Alligator Candy

by David Kushner

  If I say “one,” then that erases Jon’s existence, as if he never had been here. And saying “one” raised questions. People wondered why Andy and I were so far apart in age: eight and half years. It seemed suspicious. Some asked if I was a mistake. But even that was better than having to tell them the truth that I still didn’t fully understand: I had two brothers but one was dead.

  “How’d he die?”

  He was killed.

  “How?”

  He was murdered.

  “How? Why? What happened?”

  And so on. The questions were too much for me to deal with, so I decided it was better not to deal with them at all. “I have one brother,” I’d say, even though it felt like a lie.

  Given our disparity in ages, it was hard, as a child, to know what Andy was struggling with at the time. Though we didn’t talk about this, we felt it. We shared a sense of unspoken fraternity, an incredible love and closeness, like two guys who’d returned from the front lines of some invisible war. Though Jon’s absence wasn’t articulated, I felt it every time I walked down toward Andy’s room at the end of the hall. He’d be in there with the door locked, listening to music on his headphones or playing drums. As I knocked persistently at the door, I’d cast a glance to my right into Jon’s old bedroom. Though my mom was using it as her office, I could still feel Jon’s presence there.

  All else that was left of Jon’s were a few items that he had saved in a small brown wooden box in his closet. In private moments, I would stand on a chair and pull the box from the shelf, unlocking the gold clasp and slowly opening it. The box smelled nutty and musty. Inside was a small black plastic water pistol, a few dollar bills, a spool of caps for a cap gun, and an audiotape that Jon had made with his friend.

  One day I finally got the nerve to put the tape into the cassette deck and press Play. I sat on the carpet, listening and watching the tape spin, recalling the days I’d spend there with him playing with the flight book. The two black capstans spun the tape along, as I waited with anticipation. Then I heard the hiss of the tape, and the sound of a voice: “Oh yeah,” it said. The voice was high pitched, almost girly, perhaps made when he was much younger. The voice sang some incomprehensible words, then said “bye.” Then came a click and some hiss, and another voice: now a boy’s voice affecting the deep tones of an adult. “Hello, this is Howard Cosell down in New York City,” Jon said, “and Underdog has just been fatally hurt.”

  Underdog was our favorite cartoon. It chronicled the adventures of an ordinary pooch with a secret superpower identity, Underdog. He would fight battles against the villainous Simon Bar Sinister, an evil doctor with a greenish head shaped like a decaying tooth. His girlfriend was the comely canine reporter, Sweet Polly Purebread. Jon was enacting his own episode in which Underdog finds trouble and gets interviewed by the famous sportscaster. He went on as the voice of Cosell. “May I have a word with you, Underdog?” he asked the wounded hero.

  “Ugh,” Jon replied as Underdog.

  Then he slipped back into his announcer’s voice. “This is Howard Cosell going to Sweet Polly Purebread.”

  “Hey,” Jon said in Polly’s squeaky voice, “this is Sweet Polly Purebread, and Underdog has just been killed. Oh yeah yeah yeah. And Simon Bar Sinister has just conquered the world.” Then Jon’s voice vanished and was replaced by an electromagnetic hiss.

  16

  DAD TALKED with the chimps. It was the highlight of our trips to Busch Gardens, the Africa-themed amusement park near our house. The chimpanzees inhabited a large, open play area around the middle of the park. They lazed on giant fake boulders and swung from tire swings. My dad would step up to the rock wall surrounding the chimps and open his mouth wide, baring his teeth and widening his eyes. The chimps wouldn’t pay attention at first. But then, after hearing his convincing clicking sounds, one or two would casually take notice.

  As my dad twisted his face and mouth, the chimps actually began to mimic and respond to his gestures—cackling and gaping as if they were conversing with a bushy faced uncle. Jolly tourists in matching T-shirts and hats would also take notice, wandering over with their fried lunch to watch the man with long black hair and black beard chattering with the chimps. They assumed my dad was an employee of Busch Gardens—some monkey expert putting on an afternoon show. I knew better, that my dad was drawing from his anthropological expertise to have a little fun and entertain his kid.

