 by Adam Langer

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form

  without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

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  eISBN : 978-1-594-48081-2

  1. Jews—Illinois—Chicago—Fiction. 2. Jewish families—Fiction. 3. Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3612.A57C

  813’.6—dc22

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To my parents, Esther and Seymour Langer. And, of course, to Beate.

  “We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose.”

  —JIMMY CARTER, 1979

  “Those who say that we are in a time when there are no heroes just don’t know where to look.”

  —RONALD REAGAN, 1981

  “If the real thing don’t do the trick, you better make up something quick.”

  —“BARRACUDA,” HEART (A. WILSON, N. WILSON, R. FISHE, M. DeROSIER)

  November/December 1979

  “Grave problems confront us. The challenges they present are of sobering magnitude. They cry out for solution. So, with the help of God, let us begin.”

  —JANE M. BYRNE, MAYOR OF CHICAGO

  WASSERSTROM

  Jill

  The day after an estimated seventy Americans were taken hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Jill Wasserstrom paused on the corner of North Shore and California Avenues to contemplate the accuracy of what she had proudly declared to Lana Rovner during recess at K.I.N.S. Hebrew School. What she had told Lana hadn’t been quite true. She hadn’t given Muley Scott Wills a big old hickey after eighth-grade phys ed at Boone Elementary School. She hadn’t given Muley Scott Wills any sort of hickey at all. What had happened was that Muley Scott Wills had asked her if she wanted to go with him to Sun Drugs to pick up some items for his mother. She’d said sure, she had time before she had to go to Hebrew school, so she’d gone with him to buy a heating pad, a bottle of aspirin, two blocks of Neapolitan ice cream, three packs of Now and Later’s, and a bag of Warner’s spice drops, which they consumed before he said good-bye to her in front of K.I.N.S. But, Jill realized as she continued walking south on California, Muley Wills was unlikely to deny any story that made it seem as if their relationship was more profound than it actually was, which was why it had been a safe bet to tell Lana Rovner she’d given Muley the hickey: If Lana—who was always asking intrusive questions about Jill and Muley’s relationship—actually went up to Muley some day in the future and asked if Jill had given him said hickey, no doubt Muley either would say nothing or would immediately confirm the story to conceal the fact that Jill had never given him a hickey. Or anything else for that matter.

  At the corner of Albion and California, Jill Wasserstrom turned east and crossed the street. California Avenue was the first of two east-west dividing lines in West Rogers Park. It was one of the only two-way streets in the neighborhood and one of the only commercial ones. On California, there were service stations, synagogues, and small grocery stores, a fire-house, a diner, and a funeral home, the Shang Chai Kosher Restaurant and Tel Aviv Kosher Pizza, Burghard’s Egg Factory and the Nortown branch of the Chicago Public Library. West of California were the parks and the single-family houses, the houses with evergreen bushes, maple trees, and underground sprinklers out front, the houses with banisters, stoops, and steps carpeted with Astroturf, the houses whose doors were rarely locked. Here and there were apartment buildings—grim white or sky-blue brick edifices that smelled of senior citizens and their warm lunches—but they were the exceptions. Doctors lived west of California. Lawyers, too. Not the top-of-the-line doctors or lawyers; they mostly lived downtown or in the northern suburbs. The doctors here mostly worked for the county and the lawyers generally worked for the city. Still, for the most part, everything west of California was pristine and white-collar and Jewish, or Indian, Italian, Filipino, or Korean, all of which amounted to essentially the same thing. Lana Rovner lived west of California, on Sacramento Avenue across the street from Chippewa Park, where she sometimes sat on the benches and watched her brother Larry play two-on-two with his musician buddies from the Ida Crown Jewish Academy.

  East of California, there was a discernible change in the light. Here, the redbrick apartment buildings and smoke-gray bungalows soaked up the sun, and the streets seemed just a bit narrower. East of California, there was precious little greenery or open space, save for the playground of the Boone Elementary School and the front lawns of churches. Here, the houses were the exceptions. Jill Wasserstrom lived next to one on Campbell Avenue, on the second floor of a four-story walk-up. She, her sister Michelle, and their father, Charlie Wasserstrom—manager of the newly opened It’s in the Pot! restaurant in a shopping mall in nearby Lincolnwood—lived in a one-bedroom apartment; Michelle, a junior at Mather High School, and Jill shared a room.

  The landscape changed once again at Western Avenue, a sprawling four-lane street that spanned the entire city of Chicago. On Western, there was Bingo City, Fluky’s Hot Dogs, the Nortown Theater, and more car dealerships than on any other street in the city. There were no houses on Western, only apartments above diners, pet stores, restaurants, and taverns. East of Western was Warren Park. Once an exclusive country club, it was now a vast expanse of overgrown grass, of cracked tennis courts, muddy soccer fields, rusted charcoal grills, and one toboggan hill, a former garbage heap now known to the kids in the neighborhood as Mt. Warren. The cozy shops of Devon Avenue—with its bakeries, record stores, and Judaica emporiums—stopped at the Western intersection. East of Western were grimy grocery stores, five-and-ten shops, liquor stores, restaurants with their neon lights flickering, bars with Old Milwaukee signs in their windows, the Seconds to Go Thrift Shop, Burger King, and the dingy Laundrytown above which Muley Wills lived with his mother, who shelved books at the Nortown Library and supplemented her measly income by cleaning houses.

  Jill had just finished Hebrew school and it was already dark outside, which meant that maybe somebody would be home when she got there, but come to think of it, probably not. Her father had recently started taking extra shifts at the restaurant to pay for the Bat Mitzvah she had already told him she didn’t want, really didn’t want, and Michelle was probably still at the high school, rehearsing for the winter musical: H.M.S. Pinafore. The echoing loneliness of the apartment, which had once struck Jill as a symbol of her utter abandonment, was now little more than simple fact—something she dealt with every day, like spending the last thirty minutes of Math class waiting for Mrs. Cardash to inspect her homework just because her name came near the end of the alphabet, or going to bed with a pillow over her head to block out the detailed discussions in which Michelle attempted to engage their father about the kinds of boys she liked, the kinds of boys who worked on cars, the kinds of boys who called up WLS and dedicated Boston songs to her, the kinds of boys who played street hockey and ogled her at Blackhawks games.