Up Against the Wall Motherf**er

by Osha Neumann

  Here in the Bronx, rationality had found a safe haven. There was only one problem. From as early as I can remember, the surface tranquility of our bourgeois family life was broken by a fearsome conflict between my mother and me. I now suspect that her discontent with me was the expression of her frustration at having to raise a child without support in a strange country, compounded by resentment at having to give up an academic career, dissatisfaction with the role of faculty wife, and the stress of her secret liaison with Herbert.

  Inge was ten years younger than Franz, taller, and to my mind, more robust and physically formidable. By contrast I remember him as somewhat rotund and soft. He was bald except for a ring of black hair in the back, myopic, and hard of hearing. He peered out at the world from behind thick glasses with wire frames and wore a hearing aid attached to a black plastic battery case strapped to his chest. I do not recall his voice ever being raised in anger.

  If Inge and Herbert made love under my father’s nose—and mine—I suspected nothing. I caught no glimpse of fleeting embraces. If Inge and Franz fought, they did so quietly or when I was not around.

  All the adults had separate bedrooms. They all managed their lives so that there would be dinners without arguments, and mornings without tears and recriminations. But my mother and I could not manage. We carried on a prolonged and desperate struggle, in which both of us were losers. I was sure I was to blame, and that what was blameworthy in me was something over which I had no control—my very being.

  Franz took no part in my epic battles with my mother. In all matters that pertained to my upbringing, he deferred to her entirely. Outside the home, among his students, he inspired awe and admiration. One described him as having a mind “like an incandescent bulb which, although it had burned away his hair, his sight, and his hearing, continued to exert a fascination on all . . . [he] encountered.”3 Inside the home he was timid and submissive. He would retreat to his book-lined study, where I remember him sitting for hours on a couch doing the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle.

  Franz was ineffective as my defender, but my happiest childhood memories are of sitting on his lap while he read me wonderful adventure stories. The best, Treasure Island, The Last of the Mohicans, and Kidnapped, had illustrations by N. C. Wyeth that remain with me to this day: a pirate, climbing up the rigging with a knife clenched in his teeth, an Indian wrestling with a buckskin-clad frontiersman on the edge of a precipice.

  My father took me on his lap and together we escaped the wrath of my mother, until, one day, she decided that I was not learning to read because I preferred to be read to. She forbade Franz to read to me, banished me from his lap, and bought me glasses. I hated them. Imprisoned in glasses that bounced on my nose when I ran and fell off when I turned somersaults, I felt like a horse that had been haltered and taken from his pasture to wear forever bridle and blinder.

  The conflict with my mother centered on dirt and disorder. Either I was unusually filthy or my mother was unusually obsessed. My mother’s constant complaints nurtured my sense of personal vileness. All my bodily impulses were bad. I was the turd laid in the living room of reason, the damned spot on the rug that would not be cleansed. In a world divided between fascists and antifascists I became: the dirty little Jew as fascist.

  In a world divided between fascists and antifascists I became the dirty little Jew as fascist.

  SECRETS AND CATASTROPHES

  When I was about eight or nine, it occurred to me that my parents, together with all the other adults in my life, had entered into a great conspiracy whose purpose was to conceal from me something very important about myself. I could never find out what it was, but I was sure that if I ever discovered their secret, my view of myself and the world would be completely altered. Like a tail sprouting out my backside, whatever was being concealed was obvious to everyone but me. The baker, the butcher, my teacher, my babysitter all saw it and pretended it wasn’t there. They smiled at me and treated me as if I was completely normal. But I wasn’t.

  I never took this fantasy completely seriously, nor did I ever completely discount it. I know now my parents had many secrets. Family and friends had died in the Holocaust. I learned later from my aunt Susan that Franz’s mother died in Buchenwald. And perhaps it was my aunt Harriet who told me that Inge’s mother, driven to despair as the Nazis consolidated their hold on her crumbling world, committed suicide by gassing herself in the kitchen oven. But my parents never spoke to me of such matters. They shielded me from the past. And they shielded me from the present. My brother Michael, who was born seven years after me, remembers something—a glimpse of intimacy, the sound of lovemaking just beyond the range of hearing, an exchange of looks—that alerted him to the concealed affair between Inge and Herbert. Whether or not my father knew about the affair I will never know.

