Somehow, we made it all the way back to San Marcos, our old stomping grounds. The tank was almost bone dry and we were completely out of food and water, so we pulled over by the Hollandia Dairy, an old-school market where we used to shop. At this point, us kids didn’t really have a clear idea about our money situation, so we were thinking this was just business as usual. This was just us, stopping to load up on supplies, same as always. But before heading inside the dairy my father sat us down around the table in the back of the camper, said he something to tell us. Then he reached into his pocket and took out a dime and slapped it down.
“You see that?” he said, pointing to the dime. “Who can tell me what this is?”
We all looked at each other, thinking this was some kind of trick question. The older kids knew enough not to answer, but finally one of the younger kids piped in with the obvious: “It’s a dime.”
“Ah, but it’s not just any dime,” my father said. “It’s our very last dime.”
He was dead serious, but he was also excited. I thought, Hmmm, something’s a little off about this. And then, underneath that thought, there was another, more unsettling thought—that maybe this was something my dad couldn’t fix. Up until this time, there was no trouble he couldn’t steer us through. No wave bigger than we could handle. Nothing he couldn’t fix or troubleshoot or negotiate away. When you’re a kid, and you’re old enough to understand about money, and you hear that your family is completely broke, it kind of scares the crap out of you, but my old man was pumped about it. His attitude, his whole demeanor, didn’t fit with the way I saw it. To him, it was a thrilling, romantic moment, to be completely out of money. He didn’t have a job. We had no place to go, nothing to eat, nothing lined up. But he wanted us to see this low moment as the start of a great adventure.
Then he said, “I’m just going inside to pick up a couple things we need.” Left us all right there in the camper, to scratch our heads and wonder what the hell was going on. I followed him in after a few minutes, saw him throw some milk in his shopping cart, some eggs, some bread, some chicken. The usual … only what was unusual about this trip to the market was he didn’t have any money to pay for it. But that didn’t stop him. He made his way to the register, took out a checkbook, and paid with one of his “Dorian Paskowitz, MD” checks. He knew no one would question a doctor’s check, and in his head he must have done whatever calculations he had to to justify the transaction, but I didn’t see that there was any justification in it at all. I was too scared to say anything, too embarrassed, but I thought about it long and hard. I thought about what it meant, about how we were living, about what people would think if they knew we were stealing like this—because, hey, that’s what it was, stealing.
I was up all night, thinking about it. Best I could tell, I was the only one who’d seen Doc pass the bad check, and I didn’t know if I should tell anybody about it, if I should tell my mom. Frankly, I didn’t know what to do—so I did what us Paskowitz kids did best: nothing.
Don’t know what Doc was thinking. Probably, he put a little spin on it. Probably, it wasn’t the first time he’d passed a bad check—just the first time I’d seen it for myself. Probably, he just figured it was his turn to have his hand out, and the Hollandia Dairy folks, it was their turn to help. And that he’d pay them back, if and when he could.
There was no justifying it, really, but this was who we were. This was how we lived.
* * *
So there we were, headed across the Gulf states to Florida. Because we were up against it all over again, and because my father was a bit of a showman when it came to this kind of thing, I suppose it’s possible some version of this same scene played itself out in Louisiana, the way my brothers remember. The year before, the year after … somewhere in there. Doc liked to serve up these little life lessons for us, even if the lesson didn’t fit with the way the rest of the world seemed to operate. Even if it scared the plain crap out of his kids.
The setup to Florida was that my father had landed a job at the National Enquirer—probably the strangest gig on his résumé. They didn’t hire him to be a doctor but to serve as a kind of medical authority and to stand behind some of the more ridiculous stories they published. You know, if the headline said someone had found a six-headed alien that breathed through its elbows, it helped if there was a medical professional to support the claim. My father grabbed at it because, after all, a job was a job. And it was an excuse to head out to a part of the country we’d never seen before.