  I wasn’t aware, not consciously anyway, of how Jon’s death was affecting my mom and dad. As much as they may have discussed grief and suffering with each other and with their peers, we didn’t talk about Jon much with one another. Or at least he wasn’t being discussed very often with me. I sensed that even uttering Jon’s name was too painful between us, too real, too raw. There was one time when my mom and I were discussing Jon, and I watched as my dad quietly stood up and left the room. I didn’t feel rejected or hurt, I just felt curious and confused, struggling to understand what was going through his head. The word murdered was never mentioned. If anything, we would use the word died, as if not mentioning the M-word would somehow make it less difficult.

  I had no idea how Jon’s murder had transformed the way my father parented me. My dad had been through a sort of mirror experience of loss and suffering, losing his father when he was nine, and then losing his eleven-year-old son when he was a father. I didn’t know what regrets he harbored, what guilt he carried. I had no idea how he had spent most of his years as a father before I was born, working long hours as a rising professor, studying and writing while his sons Jon and Andy grew. I knew they’d had their special times together, hiking through the mountains and foothills of Tucson. But I didn’t realize how one way he coped with Jon’s death was by making up for lost time with me.

  Busch Gardens was a big part of this. Though we didn’t have a lot of money, he got season passes for us, and we went almost every weekend. Sometimes we’d spend a long day there, riding the flume and eating pretzels while tourists waited in long lines for free Busch beer at the Hospitality House. Other times we’d just go to ride the Skyride, my favorite attraction, which would carry us along quietly in a cart high above the park, and then come home. We also started going to watch sports, getting season tickets for the Rowdies and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who’d entered the National Football League in 1976. Or we’d go off to the schoolyard to fly a kite, or toss the football around in the back. My dad, like my mom, lived passionately and with great humor. He gave big hugs and loved eating, danced as Tevye in a synagogue production of Fiddler on the Roof. He always had the capacity to feel and express tremendous joy.

  The headaches, though, were still striking him at random. Once, we were at a showing of Clash of the Titans when I heard his measured breathing and saw his face droop down, tears rolling from his eyes. When he said we had to go, I understood.

  My dad’s master’s program in applied anthropology had begun in full force in the fall of 1974, less than a year after Jon’s death, and, as the department chair, it kept him busy in the months to come. For me, trips to the Anthropology Department were the ultimate adventure. I saw halls full of people with long hair and jeans like my dad, passionate, intelligent grown-ups with great senses of humor. Dad’s office door was covered in newspaper clippings and cartoons, including Doonesbury and R. Crumb comics. The room was thick with cigarette smoke, as students came and went.

  Down the hall was the physical anthropology lab, a wonderland of bones and skulls. The fact that they were human bones and skulls didn’t strike me as weird. I just knew that Kurt, the professor who ran the place, was always happy to let me check out the jawbones and teeth. On special days, I got to go along on the archaeology digs in the woods, using a giant sifter to search for fossils. Whenever my IDS class took a field trip to my dad’s department, I was always proud to show off the pictures of him in the small museum doing fieldwork in Israel. Anthropologists began filling our house again for the frequent office parties, which soon resumed at my hom
e. Once again I was back in my favorite environment, sprinting over the thick yellow shag carpet through the forest of legs as jazz records played.

  On weekends my father would sometimes accompany me to synagogue, where I was enrolled in Hebrew school. The shul teemed with big Southern Jews, men in pale blue suits and colorful yarmulkes kibbitzing over coffee served in white plastic cups, bosomy women tending to the grits, the eggs, and the kids. We darted between them, heading full speed for the pastries, the black-and-white cookies, the gooey rugelach. But there were obstacles, particularly the old ladies in their synagogue best, slightly hunched, wearing white lace coverings on their heads. The old Jewish ladies were tough, shuffling along the dessert table with a napkin spread out expertly in their palms, as they filled their hands with goodies and then shoved the bounty stealthily into their perfumed handbags.

