“G-O-L-D-S-M-I-T-H,” I declared into the phone.
“You sound like you like your name,” the operator said.
She had no idea.
Changing my name to Lippe didn’t make any difference anyway. My mother and stepfather bickered endlessly, blaming me for the problem of the day. I, in turn, blamed them. And it became clear to all parties involved: I had to escape suburbia for good.
Sometimes, You Gotta Believe in Magic
My plan was to run away and never come back. For help, I had a coconspirator, One-Eyed Betty, our housekeeper.
“You best believe those motherfuckers had the voodoo; they had the curse,” Betty Sharpe would tell me, pouring me a finger of scotch from my parents’ liquor cabinet and teaching me about Haitian spells. She was born in Haiti, and I can still see her in her rolled-up stockings, puffy feet hiding in the men’s high-top basketball sneakers she wore. I called her One-Eyed Betty because her left eye was cockeyed. Not to her face, of course. After all, she had the voodoo just as much as those motherfuckers she talked about did.
“Yeah, some of them motherfuckers are empowered,” she’d say, talking about voodoo spells she knew about and their unlikely victims. “That baby turned around three times, one drop of blood fell from his nose, and he fell down to the earth dead.”
I was barely old enough to leave the neighborhood, but Betty always treated me like an adult. On her day off, Betty went to Harlem to run the numbers, a street version of the lotto. But much of her adult life had been spent working for my stepfather and looking after his home. In the house, Betty became my confidante, and I became hers.
“Now, you know Maurice is fucking her. You know that,” she’d say, referring to my friend’s sexy mother and Maurice, a former shortstop for the Sing Sing baseball team. Fresh out of prison on parole, Maurice was working as Mrs. Schwartzbaum’s handyman and, according to Betty, working on Mrs. Schwartzbaum as well. Betty was like a one-woman news bureau, absorbing every morsel of information in the house, overhearing phone calls, answering the front door, talking with the neighbors. She may have had only one good eye, but she saw all.
With my mother lost in her own tirades, Betty appointed herself my personal life coach. She always warned me to stay clear of promiscuous women.
“You just be careful with that little thing you’ve got right there,” she’d say, warning me about venereal diseases. “That little thing you’ve got can give you some grief.”
Boy, was she ever right.
With her knowledge of voodoo spells and wisdom, Betty was a lifesaver. She could also stand in for my father as my fishing companion when we’d head out to Croton Reservoir. She would unchain the wooden rowboat Mr. Lippe bought for me—maybe he wasn’t all bad—and push it out on the water. I can picture her fat fingers and cracked hands on the oars and feel the water under the bow as she rowed us into the deeper part of the lake. Here, the sun warming my face, I could drop my line with a night crawler and wait for a perch or bass. She’d sit at the bow of the rowboat in her big-mammy straw hat, telling me stories about her encounters handling large venomous snakes and vicious mud-covered alligators in the Louisiana swamps.
We’d spend hours in the boat, waiting for a tug on the line.
“Motherfuckers ain’t biting today,” she’d say, gazing into the water and telling more of her stories about suburban adultery, the secrets of Haitian shamans, and seeing God.
I also designed my own safaris in Westchester County, taking along One-Eyed Betty as my personal gun bearer. We’d find a patch of woods and she’d follow me in.
“Stay back, I’ll handle things,” I told her seriously, marching into a patch of woods near Saks or Lord & Taylor, leading the way with my BB gun. So close to New York City, we couldn’t hunt for gnu, gazelles, or water buffalo. So I had to settle for the most common big-game species indigenous to those parts: squirrel.
Betty proved a handy partner. Once, I hit a squirrel with a BB pellet and dropped him dead. Like a retriever, Betty waddled over, picked him up, removed the sheath knife she kept under her skirt, and proceeded to skin him. She then collected the necessary kindling and dead branches and made a campfire. In the glow of the flames I watched her fashion a spit from sticks, skewer the squirrel, and then bless him with a wailing voodoo prayer, hopping around the edge of the fire she’d built. As we feasted on barbecued squirrel, I asked Betty about that prayer and her fire dance.
