Howl

Jeffrey Wengrofsky, The Wolfboy of Rego Park (Far West Press, 2023).

Reviewed by Michael Weingrad

Jeffrey Wengrofsky’s collection of autobiographical vignettes The Wolfboy of Rego Park is a little 88-page memorial to . . . what? To friends who died young, to the 1980s New York punk scene he participated in as a zine-writing teen, to his youth. But, more than anything, to a pre-internet way of being, when esoterica needed to be stored in the brain, to be shared face-to-face with other aficionados of the band or book you loved; when rebels didn’t have Instagram accounts and their “influence” was the stuff of urban legend and personal stories told at the bar.

The trajectory of Wengrofsky’s youth runs from working-class Jewish Queens (“After decades of coating the ships of the Brooklyn Navy Yard with lead-infused paint, grandpa came down with cancer”) and its public school childhood of comic books and neighborhood freaks and classroom bullies, to the semi-united tribes of early ’80s punk and CBGBs slam dancing, to teenage Marxism and a jail booking after a protest, to where a lot of us wound up: pomo theory and grad school.

Wolfboy’s chapters are a mix of deft reticence and unflinching revelation, the latter especially in the understated yet queasy portrait of one early punk mentor and his sexual predations. Though he writes in first-person and everything is suffused with personal meaning, Wengrofsky is always focused on other people, the conspirators and musicians and gurus and menaces, their codes and habits. Of one departed punk/dandy friend, a band frontsman and at times pianist, switchboard operator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and bartender near St. Marks Place, Wengrofsky recalls:

then in the twilight of youth, Peter already had an ethic of sorts, and people were invited into his life along axes of common interest: he liked wine and liquor, pre-war and pre-TV culture and style (he’d grab my tie and say “we are little gentlemen”), meat, and, sadly, cocaine (a big-league taboo nostalgic to the 1920s and certainly non-fattening).

From Tompkins Square Park or the roof of a LES walk-up, they would “howl into the deep inky still of the starless Manhattan sky.” 

The howls of Wolfboy join what seems to me a growing number of books by us Gen-Xers figuring out how to articulate the vanishing sense of our youth in the 1980s and thereabouts. Reviewing my own 1980s novel in verse, Jonathan Geltner (himself the author of a beautiful 1980s-facing novel) put my Gen X spin on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in this context of “a new kind of nostalgia.” Geltner says:

We are the last generation to recall life in the Analog World. We remember the Cold War, and first love . . . before the Internet. We remember how the world felt before it was mediated (even Dungeons & Dragons!) by screens. And we are doing everything in our power to get that world down on paper—or, indeed, on a screen—before the chance and the memory is lost (like tears in rain?).

Subtle, brutal, Wengrofsky’s Wolfboy is a worthy, punk-infused little entry in this race to chronicle not only our memories, but how we remembered.

Wengrofsky continues to swim the outré currents of New York creativity: acting, teaching at places like the New School, working for various art and theory mags, hosting podcasts, making short documentaries, and organizing an annual film festival connected with a production collective. Does something of punk then still live? Perhaps in spirit, though Wolfboy demonstrates that Wengrofsky knows when an elegy is called for. It seems fitting that the final chapter leaves us uneasily with Wengrofsky on the subway, but in 2019, smartphone in hand.

BIO

Michael Weingrad is the author of Eugene Nadelman: A Tale of the 1980s in Verse (Paul Dry Books, 2024). He is currently writing a book about Jews and fantasy literature.