Scream

by Tama Janowitz

  He used to race stock cars, he had two kids with two different girls by the time he was seventeen years old, he’s got a dick down to his knees.

  It’s disgusting. I mean, I am an old person; I am fifty-seven! You should just not have a boyfriend when you get to be that old, right? You should not be having sex.

  But when he grabs me by the arm and pulls me across the room and before I know it my pants are down around my ankles and he’s got me bent over a chair, what am I going to do, complain about it?

  On the other hand, he can be so, so, so mean. Not, like, he hits me, but he has issues.

  He would not go with me to the Wild Game Dinner at the Interlaken Sports Club, for example. And he will not eat a “farm-fresh egg” from the local produce place where the woman has very old chickens; she never kills them. These are happy chickens and lay eggs rarely because they are old. You have to order a dozen in advance, and their yolks are bright orange. He only wants pale ones from the supermarket, collected from the Factory of Suffering Chickens.

  He would not leave a job site, even though it was 7 P.M. on one of the only warm days in six months, to go on a walk with me through the forest. He said he had broken up with his girlfriend, but then he claimed he had to go with her to a Christmas expo and convention in a nearby city for five days in order to drive back all the angels and Christmas tree accessories she was stocking for her Christmas shop.

  Okay, mostly I can’t stand my husband, but (right now at least) I hate my boyfriend!

  My life has turned into a sweater with a hole in it: whether it’s raveling or unraveling, it doesn’t make any difference.

  time in brooklyn

  I’m not saying life was any better back in Brooklyn. I couldn’t stand it there, either. Like when the incident of the doorman molestation occurred—I don’t know—ten or twenty years ago?

  Achmed, the doorman in my apartment building, was young, always friendly and nice, sometimes maybe too nice. He kissed me on the cheek at Christmas, and it wasn’t just a peck on the cheek—he kind of grabbed me and rubbed up against me. There were other things that should have been clues.

  On Mother’s Day, Achmed gave me a huge bunch of flowers. I mean, this bouquet was beautiful, it wasn’t some tired bunch of flowers from a Korean deli. It was a lot nicer than any bouquets my husband ever gave me. Don’t get me wrong, I like flowers from a corner bodega, too. But this was from a fancy florist, white lilies and tuberoses, in a vase with tissue paper. They were in a box at the front desk. Achmed was looking at me, doggy-style. At first I was like, Holy crap, who sent me these beautiful flowers!

  “I did!” he said.

  I just didn’t know what to do—laugh, cry? It was so great to get this gorgeous bouquet of flowers, but . . . they weren’t from my husband, they weren’t from a possible admirer, they were from the Egyptian doorman who was young enough to be my son.

  It reminded me of how, one time, my friend Paige got a fancy invitation from her cleaning woman, inviting her to tea at the Duke and Duchess of somebody or other. So she asked Andy Warhol to join her. They went to tea at this Duke and Duchess’s place in New York City and then Andy said, “Gee, Paige, this is great! Who invited us to this tea?”

  “Why, my cleaning woman Helen invited us,” Paige said. Then she introduced Andy to Helen, her housekeeper.

  Andy was really mad. He wanted to have tea with the Duke and Duchess of whatever it was, but it spoiled it for him when it turned out he had been invited by Paige’s cleaning woman.

  Achmed had a thirteen-year-old daughter who was a country-western singer. He would tell me about this daughter and the talent shows she was entering at the time. Once there was a building Christmas party and his daughter performed, a huge girl playing the mandolin with a tiny partner on slide guitar, playing “Achy Breaky Heart.” Many building residents and workers did a line dance where the lobby had been cleared between the Christmas tree and the food and the menorah.

  A lot of the residents were old lefties and academics, who had bought their apartments when the building went co-op in the early eighties. They didn’t line-dance, but they did dance to “The Tennessee Waltz.” It was very impressive, especially for me. In college I had failed ballroom dancing. I actually got an F for not being able to waltz.

