by David Adjmi
A few weeks after I started second grade, Arlene swallowed half a bottle of sleeping pills. When the drug took effect she called her friend Sandra, slurring into the receiver that she was dying and wanted to say goodbye. Sandra insisted on speaking to my mother, and Arlene (who was probably at this point waffling about whether she really wanted to die) shouted to my mother downstairs that Sandra wanted to talk to her. My parents promptly drove Arlene to get her stomach pumped, and when the doctors finished, drove her back home. I was watching television in the living room when they returned. Arlene walked up the stairs to her room and shut the door. No one asked her why she wanted to die, or if she might try it again. The next morning during breakfast I felt my sister’s anguish reverberating in all the quiet. But I didn’t dare say a word. I sensed that remarking on it was a kind of violence, a pinprick in a helium balloon. I stopped asking questions, because silence seemed like a kind of etiquette.
In the middle of Thanksgiving dinner that year a violent argument erupted between my parents. Their fights were getting nastier, and my parents no longer went to any perceivable lengths to shield me from them. My mother screamed at the top of her lungs that my father was A PIECE A SHIT and she broke a dish. My father screamed at her to DROP DEAD. I crept invisibly up the stairs to my room, locked the door shut, and listened to the cast recording of A Chorus Line on my orange-and-white plastic Victrola. I went into my closet and pulled out the plastic briefcase where I kept my stash of saved playbills. The Sweeney Todd cover had a grotesque caricature of Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney. They had giant heads and small bodies. Their mouths were huge, and Sweeney bared his teeth like some wild animal—he appeared to be growling or screaming, and was swinging a bloodied razor. I stood in front of the mirror to see if I could stretch my mouth and make it half the size of my face, like his.
By the end of the year, Arlene had a new boyfriend, Charlie. They worked together at a store called Record Explosion. Charlie bought me the double album of Sweeney Todd as a gift, and I spent hours listening to it in my room on my Victrola. I’d sing quietly along, mimicking the declension of staccato notes slicing at the long sustained ones in “Epiphany.” I’d try to work myself up to feel all the feelings Sweeney felt, I’d trace over the feelings in my mind like I was drawing a stencil. Playing the album reanimated the experience of watching it in the theatre. It was a little like a séance, only I wasn’t the boy in the audience anymore, I was Sweeney himself, singing along in an atonal jag how I was “alive” and “full of joy.” But after a certain point I’d inevitably become overstimulated and frightened and would have to shut off the Victrola. I tried telling myself it was just a record, and that these were the sounds this particular record made, but it was too terrifying. Even the name he chose for himself was frightening—Sweeney—as opposed to the Anglican-sounding, consonant-heavy Benjamin Barker. The sw in “Sweeney” was the sound of a blade: a guillotine that cut to the gush of blood, to the final breath of the ey, a soul breaking free of its contours.
A few months after they started dating, Charlie wanted to marry Arlene, but my father forbade it. My father hated Charlie. Charlie was a deadbeat—he listened to someone called Frank Zappa, he wore an earring. Dad did everything he could to break them up. If Arlene was talking on the upstairs line with Charlie my father would intercept her conversation from the downstairs line and scream that Charlie was LOWLIFE SCUM and A PIECE A GARBAGE. He would curse Charlie out and threaten to beat him up. And Arlene would violently shout back that she was TAWKING ON THE PHONE over and over until she burst out in sobs of intense humiliation. I remember Arlene running up and down the hallway in hysterics, slamming doors and wallowing in despair that her love for Charlie would never be sanctioned by my parents. My father’s worry that Arlene would ruin her reputation with this Lowlife Piece of Shit Charlie caused him to turn to the Prune Juice. He was getting drunker and drunker. And on one of these nights he’d drunk a bit too much of the Prune Juice, and when Arlene locked herself in my brothers’ room (to vouchsafe her love for Charlie on Richie’s private line) my father tried to cajole Arlene, in his slurring stupor, to open the door, because he didn’t want her talking to that Lowlife Scumbag, he wanted her off the damn phone, but Arlene wouldn’t open the door, and though he wasn’t generally violent when he was drunk* my father slammed his body repeatedly into the door until it came flying off its hinges, and there were splinters of wood and pieces of door frame everywhere. Once the door frame was busted he tried to make casual conversation with her, but Arlene was terrified and weeping. I was in Arlene’s room directly across the hall, camouflaged by its citric yellow and orange flowers. I saw my father beat the door in, I saw it collapse from its hinge. I saw my sister scream and lunge dramatically backward on Richie’s bed like a figure in an oil painting. The next morning we ate breakfast together, and no one mentioned that Richie no longer had a door, or that my father was drunk and maniacal. We pretended it never happened.
