by Jan Richman
When my father felt a froth coming on, and his tongue began to swell in his mouth as though it wanted to break out of that cramped cage, he would grab a paper from his pouch, bring it to his chest, and narrow his eyes. He found that if he was in a position to concentrate on his throw when the maelstrom hit, if he could focus only on his form and his aim, then the jarring disruption of his body ceased to be jarring or disruptive, it became merely a complementary element in a compound plan. He would pick a spot on the front lawn or porch in question, fixing on his site by locating it within a radius, thirty degrees north of the oak tree, ten feet due east of the mailbox. Of course, he had to select his target quickly, and he usually just placed home plate twenty feet or so in front of the front door, so pitching a strike would mean the paper would sail past the plate and lob to a perfectly placed landing. Sometimes there were complications: bushes, trees, lawn ornaments, swingsets; one Riverside home even had a koi pond with a mini-waterfall and lily pads, and he was often tempted to try to skip the paper like a stone over the pond to land damply on the front stoop.
After a few weeks on the southeast Hackensack route, my father was familiar enough with the particular design of each subscriber’s yard to have internalized his point-range strategy. He no longer had to slow down to think about placement; he would simply draw a paper, tuck it to his chest, narrow his eyes, and fire, all while pedaling smooth and fast. Draw, tuck, narrow, fire, shit damn, goddamn shit! Draw, tuck, narrow, fire, scum-sucking gonad schmuck, Jesus Christ afterbirth! His liturgies held themselves back until the throwing sequence had been completed, and he gleefully pedaled from house to house cursing and twitching, often jumping up and down on his wide leather saddle and flapping his arms like Icarus on a bender. The closer he came to the end of his route, the lighter his pouch became, and the lighter his pouch became, the jauntier his pitches were. When he was weighed down, his technique had to be old-school and specific. When he had a narrow leverage, the threat of toppling if he got too wild was as palpable as the strap digging into his shoulders and rib cage, rubbing the skin over the regular throb of his heart. But without the disciplinary heaviness of the full pouch, he felt more freedom to cut loose and experiment, to grab the paper with both hands and wind up like a witch stirring a cauldron (he trued his spokes every other night, just to make sure his back wheel was perfectly aligned for no-hands riding). He tried fastballs and fireballs, sinkers and submarines, faders and jug-handle curves. He threw with his eyes closed and with his head turned in the other direction. He tossed a few behind his back just to keep in practice with the small-fry tricks of the trade. It had taken him a while on the route to realize that absolutely no one was watching him; at first he’d tried to keep the flamboyant pitches and flapping episodes to a minimum, tearing one off only when he couldn’t resist the urge. He was so used to being mimicked and mocked, his every move noted and analyzed, that the notion of roaming completely alone in the world, unseen, seemed too good to be true. Even in the bedroom he shared with his brother, who did not inspect or judge him, who in fact did not even seem to notice or care that he was different from other, calmer, kids, he never felt totally at ease. He was always aware that his lack of control over his motor functions marked him as defective. But between five and six every morning, when he was out of radar range of his loved ones and the only spectator was a bewildered family dog who’d been relegated to the yard all night for excessive whining, he began to forget his disgrace. He did not feel out of control. He was not attempting to resist or desist or modify his behavior. In fact, it was in that germinal hour that my father felt most in control of his life, his body, and his environment. There were one or two variables (weather, dogs, special editions) but mostly he knew what to expect and he was prepared. He was the master of his territory, the king of his mile-long castle. Indeed, when it was time to actually knock on the various doors he’d come to know so well in the sleepy deserted dawn, the tips my father received were more ample than any other boy’s, including the legendary Ray Golden, now a seventh-grade cigar-smoking lightbulb entrepreneur. “Good aim,” my father would say when kids asked him how he made so much money on a lousy paper route, “and perfect rubber band placement.”
“Are you familiar with this type of bird, a peacock?” asked Dr. Berger in his thick Eastern European accent, as he swiveled back and forth in his office chair and gazed at my father with a half-smile below his baggy, red-rimmed eyes.
“A peacock? Sure, I’ve seen ’em at the Bronx zoo. With the huge purple tailfeathers.” My father liked being able to answer a question with as little ambiguity as possible. He had been urged by his father not to mouth off to Dr. Berger, to answer each question correctly and politely.