  I suspect now that some intuition of these secrets lay at the heart of my fantasy. No one now living knows exactly when Inge and Herbert’s affair might have started, and so I have never been completely clear who my father is. As a result I tend to split the difference. I vacillate between thinking of myself as having a single father or two. My brother has my father’s rather modest nose. I have Herbert’s prominent proboscis, and his gray blue eyes. The timber of my voice is identical to that of Peter, Herbert and Sophie’s son. We sound alike on the telephone.

  Very early, in the bosom of the family, a child learns that appearance and reality diverge. Once learned the lesson is not forgotten. I still think of truth as hidden, and believe The System—capitalist, patriarchal, racist, however you wish to characterize it—to be a living lie from which the mask must be torn by acts of radical transgression. I know that I am not alone in the conviction that the world is fundamentally not as it appears. Distrust of what we are told runs deep and wide like an underground river beneath the jolly acquiescence of our daily lives.

  Until I was fourteen I believed, as most children do, that my family was a permanent and immutable structure. I had my mother and my father, just as I had my nose, my mouth, and my eyes. And then, as so often happens, a series of catastrophes changed everything.

  It was the middle of June. I was home, marooned between school and summer camp. Franz was away traveling and lecturing in Europe. In the middle of the night I was awakened by the sound of my mother crying in her room on the floor below me. The next day at breakfast, her voice shaking with anger, she informed me that my father was having an affair with one of his graduate students. She and my father were separating and would get a divorce.

  No adult had ever talked to me about the personal life of grown-ups. My mother’s brief announcement was an astounding breach of protocol. What did it mean for me? Would I ever see my father again? I could not even formulate the questions. Nor could I guess that the mother who stood before me, wronged and abandoned, was also the mistress of my father’s best friend.

  Three months passed. I was again up in my room, this time getting ready to go to school, when my mother called me downstairs. She was standing next to the stove in the kitchen. She asked me to sit down and poured me a glass of milk. She had something important to tell me. I waited. The glass of milk sat in front of me on the table. Then she told me that my father had been killed in a car accident in Switzerland. He had been traveling with his good friends, the Altmans. The car in which they were all traveling had unaccountably gone over the edge on a mountain road. Everyone had died instantly. My father had been in the back seat. She made a point of that. He had not committed suicide.

  I remember thinking: I should feel something. But I felt nothing. I gathered up my books and took the bus to school. I came back. If we had any further conversations on the subject, I do not remember them. My father disappeared from my life as if he had never been there.

  I had totally misjudged the situation. He had desire. He was not a eunuch. He was flesh. By leaving my mother he had regained his body. Fear of my mother’s wrath had not deterred him. He had made his escape. And then, like a slave who
flees the plantation only to fall into a swamp and drown, he had paid the price of freedom with his life. I was proud of him and I was angry with him for abandoning me. But above all, I was numbed by the events he had set in motion.

  The message I got was clear. There is no escape. The price of freedom is death. And part of me died when he died. I suffered a kind of psychic spinal cord injury. I could think, but I couldn’t feel what I was thinking about. I gave up all hope. And I have struggled ever since to regain it.

  One evening, some weeks after my mother’s announcement, I was in my room, trying to finish my homework, when suddenly I began to cry. Tears streamed down my face onto the book that lay open on the desk in front of me. They came out of nowhere. I had not been thinking about my father. I had not been feeling sad. It was as if a piece of plumbing had burst. I sat in front of my open book, the tears kept coming, and I continued to feel nothing in particular.

  I endured the memorial service at Columbia University. It had nothing to do with me. I was forced to put on a tie and sit in the front row and accept awkward condolences from grownups who were utter strangers. I had no one to turn to—certainly not my mother, who shortly thereafter, in what some people considered unseemly haste, married Herbert. Perhaps worried that I would share their disapproval, my mother informed me that the marriage had been planned before my father died, that Herbert had told him, and that he had given his unqualified blessing to the union.