“Hush up,” she told me. “That’s private.”
Back in the house, Betty did her best to protect me. When Mother would go on a tirade and lay into me, Betty stepped up and went to bat.
“Leave that boy alone,” she’d tell my mother. But even Betty and her wisdom, kindness, and knowledge of voodoo could not alter my mother’s chilly temperament.
“That woman is crazy,” she’d tell me, throwing up her hands, returning to her chores, and leaving me to fend for myself. In my room, the door locked, I began to practice my own voodoo. I fashioned a mannequin and adorned it with female garments as a stand-in for my mother. I then brandished a machete I had stolen from the trunk of my father’s car and danced around my bedroom, wailing the same voodoo prayer that Betty had around our roasted squirrel, and proceeded to hack my own voodoo doll to pieces.
I don’t think it worked. Maybe I should have kept practicing.
My mother continued to drive me nuts. After a while, I stopped trying to please her. I have only one memory from my entire youth of feeling close to her. I was six. She bathed me and wrapped me in a warm towel. I still remember that moment. I wished there were more. I loved her, of course. That’s what children do. But nowhere is it written that it is one’s duty to love a parent. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that to be loved, you must be loving. Love has to be deserved and earned, by everyone. My father knew this. My mother?
“Let’s send the boy to a shrink,” she finally said, removing herself and Captain Smug from any responsibility for my rebelliousness at home and in school.
Consider Where the Joke That Goes Too Far Might Take You
The office of Maurice Cohn, my first psychiatrist, was located in White Plains, about a half-hour drive from our home. Mother sent me in a taxicab. I had the same driver for each trip: Ray. He was from Tunisia, a fascinating part of the world I itched to explore, the North African home of belly dancers, camel caravans, and, apparently, venereal diseases.
“They put this thing down your dick and scrape,” he told me about remedying syphilis. A rather strange admission to a stranger, especially one who was a young boy, and especially to a young boy en route to a shrink. But it was an introduction to another aspect of sexual activity, a subject that was beginning to fascinate me increasingly.
The interior of Dr. Cohn’s office on the second floor was bizarre. The walls were covered in Rorschach drawings, and around the room were stick figures. This was creepy shit.
I hated every minute of so-called therapy. The sessions were on Friday afternoons—the same time as baseball practice. I was the pitcher on the team, a crucial position that I loved, and missing practice was a big deal, especially on a regular basis. Naturally, this was the time my mother chose to schedule me to see Dr. Cohn.
I resented being there. Dr. Cohn was bizarre. He wore cheap blue suits with brown cracked shoes and white sport socks. He had poor hygiene too, and I can still see the blizzard of dandruff falling from his thinning black hair down over his face, landing on both sides of his chubby little nose. As a doctor, he was not impressive. I found him easy to manipulate.
He kept probing me, but I never wanted to give him what he was after. I finally felt sorry for him. I realized he had a dismal practice and an odd personality, and I wondered if he needed a therapist more than I did. I knew he wanted me to be revealing, to make an admission, something he could hang his hat on. Every once in a while, when I gave him a nugget he would scribble down on his pa
d, he’d let me have the verboten can of Coke and a marshmallow, stuff I loved and certainly didn’t get at home. All of my favorite treats had been banned by my mother long ago, precisely because they were my favorites.
One fall afternoon, suffering from sheer boredom and frustration, and wanting to get away from those scary Rorschach drawings and stick figures, I came up with an idea.
“Can we go on a field trip?” I asked eagerly.
“Okay, okay,” he said, excited that I might open up to him.
