So it was very quickly established both that I was the sole representative of the Holocaust studies program and that I completely sucked at Holocaust studies. I even attended the inaugural Holocaust studies conference on behalf of my department, where historians spoke on different topics, and I was so woefully underwhelming that I’m pretty sure Elie Wiesel, the keynote, rolled his eyes at me. A few months in, the director of the department brought me in and asked if I was interested in moving into the religious studies department because maybe my “talents” were more suited to that. My own department was trying to trade me to another just to save face. And I was the only one in it. What I lacked was, to put it simply, “academic rigor.” I lacked the facility to find hard truths. I couldn’t hold firm historical data. I couldn’t maintain a heuristic erection. I just couldn’t “never forget” it up.
After the failed attempt to pass me over to theology, they suggested I learn Polish as fast as I could. At least then that would qualify me to tap into primary-source material, and maybe then I could turn this around. Quickly, I realized that Polish is an unbelievably hard language to learn. In fact, it probably would have taken six to twelve years for me to learn Polish. Also, I realized this was a way for my department to stop me from writing any more inane material and instead put me in a sort of academic solitary confinement, where I would just go away and learn Polish. It would save everyone a lot of wasted hours of my writing and their reading my shitty papers.
Literally, the next reasonable step would be for them to buy back my tuition. Accepting that Holocaust studies was a dead end for me, I finished out the year, using a lethal combination of plagiarism and eating at Polish restaurants where I could order and hold brief conversations with waiters in Polish on the German killing operations in Poland (check out Podhalanka if you’re in Chicago, and tell them the kid who talks about the Holocaust sent you).
With that, I give you a brief portion of my failed Holocaust memoir, in the great tradition of fake Holocaust memoirs (and fake memoirs of all kinds) of recent years, like those written by Misha Defonseca (who claimed she escaped the Warsaw ghetto and was raised by wolves), Binjamin Wilkomirski, Herman Rosenblat, et al. Many have tried to co-opt the monolithic tragedy that was the Holocaust for selfish purposes, and so, here, do I. Maybe it’s the best way to exemplify another common human trait: “Those who can’t do, lie.” See if you spot some of the clues I’ve subtly placed that expose this as fake.
MY HOLOCAUST MEMOIR
CHAPTER 1
I remember less the way our modest half-timbered house looked but more the smell: pinewood, burnt leather, and choucroute. My father smoked a small briarwood pipe with a black mouthpiece and a smooth, almost pellucid chamber. When he kissed my cheek good night, his mustache was redolent with cherry pipe tobacco and kirsch.
When the Nazis came, I was seven. I heard a banging and then loud voices. I did what my mother had told me. I took my place underneath the large wooden dresser cabinet in the corner of my room. More loud voices. Then footsteps. Then, quiet. Cold, searing quiet.
I waited till dark to emerge. The front door was open and my father’s pipe sat upright in the ashtray next to his armchair. I took a deep breath: pinewood, burnt leather, choucroute. From this point forward, everything had changed, and the spirits of the dead walked the earth. I remember myself when I was Jon Benjamin and I was seven and lived on 64 Rue Marbach. I even remember moments before, but that was someone else. Now, I was a phantom.
I walked out my front door and down the walkway, past the precise row of impatiens my mother had planted on Rue Marbach, and into the night filled with screams and the rumbling of motorcycle engines from some all-black bike gang that was roaming the night streets like in that movie Biker Boyz. Kid Rock was in that, and it was directed by Reggie Rock Bythewood.
I decided to be invisible and walked through Place Kléber, with the streetlamps burning reddish orange and groups of drunken revelers casting violent shadows across the cobblestones and onto the buildings that lined the square. Most Jews were being rounded up and sent to Drancy outside Paris, or so I was told. I kept walking, invisible, through the city streets, until the cobblestones turned to dirt and the dirt turned to pine thistle and mud and when I looked up, the densely leaved trees looked like sullen dizzy giants swaying in the night breeze. I fell asleep, hungry and cold, but overcome with a strange sense of calm, as if the forest itself was reading me a lullaby.
