by David Rakoff
A 1999 article from The New York Times told the story of the villagers of the Cambodian hamlet of Bet Trang. Coming upon three thousand tons of cement-like material in a nearby field, they could not believe their good fortune. The white plastic of the sacks proved to have manifold uses, as ground sheets, tents, waterproofing, emptied out for grain storage, you name it. What a boon, until, of course the villagers developed headaches, diarrhea, and weight loss. Eventually it was found that the powder, compressed ash from an industrial incinerator, contained insane amounts of mercury and other hazardous metals. It was dumped there by the Formosa Plastics Corporation of Taiwan. And why was the waste dumped in Cambodia and not the country formerly known as Formosa? Because the comparatively wealthy citizenry of Taiwan had a first-world sense of liberty and entitlement, and an opinion about the poisoning of their habitat, and they understandably protested. But the Cambodian villagers did not complain, even as they got sicker and sicker. This calamity seemed not materially different from everything else they had endured over centuries of colonization and fratricidal civil war. They had been taught to expect nothing from this life. Certainly nothing good.
Buddhist detachment might have it all over Western notions of jealousy, guilt, covetousness, and general engagement in its deep understanding of the essentially amoral random anarchy of the universe. Asian cultures score more pessimistically on diagnostic measures, tending to value the self-effacing aspects of self-doubt. With less value placed upon positive emotion, there is less impetus for gratuitous optimism. But just like those anxious, sad-sack Westerners, there are, of course, exceptions everywhere. My friend Jim went to see Amma, the Indian mystic whose hugs, it is said, are a dose of extra-strength sympathy and benevolence (she dispenses these hugs to audiences around the world, including America, so her fans must be Western in some healthy percentage). Amma is said to be a conduit of all the love of the universe channeled through one pair of arms, a single warm body plugging into the great celestial wellspring of lovingkindness. Jim, a man of perhaps the sweetest disposition I have ever known and an avowed optimist—he wrote a beautiful chapbook of poems devoted to it—waited for something like four hours in Madison Square Garden and was incredibly glad he did.
The best I can manage is a tepid, “If you say so.” I love a hug as much as the next guy, but I need a context of familiarity, some reason to believe that said hug is meant for me specifically. Being touched can be lovely, transcendent even, but a hug is almost deeper than eye contact, as meaningful as a kiss. A hug that one waits in line for from a woman who wouldn’t know me if I stood up in her soup would be like reading a piece of direct mail and being warmed by its repeated use of my name (“and if you act now, DAVID RAKOFF, we’ll also send you …”). I would feel duped and even lonelier than before, like stuffing the other side of the bed with clothes and making like it’s a boyfriend.
The embrace of another clearly has some salubrious effect. Babies definitely need them, we all do. But a hug bestowed so freely to a stadium full of people, without prejudice or favor—while lovely and humbling in its benevolence—might also be seen by someone who cannot help but transfuse everything with his negativity as debauching the very nature of what it means to connect with another person, which requires hours and hours, not of waiting in line but of putting in the time getting to know someone. That harboring of initial illusions and hopes, the eventual downgrading of same, the word-filled, prone-to-recrimination-and-betrayal nuisance of it all, and the still continuing to rely upon, be relied upon in turn, be dismayed by, argue with, and withal love another human being. It’s the difference between sugar and complex carbohydrates. It might be more fun to eat in the short run, but it’s markedly less sustaining in the long.
But to tap still more deeply into the churlish vein, it is the belief in the extra-soothing power of the universe that gets me since, as best as I can determine, the universe cares not one jot for you or me. It really doesn’t. As the writer Melissa Bank points out, the only proper response to a tearful “Why me?” is, sadly, “Why not you?” The sunniest, most positive child in Malaysia laboring in a fucking sneaker factory can visualize all the good fortune he wants, but without concrete changes in international models of global trade, finance, and educational opportunities along with some very temporal man-made policies, just for starters, guess where he’s going tomorrow morning? (A hint: it rhymes with schmucking sneaker factory.)