“Yes, that’s right. But the peacock doesn’t always show his fan of fancy feathers, does he?”
My father gazed at the doctor uncomprehendingly. He flattened his wad of pink bubble gum onto his lower lip and bit down on it several times with his top teeth, making a texture like seagrass. “He doesn’t?” he asked.
“No, most of the time he tucks those feathers up into his tail and hides them. Do you know what makes a peacock show to the world his swirly blue feathers? Can you guess?”
“On his birthday?” My father could tell by the doctor’s gentle, pained squint that he missed the joke. He felt heat rising up to his face, and quickly added, “Maybe it’s when he’s hungry, to show the guy who feeds him that he’s ready for his dish to be filled.”
My father liked Dr. Berger, though he couldn’t say exactly why. He didn’t understand half of what the doctor said, between his accent and his American Journal of Psychiatry vocabulary. He sensed that beyond the doctor’s eagerness to succeed in making him well, there lay a tragic and complicated past. On the walls of Dr. Berger’s office were photographs of Sigmund Freud and Emma Goldman, figures that were associated with vague distressing circumstances in my father’s mind. The doctor was what my father’s father would call a “real character,” straddling the line between the old world and the new world, a distinction my father was learning to make with more and more agility. Many older people in this part of New Jersey were immigrants, mostly from Eastern Europe. Most had accents of one stripe or another, and some could barely wish you Good Day, though they littered their conversations with all the current American slang. Some, like Dr. Berger, dressed in rodent-gray woolen suits—even in summer—and carried pocket watches. Others, like my grandfather, wore cotton guayabera shirts from Cuba and sandals from Woolworth’s that buckled at the ankle. Hairstyles were an easy clue, as were smoking habits (pipe or cigarettes? hand-rolled or machine-bought?). Generally, those who conformed to the rules of modern American culture and made an attempt to break with stifling European traditions (except for kugel; kugel was not up for negotiation) were considered admirable by my father’s parents. Those who still clung to the ways of life steeped in oppression and ignorance were regarded with a mix of scorn and amusement. But Dr. Berger was spoken of by my grandparents with hushed respect—he was an intellectual who studied in Vienna, a practicioner of the newest science, and he had promised to cure their son.
The doctor shifted in his chair, which emitted a high squeak like a balloon being rubbed. “You have stumbled upon a very important aspect of this little riddle,” he said. “A peacock brings out his feathers when he wants to show somebody something. It is, in fact, a kind of show when the peacock struts, like the Folies Bergere.” The doctor grinned at his own analogy, then frowned, seeming to realize that this ten-year-old boy might never have heard of the Folies Bergere, and may have missed the connection. He leaned in closer as if to detect any glimmer of puzzlement.
My father tried to imagine why a peacock would put on a show, prancing around the aviary in his lavish getup, doing can-cans up and down the birdwalk on his skinny bird legs. Do birds have knees? The image made my father laugh. The laugh turned to a shiver, then his torso was yanked from side to side as though by invisible forces argui
ng over the viability of his soul.
“Oh, Jesus,” he muttered. “Oh, peacock jism! Peacock shit!” He pounded his fists into his small lap, his giggle getting louder, each syllable a distinct bark.
The doctor narrowed his eyes and wrote something down in his notebook. He did not seem ruffled by my father’s outburst. “We laugh, Mr. Richman, when we have become uncomfortable. The idea of showing off to impress the opposite sex causes you to feel helpless, and in turn you become angry, firing on me with your rat-a-tat-tat laughter.” The doctor smiled widely, obviously enjoying himself, revealing an immaculate mouthful of false teeth.
Knock it off. Drop it. Pack it in. Lay off it. Put a lid on it. Hang it up. Call it a day. These were some of the pearls of advice given to my father by experts in Hackensack when he was a kid. “It” was his twitching and jerking, his cursing and stabbing the air. “It” was his pounding at his groin repeatedly, his facial grimacing followed by nasty comments, the storm of flutters and stutters that came over him at the most inappropriate moments. He was using “it” to call attention to himself, to steal the limelight, to establish a niche in the world that would be better carved by hard work and assiduous social skills—and his little trick had worked. Now he had been singled out to take two trains into New York with his mother once a week, to sit on a smelly leather divan in a dark-wood office full of stale cigarette smoke, and to field intensely personal questions fired at him by an Austrian titan in a worsted suit. Was he happy now? Did he feel vindicated and victorious for being the class-clown show-off? Is this what he wanted?