  The running inevitably stopped when we were corralled into services. We’d sit there on the brown, cushy fold-down seats, holding the prayer book in our hands as the cantor sang the familiar Hebrew prayers, sometimes blowing on a little pitch pipe first. The services had a rhythm and a cadence all their own. The melodies seemed to build and beautify as they reached the end of the service—perhaps because the end meant the sooner I could climb back into the station wagon and go home to watch Creature Feature, a weekly matinee of monster movies, on TV while eating leftover roast chicken.

  During the service, I didn’t understand what was being said or how I might extrapolate meaning for my own life. The Hebrew was beyond me, and the English translation always seemed to be essentially the same: praising the Lord over and over. Instead, I would tunnel into my imagination, the skill I’d been building at IDS, and it served me well here. Sometimes I would bring props to help me, such as broken magnets I could stealthily assemble into a magnet monster, or a watch with a Twist-O-Flex band that I could maneuver in exponential variations.

  But while I would be off in my own world during Saturday school services, I felt differently when my dad came along. There was a comfort in his presence, the familiarity of his voice singing the hymns, the way he harmonized—just like he harmonized when he sang Pete Seeger songs at home. As he sang, sitting next to me, I would play with the ends of his tallith, his prayer shawl, twisting the white fringes between my small fingers. Occasionally my dad would take notice, and rather than admonishing me, he’d slip the tallit from my hand and playfully tickle my nose and eyelashes with the fringes, which always made me smile.

  But then the point would come in the service for the mourner’s Kaddish, the prayer said by those over thirteen who had recently lost a loved one or on the anniversary of a death. As was customary, the mourners would rise while everyone else remained seated. When our family said Kaddish, I would notice the eyes of the congregants looking back at us, perhaps only for a moment before they turned away. Some people in the synagogue didn’t like the idea of standing during the Kaddish because it made them feel awkward. But my dad said that standing was the point; you stood so that other people in the shul could know that you were grieving and show their support.

  As I listened to my parents say the prayer—“Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba . . .”—I knew that they were saying the words for Jon, and that Jon was on the minds of everyone who saw them standing there. We were a public family, and Jon’s murder was a part of the community. This wasn’t the same for the other deaths, I realized. No one knew the story of my dad’s father, Abraham, when my dad said Kaddish for him. But when my family stood for Jon, they saw the emptiness that was there, the missing person in our family who never returned.

  I didn’t imagine how Jon’s death must have impacted every other parent in that place, how they must have held their own children close, thankful that they didn’t have to endure such pain or wonder how they could possibly survive if they ever did. Instead, I just saw the way they glanced away from us, or how, on our way out, someone might hug my parents or take their hands gently.

  In those moments, I knew that this death transcended my own family in a way that was beyond my comprehension. Part of me felt exposed and vulnerable by this attention, but another part of me felt supported and nurtured. Even though my childhood amnesia left me without the details of Jon’s murder, during the week that he was missing, and the aftermath, I could see that the adults around me carried the memories with them. They had been there with my parents, although doing what I didn’t know. They had seen things, learned things, understood something that perhaps I would too one day.

  17

  MY MOTHER would see Jon occasionally in her dreams. One came in late April 1975. In the dream, he looked as he did about a year before his death: shorter hair, uneasy from struggling at school. He was away at a camp—one from which he was never returning. But he was able to write home every few days. Each of us received a thick letter folded into a tiny envelope. The letter to my dad told him that everything was okay where Jon was now. When my mother awoke, she began writing on her legal pad in her office, his old room, to get it down before she forgot.