That can be a cold and lonely reality with which to contend, and one to which every one of us, even the most vinegar-soaked pessimist, is naturally resistant. We all spend our lives rejecting this truth and, consciously or not, entreating the universe—with its vast stretches of deep space, dark matter, and uncharted, immeasurable distances—to somehow align itself in sheer admiration of our fervor and gumption, to rain down precisely that which it is we wish for.
And the universe will say nothing.
Even the most charmed life is a veritable travelogue of disappointment. There will always be an inevitable gulf between hope and reality. It is how we traverse these Deserts of Letdown that shows us what we are made of (perhaps almost as much as does choosing to characterize them as Deserts of Letdown).
“Such sand this is!” some of us will moan, fretting our way along, grain by melancholy grain. (Is that a Yiddish inflection you hear? I leave you to draw your own conclusions.) “Sand?” others will answer, briefly bewildered and barreling across, unmindful of their burning feet.
But look: There we all are (and in the following everyone seems to be in agreement); moving forward, like it or not.
Shrimp
Nothing assails the writer’s credibility more than the pleasant childhood. I freely admit to having had one myself. A happy fact reflected sadly in my book sales. And yet I’d sooner do most anything short of putting needles in my eyes than willingly remember what it was like to have been a child. Things were not terrible. I was neither beaten nor abused. No dank cellars or chilly garrets for me. Neither my trust nor my body were violated by a clergyman or a beloved family friend. I was safe and sound.
No, indeed, I freely admit to having had all the accoutrements that make for a lovely childhood, one replete with the perquisites of great creature comfort, in a bustling and cultured metropolis, in a home decorated in typical late-twentieth-century secular-humanist Jewish psychiatrist: African masks, paintings both abstract and figurative, framed museum posters, Marimekko bedspreads. And listen, on the hi-fi, why it’s The Weavers at Carnegie Hall or Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. Or is that Miriam Makeba, clicking her way through a Xhosa lullaby? And on the bookshelf, among the art monographs, the Saul Bellow and Philip Roth novels, the Günter Grass first editions, collected New Yorkers, Time-Life Great Books, National Geographics, and Horizon magazines, there tucked in behind the Encyclopedia Judaica, you might just find that old illustrated copy of The Joy of Oral Sex, a gag gift never thrown out.
Mealtimes were filled with sprightly talk, with each member of the family given their conversational due. Weekends involved regular outings to museums to look at Henry Moore sculptures, or dinosaur bones, then off to the gift shop to buy a liver-speckled cowrie shell or dried sea horse for one thin dime. There were trips to the theater and the ballet, annually to New York City to see relatives and Broadway shows, and to buy an amethyst geode at the gem store on Thirty-fourth and Madison, and excursions even farther afield, to Spain or London or back to the old country where we, the children of the New World, could be shown off to the relations left behind. Yes, I can say with no fear of contradiction that, as the indulged youngest of three, mine was a golden upbringing, under the loving guidance and tutelage of two caring and adoring parents whose own path was illuminated by the sunlight they were convinced shone straight out of my ass.
And still, I loathed being a child. Plainly stated, being a child was not—as used to be said around the time that I was a child—my bag. Childhood was a foreign country to me. Everyone has an internal age. A time in
life when one is, if not one’s best, then at the very least one’s most authentic self. When your outside and inside are in sync, and soma and psyche mesh as perfectly as they’re ever going to. I always felt that my internal clock was calibrated somewhere between forty-seven and fifty-three years old. I don’t want to make it seem like I was so smart or mature or advanced. I did all right for myself, but I was off the charts in only one respect, remarkably so. I was tiny. I come from a short family, but I was worryingly diminutive. Freakishly small. I knew some others who were below average in size, but they usually made up for it by being athletic or … straight. I was not one of the shouting, jostling, hockey-loving boys, and I also wasn’t a girl. I was what used to be called a Big Fag.