I dreamed of my mother laughing and father sitting in his chair as the teakettle whistled, and that scene in the movie Biker Boyz when Slick Will played by Eriq La Salle (yes, the guy who played Dr. Peter Benton from ER) told the character Kid that when Smoke lines his bike up for a race, he doesn’t see anything, he doesn’t hear anything . . . just the finish line . . . Slick Will tells him, “Cat like that gets in the zone, it’s like a gift from God,” and then Kid stares right back at Slick Will and says, “Sounds like bullshit to me.” Only minutes later, Slick Will was killed by an out-of-control bike that crashed into him during the end of a drag race.
Just seeing Eriq La Salle (spelled E-r-i-q . . . pretty ballsy, by the way, using a q in place of a c or k), really made me think about that other medical drama St. Elsewhere and that show’s final episode, where they show the hospital and it is snowing, and they pull out to reveal that the hospital is in a snow globe, and the snow globe is being looked at by the autistic son of Dr. Westphall, but Dr. Westphall comes home and we see he’s not even a doctor but a janitor or something who worked at St. Eligius Hospital, thereby concluding that the whole show had been the convoluted fantasy of an autistic child.
That’s what it felt like that cold night in the forest in Neuhof, when the Nazis came to Alsace and the world became broken.
My Failed Book List
Your Kampf: Hitler’s second book, about your struggle, not his.
1988: Orwell’s follow-up about a synth-pop band called Thoughtcrime.
James Eyre: A novel about a dude getting laid all the time in the nineteenth century.
The Picture of Lori Ann Gray: The story of a woman who makes a very poor deal with the devil wherein she ages at the same rate as her portrait.
Waiting on Godot: A play about how tough it is being a server in a busy NYC restaurant.
The Most Oedipal Game: The story of an island where you can hunt and kill your father.
The Bird: A retelling of the Daphne du Maurier story The Birds (adapted into the famous Hitchcock movie) but with just one bird. One really crazy bird.
The Girls: An inversion of The Birds about a group of girls trying to kill a bird.
The Old Man and the TV: The story of an old man desperately trying to set up his Apple TV for more than four days, only to not be able to do it.
David Copperfeld: The story of a young man who one day becomes an accountant.
The Note: An old man reads from a Post-it to his lover who is afflicted with advanced Alzheimer’s about where her pills are kept.
CHAPTER 12
Getting High (and How I Failed at Being Gay-Bashed)
I have always had a contentious relationship with marijuana. The first time I got high was at my friend Marc’s house. Marc was my seventh-grade classmate and lived in an affluent neighborhood not far from where I lived. His house was sleek and modern and on a large meticulously landscaped property with varied and unique species of trees, like red ones and greenish ones and greenish-brown ones (I’m not an arborist), and a koi pond in the front. It was like visiting a Japanese temple.
His father was a businessman and usually sat in a leather chair with a large unlit cigar in his mouth reading a paper. He looked like he belonged there. He and the chair were in perfect union. The house was sprawling and, as a kid, the prospect of being able to wander into a separate wing with almost complete privacy was thrilling. It was the kind of house where it felt like Marc was more a lodger and less a family member, like a thirte
en-year-old Kato Kaelin.
He had an older brother, who was a senior in high school and whose main and most memorable characteristic was that he dressed and acted like he was Southern. He wore jeans and a CSA belt buckle and drove a Trans Am with a confederate flag on it and a bale of hay in the back. It also had a Dixie horn. Look, the Confederacy was not well represented in New England in the early 1980s, so in this respect he was something of a vanguard figure. A bit controversial, but at the time, just another local kid with a very disturbing and comprehensive obsession with The Dukes of Hazzard whose parents, for some incomprehensible reason, bought him a tribute car to the Confederacy. Hey, at least it wasn’t Magnum, P.I., since Ferraris are way pricier. Despite his Confederate leanings, he was very sweet and, coincidentally, the first person to get me high.
