by Dave Itzkoff
He was, as usual, in his underwear, his hair was scattered in every direction, and his eyes were half shut. But to me, he was my Jewish hero: my biblical David, my Judah Maccabee, the rebellious protector of my faith.
“What’s going on, Maddy?” he murmured to my mother.
“Tell him,” she said. “Tell him he has to go to Hebrew school.”
“Well,” he said wearily, “does he want to go to Hebrew school?”
I answered, “I don’t want to go to Hebrew school.”
“So if he doesn’t want to go,” my father said, “why are you making him go?”
“Because, Gerry, he has to learn that when he makes a commitment to something, he has to see it through. He won’t listen to me, but he will listen to you.” She sounded exasperated.
“If he doesn’t want to do it for himself,” my father fired back, “you’re not going to be able to make him do it. So just let him stay home.” His voice was booming now. Justin was crying, and I was beginning to realize that maybe not everyone’s family operated like mine did.
“Uh-uh,” my mother said, raising her voice to match my father’s. “You’re not letting him out of this. He has to go whether he likes it or not.” She started waving the Hebrew schoolbooks at him, like she had at me.
Suddenly, he grabbed the books out of her hand. “Oh yeah?” he said, and in one continuous movement, he made his way from the living room to our terrace and swung open its sliding door. “If I say he doesn’t have to go,” he shouted, “then he doesn’t have to go!” He took one step onto the terrace and flung the books over the side like Frisbees.
I raced to the terrace myself, to see if I could catch a glimpse of the books as they twirled and spiraled to the ground, but they had already fallen out of sight. I was beaming. Justin was bawling. My mother was fuming. I stayed home with my father. My mother took Justin to Hebrew school.
I stopped going to Hebrew school, and as I ascended from second grade to third grade, I became renowned around the apartment for my performance as Charles Darwin in the Dalton School’s production of The Great Naturalists, in which I sang a climactic tribute to the discovery of evolution called “Strange, How Things Change.” But I could tell that things were not all right in the household.
The gaps between my father’s appearances had grown to two and then three days. My mother was around plenty, filling ashtrays and half-empty coffee cups with stubbed-out cigarette butts, scribbling lengthy notes to herself on yellow legal pads that she would hastily pull to her chest whenever I tried to glance at them, and sneaking into the bathroom with the telephone, its curlicued cord stretched taut across the living room as she tried without much success to talk in secret.
One afternoon I returned home from a day blissfully free of Hebrew school to hear the sinister strains of Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen” already wafting from behind the door. When I let myself into the apartment, my mother was waiting for me, sitting cross-legged on the couch, dead cigarettes strewn around her like ashen confetti and her makeup smeared by tears, as she clutched one of those notepads from which she began to recite a monologue she did not trust herself to deliver without cue cards.
“This is something your father and I have been going through for a long time,” she said without looking up from her notes. “We have tried and tried, but I don’t see how it’s going to work out. We want you to know that we both love you very much.”
This obtuseness was too much for an eight-year-old. “What, what is it?” I impatiently asked.
Finally, my mother looked up at me. “Your father and I are getting divorced,” she said.
I started crying, though I’d known the announcement of my parents’ divorce was a rite of passage I’d someday have to undergo—something that happened to all my classmates, like getting the chicken pox or expanding your apartment into the one next door to yours.
“But why, Mom?” I wanted to know.
“He’s a drug addict, Davey,” she said. “He’s been addicted to cocaine almost your whole life.”
The information still wasn’t computing. Hadn’t my parents seen the public service announcements that played round the clock on our televisions? Didn’t he understand he could just say no? Didn’t she realize that an honest, thoughtful conversation would sort out the problem? “Why does he take drugs?” I asked her.
“How should I know?” she snapped back. “If I knew that, maybe I’d be on drugs myself.” This was not a reassuring answer.