  Anyway, one night Achmed the doorman called on the intercom and said he was on his break and asked if I wanted to hang out with him in the boiler room. The boiler room was behind a marked door that said no one was allowed in unless you worked in the building, so I was kind of excited to see what was behind it.

  “Okay, sure,” I said.

  I caught a glimpse of myself on the way out. I was pretty shabby. “How old do I look?” I said to Willow.

  “Well, you look like you might be younger than sixty,” she said.

  I went to the basement. Inside this boiler room were gigantic, huge, riveted—gosh, I don’t know—boilers? And this area was two stories high at least, and very hot and noisy, and it was like being in a submarine engine room. From around the corner I heard Achmed tell me to come in.

  I entered the porters’ and doormen’s lounge. There was a giant TV, a smaller TV, a big sofa, a refrigerator, rugs, chairs—it was messy and yet a place to hang out. I guess like the basement of some sixties home or something for the kids. Or maybe like some of the nightclubs I used to go to back in the early eighties.

  Achmed wanted me to have some cognac, Ukrainian cognac.

  I said no because I had my glass of wine with me. Then he turned off the sound on the TV, which was playing a movie with giant cartoon rats.

  He sat next to me on the couch donated by some building tenant who had remodeled and who had also given him the cognac. “Are you sure you don’t want the cognac?” he kept asking me. I did not know at that time that Ukraine is known for its fine cognac. I said, “No.” This time he got out the cognac and poured himself a large glass.

  Then I tried to ask him questions—what his wife did, about his father staying with him. His father, he said, had been visiting but was about to go back to Egypt. His wife came from Peru and they had met online. He had worked in the building for eight years or something and was a member of the doormen’s union.

  Even though I kept asking him questions, he leaned on me and started to kiss me. I protested, saying we were friends, and tried to leave, but he followed me to the door, once again grabbed me, and tried to kiss me on the mouth.

  It was not really possible to pry him off with ease, but eventually I did.

  When I went upstairs Willow said I had been gone ten minutes. To me it seemed like several days in the boiler room.

  I suppose I was foolish to go there, but I had truly thought we were friends and that he was fond of me. I was almost fifty-five years old and had I removed my clothing, I can assure you he would have screamed. I’d had an operation where they removed a tumor the size of a five-month fetus, which left me misshapen. Then afterward, stupidly, I went to an old boyfriend’s wife who was a plastic surgeon to get liposuction and try to even out the lumps. Do not go to an ex-boyfriend’s wife for lipo! Not when that ex-boyfriend has never gotten over you. I swear, she added fat deposits on me when I was under anesthesia.

  In any event, I was not inclined to do anything with Achmed. But then the next day he followed me into the elevator.

  Certainly there was a period when I would very much have liked to have an affair. But not then. I was wearing a skirt, and Achmed scuttled up behind me into the elevator. Just as the doors were about to close, he stuck his hand around the edge of my underpants and right up in there.

  I was enraged. I mean, this was no white-glove building, but they could have at least insisted on latex. How could I have misread the whole thing so drastically? Now, for the rest of my life, I was going to have to go past a doorman who might either follow me into the elevator and try to stick his hand down my pants, or, even if he didn’t, look at me and think, There goes the one from 16A I felt up.

  I didn’
t want to get the guy fired. He had a wife and the singer and another daughter. His father didn’t speak any English. Life was hard.

  Plus, I couldn’t think of him trying to supply me with Ukrainian cognac without remembering that it was in Kiev where I’d lost my mother in a crowd, eight years earlier. I was with her and Willow in a Folkloric Tourist Market, and when I turned around Mom was gone. She had no money, no credit card, no passport, no copy of the address of where we were staying. Willow and I spent the entire day looking for her, and it wasn’t until night had fallen and it was raining that I gave up. I think Mom was losing it even back then.