We were all psyched for Florida. We’d heard there was supposed to be some really good fishing down there, and at that stage in our lives we were big into fishing. It started in San Diego, when we used to surf Tourmaline. We’d park somewhere at the end of the day, and I’d splinter off with Abraham and Moses and head out to the jetties. We had no fishing gear of our own, not even a line. We had to scavenge among the rocks at low tide and scrape together other people’s discards. Half the time, we’d be untangling all these lines or knotting all these short pieces together. We could always find hooks, too. For weights, we’d use rocks or spark plugs or whatever washed up onshore that seemed like it would do the trick.
Bait was never a problem. We’d dig for sand crabs, or collect the flat crabs on the rocks, and then we’d cast our homemade lines into the water and wait. It was hillbilly fishing, but it worked. We’d always catch a mess of small fish and end up throwing most of them back, but there was always enough to take home. Sometimes, when we were a little older, we’d get a fire going right on the beach and cook ’em up right there.
So when the idea of Florida came up, we were all over it. The Enquirer building was in a town called Lantana, not far from Palm Beach. There was a pier there, down where we used to surf, so once we got a feel for the Atlantic our days were pretty much the same as they’d been back in California. We’d surf and fish and goof around. The surfing was good—nothing like we were used to out in California or Mexico, but this gave us a bit of an edge in some local contests. A lot of the locals had never seen kids our age with so much confidence on their boards, but that just came from spending so much time in the water, on much bigger breaks.
We rented a small house with a big backyard leading down to the Intracoastal Waterway, which had a whole bunch of little canals feeding off of it. Wasn’t exactly the Everglades, but it had that look, that feel, and at night we’d grab one of our new friends and hop into his small boat and head out fishing. It was real swamp country, real spooky, but there was something thrilling about it, too. The landscape was like nothing we’d ever seen.
I loved how these local kids all had their own little putt-putt boats to get around. They’d zip in and out of the canals like the kids in California would cruise the strip in their hot rods. We fell in with a crowd of kids who liked to sleep out on the banks of all these weird back waterways. We’d make a fire and set up our tents and it was like a scene out of Mark Twain. There were feral cats running around everywhere. No gators, though. Don’t think we were deep enough into Everglade country for that, but we saw our share of giant cane spiders.
One night, we even saw the great Skunk Ape.
What’s that you say? You’ve never heard of the Skunk Ape? Well, best we could tell, it was South Florida’s version of Sasquatch, a local legend that had somehow managed to scare the crap out of local kids for generations. And, on this one night, it scared the crap out of us. The legend of Skunk Ape is that you start to smell a hideous odor before he appears. He’s half man, half ape, and he stinks to high heaven, so we were sitting around the fire one night, smelling this god-awful smell, hearing these thundering footsteps. And then—we could swear it!—it sounded like a tree was falling, off in the distance. Not just the snap of a sapling, or the crack of a branch, but a real, serious tree. We heard it land with a giant thud, and at this point we were all freaking out. Even the local kids who’d dragged us on the adventure were terrified. One of them got so spooked he fired off a couple rounds from
his .22 into the swamp, and after nightfall the footsteps seemed to fade and the smell disappeared.
For some reason, we stayed the night. Don’t think we slept at all, but we toughed it out. We were too cool to let any Skunk Ape chase us from our adventures.
Meanwhile, the fishing was incredible. We’d catch these giant sheepshead, some ballyhoos, some goggle-eye … fish I’d never even heard of would just come tugging on our lines, all day long. It was crazy. Giant jellyfish, cobia, snook … more species of fish than we could even count, and we’d bring home whatever we didn’t eat there and then and my mother would find a way to feed them to us.