At first my father’s parents did not want to send him off to expensive professionals. They thought they could handle “it” at home. They had taught both their sons to loathe any kind of infirmity or illness, to eschew behavior that was out of the scope of normal activity. Deviations from the norm should be compensated for by creative problem solving. My grandfather, an extremely short man, made up for his lack in height with an impressive assortment of lofty hats, a collection that earned him the nickname “The Hat,” as in: “Did you see The Hat driving down Hackensack Avenue today?” (From a distance, all you could detect of my grandfather behind the wheel was his enormous topper, creating the optical illusion that the hat itself was driving the car.) To be sick was to show weakness; to give in to a genetic flaw was to opt out of the game.
When at the age of seven my father began exhibiting odd behaviors, such as excitedly bobbing his head or punching wildly at imaginary enemies, my grandparents were mildly annoyed. They wanted him to know that it wouldn’t pay to break the most hallowed family tradition: the art of blending. So they ignored his pleas for attention. When he’d break into one of his air-boxing matches, they’d turn their backs and continue their conversation facing away from him. They’d barely pause their forks between bites if he’d start braying in the middle of dinner. But the quirks and peccadilloes of my father’s body proved more tenacious than they had bargained for. They thought he was testing them to see how much jaybird shimmying he could get away with before they lost their protracted tempers. They entered into the battle of wills. They shook their heads and smiled at each other conspiratorially. Even-keeled and unreadable, they bargained coolly with my father. If you cease that ridiculous dance, they said, we will give you five dollars and a new baseball glove. If you continue to annoy us with your incessant gyrating, they added, you will not be allowed to join the baseball team this season, nor will your brother. This last bit was thrown in to kindle another longstanding family tradition: sibling loyalty. They knew my father revered his older brother, and that the threat of a tandem punishment would paint the situation quite differently in my father’s mind. Also, they weren’t absolutely certain that their self-restrained, non-convulsive eldest son, with whom my father shared a bedroom, had not masterminded this convoluted plan to overthrow the family hierarchy. In reality, my uncle, while being very smart, was also artlessly honest, honest in the sort of way that could not conceive of guerilla tactics or manipulative strategy, honest to a degree that could only be due to extraordinary spiritual alignment, which his parents would have noticed had they been paying attention.
Don’t get me wrong. My father’s parents loved their children. But they were warriors. Middle-class, bridge-playing, atheistic Jewish warriors, and yet, yes, fierce. They viewed each of life’s circumstances (and their children, after all, were among life’s circumstances) as an opportunity for battle, and they felt justified in teaching their children this view, since those with the most military skills would survive the war. In any war, the best strategy is to listen carefully to your commanding officers.
My father tried. He spent the entire baseball season of his ninth year trying to control his outbursts. He already knew what a tricky quality “control” was: he had learned early to circumvent his desires in order to have a better chance of obtaining them. If, flipping through the Sears catalogue, his impulse was to point to the picture of a pearl-blue motorized miniature race car and run through the house waving it over his head, crying, “I want! I want!”, he knew it was wise to sublimate that impulse. Instead, he would casually leave the catalogue flipped open to the page in question on the coffee table or near his father’s workbench. When someone asked him if he found anything interesting in the catalogue, he would say, “Oh, sure, lots of things,” and wait to be questioned further. It wasn’t that you couldn’t want, he’d learned, but that you couldn’t want directly, or ostentatiously. You had to want in such a way that the outcome of your wanting ceased to be of immediate concern. And yet his attempts to curb the episodes of twitching failed miserably. He tried to squelch the fits as he felt them coming on, but he soon dropped this method, as his body’s compunctions proved infinitely stronger than his mind’s thin disciplinary efforts. When he felt the urge to tremble or curse, to knock his arms back and forth across an iron railing again and again, there was no time to stop and weigh the options. The momentum had begun; it would be like trying to stop a bowling ball after it had left your outstretched hand. He was obliged to complete an action once it had blipped onto the screen of his consciousness.