  I did find her eventually, five or six hours later, thanks to the U.S. Embassy. She was having drinks with the vice-consul at an American jazz bar.

  family relations

  The roots falling out of my family had commenced years before my not talking to my brother Sam and Dad disinheriting him. First, Sam got into an argument with Dad when Dad visited him and tried to smoke marijuana. Sam asked him to please smoke it outside since he had terrible allergies and the smoke bothered him, and this pissed off my father.

  In my mother’s case, the rift with Sam’s wife began when my mom called to thank Sam and Veronica for a Mother’s Day present they had sent. According to my mother, Veronica picked up the phone and said angrily, “You should thank your son, don’t thank me!” Then she launched into a shrill diatribe of complaints against Mom. It was out of context and vicious, too. I was not privy to hearing this because I was not there at the time. I myself had long ceased calling my brother, knowing that his wife was right there, listening to every word on speakerphone—or extension—but never saying anything.

  I had my own issues with Veronica, and not only because she really hurt my mom’s feelings. My mom said Veronica told her she was a hunchback. My mom cried. This is nothing against hunchbacks but my mom was not a hunchback. She had a little osteoporosis. Even if my mom was a hunchback, do you go around saying, “Hahaha! You are a hunchback!”

  For me, though, the trouble started many years ago when Tim and I went to visit them outside Boston. When it was time to go I went to the closet to get our coats, but they were gone. And I said, “Hey, where are our coats?”

  “I put them out in the garage,” said Veronica, “because they smelled. Sam is allergic.”

  I did not have an odoriferous coat. And I did not want to visit people who said I did.

  Of course Veronica was even worse the last time my mother went to see them. Sam and Veronica accused my mother of wearing perfume. And when my mother said, “I am not! I knew you were sensitive to odor and so I deliberately did not wear any perfume,” they did not believe her. They ransacked her items and went through everything she had brought with her to find her perfume, which they assumed she had hidden after she applied it. But she hadn’t.

  I DON’T KNOW WHY TOLSTOY said “All happy families are alike.” First of all, he couldn’t have spent much time with any family or he would have found out that there is no such thing as a happy family. I have met happy families, and after a few minutes one of them takes you off to one side to explain the real truth.

  Tolstoy was busy writing or touring the countryside visiting serfs, which caused his wife unhappiness since she had to spend all her time fixing up her husband’s novels and raising eight children, even though her husband the count was giving away all their money to the serfs he hung out with, faster than he could impregnate her.

  I am pretty sure you can’t find one family on the entire planet where there is not one family member at war with another.

  In Schuyler County I made a lot of new friends through Newell Farm, where I rode. Everyone seemed to have a normal family, until they started confiding. There was “Dressage” Amy: her sister came down with a virus that overnight left her paralyzed and barely able to speak. So her youngest son took her to Canada and lived with her in an apartment. They had the woman’s Social Security disability money to live on, but this son said, “I have to take care of my mom all the time, and that’s not fair!” Because he wanted more money from other family members.

  But they did not want to give him their own money because the last time they did that he tied his mother to the toilet and took the extra money and went to Toronto and hired a prostitute. I believe he also bought some drugs, but I do not know the full details, only that he forgot he had tied his mother to the toilet and sometime between twenty-four and forty-eight hours went by before he got back and untied her, unsoiled but greatly dehydrated.

  Or my friend “Trail Rider” Melanie. When she was young her mother died. Her younger sister disappeared for years to live in a trailer, where she had many children by different men. Then Melanie’s aunt called to tell her her father had died. They hadn’t been that close, but it still came as a shock. One day, about ten years after the death of her father, she thought she would call her father’s wife, who had inherited all the money, to find out if she knew where her sister was. And her father answered the phone. He was not dead! He just didn’t care enough about her to bother calling.

  Meanwhile, of course, Melanie was in recovery from breast cancer and her husband and her mother-in-law (with whom they lived) would not let her drive a car or ride a bike, because she had suffered concussions in the past, and so they did not let her have those privileges. The area that they lived in was not near any stores and it snowed most of the time, and when it wasn’t snowing it flooded. She was quite trapped there, with her mother-in-law, whom she was not permitted to address by her first name. And her husband and her mother-in-law made her dog wear underpants in the house because it was a short-haired dog with an up-curling tail and they did not like to look at its anus.

