Alligator Candy

by David Kushner

  The pain of loss had another side, he said, speaking of how suffering could make a person “splendid”—more able to appreciate the range of human existence and emotions. He said that if he could wish one thing for a child, it would be that the child live through a death or a divorce so as to gain the wisdom that came with such experiences. But, he went on, the child must go through these experiences with at least one supportive person. More than anything, Brantner empathized with my family. When my parents met with him, my mother told him, “I can’t drive behind a car and see a trunk without thinking of Jonathan in the trunk.”

  “Now I’ll think about that too,” he replied.

  “That was to me one of the most profound therapeutic things at the time: empathy,” my mother later recalled. “Another thing he said to me that was really scary was you can’t be assured this won’t happen again,” she said, “I thought, Oh God, how can I go through that again? He said, ‘It’s the people, it’s the support, it’s the community.’ ”

  This growing sense of community became manifest on May 16, 1975. An Israeli artist and family friend, Kopel Gurwin, had been commissioned to create two banners that would hang in our synagogue in Jon’s memory. There was one on either side of the entrance lobby. On the right hung a banner in blues and greens, showing a cluster of animals around a child, inside a mosaic of shapes. On the border were Hebrew words, the last clause from a biblical passage “[A] child shall lead them.” It translated to: “And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; And a little child shall lead them.” A plaque alongside the banner noted that in this banner, “Gurwin seeks to capture Isaiah’s messianic vision of a world at harmony, enjoying peace, relationship and love . . . The figure of a child, secure and unafraid, leads the world to better understanding of harmony.”

  On the left hung a banner called Jonathan’s Covenant. It showed two cubist figures, in purples and reds, with faces pressed side by side, and was taken from a biblical passage about two characters who happened to share my and Jonathan’s names. “The banner depicts the strong filial love shared between Jonathan and David,” the plaque to the banners read, and “suggests the loving relationship shared by Jonathan Kushner and his brothers.”

  I had no idea what passage it referred to; it just struck me as strange that there were two friends in the Bible with the same names as us. I also felt a bit guilty that there wasn’t an Andy up there too, although I knew that this was not intentional; it was just part of the Bible story. Alongside the border were Hebrew words that were translated on the plaque: “. . . and the Lord be with thee, as He hath been with my father . . . and Jonathan caused David to swear again by the love that he had for him: for he loved him as he loved his own soul.”

  18

  AT SOME POINT, I saw their faces. The older one had short, dark hair and a high forehead, buggy eyes, a thick mustache. The newspaper photo of the younger one showed him with his eyes shut, thick hair swept low over his right eye; he wore a dark T-shirt. As far as I could recall, no one sat me down and showed me the pictures of the men who murdered my brother. I would just occasionally see the photos in a newspaper left on the kitchen table alongside the comics, the sports, the weather. Apparently something was happening—something in the court system—that was keeping the story in the news, even years later.

  I could bear to look at the pictures only for so long before I had to turn away. Part of me wanted to know more about these men: Who were they? What exactly did they do? They knew the answers to everything that haunted me. How long had they been in those woods? How long had they planned this? Was there a reason they selected him?

  But the part of me that wanted to know all this was small. The rest of me felt sickened, frightened, horrified that there were actually real people behind my brother’s death. Before seeing their faces, I had consoled myself by keeping their images in the abstract; by not visualizing anyone at all. All I saw was my own edited filmstrip of Jon’s final day: our conversation, his departure, the blur of the red metal bike, the banana seat, the high handlebars, twirling pedals, the woods, and then a curtain of darkness dropping forever. I didn’t want to see the faces that were watching Jon that day. I certainly didn’t want to know their names. All I caught was the last name of the older one, Witt, and the moment I saw it, I tried to erase it from my mind.