  Herbert and Inge were married before a justice of the peace. Afterwards, at a crowded reception at Inge’s sister’s apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan, I watched as they embraced and heard my mother say “kiss me,” and he did. To my astonishment, they both seemed to enjoy it. I don’t remember my mother and Franz exchanging a single sign of affection. They did not embrace in my presence. This was the first and last and only display of physical affection I recollect witnessing between any of my parents.

  I spent the years remaining before my departure for college, sunk in the contemplation of my own misery and struggling with an emerging sexuality, which grew stunted and misshapen in the infertile soil of my self-loathing. When I was fifteen I read Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and imagined myself the underground man reveling in degradation.

  The more aware I was of ‘the highest and the best,’ as we used to say, the deeper I sank into my slime, and the more capable I became of immersing myself completely in it . . . It was as if this was my normal condition, not a disease or a festering sore in me, so that finally I lost even the desire to struggle against the spell . . . I didn’t believe the same thing could happen to other people, and so I have kept the secret to myself my whole life. I was ashamed. . . .4

  I remember thinking: Dostoevsky wrote about miserable, pathetic, humiliated, mediocre people. But he was a great man. A genius. Perhaps I could be the first truly mediocre man to give an authentic account of mediocrity.

  I discovered Dostoevsky and masturbation at about the same time—an unfortunate conjunction. I was so ignorant about matters pertaining to my penis that the first time I masturbated—lying in a warm bath, absentmindedly fondling myself—I had no idea what was happening and assumed that somehow, by fondling myself, I had prematurely released urine that was not fully digested.

  Despite the collapse of my parent’s marriage, I still perceived grownups as defined by their ability to subordinate the passions of the body to the guiding hand of reason. But my body rebelled, clouding my mind with perverse desire. Reason was not what guided my hand to my penis. My two fathers, Franz and Herbert, and my mother were aristocrats of the intellect. I was their crippled offspring.

  Reason spoke with a German accent. It was Jewish, and it was out of place in America, a stranger in a land it could never make its own. I associated it with decorum, privacy and muted sensation. Sublimation of desire was the price of a decent life. The fascists were the ones without restraint. Walking home from school I passed shopkeepers, delivery people, plumbers, bus drivers, cops, hairdressers, mothers pushing strollers, old men sitting on park benches. I passed through their world like a stranger, burdened with envy of their direct, unmediated contact with reality, and at the same time believing that, being deficient in understanding, they were doomed to a lesser form of existence than that enjoyed by my parents. I worried that if I did not succeed in becoming a professor at a university, I would be similarly doomed. In so far as I wished to participate in life directly like “ordinary” people, I wished my own destruction.

  After Herbert and Inge’s marriage, Herbert accepted a job in the philosophy department at Brandeis University and we moved to Newton, Massachusetts, a decorous suburb of Boston. We lived on a street lined with Sycamore trees. The lawns on both sides were carefully tended. Home life went on much as it had in the Bronx. My mother cooked and maintained the house. Herbert’s colleagues came over periodically for dinner.

  One evening, a few months before I went away to college, I borrowed my mother’s car to go out on a date with Ellen Maslow, the daughter of Abraham Maslow, who was at the time the Chair of the Psychology Department at Brandeis and the exponent of a humanistic psychology of “self-actualization,” which Herbert thought of as total drivel. I was driving home from my date, daydreaming to the music on the radio, when I rear-ended a car stopped ahead of me at an intersection. I ran over to see if the other driver was all right. She was resting her head on the steering wheel. In a dazed voice she told me she had hit her head on the windshield and felt dizzy. I was sick with fear. I have only a vague recollection of what happened next. Police arrived and took a report. The woman was still sitting in the car when they allowed me to leave. I drove home and ran into the house, fighting back tears. Inge and Herbert were sitting side by side on the sofa in the living room. My voice shaking, I told them what had happened. I wanted to be comforted. I wanted to be told everything would be ok. But Inge said nothing and Herbert, putting down his book, told me that in his opinion the accident was an unconscious expression of my anger against my mother.