It was in his room, country music was playing, and I was uncontrollably laughing for at least an hour. I also remember obsessing about getting an erection, and so I was laughing while forcefully pressing my hands into my crotch, holding back a phantom erection that I kept imagining I was getting. It must have appeared odd: me standing in a doorway giggling while jamming my penis and balls into my legs. As much fun as that first time was, I spent the next week with sore balls, and that would become a bellwether for my contentious relationship with pot that would continue until I stopped smoking, in my early forties. I guess one could make the argument that as much as I’ve tried, I am truly a failed pot smoker.
Almost every time I was saddled with some sort of intense anxiety or dissociative experience. But the drive to get this drug to be enjoyable for me was a real goal, seemingly unattainable, like my suburban version of summiting Everest. My brain chemistry and THC are just natural enemies, and in spite of all my efforts, smoking pot would inevitably leave me isolated, rocking back and forth and trying not to swallow my tongue.
* * *
—
In my early thirties, after a few months of dating, I decided to take my girlfriend Amy on our first trip together to Toronto. I had a friend who was from there, and he had arranged for his brother (who was a lifelong Toronto resident) to plan some stuff for us to do: tickets to a hockey game, etc. It was a very hockey-centric schedule, and that seemed good, considering Amy had no interest in hockey. I found that out during the hockey game and then after, at the Hockey Hall of Fame, or maybe at the bar after the game that showed exclusively hockey highlights.
The second night, we met my friend’s brother for a beer at the Horseshoe Tavern, a famous music venue. After a bit, Amy was tired and went back to the hotel. My friend’s brother and I stayed at the bar for a while and chatted about hockey. He said his friend was having a party in an apartment nearby, so we went. It was a walk-up apartment and very trap house–y: the party kind of sprawled out over various rooms, with people milling about, and in each room a different tableau of party tropes, like people doing coke on a table, and in another, a couple in flagrante delicto, and in another, a guy playing guitar and a girl on tambourine with a group of people gathered about (all right, not so trap house–y).
We went out onto a deck that overlooked the main street, and he lit a joint. I had the premonition, like every time I smoked pot, that I would lose my shit, but I took a hearty puff anyway, and within about seven seconds, I lost my shit.
It must be a curious thing to see me high, because in my estimation, I am like Schwarzenegger in Total Recall when his woman suit glitches out: “Two weeks, two weeks, twos weeeeeeeeeeeks . . .” and melts off. Luckily, this guy was a talker, and smoking pot compels more talking, so in this case (and most), I stood silently in a state of pure terror, while he made droll conversation.
As my mental state started to spiral and the party became a blur of light and sound, I made my way out knowing only that I had to get back to the hotel. Safety. Must go to safety. Must go to the hotel. The hotel I’m staying at. As I got to the street, there were like hundreds of people and hundreds of cars backed up, and that was not good for my state of mind. I was desperate to get back to my hotel, but I now couldn’t remember the name of it or where it was, and my girlfriend had taken the key, so there was no hope of finding out.
I decided just to get a cab and then figure out what to do from there, like maybe ask the driver to list the names of all the hotels in Toronto so eventually I could hear it and remember. But it was actually impossible to get a cab. Someone in the crowd said to take the trolley, so I shakily made my way over to a trolley stop and sat there with a group of drunk women who were waiting as well. I sat like rigor mortis was setting in.
After what seemed like an hour, the women had peeled off, after a friend had miraculously gotten a cab. But I continued to sit, waiting for a trolley that would, in my mind, somehow take me to the hotel that I was staying at, without actually knowing where or what it was. I guess I just thought it may be a magic trolley, like the bus in My Neighbor Totoro.
Finally, a man approached, stirring me out of my mind spin and chirped with that clipped Canadian pitch, “No more trolleys.” FUCK! FUCK! I was so fucked. I realized I had to go back to that house party to try to find my friend’s brother just to avoid going to a hospital ER to sleep. But I was too high to find the house again, and now the bars were closed and the crowds were still thick in the streets and I couldn’t think straight, so I summoned enough focus to hatch a plan.
