jokes and the nervous showers, what did he actually know? It remained for a busboy in back of the resort kitchen to tell him about the sex act. Stern couldn't believe the actual machinery and said, "Really?" and the busboy said, "Yeah. When you put it in them, they get a funny feeling up their kazoo."

[Pg 131]

The Grove Rest Home had the sweet summer coolness and the proper fragrance, but it was a parody of a resort, with all its facilities torn and incomplete. Stern heard there was a small golf course and borrowed clubs one morning, setting out to look for it. He tramped the length of the institution and finally spotted a flag in the center of some tall weeds far beyond the kitchen. A bald man with a thick mustache stood alongside the single hole of the golf course, hands locked behind his back, puffing out his cheeks and flexing an artificial leg in the style of a British colonel surveying a battlefield. He said he was an electrician. A hot wire had fallen on his leg and sheared it off. His main difficulty had been in dealing with his grown son, who couldn't get used to having a one-legged father. "I told him you get older, these things happen, but he wouldn't buy it and kept spitting on the floor." The man spoke with a thick Brooklyn accent, but when he was silent, flexing his leg, he took on an amazingly autocratic demeanor, a British colonel once again. "Are you playing?" Stern asked him. "No, I'm just standing next to the hole here."

The golf course was a broken, one-holed, weeded one,[Pg 132] and Stern's days at the Grove Rest Home seemed weeded and broken, too. There were no scheduled activities, and between meals Stern passed the time in the library, reading peripheral books, ones written by people who had been close to Thomas Dewey and others about Canada's part in World War II. The only newspaper available was a terrible local one devoted almost entirely to zoning developments, but Stern waited for it eagerly at the front door each night, pacing up and down until it came. He looked forward, too, to "milk and cookie" each evening at seven, which was the nearest thing at the Home to a special treat. One night, when he was in line for his refreshment, the mustached woman squatted down on the front porch and began to urinate, throwing her kerchiefed head back and hollering, "Pisscock, pisscock." Gears clanking and grinding and seemingly slower than ever, Lennie came out from the staff room and made for her, finally getting there and carrying the woman, screaming, up to her room. Later, Stern learned she had been taken to Rosenkranz. In the room that night, the old actor said, "I really liked 

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