If he had to go to the bathroom while playing a game or listening to a radio program, he could hold it until a more convenient time; sometimes he could even go to bed needing to pee, and deciding to wait until morning. If he woke from an unpleasant dream in the middle of the night, he might consider creeping silently into his parents’ bedroom, tiptoeing over to his mother’s side of the bed, and seeking solace in her arms, but that instinct soon vanished when he fleshed out the fantasy with its tangible details: the shadowy, underwater dark of the house at night, his parents’ strange, animal breathing as they lay in their lumpy lair, his father’s violent surprise, the scolding that followed, the shaming. So he would squeeze his pillow into a little ball and push it tightly into his belly, wrapping his body around it like an oyster around a pearl. If a dream had been truly terrifying, he would wake his brother and whisper the details, under the pretext of the freshness of the memory. Sometimes, my uncle would wake my father for the same reason: an elaborate telling to remove the poison from sleep’s untamed claws. But it was clear to my father that this new game, this urgent duty of his body’s to twitch and shout, had different rules entirely.
With all their free time that baseball season, my father and his brother constructed a mathematically correct model of the Milky Way in their bedroom, a painstaking thread-and-tinfoil spiderweb strung together on a coathanger infrastructure, that bobbed and glittered above their narrow twin beds. My father’s nervous system percolated more often and even more grotesquely than before.
“I see you have been improving on your already good looks,” Dr. Berger said, his buoyant hint of sarcasm not lost on my father, who glared at him from under his new haircut. The doctor waved him into the office, gesturing toward the couch. “But seriously, Mr. Richman, how does it feel to have a clean neck? Do you feel in some way as though your conscience has
been cleared of a tiny bit of gunk? As Catholics must feel after they go into the little room with the priest?”
“Gunk?” asked my father, as he carefully sat on the edge of the sofa. “I don’t feel gunky when I go in. It’s after I come out of the shop, with all that powder and oil and goo they slap all over me. To tell you the truth, it’s kind of spooky, a haircut is.”
“Spooky?” Dr. Berger leaned back and crossed his legs.
“Well, the whole idea is to sit real still while some guy brings a sharp razor right up close to your brain. I gotta watch myself in that place.” He shifted his position on the leather, slapped the smooth cushion beside him nine times hard, and murmured, “Goddamn it, goddamn you, goddamn it, goddamn you,” under his breath.
“It would make anyone crazy,” he said when he looked up, smiling at his own quip.
The doctor laughed. “Ah, even a psychoanalyst like myself, perhaps. But tell me, why did you just say ‘Goddamn you’? I seem to be the only ‘you’ in the room. Are you feeling angry at me?”
My father looked down at his corduroy pants. He picked one thin wale on his thigh and followed it all the way down to his ankle, squinting to make sure he didn’t lose it in the soft fold over the knee.
“Mr. Richman? Did you hear my question? Or have you become suddenly deaf?”
My father never knew how to answer such questions as to why he did what he did during one of his episodes. He didn’t know why, any more than he knew why the earth revolved around the sun or the Brooklyn Dodgers lost the 1936 pennant. What he wanted to know was why perfectly normal people were always asking him this question.
“Why is your beard gray, doctor? Why does your waiting room smell like cornflakes? Why do you write in a red notebook instead of a blue one? Why? Why? Why? WHY?”
As my father heard his own voice getting louder, he took several deep breaths to steady himself. Sometimes in his dreams he experienced violent anger of the type that he could never express in waking life. Some misunderstanding with a faceless stranger would blossom in fast motion like a scene from a school science film about pollination, until it was a wreath around his neck, choking off any remaining goodwill or temperance. A kind of circling would ensue, not just the classic wrestlers’ ronde, but a turnabout involving the whole room, the whole universe. As my father’s anger grew deeper, the earth seemed to spin off of its axis and tumble aimlessly through space. There was no still point. The more he tried to fix his attention on the faceless stranger, to find and follow the movements of his opponent, the wider and more uncontained the arena became, everything whirling at once, a spinning top inside a merry-go-round inside a house inside a hurricane. Every punch he threw came up empty. He was left incomplete, boiling mad, clinging to one strand in the unraveling coil of reality, screaming hoarsely or only trying to scream, unable to make a sound. He swung and jabbed, shadowboxing, having lost sight completely of that elusive stranger,unable to remember what had set him off in the first place.