Once the lad stepped foot onto Grossinger’s resort property, he suffered immediate culture shock. He was amazed at how fat all the guests were and how the couples romped around in their matching blue, green, and magenta sweat suits like overweight gazelles. He was mesmerized by the number of people playing Simon Says for hours and hours. He suffered the resort’s bullying waiters who forced him to eat three and four portions of strangely delicious dishes that had weird names like kugel, flanken, latkes, kasha, kishke, derma, gefilte fish, kasha varnishka, halvah, mamaliga, lox, sable, challah, knishes, tsimmis, rugelach, babka, and forshpice.

Billy asked a waiter what forshpice was.

The waiter said, “I don’t know, just eat it.”

The crotchety waiters ignored Billy’s pleas and supplications that he was full and couldn’t eat another morsel. They turned deaf ears to his entreaties and all but physically pushed helpings of marble, sponge, and chocolate cake down his throat. And always when he was bloated beyond his wildest imagination, the waiters compelled the poor boy to drink two or three egg creams before leaving the dining room.

Billy wondered why the waiters were trying to kill him. He had done nothing to them.

Billy watched in awe as the breakfast and lunch crowds departed the dining room, walked only as far as the thickly padded beach chairs a short distance away on the huge patio, and flopped into them as if they had just run a marathon when all they had done was eat. They lay there grepsing (belching) horrible bursts of unpleasant-smelling air. They sounded like the walruses they resembled. Then, after a few hours, Billy watched in awe as the herd got up from their beach chairs and waddled like incredibly plump penguins back to the dining room for another meal.

At night Billy followed the guests into Grossinger’s hyperkinetic nightclub. He stared dumbfounded at the attire of the nighttime crowd. Everyone dressed to the nines in satins, sequins, cashmere, and silk. The fat, balding married men suavely checking out the unmarried women while picking food out from between their teeth with the fingernail of their little finger. The seedy, self-adoring, would-be lotharios; the hot-to-trot, long-in-the-tooth secretaries; and steamy divorcées seething with general unhappiness and desperation, jealous of what the other women looked like and the makeup they used. Some married couples brazenly gloating over having captured a revolting mate against all odds. Two loud Latin bands took turns playing so that there was never a moment of quiet or a time the dancers could rest.

Everyone dancing the rumba, mambo, and cha-cha-cha with the facial expressions of brain surgeons, concentrating on their steps as if performing a life-or-death operation. Everyone sweating as though they had just stepped out of a shower, their shirts and dresses plastered to their backs. Everyone’s lips moving as they counted time—ONE, two, three, four, ONE, two, three, four—doing the traditional box step with all the verve and panache they could muster, praying to God they wouldn’t lose the count.