One
Seven years old and dressed in a blue serge suit, I pose next to Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, the chairman of the committee before which I have just given my testimony. Senator Kefauver looks drawn, pinched; he has been talking to me with that excess of heartiness I will later associate with politicians who have tried to become President and failed. I am sitting on the Senator's desk with my little legs dangling over its edge. The Kefauver committee is investigating TV quiz show scandals, and I am there to tell about my experiences trying out for the show “Take a Giant Step,” where my subject was to have been world capitals. The show's producers had offered to supply me with the correct answers but I had refused them because I knew I could win the grand prize -- college scholarship money -- legitimately. My grandfather, whose intent it had been to capitalize, as it were, on my geographic knowledge, looks pleased at the way events have turned out as he takes the photograph of me and Kefauver with his Kodak Brownie. Senator Hubert Humphrey is standing next to my grandfather as he clicks the shutter, the flash goes off, and I see a blue spot where Humphrey's head should be.

Two
The old Kodachrome film, even when transferred to videotape, has that garish Technicolor look of the early 1950s. Here I am even younger, three or four, and I am bare-chested, wearing only boxer-style bathing trunks, grey socks and sneakers, and boxing gloves as big as my head. I am sitting on a stool at the corner of the boxing ring that my grandfather has set up outside the main building of his hotel. In another second the bell will sound -- we don't hear it on the videotape -- and I will gamely march to the center of the ring and flail my arms around the head and shoulders of my friend Bobby, who is doing approximately the same thing. The camera pans to the faces of laughing adults, then back to Bobby and me hitting each other as we were told to do. The cute part comes after the round is over and Bobby and I are shown with shaving cream over the parts of our faces that will one day grow beards, as we pretend to do a television commercial for Barbasol.

Three
This videotape, also once film, has subtler colors. It is the end of the movie record of my bar mitzvah reception in the Flamingo Room of my grandfather's hotel. We have already seen numerous relatives -- most of them dead now -- dancing and drinking and eating. We have seen some guest's place setting, complete with food, appear on a table, utensil by utensil, course by course, in someone's idea of clever trick photography. We have seen the ice swans and the chopped liver chickens and me doing the rumba with my mother and my aunt. I am now just outside the Flamingo Room, the better of the hotel's two nightclubs, half-lying on a little couch as I pretend to be asleep and to be dreaming of scenes that appear above me, scenes of the reception that have already been shown. Allegedly I am dreaming about going under the limbo bar as my white yarmulke falls off, about being kissed simultaneously by four girls my age, about waltzing with my frail great-grandmother. Watching this scene twenty years later, Bobby will tell me, “All night you kept saying to me, 'When is this going to be over? When is it going to end?'“

Four
I am seventeen, with my first girlfriend Judy, supposedly picking blueberries in the woods. We have agreed to do this for one of the cooks at the hotel, who wants to surprise Sunday breakfasters with fresh blueberry muffins. Judy is the daughter of the comedienne who appears most regularly at the hotel, a fat, boisterous, foul-mouthed woman best known for making jokes about her weight and ugliness on the Merv Griffin show. Actually, Judy's mother is not bad looking for a large woman in her forties, and in the wedding portrait I have seen in Judy's house, her mother looks beautiful. Judy is incredibly pretty to me, and I can detect only the slightest hint of baby fat on her thighs. We are both wearing denim cutoffs, only Judy's are rolled up neatly as far as they will go, and mine are frayed badly at the ends, just above a triangle of mosquito bites on each of my legs. I am lying on top of her, there is a plaid woolen blanket under us -- it scratches a little -- and somehow things go a little further than usual and zippers get unzipped and suddenly I am saying, “Judy, do you realize what we're doing?” She sighs and says, “Shut up, I don't want to know.” A month later, we are making love in the mud at Woodstock, where the last night, stoned and too tired to think, I will tell Bobby -- in front of Judy -- about her “Shut up, I don't want to know” line. Bobby will put it in his mental file of odd things Judy has said, a file both Bobby and I refer to as “Judyisms.” The last time I see Judy, she is with her husband and three-year-old son at her mother's funeral at Frank E. Campbell in the city. Judy hugs me and says, “I knew you'd come, mom always liked you because you loved to laugh at her.”

Five
Bobby is passing me a joint. The room smells more of the coconut incense that we bought from a Muslim on Eighth Street than it does of marijuana. I am lying on my back on the floor. Bobby is upside down in a well-upholstered chair, and we are passing the joint back and forth until it gets so small Bobby has to take out his roach clip. I hate to use roach clips and have made it a habit to stop smoking a joint before I need to use one, something Bobby is once again chiding me for. I am concentrating on the red glop oozing upward in the lava lamp. We are in Bobby's parents' apartment on Sutton Place, where we often go when the country becomes too oppressive. This afternoon, we took the Quickway down and came in through New Jersey, going straight to the Village. We bought some posters and a whale's tooth at the Postermat and saw Robert Downey's “Putney Swope” at the Art. The phone rings, and while Bobby is talking in the other room, I remember my mother telling me in one of her rare moments of sobriety that Bobby's father wants to divorce his mother so that he can marry the very young wife of Blackie, the social director at my grandfather's hotel. Blackie is a nice old guy who has never failed to get me out in Simon Says. Bobby comes back into the room looking really angry and tells me he's going out. I find him an hour later in the rain, riding the statue of a boar that for some reason stands at the end of the block, its back to the river.