I started to think about what life was going to be like from now on. There would be fewer incidents that would set off my mother’s temper, perhaps, and no special protector to defend me when they occurred. Maybe my mother would start dating again, even remarry, and we’d all be driving down Park Avenue in our new family car when we’d look over at one of the grassy dividers and see my father camped out among the bushes, surrounded by his few remaining possessions and his clothes ripped to shreds.
“Can I still live with Dad?” I asked my mother. The quavering look in her eyes told me this wouldn’t be possible.
I realized that everything was over. No more family, no more Mom, no more Dad. No more videogames, no more action figures, no more visits from Justin. I thought about that confrontation between my parents a few months ago, and I wondered what would have happened if, instead of tossing my Hebrew schoolbooks off the balcony, my father had hurled me over its side? Would I have plunged to the ground before anyone could take notice of me? Or could I have willed myself to resist the tug of gravity and floated up into the sky?
For all the strange and shocking circumstances that had nearly brought our family to the brink of collapse, stranger and more shocking still was what happened next: nothing. Every afternoon I came home from school expecting to find my mother waiting in the living room with all our belongings packed into suitcases, ready to hit the road. Every time she introduced me to a man who seemed to be roughly my father’s age, I wondered, Will this be the person who replaces him, takes us in, and gives us a new home? But the divorce that she vowed to extract from my father never came. With each morning that we woke up in the only apartment I had ever known as my home, my dread of an impending cataclysm subsided a little more, until the day my mother pulled me aside and told me, “Look, your father and I aren’t getting divorced anymore, so there’s nothing for you to be nervous about. You can stop wetting your bed now.”
There came a later day when I thought my father was going to dismiss the possibility of our family’s dissolution once and for all. Though he had been weakened and diminished by the recent upheaval and absent from the scene even more frequently than usual, he summoned the strength just once to gather us all—his wife, his son, and his daughter—around the dining room table to deliver what he told us was a crucial announcement. My sister and I leaned in close as we listened for what would surely be the formal declaration that our parents’ hostilities had concluded. “Do you know,” our father began with purpose and intensity, “that your mother and I haven’t had sex in over a month?” We children made noises of revulsion as we sprang from our seats and fled the room.
Now I knew everything about my father, I thought. When he went missing for days, I knew what he was up to. And when we arrived home at the same time, crowded into an elevator with a few unsuspecting neighbors, and he’d put his hand on my shoulder and say in a soft, ragged voice, “When we get upstairs, I want to talk to you about something,” I knew enough to tell him, “I don’t want to.”
He would answer, “But I want to.”
The elevator doors would shut, and I would look at the man I once thought was my special protector, his chest heaving, his eyes bloodshot and bulging, his body reeking. I would look around at the faces of the bystanders temporarily trapped with us, trying to catch their gazes before they darted their eyes away, and I would think: Now who is going to save me from this?
Sometimes I would find him on the street, pacing, like he’d remembered how to get himself all the way back to w
here he lived but couldn’t recall how to walk through the front door. I would recognize him at a distance, and as I drew closer to him, he would be unable to look me in the eye, let alone focus on anything.
“Dad,” I would ask, “what are you doing out here?”
“David?” he would answer. “Is that you? Come here, I want to talk to you about something.”
I could feel the heat of his breath wilting my skin, and see the rivulets of mucus that he made no effort to stem as they dribbled from his nostrils and meandered across his mouth. Even in these moments I couldn’t tell that anything was wrong with him.
I would compliantly follow him to wherever he led me, to sit on a nearby bench or to deposit ourselves on the curb, and I would listen as he recited a familiar lecture. “David,” he’d say, “don’t you know that sex with a woman is the most beautiful and wonderful thing there is? But you can’t be afraid of it, like I was. And you can’t be afraid of rejection, either. Because it wounded me, David—oh, how it wounded me. It made me scared, small. But I can make sure that doesn’t happen to you. You can benefit from my errors. You know that if you ever wanted me to get someone to do it with you, I would pay for that, right?”