  I was overwhelmed by a sudden and uncontrollable fury. I picked up a heavy alabaster bowl that was sitting on a coffee table in front of them and hurled it against the wall above Herbert’s head. It shattered into pieces. I stormed out of the house. I was angry and quite pleased with myself at the same time.

  The target of my first and only childhood expression of overt rage was the beloved father figure of the New Left, who anointed a generation of rebels with the balm of theory. But he had not read to me on his lap. He was not a loving father. He was a usurper. I would not be his intellectual problem to be analyzed. For years I kept fragments of that bowl, carrying it with me when I moved from one place to another, thinking I would repair it some day. Then I lost them. I no longer throw alabaster bowls, but in that moment was born in me a deep attraction to the transgressive act as revelation and release.

  I graduated from Newton High School in 1957 and was accepted at Swarthmore, a small Quaker college eleven miles outside of Philadelphia.

  The tiny town of Swarthmore was prim and lily-white. The sale of liquor was banned inside the city limits. It didn’t have a movie theater or a decent cafeteria or any place you could buy a proper Philadelphia Cheese steak. The campus was a botanical garden. World famous rhododendrons grew by the banks of Crum Creek. I was miserable. The last thing I needed was cloistered tranquility. I yearned to be in touch with what I imagined to be real life, the life of working, pleasure seeking, flesh and blood human beings. I felt separated from the real by a vast stagnant sea. I wanted the real to reel me in, to pull me from my obsessions and compulsions.

  I lived in a boys’ dormitory at the outskirts of the campus. My first roommate was heavyset, cheery, neat and clean. I found him repellent. One evening I noticed a sliding wooden door at the end of a corridor. I pried it open and discovered an abandoned freight elevator. By operating its rope pulleys, I could move it up and down between floors. I brought my bedding and a chair into the elevator and created a hi
ding place for myself. There was a bare electric bulb in the ceiling. There were no windows. Night was the same as day. I could hear the sounds of people coming and going in the corridors. No one knew I was there. I literally inhabited the woodwork. I had become a living, breathing Dostoevsky character. My compulsive self-consciousness made it difficult to approach any of the girls to whom I was attracted. I was sure they would see through me immediately to the secret masturbator. On one rare occasion, I persuaded one of them—she has since become a famous feminist historian—to come to my room. We necked heavily. I was very aroused. When she left, I put on a recording of a Mozart quartet. I wasn’t sure whether, having experienced carnal passion, the higher sublimated pleasures of art would still appeal to me.

  I spent my junior year abroad at the London School of Economics. I didn’t go to many classes, but I heard Peggy Seeger and Ewen McCall sing whaling songs in a little upstairs West End club. Ewen cupped his hand over his ear to hear the harmony. I felt the peculiar elation of being in a city where no one knew me, and I could explore the possibilities for perversion without encumbrance. I drank pints of bitters in corner pubs and wrote in my journal. I visited a prostitute, but could not get an erection. She sat me on the edge of the bed in her basement flat and efficiently jerked me off with a vibrator.

  But I was not completely sunk. The fishy depths of degradation rejected me. I bobbed towards the surface and found myself, one day, sitting on the pavement with a crowd of chanting protesters in front of the gray stone facade of the South African Embassy. Pigeons wheeled in the air above us and watched impassively from the statute of Lord Nelson in Trafalgar Square as we shouted our condemnation of the massacre of Blacks in the South African township of Sharpville. The grieving, terror-stricken faces of peaceful black demonstrators running from a hail of dum dum bullets and carrying the dying bodies of their brothers and sisters had greeted us from the front pages of the morning paper. We had marched from the University in hasty protest, and when the police arrived, we sat and refused to move. We were promptly arrested without incident, loaded into black police lorries, and carted off to jail, from which we were soon released due to the intervention of a member of parliament.