Six
My uncle is cursing his IBM PC-AT. I go behind his desk and see what the matter is. “I keep getting these damn syntax errors,” my uncle says. “What are you trying to do?” “Clear the screen, of course.” “The clearscreen command is CLS, not CS,” I tell my uncle. “That doesn't make sense,” he says. “Do you want me to do the work?” I ask. “Please,” says my uncle, “you know I'll never get the hang of this thing.” I call up the Lotus file of projected versus actual reservations for the just-completed Passover holidays; the numbers look very bad. After I print out a hardcopy, I put the computer back in DOS and try to call up another file my uncle wants to see. “Not ready error reading drive A,” says the computer, “Abort, Retry, Ignore?” I retry a couple of times with the same result. “Abort already,” says my uncle, standing behind me. I shut off the machine. “Can you imagine my father with one of these?” my uncle asks. I can, but I don't say so. Later I will attempt to classify the members of my family as one of three types, depending on which key they would hit: A for abort, R for retry, I for ignore. Obviously I am one of those who retry, and just as obviously, my uncle aborts. My mother is like her brother and would abort. But my grandfather, were he still alive, would hit the I key to ignore every time he got that “not ready” error message.

Seven
In my uncle's private office there are many photographs of my grandfather with celebrities. My grandfather smiles next to a frowning Golda Meir. My grandfather shakes hands with a too hearty Governor Rockefeller. My grandfather stands with his arm around President Johnson, of whom he used to say that LBJ stood for a Little Bit Jewish -- a joke he'd gotten from Judy's mother and repeated until we all wanted to scream when he'd tell it again. In another photograph my grandfather is handing Jerry Lewis a check for the muscular dystrophy telethon. There are some older sepia photographs of my great-grandmother and some long-forgotten politicians and entertainers. In the newer color photographs from the 1970s my uncle appears with Bill Cosby, Howard Cosell, and Sugar Ray Leonard, who once trained at the hotel. In my uncle's private office there are no photographs of me or my mother or my uncle's wife. My aunt and uncle had only one child, and he died very young of cystic fibrosis. There is one baby picture of my cousin, two years old or so, looking miserable in my grandfather's lap.

Eight
Bobby and I drifted apart after I got serious about hotel management at Cornell and he got serious about heroin. For me, marijuana and then hash were pleasant diversions but not important; I never doubted I could live without them, and I haven't touched them since I was twenty-three and had a bad experience with some Maui wowie: I was convinced my heart was beating so fast it would explode and I rolled myself into a ball on the floor, afraid to move, even as my roommate tried to coax me out of this fetal position with a raw carrot, as if I were some kind of straw-hatted donkey. Bobby got hooked on smack after his parents' divorce and his father's marriage to Blackie's young wife. (Blackie died of a heart attack the day after my grandfather did; their funerals came on the same day and my mother said she preferred to go to Blackie's.) Eventually Bobby cleaned up his act at Synanon and went into the army, where he had the good fortune to spend the worst days of the Vietnam War in peaceful West Germany, lecturing other soldiers about drug abuse. Bobby's parents' hotel was sold to the Mafia while he was away, in those few optimistic years when people thought casino gambling would come to the Catskills. When that never happened, the Mafia sold out to Swami Goptananda, who turned their nightclub into a temple where his followers held worship services and mass weddings. Somehow my mother fell in with the Swami for a while and claimed that she had found peace of mind at last -- until some real estate deal Goptananda got her into went sour. Now she's in California with a florist shop and a guy younger than I am. Bobby lives in this old farm outside Fallsburg, next door to his ex-wife. After their kids left home, they ended up getting back together, sort of, living separately and singly. “It’s so much better this way,” Bobby has e-mailed me.

Nine
“Every year I think, 'This is the year,'“ my uncle used to say. “This is the year this place gets turned into a condominium.” “It's demographics,” I used to say, “demographics and changing times. You can't take it personally.” “I'm my father's son,” my uncle used to tell me, “so don't tell me not to take it personally.” I knew my grandfather well enough to say nothing.

Ten
At three in the morning the Flamingo Room used to be very quiet. I’d sit at one of the front tables near the stage, a table where an elderly man died quietly during a Robert Klein monologue back in '70. Hearing about this in California, Judy's mother sent Klein a telegram that said HEARD YOU KILLED EM AT LOU'S. Lou was my grandfather, of course. Growing up, whenever I told someone about my relationship to him, I would always hear, “Of course, of course -- everybody knows Lou.” Once, when Bobby and I got picked up for reckless driving in Monticello, my grandfather raged at me, “I have an image to live up to!” He's been dead a very long time and he's still got an image around here. Myself, I left over 25 years ago. I didn’t want to end up like my uncle. I sent my resumes to hotels in Florida and the Caribbean, using a post office box in town as my address, and after various misadventures eventually ended up here in St. Maarten, running a timeshare. At night, lying next to my third wife, I close my eyes and flash back on how it was before I left New York. As I wait for the Ambien to kick in, I can hear my stepdaughter’s emo music playing in the next room.