When he’d trail off in midsentence or forget what he’d been talking about, he would bury his face beneath the sleeve of his jacket like a vampire shielding himself from the sun, or insert his nose directly into the breast pocket of his shirt and take a huge and audible sniff.
That was when I would shake off my denial and accept what was going on. “Dad,” I said with revulsion, “you’re getting high right now, aren’t you?”
Though he had been caught, he was too sheepish to admit the truth. So he stared at the ground, pretending he hadn’t heard me, shuffled his feet, and took another snort.
For months I had been priming myself for total, catastrophic change, attuning my senses to their highest degrees of receptiveness, raising my defenses to their highest levels of readiness, but the upheaval I expected did not occur. The war games I had been running in my mind were a waste of psychic energy, and now I could not dial back my state of readiness. I was misreading signs, leaping at false alarms and failing to anticipate when authentic, drastic change was headed my way.
Left on my own, I began to develop strange habits. I became fixated on syllables—the number of syllables in words, in sentences, in passages of text I read, and in song lyrics I heard. I began counting them out in my head at first (12), then started counting them silently on my fingers (26), flipping my digits up and down as I went (37). Sentences or phrases that contained multiples of five syllables were the best (20), because then they completed a hand—all my fingers would be up or down when I reached the end (45). If they contained too few or too many syllables (13), then I would try to think of words that could be added to them (29) to make them come out even (36). Do you see now (40)?
In addition to my unique neuroses, another, more universal stirring was beginning to make itself known. It seemed to wash over me all at once, around the age of eleven or twelve, the promiscuous, paranoid suspicion that everyone everywhere around me was fucking: not only the stripped bare, fully exposed females in my father’s hidden magazines, who left me obsessed with the possibility that under the right circumstances, a woman’s clothes might fall entirely off her body, but the disobedient frat boys and the compliant co-eds they chased in the movies I saw; and the impossibly suave bachelors and the backtalking babes they flirted with on the television shows I watched; and the superheroes and heroines, in the comic books I read, whose every bulge, curve, and ripple was perpetually threatening to burst forth from their skintight costumes; and yes, on rare occasions, my parents.
Before I realized it, the boys I rode with in a private van to a private school went from fantasizing about action figures, fast cars, and baseball cards to strategizing about the girls in our class, who had gone the furthest, and just what they’d do to them, in precise and elaborate detail, if they ever had the chance to get them alone. Their knowledge astounded me and their aggression frightened me. How could I compete with them, and what would any girl want from me, with my contrary anatomy, my frantic fingers, and my uncooperative bladder? What was I supposed to do to make them take notice of me, and what was I supposed to do with that attention when I at last received it? When I got visual confirmation of the answer one life-altering night, at a fateful all-boys’ slumber party at Chris Dworkin’s house, from a most peculiar videotape that Alan Perlmutter produced from a brown paper bag, I was invigorated and horrified by the act that awaited in my future.
I had never received a proper education in these affairs. All I had were the results of my repeated experiments in rubbing myself against my bedsheets, and the sound in my head of a man’s voice telling me that sex was a beautiful and wonderful sacrament and I should never live my life in fear of it or in fear of having it denied to me. But why did I have to be told this was even a possibility? Would I have been so fearful if I’d never known it was something to be afraid of?
My first school-age crush arrived in third grade. Her name was Courtney Kolesnikov, and she was a girl with sleepy purple doe eyes and a sleek Roman nose who had already started growing to statuesque heights while all the boys were still underdeveloped and—what’s that word again?—shrimpy. She was delivered to me one night in a dream, in which I imagined that some invisible ghost was trying to pull down the pants of all the girls at school; hers were the only ones that this unseen phantom successfully removed. I reflected on this the next morning, and by the end of the day I realized what it meant: I liked a girl.