  The dreams made her feel all the more resolved to do what she could to preserve his memory. “I don’t believe in life after death,” she wrote. “I only believe we give a person immortality and do so by remembering, thinking about, bringing to mind, touching, smelling, sensing in our heads all the details about the dead one we love. Maybe our concern for our mortality made us discover how to capture an image in a photograph. The special pain of looking hard and long at the picture. I have tapes of Jon. I’m afraid to listen to them. Why? Why not? What can be more painful, the cloudlike transparent memory of his voice and image, or the absolute almost solid image of his recorded voice, like a photograph.”

  And yet, she realized, her pain was changing, internalizing in ways she was trying to understand. “I haven’t cried for Jon for a while,” she wrote. “Pain without tears (like I used to have). Maybe it’s because the grief has taken root. While rooting, the aura of new grief bubbles and rises almost constantly to the surface. But it’s deep and rooted and solidly planted and the motions and responses are firm and rooted and always a part of our very soul. Never will I cease to love this Jon, or stop longing for him. We must remember him, talk about him, bring his image and sounds to our consciousness.”

  While we were now all back in our routines—me at school, Andy at school and playing in his band, my dad at the university, my mom teaching Lamaze—we were each still in our own private orbit. But it was my mother, once again, who took the lead, just as she had been the one to open the door to Jon’s room again. She wanted to reach out, to talk with someone else who could understand and share her pain. “Bring me a mother,” she told my dad one day.

  The president of the university had lost a child as well, and his wife agreed to meet with my mother. Though the woman had lost her child to illness, there was a comfort between them, a motherly understanding of what it felt like to bear a child and lose the child too young. It felt like such a taboo at the time to talk about death so openly, and yet it provided so much solace. They resolved to bring in other parents who had lost children too.

  At the time in the midseventies, the field of death and dying, which echoed the name of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s pioneering 1969 book, was still new. The movement challenged what one practitioner called our “death-denying culture” by probing and plumbing the universal question: how to cope with the end of life, both our own and others. But for my mother, the death and dying movement seemed like a natural extension of the social action she and my father had taken part in over their lives. The denial of death had created a kind of mass oppression, a culture of silence that left mourners feeling alienated and ill-equipped. Grievers were supposed to buck up, be “strong,” not cry in public, or carry on about their suffering beyond an acceptable period of time. By exploring the experience of loss, the death and dying movement was giving voice to the voiceless.

  Once again, a personal experience—Jon’s death—had drawn my parents into soci
al action, just as my mother sought Lamaze before Andy’s birth and my father sang union songs as a young activist in the Bronx. They had come to D&D, as they nicknamed it, to help them survive the seemingly unsurvivable, and part of helping themselves was to establish this community for others.

  After leading informal support groups, my parents started one of the country’s first chapters of Compassionate Friends, a support group that had begun in England for parents’ who’d lost children. It felt radical at the time—gathering others like themselves to share their losses, their struggles—as radical as fighting to let fathers in the delivery room or staging sit-ins at lunch counters during the civil rights era. My father, though he had been suffering largely in silence, followed my mom’s lead, and the two poured their hearts into the movement. They organized conferences and helped launch the area’s first hospice. My dad began a long correspondence with Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel.

  From my vantage point, the D&D (a phrase I later equated with the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons) crowd resembled the same kind of people I’d seen around my house for years: long-haired men and women in faded jeans and silver jewelry. And they seemed just as passionate and full of life, surrounded by music and food and laughter. But then I’d notice something else occasionally pass across their faces: expressions of seriousness and gravity that I had become accustomed to seeing when people approached my parents or Andy and me.

  At one point, my parents introduced me to an older man with a long gray ponytail and kind eyes. His name was John Brantner, and he had become a close friend of theirs. A psychologist from Minnesota, Brantner spoke of such things as “positive approaches to dying,” the title of one lecture. “Could we start at the end of a relationship instead of the beginning and work our way backward—see what the ending means to it?” He said in that presentation, “Could we use grief in a positive way to inform our other relationships, our ongoing relationships, and relationships that are yet to come?”