It was in Florida that my father first put us big kids to work. David and Jonathan were probably old enough to work legitimately at this point, while Abraham and I, at fifteen and fourteen or so, were close enough. My father gathered us around one afternoon and told us we were old enough to go out and find jobs. I think David and Jonathan might have gone out and worked before, but it was a first for me, and probably for Abraham. And so in many ways this was a turning point for our family, the first time the older kids were sent out into the world to earn our keep. My father even lined up a job for Moses, even though he was only twelve or thirteen—too young for working papers, certainly, but that kind of detail never got in the way of a Paskowitz family plan. I mean, it’s not like we were being paid on the books or anything.
It was like the end of our innocence—although we were hardly innocent. It’s like my parents had been stiff-arming the real world since we moved into the camper—and here, finally, the real world pushed back. In some ways my older brothers and I were excited to be let loose and start earning our own money, but in other ways we were scared shitless, because we knew how little we’d be making at these minimum wage gigs. We knew that if our thin paychecks were supposed to make a dent in the family finances, we were fucked.
All five of us started out working at a concrete water park that was being built along the highway. Can’t imagine how my father managed to get five of us hired on, but he was good at that sort of thing. Touching people up … that was one of his specialties. My job was to sand the imperfections out of the concrete slabs, so the customers wouldn’t get cut sliding down after the slabs had been painted. It was a miserable job, and it didn’t help that there was 100 percent humidity, on top of one hundred–degree temperatures. The job was so terrible we all stepped away from it, one by one. My father didn’t mind, long as we had something else lined up. Abraham was the first to go, I think. He got a job as a bag boy at Winn-Dixie, a big supermarket chain. I followed soon as I could, with a gig at the Piggly Wiggly, a much smaller, much lower-end market.
The guy who hired me insisted that I needed working papers, but he was a kind man and he let me work on an interim basis, and every week he’d check in with me and ask if I’d submitted all the forms through my school. Each time, I’d just nod and tell him everything was cool, and buy myself another week.
I never saw any money—my paycheck went directly to my dad—but I remember feeling a sense of autonomy, like I was finally making my own way. I used to get this big rush of independence every time I broke for lunch, because I’d fix myself these great meals and eat like a prince. I’d have to pay for it, of course, but I’d get an employee discount and the money was deducted from my paycheck, so Doc never really knew the deal. But it was the one chance I had to break from the healthy gruel my mother was still feeding us, so I’d load up on fried chicken, coleslaw, chocolate milk … all the good stuff I could never get at home. I’d serve myself these big, heaping portions and walk with my tray to this employee picnic area that had been set up behind some hedges in the parking lot. I’d sit there all alone by the junction box that powered the place and eat my fill, kind of loving it, digging the independence of it, thinking I’d finally arrived.
The job didn’t last long. My boss kept after me. He spoke in a thick Austrian accent. He kept saying things like, “Izzy, ve need your vork permits. I shall have to call at your school.”
I put him off as long as I could, which just about coincided with the day a bunch of repo guys came to claim our camper. Turned out we really had been up against it. Turned out Doc really did need our tiny paychecks from Piggly Wiggly and Winn-Dixie and wherever else my brothers had managed to line up work. He’d always leased our campers, and we learned later on he was forever ditching his payments. For some reason cutting out on the camper payments struck me differently than the time I saw him passing that bad check at the dairy in San Marcos. This time it didn’t feel like stealing so much as trying to stay one step ahead of the man. It had a catch me if you can feel to it, and here they’d finally caught up to him.
I came home one day and saw all our shit spread out in the yard. The camper was gone. Nobody seemed too upset about it, though. The little kids were freaked, but us older kids just shrugged it off. It was something to deal with, that’s all. Mostly, there was just a bunch of sleeping bags and some loose clothing, plus whatever crap we’d been keeping in our little half cubbies. Nothing we couldn’t find room for in our tiny house, until my father could scrape together enough of a stake to lease another rig. And that’s just what happened. We hung on in Lantana for another couple weeks, and my father did his thing at the Enquirer, and I think I probably worked another odd job or two, and at some point we got our shit back together and piled into a new rig—which, of course, wasn’t really a new rig at all, just another run-down cab-over, with just as many miles on it as the one we’d lost.