For weeks I kept the secret, dreading that I had committed a crime and would soon be found out for it. But I did not do an effective job of hiding my feelings from her or from my classmates: at every opportunity, I had been sitting next to her during math and reading sections, running alongside her as we did our laps in gym class, surreptitiously slipping her my unwanted Archie and Richie Rich comics. What I had admitted to myself with great difficulty was easy enough for other students to codify into a taunt: “David likes Courtney.” They said it to me with spite and derision, turning a word that I thought conveyed endearment and affection into an act of loathsomeness, and they hung it around my neck like a millstone. They chanted it when I was tagged out in softball, when I gave the wrong answer to a multiplication problem or couldn’t find a seat on the bus, and especially whenever I came anywhere near Courtney—or any other girl, for that matter. Soon Courtney herself became convinced of the wrongness of my feelings: if, in an act of classroom charity, I tried to offer her the answer to a teacher’s question, she rolled her eyes in disdain, and if I tried to run alongside her in gym, she just pumped those long legs harder and sped off. She despised me for liking her, and I hated myself for it.
This went on for almost two years, until fifth grade, when she stopped me on our way out of the classroom. “I have something for you,” she said, reaching into her backpack and producing a small envelope that she handed to me. She turned around and walked away before I could open it.
The envelope contained a very literal love note: a piece of paper on which she’d drawn a musical clef and two notes with our initials, D.I. and C.K., inside them, sitting happily side by side. I had no idea what prompted her change of heart; maybe my months of silent, slavish devotion had worn her down. I was so excited by the news that I slipped the note into my backpack, told no one about it, and did nothing.
More weeks went by before I called Courtney and asked her on our first date. On a day of parent-teacher conferences when we were off from school and no one there would know we were out together, I took her, unsupervised by adults, to an afternoon matinee of Raising Arizona, an early Coen brothers comedy that mightily challenged our middle-school minds. The mood, more panicked than romantic, was not enhanced by a ticket taker who asked if we were brother and sister; I made absolutely no physical advances on her during the afternoon. We politely said goodbye after the thoroughly perplexing fi
lm. I called her that evening to make sure she had gotten home safely.
It was our last date. The more I thought about the tremendous burden this romance represented, the more it scared me. I was repulsed when I thought about myself and couldn’t bear to involve her in this disgusting fraud. I looked at my little boy’s hands and saw the lethal claws of a carnivorous beast.
Courtney started calling to ask why I wasn’t calling her. I never had a good answer. “Don’t worry,” I told her, “I still like you.”
In our last phone conversation, she sounded like she was going to cry. “Why did you do this,” she asked, “if you never really liked me?” I hung up because it was easier to run away. I went into my backpack and retrieved the love note, now creased and beaten from perpetual agitation, pocked by the pencils and uncapped pens it had been tossed among in my carelessness, and put it in the trash. When Courtney and I saw each other in classes or around the halls, we had a sensible reason for avoiding eye contact and keeping our interactions to an awkward minimum. And that’s how my cowardice ruined my first relationship.
After devoting many months to reconciling and rekindling their marriage, my parents decided their next project was to find a new home, a tidy suburban baptismal where they could wash away the frustrations and distress the city had imposed on them. From the answering-machine messages left by their real estate broker that I kept surreptitiously deleting, I learned that they had bought a house in northern New City, a locality that had attracted them not with a name that promised freshness and a new start but with the Ford dealership where they bought their first SUV. I had never seen the town, but as soon as I finished ninth grade, I would have to live there.
The verdict on my future arrived at a frustrating time, just as I was getting acclimated to the workloads that awaited me and the caste system that had built itself around me in my first year of high school; just as my spring-term position as the assistant manager of the girls’ softball team was getting me out of gym and into the company of several very tall, very strong young women; just as my nose decided it was going to grow away from my face as fast as it could and see if the rest of my body could keep up with it. The transition was social suicide, and I told none of my classmates or teachers that I wouldn’t be returning in the fall, savoring the shock and dismay I imagined they would feel when my absence occurred to them early the following September.