  Though I was just a child, the older I became, the more my mind struggled with the looming mystery of Jon’s murder. Of course, in one sense, there was no mystery at all. The facts were out there somewhere. The case, as far as I knew, had been solved. But because the facts were beyond me—beyond my courage or ability to ask the questions that would reveal them—the mystery festered and grew. The most mysterious thing of all to me was how something like this could happen in the first place. And, more terrifyingly, if this could happen to Jon, then—and this fear could not be assuaged—it could happen to someone else: my friends, my family, me.

  Kids grow up hearing fairy tales, but the biggest fairy tale of all, I realized at the age of four, is that life is safe. Life isn’t safe, I learned. It’s crazy. Evil is real. One minute you could be riding your bike on the way to get candy, and the next, you’re dead. Anything could happen anywhere at any time. So now what? How was I supposed to live without giving in to the fear? Every kid fears the bogeyman, the creature in the closet, the monster under the bed. But my bogeyman had a face—two faces—and they couldn’t be dispelled by someone telling me he wasn’t real.

  Unfortunately, I was an imaginative kid, and the less I knew, the more terrible things I invented in my mind. With so many holes in the central story of my life in tatters, I filled in the blanks myself, like scribbling in a giant Mad Lib.

  “My brother Jon was biking through the woods when a man hit him with a _____ [NOUN] and then gagged him with a _____ [NOUN] . Then they _____ [VERB] to the _____ [NOUN] . It took Jon _____ [NUMBER] _____ [UNITS OF TIME] to die. The reason he was missing for a week was because they _____ [VERB] him and then they took him to the _____ [NOUN] and then . . .”

  From there the story degenerated into dark fantasy. It felt like I was in bed, holding that magical old edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that was coming to life. The letters fell from the pages, which became windows to some other world. Each page I flipped had the same image: a scene of a dark forest. The faster I turned the pages, the quicker the scene came to life: a sticky black ooze on the floor of the woods rising up to the tops of the trees until the ooze was coming out of the floor of my room, up through my blue shag carpet, past the orange plastic night table, up alongside my bed, spilling over my fuzzy orange blanket, up the walls of the playing-card-soldier wallpaper, past the blue strips of the Venetian blinds, up toward the ceiling that I had tacked with football pennants—the blackness was everywhere. In those dark moments, I felt immobilized both by what I knew and by what I didn’t know, and I was drowning.

  By 1980 the awful reality of child murder became impossible to push away. It seeped into my house through the portal of my television. I’d be sitting on the couch in our den, waiting for a new episode of M*A*S*H or The Jeffersons, when there’d be another newsbreak—another grainy video of adults searching a forest, or police officers carrying a stretcher with a small mound wrapped on top. The “Atlanta Child Murders,” as they were known, had become a nationwide saga. Day after day, newscasts carried the stories of the missing African-American boys and unsolved murders.

  Sometimes my mom or dad would be sitting next to me when the reports came on, and I would feel an icy stillness envelop us. Nothing was said, and nothing had to be said. I knew that we were all flashing to Jon, to the woods, to our story. And I desperately wanted the moment to pass, the report to end, and to have George Jefferson or Hawkeye Pierce bound back across the screen. My eyes would leave the TV and travel over the wood paneling, past the burbling fish tank, the bookshelves of Tom Robbins and Elie Wiesel novels, and up the wa
ll to the gold-framed photo of Jon: the one that had been used on all the missing person fliers, the one that still ran in the papers whenever the case resurfaced, the one of him in the red shirt, head tilted, smiling.

  But it was getting harder to wish away the news of missing kids on TV. Something seemed to be changing in America. Stories of missing kids were in the headlines more frequently. It had started the year before, on May 25, 1979, when a six-year-old boy in Manhattan, Etan Patz, vanished on the morning of his first solo walk to his school bus, just two blocks away from home. While abductions had been relegated to local news in the past, the unique nature of the Patz story—the SoHo location, the first trip to school—riveted the New York tabloids and spread nationwide.

  The case sparked the missing children movement. The public became aware just how badly coordinated federal, state, and local officials were in sharing information on missing kids. Patz became the first missing child to have his picture appear on milk cartons. Eventually President Ronald Reagan declared May 25, the date of Patz’s disappearance, as National Missing Children’s Day. The ominous tagline of late-night TV news casts—“It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your children are?”—seemed to take on a new urgency.