We left his spooky office, walked down the stairs to the sidewalk, and looked around. Across the street was a small patch of grass and a park bench. We crossed through traffic and sat there on the bench. It was a beautiful fall day, the sun was out, and I felt so sorry for this guy. He’d tried hard to crack me. He must have felt like a failure, I thought.
Then a few pigeons strutted by. The autumn light in the crisp air caught their feathers, and I could see the colors shine on their black, purple, and green hackles.
“Isn’t that beautiful?” I said, pointing to the resplendent colors in the birds’ feathers.
Dr. Cohn got excited. He sensed an opening.
“Tell me, Jonathan, what does that remind you of?” he asked.
It hit me. After giving him nothing for months, I knew what he was fishing for and how to make Maurice Cohn’s day. Sitting on the park bench, I turned and gave him the answer he was waiting for.
Three magic words.
“My mother’s vagina,” I said.
Bingo! He smiled wide, put his arm around my shoulders, and hurried me back to his office. Extra marshmallows and Cokes for all!
Shortly after, content that he had his brilliant diagnosis, he conferred with my mother. I had hoped never to see Maurice Cohn again, and my wish came true. After making my disclosure on pigeon feathers, he had come to the conclusion that I needed a far more serious set of treatments. A lone practitioner like him could not do the job alone. Instead, he recommended to my mother and stepfather that they send me to the Phelps School, a school for “boys like me.”
Just Because You Fight Fair Doesn’t Mean the World Will Too
The Phelps School was located in a farming town outside of Philadelphia, far from the rest of my family back in New York. It was dedicated to giving personal attention to a range of teenagers others couldn’t handle. A bit too personal, I was to find out.
From the outside, the Phelps School looked idyllic enough. As we drove in through the front gates, I saw the austere Tudor building that housed the dorms and classrooms, all surrounded by farmland. The school was only a few years old, the vision of Dr. Norman T. Phelps, whom we met after we arrived. He wore high leather boots, all shined up, had a buzz cut, and carried a riding crop. He looked more like an aide-de-camp to Hitler than an educator.
“Achtung!” he shouted as he greeted me with a handshake, crushing all my fingers. Or at least that’s what I thought I heard.
I turned to my mother to politely ask her not to leave me in the company of this Gestapo-like man, but, once again, she was speeding away in her Packard, back to New York. Without me.
“Achtung!” Führer Phelps said again, promptly dispatching me to an aide, who escorted me to my bunk in the dorms. I scanned the other kids, searching for friendly, sympathetic faces. There weren’t any. So I introduced myself to an unfriendly-faced upperclassman.
“My name is Jonathan. What’s your name?”
“Fritzy.” Fritzy looked more like an SS recruiter than a student. He had hair on the back of his fingernails, and my estimate was that he’d reached the complete state of puberty at six months.
“I’m going to keep my eye on you.” This was less comforting than it was menacing. I scanned the dorm for a place to get out of sight. Since there was none, I walked straight out the door and continued onto the path and into the cornfields by the road. I kept walking deeper in, so deep that nobody could find me. Eventually, it got dark. Then it got cold. I had no choice: I walked back to Phelps and got in my bunk, far from my father and safety.
Soon, morning came, and I learned that I had been banished not to a reformatory school at all but to a labor camp. I was shown my daily chores: mucking out the horse barns, then into the fields for farmwork. Before classes started. We were then forced to attend chapel and participate in a Christian prayer service. The organ started to play, and we all were ordered to sing in unison.
Onward, Christian soldiers,
Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus
Going on before.
What was this? I looked around frantically and found one other wide-eyed student who didn’t know the lyrics. Herman Weiss was the only other Jewish kid there, and we looked at each other, perplexed and panicked. We hummed along, fearful of being reprimanded if we were caught not singing.
Christ, the royal master,
Leads against the foe;
Forward into battle
See his banners go!
Back in the dorms, when I could safely use the phone, I called my father. I begged him to pick me up and take me away.
“Hang in there, you can handle it,” he told me over the phone.