  So each family has its troubles and woes, and in some way all unhappy families are alike, because as far as I can tell there really aren’t any happy ones, at least not fully or all the time.

  In my father’s case, it was dislike of my brother’s wife that caused him to disinherit my brother, and then he turned his back on me when I left his house after realizing just how many weapons he had lying around—well, that and my objection to the drug dealer.

  By the way, the morning I fled his home, I returned his munitions and wrote him a note:

  Dear Dad,

  You tell me:

  1. Your drug dealer is “gentle” but “unreliable”

  2. You brought up and discussed your sawed-off shotgun FIVE TIMES at great length during the course of one day.

  There was no way to explain anything to him. Years before, he’d gotten an acre or two of land as some kind of settlement for a lawsuit (he and his past wife were always embroiled in lawsuits of one sort or another), so he sold the land for something like five grand. Then, when he complained that my brother could have bought land and lived near him instead of moving to Alabama, I said, “Right, Dad, but if you had wanted your son to stay near you—your son who helped you build your house!—you might have rewarded him with the acre of land you got in a settlement, instead of selling it for five grand!”

  “It was two acres of land and it sold for five thousand per acre!” Dad said.

  I’m telling you, you just couldn’t argue with him.

  When I went back recently, I think Dad was happy things were going so badly for me, and that I had ended up totally broke and living up in the middle of some bizarre black hole of the United States without culture, and I think when my brother called, he encouraged him against me.

  My brother is highly litigious and not only had gone to court to get appointed his father-in-law’s guardian, and put him in a house with a padlocked door, but also had sued his sister-in-law, plus took on a gas station. This gas station charged him for two more gallons of gas than the tank capacity in his car stated. “You overcharged me!” my brother said.

  “No, we didn’t,” they told him.

  So he went to court and got them put out of business. Me? I might complain and if that didn’t work, I would—in future—not go to that gas statio
n.

  And there were malpractice suits, plenty of them. I’m not saying they had anything to do with his medical skills, but a Jew ob-gyn in Alabama is going to be subjected to them. Any time an Alabamian has a baby born without a brain, it’s going to happen. My brother has, therefore, become inured to the agonies of our legal system.

  My father was so nervous he had Sam removed as executor of his estate. If they took the ice cream and the live-in alleged prostitute away from Veronica’s father, surely they would take away Dad’s pot.

  an attempt at explanation

  Okay, none of this is coming out right. I want to try to explain how I ended up living in Schuyler County absolutely dead broke, in the middle of nowhere, and doing nothing but visiting my mother in a nursing home, trying to clean up her house, which has books up to the ceiling in every single room, and going to the emergency room in the middle of the night when the home calls to tell me Mom’s fallen out of bed and they have no one to take her to get checked. My writing career’s gone to hell in a handbasket, and then there’s my kid: she’s not happy. It’s hard changing schools in eleventh grade.

  There’s more. It all goes on, the minutiae, the nonliving, while my brother, who’s about to retire, is off to Denmark, Hawaii, touring stately homes in England with his wife, and—when he comes up to visit, once a year—berates me about Mom’s house not being kept clean. Right. There’s mold on the walls because . . . it hasn’t been painted in thirty years.

  It’s all just stuff, I know it. It’s all small stuff. I’m not living in a barrio, a tin shack, a favela, a ghetto where there are constant mudslides or shootings. I’m not trying to pick up grains of rice where they have fallen from the back of a truck. But this thought? It doesn’t help.

  I can’t sleep. I can’t write. Two weeks ago my horse head-butted me—it was an accident, but still, she gave me a black eye, and I’m starting to think it was worse than that. I have blurry vision and my head still hurts in that spot.