  With the Patz case unsolved, and the body count in Atlanta racking up to nearly two dozen missing children, a new fear began entering the minds of parents around the country. News reports spoke of curfews in Atlanta and kids feeling more afraid of playing outside. The media seemed to have found a new fear to exploit; every parent’s Ultimate Nightmare.

  I could see some of the ripple effects of all this reaching Tampa. The story appeared in the local papers and entered conversations among the neighborhood parents. Occasionally I would see them cast a long glance in my direction, perhaps careful not to upset me or maybe to see how I was responding. I gave them no indication of anything. I just went on playing electronic football or Atari, pretending as though I weren’t aware, hoping that the attention would go away.

  Now and then, though, I would reach out in my own passive-aggressive way. During one community class trip at IDS, we were taken to a local cemetery. While the teacher showed us the different kinds of headstones and crypts, I wandered off by myself and sat by a tree. In a way, it felt so transparent—such a maudlin bid for attention. I remember thinking how badly I wanted the teacher to come over and ask me if I was okay. But I felt too embarrassed and ashamed to ask for comfort myself. Instead, I just sat there for what seemed like forever, picking at blades of grass until the class moved on to another section of the cemetery, and I rejoined them.

  Despite the growing awareness of missing kids, we still seemed to have as much freedom as ever. If parents in our town were feeling more afraid, they weren’t changing their behavior yet. Kids still went off into the woods behind the 7-Eleven and disappeared on their bikes for hours on end. Even I was able to continue my explorations around the neighborhood. But my parents had limits.

  At the peak of the Atlanta murder mystery, IDS organized an Outward Bound trip, one of those adventure excursions that were supposed to teach us confidence through survival skills. After weeks of training, we would then pass the final test. Each kid would have to go off into the woods and spend the night alone. Everyone in my class was going, but the thought of me off in the wilderness by myself was too much for my parents. When my mother and father said they didn’t want me to go, I felt disappointed, but I was also relieved.

  On June 21, 1981, the Atlanta mystery finally came to an end when police arrested twenty-three-year-old Wayne Williams, who was found guilty of two of the twenty-nine murders and sentenced to life in prison (the murders stopped after he was apprehended). But the new fear didn’t end. The next month, six-year-old Adam Walsh was reported missing from a Sears department store in Hollywood, Florida, where he was playing video games while his mother shopped for a lamp a few aisles away.

  Coming on the heels of the Atlanta case, the Walsh murder became another nationwide saga, as police and locals searched in vain for the boy. His severed head was finally found in a canal a few weeks later, but the murderer remained at large. The boy’s father, John Walsh, would go on to become an outspoken advocate for missing children. He also founded a nonprofit to fight for improved legislation: the Adam Walsh Outreach Center for Missing Children, which later merged with a newer organization, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

  The two-year period between Patz’s disappearance and Walsh’s murder would prove to be a national tipping point. In 1982 Congress passed the Missing Children’s Act to fill the need for a coordinated center of information when a kid disappears. Such resources didn’t exist when Jon vanished. The Missing Children’s Act empowered the FBI to maintain a database on missing persons that parents and cops around the country could access.

  These developments were all beyond me at the time. And I suppose, like everyone else, I went back to my life and pursued my freedom with as much denial as I could muster—just as I had been living for years without truly knowing what had happened to Jon. It was still a mystery to me. A boy a few hours’ away in Florida had vanished and been decapitated after he went off to play video games at the mall. But that wasn’t going to stop me from disappearing too.

  On my eleventh birthday, I asked for a green Schwinn bike that I had seen in the shop. I don’t recall being aware or not that this was the same color and make of Jon’s last bike, the one he got on his eleventh birthday, or if my parents picked up on the connection. But once I got it I was ready to ride as far away as I could. I had first felt the possibilities of this freedom and adventure when, some years before, my dad taught me how to ride. I was nervous about falling down, but not, as I would recall later, nervous about what it meant for me to be able to ride off on my bike alone. I just wanted mobility, the freedom to go off, to discover, to ride to my friends’ houses on my own and feel a sense of independence and power. If I was afraid of what might happen to me—that I might suffer the same fate as my brother—that fear wasn’t strong enough to stop me.