In E. B. White’s 1945 classic, Stuart Little, the protagonist is the second son of Mrs. Frederick C. Little of New York City. A child who was “not much bigger than a mouse” and who also “looked very much like a mouse in every way.” Stuart was articulate beyond his years. Stuart had a flair for costume, dressing up in the full regalia of vaguely pornographic sailor whites just to visit the Boat Pond in Central Park. When my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Brailey—perhaps the only woman I have ever truly loved—read Stuart Little to us, I remember thinking Yes! This confluence of traits: the unquestioned membership in a family despite one glaring material difference from them all, the tininess only seeming to accentuate the courtly manners and dandy tendencies … this was me. I was Stuart Little.
Or so I fervently wished. I lacked Stuart Little’s self-possession. His ease in the world. Stuart Little was only afraid of dogs, whereas I was polymorphously phobic, scared of everything: dogs, heights, subways, crowds, snakes, the dark, elevators, tunnels, bridges, spiders, flying, loud noises, roller coasters, amusement-park midways, the ruffians who hung around same, horror movies, fireworks, rock music that seemed to glorify chemical abandon, balloons blown up too big, changing light-bulbs, athletes, going down into the basement … everything was freighted with terror.
I vibrated with anxiety. Tight as a watch spring, skittish as a chihuahua, when I wasn’t bursting into tears, I covered my overarching trepidation with a loud-mouthed bravura. I was highly unpleasant. I’m not fishing here. It dawned on me recently that even though I have published books and lived through a bout of cancer, barely a handful of people from my childhood have ever attempted to contact me, and I don’t blame them one bit.
———
Stuart Little, having set out for the open road to seek his fortune, finds himself the substitute teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, a position he manages to secure simply by donning the professorial drag of striped trousers, tweed jacket with waistcoat, and a pince-nez. The children are rapt by his cunning size and stern air of authority. In a lesson on ethics, he has one of the boys steal a small sachet from one of the girls. Stuart turns his attention to the purloined pillow, which attracts him; it might make a lovely, fragrant bed:
“That’s a very pretty thing,” said Stuart, trying to hide his eagerness. “You don’t want to sell it, do you?”
“Oh, no,” replied Katherine. “It was a present to me.”
“I suppose it was given you by some boy you met at Lake Hopatcong last summer and it reminds you of him,” he says to her, dreamily.
“Yes, it was,” said Katherine, blushing.
“Ah,” said Stuart, “summers are wonderful, aren’t they, Katherine?”
Stuart Little, at this point in the story, is seven years old. And yet here he is, transformed into Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach. The aging roué, his summers of love and beauty all far behind him, now watching the erotic play of the youngsters on the Venice Lido as the plague creeps in.
How I wished that I, too, might be able to skip directly to adulthood in just the same way. Not so much so that I would be big but so that I might be done with all this and enjoy some peace. Grown-ups, it seemed to me, didn’t have to play sports. Grown-ups didn’t have farting contests (this was decades before Johnny Knoxville and his anal-obsessive Jackass pranksters). Grown-ups, in general, seemed more indulgent of others’ problems, each having so many of their own. If I could make it to adulthood, I would be able to join their tolerant ranks and no one would mind my size.
Until such time, I could usually divert people’s attention away from my physical lack by trotting out an advanced vocabulary, or displaying some sort of comic timing, or making a Yukio Mishima reference. And then, like the trout tickler who has cooled his hand in the stream for long enough that the fish doesn’t even feel itself being picked up out of the water, there would come a moment where I knew I had my listener. There would be a subtle change in their faces, an inclining forward. Their features would assemble themselves, focused upon me in an attitude of almost perplexed amusement.