I decided to try to retrace my path to the bar from the hotel by sight, based on the location of the CN Tower (an iconic very tall tower in Toronto). The one thing I knew was that the CN Tower was visible from the cab to the Horseshoe, so maybe I could find a path where the iconic and extremely tall CN Tower appeared in my vantage point the same way as when I saw it on the way, but in reverse. Follow?
I was convinced this theory would work, and somehow I would eventually land at the hotel whose name, still, I did not remember. But I figured I couldn’t remember the name because I was high, and I knew that when I stopped being high, it would come back to me, but I also felt sure that I would never stop being high forever and ever. So I just started walking while looking up at the CN Tower, and when the tower was obscured by a building, I felt increasingly high and panicked and, in response, scurried to find the tower, like a terrified puppy. The CN Tower was now the center of the universe and my umbilical cord to a fragile sense of reality.
I must have walked some twenty minutes and the tower was a good ways off from where it had started in my eyeline so I felt like I was making progress. But this notion was quickly met with the stark realization that I was in the middle of nowhere, in some kind of barren warehouse area, and the streets were empty, save for the very occasional passing car. This brought me back to my natural state of pure panic, but I had my tower. That tireless, immoveable tower. My lighthouse. And then, a jolt from the dark. “Hey, faggot.” I looked down and there were four teenagers. They were in a phalanx, and I was sort of relieved, but for the “Hey, faggot” part.
“Where you going, faggot?”
Okay, so he was sticking with the faggot thing, but there was still a glimmer of hope that they could help. Maybe, I thought, faggot was a familiar, friendly greeting in Toronto, like mate in Britain.
“To my hotel.”
“To his hotel!”
A classic, familiar bit of repartee that signals bad things to come: when someone repeats what the other is saying in a slightly mocking fashion, a very common refrain signaling the beginning of hundreds and thousands of fights since the beginning of time.
“I’m lost, actually.”
“The faggot is lost.”
I only then started to realize that I was being gay-bashed. I pivoted to quickly provide insignificant details as an attempt to stall the inevitable.
“I can’t find my hotel. I’m visiting here. I’m American.”
“An American faggot.”
I couldn’t help laughing because of the way this kid said “an American faggot.” It
was actually poetic, with the combination of his thick Canadian accent and those choice and peculiar few words. It was like the title of a lost Walt Whitman poem. But my laugh struck the wrong chord for them.
“What are you laughing at, faggot?” Less Walt Whitman now. Then he pushed me hard, and I was like a rag doll anyway, but being that high, I just toppled over.
In these strange, heightened moments, the mind works quickly, intuitively. I had been assessing the situation subconsciously and I knew what I needed to do. This was a classic case of “appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.” One swift blow to their leader, the loud one, the one who pushed me down and stood over me with a Cujo glower, and the others would cave and either scurry away or take me as their new leader. It was clear as Canadian Mist. Just as it is foretold and immemorial. I would just quickly stand and punch him right in the neck, crushing his homophobic Adam’s apple and choking his breath, leaving him helpless and buckled over in defeat.
Instead, as they gathered around in a fashion that was highly suggestive—me kneeling—I seized this pivotal moment and said, “Who wants to get blown by the faggot first?”
Let’s be honest, I can’t punch. A stillness cloaked the scene, like a cold calm before the rogue wave hits. The leader looked appalled. Like genuinely appalled. It was the invitation they had been waiting for, and now, they had their act of war.
I braced for my kick in the head, but instead came a blinding light and the sound of a loud horn blaring. The kids scattered and, directly in front of me, a car with its headlights on appeared. A woman stepped out, but I couldn’t really see her in the lights, and then she just got back in the car and drove away, and I was left alone, shaking, less high from fear, and it immediately occurred to me. The Windsor Arms Hotel.
Failure Is an Option Page 8