  As my dad stood by me on my Huffy dirt bike, it clearly wasn’t stopping him either. And if he was struggling with this, he didn’t let on, not then or later. Instead, he just ran beside me as I wobbled on the bike, steadying me with his hands if I leaned too far. At one point, he couldn’t steady me enough, and I flopped over on my side onto the grass. I was fine, and I think we laughed about it. And then I got back on again. It took awhile for me to get my footing, to give myself over to the motion and balance until I wasn’t thinking about them anymore. I was just pedaling, fast and furious, as the sound of my father’s running feet faded behind me. “How far could I go?” I asked my parents after I learned to ride. “Anywhere but the woods,” they said.

  19

  ONE WOULD think that my parents, especially, would be the first to keep Andy and me under lock and key, but I experienced almost the opposite and rarely felt anything but freedom. For my parents, it was a constant struggle between what my mother told me later was “the fear and the freedom.” She said, “You don’t want your kid to be crippled. You want them to be alive and enjoy life. And despite my fears, I couldn’t be responsible for keeping you back from enjoying life. But at the same time, I had to be careful.”

  They weren’t able to let my brother and me go right away, but it happened gradually. When I reminded my mother how I used to take off on my bike for hours at a time—and this was long before the age of cell phones—she marveled at it herself. “If I didn’t know where you were, if we did that, I don’t know how we did it,” she said. “But apparently we did.”

  It wasn’t easy. My mother worried, especially at first. Even when they found the courage to let me go, the fear didn’t subside. “If you were away and I didn’t hear from you, I’d think, Why didn’t he call? Where is he?” my mother recalled. “I remember so many times when I didn’t hear from you and you didn’t let me know, I’d get to imagining, Oh my God, this is so terrible; I’m so frightened of
these terrible feelings.”

  And so my parents would reassure each other, and they would find reassurance from friends. As I got older and began staying out late on weekends, a friend suggested to my mother that they have me knock on their bedroom door when I returned, which helped them sleep at night. And when that didn’t work, she would simply talk herself down and say, “Wait, they’ll come back, they’ll be okay.”

  For Andy, my parents’ ability to let go and encourage us to get the most out of life was infectious. Times were not always rosy—there were the usual conflicts between parents and kids—but there was a sense that life was full of wonderful possibilities, despite the horrors. There was so much joy around our house, so many good times; our parents were known for their warmth, their humor, their compassion. He felt even more determined to find the career and life that would fulfill him.

  I began spending more and more time out on my bike. I would ride off down the sidewalk alone. Nothing but the pedals under my soles, and the playing card lodged in my back tire spokes simulating motorcycle sounds. I don’t remember declaring a destination when I would head off. It was usually just a matter of saying something like, “I’m going to ride my bike,” and then hearing my mom mutter something, and then I was off: down the driveway, around the corner, looping down our street, passing the tall palms, friends’ houses, maybe pulling in and ringing a doorbell—Is Marty home to play Atari with me?—and either taking a friend with me wherever or just continuing alone on my way.

  Out of our street, I’d pick up the sidewalk again along the main road, glancing over my shoulder at the woods where Jon vanished. Disappearing on our bikes didn’t just give us more freedom. It gave us the opportunity to fuck up. Fucking up, if no one got hurt, was a good thing. It made me feel alive, urgent. The more I feared the consequences of my mistakes, the less I thought about the absence of Jon. When you fucked up, you discovered yourself more, slammed into the barrier between right and wrong. Before that, you were just pushing in a million directions, pushing in the darkness until you felt a wall. When you pushed so hard that a wall fell down, you knew you’d found one. But you couldn’t find one unless you were out in the black.