There is a reason it is called charm. It is a trick, and like all false magic, it never lasts. Eventually even the most gullible rube will begin to examine the rising table, or ferret out the source of the one-for-yes, two-for-no knocking from the spirit world. And then he sees the sham. Just as quickly as people’s faces went a little bit dreamy, I could see them blink themselves back to reality. I’m talking to a child, they would suddenly realize. Like in a cartoon, where the concussion’s halo of revolving stars is dissipated by a vigorous shake of the head, they would look at me with a kind of what was I thinking self-reproach. I had been caught out, once again.
At age fourteen, I remember being at a family party, talking to a woman I did not know. She taught classics at a high school in Toronto, as I recall. We were having a nice conversation until the moment when I mentioned, yet again, something about ninth grade—or, as we called it in Canada, grade nine. She made an exaggerated gulp, bugged her eyes out a little, and crossing her surprised hands upon her collarbone, said, “I’m sorry, did you say grade nine?”
“Yes,” I replied, knowing exactly where this was leading.
“Oh my,” she said, smiling. “All this time I thought you were telling me you were nine.” She playfully pushed me on the shoulder in an Oh, you gesture, like this was some stunt I had put over on her, which I suppose it was. She smiled companionably. My size was a joke we could share in equally. I thought that was a hideous, horrible mask you were wearing but it’s actually your face! Aren’t you clever and funny!
I was four foot nine when I entered tenth grade. The local public high school was an institution catering primarily to teen Jewish royalty, as my brother called us. I could not compete in the arms race of wardrobe and accessories, and I didn’t try. Happily, my size also meant that I didn’t have to even feign interest in the erotic play between the boys and the girls. One look at me was all you needed to know that that would be writing checks my ass couldn’t cover.
Like generations of other misfits before me, be they morphological, sexual, or otherwise, I decided that I would make theater my refuge. I was a pretty good actor as a child, albeit with the budding homosexual’s propensity for schmacting, the overuse of outsized and non-contextual emotion. I could cry on cue and did so whenever I got the chance, which was mainly alone in my bedroom in front of the mirror—great heaving arias of melodramatic hysteria that could burst forth with all the vulgar hoopla of a magician’s bouquet.
The nonmusical offering each year was directed by the drama teacher herself. She selected ambitious works like Brecht’s harrowing Mother Courage and Her Children, which made liberal use of burlap and brown makeup smudged onto cheeks to evoke the filth and hardship of the Thirty Years’ War. Another time it was David and Lisa, which was about two adolescent mental patients. David was hyperintellectual and didn’t like to be touched, while Lisa was a bubbling free spirit, given to rhyming echolalia. This was one of those plays from the 1960s that equated insanity with deep artistic sensitivity, asking the disingenuous question, Who is to say who is crazy? You? I? Perhaps it is the mad who are truly sane! It was considered bad form at the time to posit that the muttering fellow in the corner scratching Bible verses into his forearm with a fork
seemed a little bit, I don’t know, off?
That year’s offering was to be The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, a work that dealt with the social problems and injustices facing Canada’s native population. It was the 1970s, so we were still calling them Indians. A gritty drama, Rita Joe was unrelieved by even the faintest glimmer of levity or hope, ending with a spectacularly brutal gang rape and murder of its woebegone heroine. Precisely the kind of deeply earnest downer that only a bunch of teenagers would dare put on.
I could not wait.
The drama classroom was in a portable, one-room prefabricated building on cinder blocks in the middle of the schoolyard. It was a shoes-off environment, no desks, just wall-to-wall nylon broadloom in a mottled goldenrod. The carpet was pilled, matted with staples and crumbs, and waxy with years of adolescent foot sweat. About fifteen hopefuls sat on the floor in a circle around the drama teacher, who sat with her legs folded under her, Zen tea master–like. She surveyed us and then her eyes lit upon me. She gave me a small smile, the corners of her mouth turning up slightly, while at the same time from her nose I could hear a small puff, the softest whisper of breath. The sound a pillow makes when you sink your head into it. The exhalation pushed her head back and up in the opposite direction ever so slightly.