Kaleidoscope is the first in Waiting For Winter, the author's pentalagy, chronicling Chaim Goldberg's life. Medicine Man is next, about the young doctor misusing his prescriptive privileges to obtain pharmaceutical cocaine, and the consequences. 

Kaleidoscope Logline: Summer 1965, Jewish lifeguard Chaim Goldberg, setting for college in the Fall,  is seduced by Nedda Beaudreaux, a woman twice his age married to an underground mobster. The next day he meets Catholic, freckled, Stella O’Shannahan, a classmate. He wants them both. This becomes a very unstable summer of drugs, sex, and rock ‘n roll when Nedda drags these neophytes in her world of gangsters, thuggery, money, abortion, deaths, and murder. Set in Levittown, Pennsylvania against the backdrop of integrating Levittown. Based upon a true story.

Great summer adult read... Author will personalize and inscribe to purchasers! 

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Excerpt:

August 1963, Yardley, Pennsylvania

       Flipping open the worn paperback, he bent the cover around the spine and skipped through the first few lines. “Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases, so that one is never sure if she comes at all, nor for how long she will stay.” He knew that he shouldn’t read on the guard stand, but this was hot stuff, and D.H. was meant to be read on a hot summer day. A pup tent grew in his swimsuit. This was his second time through the book.

       He had to appear attentive as he scanned the golf course with heavy, black, Zeiss 7 x 80 binoculars. Out at the rough, just to the side of the fourth green, he spotted Poe, a shiny raven, the size of a football, which he’d watched all the dry summer. He pecked the eyes out of a dead rabbit, and the long ears wiggled in the dried grass each time the bird nipped at it.

       Poe was a Corvus corax, distinguishing it from Corvus brachyrhynchos, the common, smaller, crow. He liked Latin taxonomy and enjoyed watching it flap its wings and take flight with its earned rabbit morsel.

       The pool thermometer looked as if it were about to burst, like hirsute Karen’s zits, with the mercury meniscus, swollen in the heat, nearing the top of its column. It was only eleven, and southeast Pennsylvania sizzled in its summer. Never know how much I love you, never know how much I care…Fever!

       The lyrics filled his mind like a hose gushing water…when it sizzles, and his radio played beneath the tube-steel guard seat. Perspiration trickled from his armpits as he daydreamed of the protected dunes on the New Jersey shore when, just a few days before, he’d snuggled between the nubile breasts of his ophthalmologist’s daughter, Joanie Hoffmann-Willberger, a Willberger, of the Trenton landed gentry. His mother was in ecstasy with that liaison. She was Jewish.

       Kissing Joanie was like licking an ashtray, but he endured that because she gave him what he wanted—what every teenaged boy wants—sex…ungarnished sex. She let him linger between her breasts, and he dared to suckle until she pushed him away with, “Hurry, my mother’ll miss us.” She pulled her padded bikini top back into place and stubbed out her cigarette in the hot sand. He drew satisfaction knowing that his mother would never know what had happened on the date she’d arranged.

       He’d had some fun with girls: a few fervent, quick, surreptitious hand jobs at the movies and assorted bj’s in cars or in other dark, secluded places. One time, he slithered his fingers into Joanie’s moistness, and she shuddered, and then he tried to enter her, but she snapped shut like a clam shell diving for safety.

       Her lips accepted him like the petals of an hibiscus flower. “Don’t get me messy,” she warned as she pulled off him just as he spurted. Zingo! He laughed at how wonderfully offended she was when he splatted her bouffant. She slapped him. “You’re a dirty, mean boy,” she’d said, and he loved it. He thrilled at her pretextual annoyance with his bad-boyness. He regarded girls as a sexual commodity, like McDonald’s cheeseburgers, whom he could consume at his whim and as often as possible.

       Sweat dribbled down his sculpted latissimi dorsi into his swim shorts, drenching his red, Yardley Country Club lifeguard shirt. Fever, when it sizzles. His controlling mother vexed him but, despite her admonitions, one goal remained paramount. He wanted another cheeseburger. He had to get laid. He’d had enough of reading and vicarious experience; he could not go to college in such a defective condition. Henry Miller was vicarious; this was real.

       Virginity would be worse than low SAT’s. Every guy, so it seemed, had already gotten laid, and his time had come…and he laughed at the pun…come. O tempore, O mores, to hell with Cicero.

       A devoted academic, he’d done his exhaustive research masturbating to Playboy, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Memoirs of Hecate County, Peyton Place, both Tropics, and looking at French pictures he’d found in his dad’s books in the bookshelf in his room. “No one goes to college a virgin,” Zubarsky said. His friend huffed and puffed as if he’d already been a big, bad wolf.

       His band mates laughed at his ineptitude with girls, not that any of them were any better at it. Then, there was that other smarmy threat: pregnancy. In her high-pitched hysteria, she threatened. “One sperm, and you can forget about medicine.”

       “Mom!” he answered, aghast and embarrassed. She transgressed with impunity his most intimate areas. He’d been slow to physically mature, so pubic and axillary hair were recent additions to his lithe and muscular swimmer’s body. He was shy with girls, but to have her articulate such things was like catching him jerking off.

       Cobblestone Karen, one of Johnny Calamari’s nieces, teased him at the Club, “Hey Red, do you shave?” Ravaged by acne, Chaim nicknamed her that because of her cobblestone complexion.

       “Go grow your mustache,” he replied, and she shut up. She looked like a catfish, complete with an odd wiry hair sticking out from a facial mole on her left cheek. He wondered if she had hairy tits.

       At the beginning of the summer, he’d taken over the family’s 1955 Buick, tattered, green, and bug-eyed, and his friends quickly hectored him about that, seeing its resemblance to a bullfrog. The Frog, they called his key to freedom. The best part about the car was that it had a massive V-8. He would soon learn that it had another great benefit: an hospitable back seat.

       Wet vapors steamed as he lifted his pith helmet, and the moist, hot air ventilated his soaked, copper hair, cooling him, but in the swelter, daydreams spun. Lifeguarding was boring. No one will ever drown here, he thought, but then he heard commotion, splashing, thrashing, a shrill “help, help!”