But it was new to us, and this added to the excitement, so we filled up all the spaces where the previous owners had been and set out for home—wherever the hell that happened to be.
* * *
Long as I’m on the East Coast, I’ll slot in a New York story. Didn’t happen on this same trip—probably, it was the year before—but somewhere around my thirteenth birthday, 1976, we lit out from California for a meaningful journey. We pointed the camper to the Big Apple for my bar mitzvah. My older brothers had all been down this road, but David had done his rite-of-passaging in Israel and Jonathan and Abraham did theirs on the West Coast, wherever my father’s free spirit–type Judaism happened to place him at that moment. When my turn came, it was decided we’d head out to my grandparents’ synagogue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan—a place called Congregation Rodeph Shalom, one of the oldest temples in the city, going back about 150 years.
The place pretty much echoed with the New York Jewish experience, and it pretty much intimidated the crap out of me, but my grandfather set it up and I had no choice but to just go for it.
To be clear, my father was a proud and selectively observant Jew. He raised us kids to be the same way, but at his core I don’t believe he thought of himself as only Jewish. He was Jewish and then some, Jewish and a little bit more besides. We were taught by his example to be children of the whole wide world. We were children of faith, yeah, but it was a deep, all over, no-labels kind of faith that also included a faith in each other, in ourselves. We cared deeply about Israel, and the many friends we’d made there over the years. We said the Shema—even if we said it in a Pledge of Allegiance, going-through-the-motions sort of way. We sometimes joined my dad in his daily prayers, although he was quick to point out that we didn’t truly “count” in this until we had become bar mitzvah. We didn’t keep kosher or observe the rituals of the Sabbath, but we were aware of what these things meant, the sacrifices they carried. This was our Paskowitz brand of religion. Didn’t always mesh with how we passed bad checks or had our rigs repossessed, but it was an elastic system of beliefs that Doc could stretch to cover our sometimes funky circumstances.
And so we grew up knowing it was this great big deal, to chant from the Torah and to be welcomed into the Jewish community as an adult. It meant a lot to my grandparents as well. Remember, my father’s parents, Lewis and Rose, were Texas Jews, so I imagine they went at this whole religion thing in their own, frontier-type way, but somehow they wound up in
New York at this heavy-duty synagogue. Somehow they arranged it so I could be counted there. They arranged it with the rabbi who sent me a tape with all the blessings I was supposed to chant and the section of Torah I was supposed to read. I couldn’t actually read Hebrew, of course. I’d had those few weeks of training at that Israeli ulpan, back when I was little, but that hadn’t exactly stuck. Looking at the letters of the Hebrew alphabet for me was like looking at hieroglyphics, so the only way I could keep up was to do it phonetically, to try to piece the sounds to the melody and memorize the whole deal.
Wasn’t a whole lot to memorize, looking back, but when I was in the middle of it, obsessing, it felt like the lines stretched on for just about forever. I spent the entire trip to New York huddled in the back of the camper, learning my prayers, going at it over and over until I thought I had it down, only I never quite got to where I had it down. The closest I could get was close enough, but my dad kept grilling me, pushing me. He also kept telling me not to worry about it, and my older brothers kept telling me not to worry about it, but that didn’t keep me from worrying about it.
So there we were, a mostly happy band of wandering hillbilly Jews, careening across the country for a rendezvous with some ancient scrolls at a landmark Manhattan synagogue. We must have made an unlikely picture as we rolled towards town in our weighted-down camper. We had our boards piled high up top, same as always, only this was probably the first time we’d driven through such a densely populated metropolitan area. Don’t think my father had it in his head to account for the clearance of our rig, he was so used to driving in wide-open spaces. But in New York, of course, there’s no such thing. The approach to the city is booby-trapped with bridges and tunnels and overpasses, so truckers know to proceed with caution.
Unfortunately, we Paskowitzes knew no such thing.
Scratching the Horizon Page 12