“Please come get me.” My usual refrain.
“I can’t,” he said.
Legally, he was bound. He and my mother were tangled up in a custody case that was stuck in court. He was trying to win the legal battle, he told me, but that was challenging: His lawyer was a friend he met playing pickup basketball in Harlem. My wealthy stepfather’s army of well-heeled attorneys, on the other hand, were headed by General Baron, a man so accomplished at litigation he was called on to establish the legal system in the territory of Guam. Seriously. The entire legal system of Guam.
My father encouraged me to stay tough. Things would change as I got older, he told me, and he was doing all he could, and he promised he would keep fighting for me. I knew he was. He was just severely outgunned.
Know When to Make an Exit
In every direction at Phelps, there were threats. Mr. Arnold, the name I’ll use for one of the teachers, was a cause for imminent concern. At night, he’d hold the boys on his lap and tell them bedtime stories. These bedtime stories were quite interactive, complete with hands on thighs and other places. But they paled in significance to my biggest threat there: Fritzy. He wasn’t the smartest adolescent giant, just an aspiring Neanderthal, and everyone was afraid of him because he ran the circle jerks, whether we wanted to partake or not.
The circle jerks took place in the barn, before the evening prayers. Fritzy tapped the Hogan brothers, a host of other kids, and myself to meet him there. We stood around the hay bales, jacking off in front of one another. It wasn’t the worst part of the day, certainly better than Christian prayers. Can I be honest? I kind of liked the experience. I felt like I had something in common at last with my contemporaries at Phelps, like I belonged to this secret group of brothers, albeit a secret group of brothers who masturbated in front of one another. Maybe things were looking up. That is, until I learned that Fritzy and the others were, at best, anti-Semites and, more likely, full-blown aspiring Nazi sympathizers.
Perhaps a lot of this was in my imagination. Then again, the neatly drawn swastikas on all of Fritzy’s notebooks were very, very real. Granted, he was also pretty good at drawing the Star of David. The problem was he usually superimposed said star on the unfortunate fellow in the game of hangman. One day he did this in class. He sketched the body parts, branded the figure with the religious six-sided shape, then pointed at me. He then drew an arrow at the hanged man’s chest. And smiled. So much for my imagination. It was time to go.
I was afraid to escape from Phelps by myself. In plotting my escape, I needed a partner: My lone fellow tribesman seemed to be the best candidate. If he could be convinced, I thought, Herman Weiss and I might have a chance to break free. Also, if we were caught
, it might be harder for Führer Phelps to get away with too much punishment if there were two of us in the school brig.
To convince my compatriot, I told Herman to meet me at my hiding spot in the cornfields, a place where we could talk and Fritzy and the others could not hear us.
Herman wasn’t having it.
“If we break out of school, how would we get home?” he asked me. “We have no money.”
“Look, we could die here,” I said urgently. “We might not make it if we stay. They’d never know the truth.” Even then I had a flair for the dramatic.
Herman was nervous, worried about the punishment.
“Have fun with Fritzy,” I said. “I’m going. With you or without you.”
“How do we get on the train?” he argued. “We don’t have any money.”
“We hide in the bathroom,” I said. “I do it all the time going to see my father.” This was an old trick I and other runaways often used to avoid the conductors. In those days, the train bathrooms were nicely appointed and usually had a bench, which came in handy, as I was tired from my escape.
“But what if our parents take us back here? They’d really punish us.”
“What do you call this?” I said, and went into another fib to push Herman over the edge. I paused for emphasis and affected deep concern.
“What if they never found your body, Herman?”
He paled.
“And another thing—I didn’t want to tell you . . .”
“What?”
“I overheard something in Mr. Arnold’s class,” I said.
“Wha-wha-what’s that?” Herman stammered fearfully.
I took a long, deep breath and looked over my shoulder to make sure no spies were around. In my most conspiratorial voice I shared some crucial and wholly fabricated news.
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