After that night, the fighting stopped for a while. I didn’t understand the turn of events, what made people happy or mad, but I was grateful for the reprieve. One night, we all clustered together in the living room, and Dad put on a Barbra Streisand album. Everyone was in a good mood. We had a spirited conversation. Arlene began singing along to the Barbra Streisand record while we all sat on the sofa and watched her perform. She was obsessed with Barbra Streisand, and had every single nuance and cadence of her vocal quality down pat. When Barbra Streisand belted a high, impassioned note, my sister belted with her in a way that both mocked and embraced the baroque emotion in the song.
At some point, Richie made a joke about a woman named Geraldine.* I’d never heard of Geraldine, and when I asked who she was the mere question instigated wild laughter. “You never saw Flip Wilson?” said Richie.
“That was before he was born,” said my mother.
Stevie stood up from the sofa. He lifted his hand and let his wrist drop, then began to sashay across the living room. The room exploded with laughter. “He’s doing Geraldine! That’s Geraldine, Dave!” My father smacked his knee with the heel of his hand. My mother’s face was frozen in a wide mirthless smile. Then I heard it emit a hard, granular noise that I recognized as a kind of laughter. Richie followed Stevie’s lead—he began to flounce around and speak with an exaggerated lisp. My father slapped my brothers five, then began to swoosh and flap his limp hands along with them, which only made my mother and sister break up even harder. “He’s acting like a Lot Six!” said Arlene, and she clapped her hands together and threw back her head, laughing so hard her face turned red.
I laughed along with them, but as I was laughing and having fun, I could feel my tiny heart pounding in my chest. My face was hot. I felt like I was burning. The room around me dissolved, and I was shaking uncontrollably.
“What’s a matter, honey?” My mother’s eyes were fixed on me. “Why are you shaking?”
“Why’s he shaking?” said my father.
“Are you coming down with something?” My mother felt my head. My heart was beating so hard I thought my rib cage would break.
“What’s the matter, Dave?” said Arlene.
When I tried to answer, I broke down sobbing.
“Are you tired, honey?” said my father. “You want to go to bed?”
“He looks tired,” said Stevie.
“Hazit*—what’s the matter with him?” said Arlene.
My mother stroked my hair. “Do you want to go to sleep?” she asked.
I nodded and wiped my eyes.
I kissed my parents good night, walked up the stairs to my room, and climbed into bed. When I was safely alone, I buried my head in my pillow and let out a series of anguished, racking sobs. I’d heard the term Lot Six before but I didn’t know what it was—only that it was something freakish, that a Lot Six was someone who had no place in the world. I couldn’t let myself be that. I wanted to be part of life. All that night, I cried myself to sleep, hugging my pillow to my chest, silently vowing over and
over to never become a Lot Six.
The Great Black Pit
IN THE LATE seventies there was a craze for grisly horror films. Though I’d never seen one, the images were everywhere—on newspaper ads and marquees of theatres, on posters that festooned the intestinal tunnels of New York subways: Maniac, Dawn of the Dead. The very names sickened me; I had no defense against the darkness they portended. I didn’t believe the films were an expression of reality—they were over the top and fake—but they were still terrifying, and I couldn’t understand how my siblings would watch them of their own free volition. They viewed the horror as a kind of entertainment. They talked about how funny and sick the horror was, how they had to clamp their eyes shut when it got too gruesome. How people would wear the skins of their murdered victims as masks and little children were possessed by devils. I listened in fascinated revulsion, envious of the strength they possessed—strength that rendered them capable of withstanding horrors I was too weak to stomach. The remotest vaguest descriptions of scenes from the films would make me physically ill, as if the words tapped some invisible meridian in me.
My emotions always manifested as physical symptoms. Maybe generations of trauma left their impression in me, like teeth marks. My mother’s mother, Grandma Franco, had terrible phobias, and those too had physical manifestations. She grew up in Aleppo, as did my father’s family—the Adjmis and the Francos knew each other, everyone knew everyone—but my grandmother was taught to be wary of the Adjmis as they were known to be not particularly nice. The Adjmi boys knew about her phobias. They knew of her peculiar terror of snakes. They thought it was funny that a girl could be so frightened of a harmless garden snake. When she was eleven, as a joke, they hid behind a tall hedge and when she passed pelted her with tiny snakes. The snakes ran through my grandmother’s hair and under her clothes. She screamed and went into shock. Her terror was so intense it turned her hair white, then it fell out completely. She became catatonic. She couldn’t walk or speak for a full year.
When I first heard this story, it sounded like a dark fairy tale, some ugly moralistic parable to dissuade bad marriages. Surely any union produced by these two sets of people could only end in disaster: my origins were blighted from the outset. Decades later, when, at the age of sixteen, my mother announced her engagement to an Adjmi, my grandmother was livid. She wouldn’t allow it. But she was a woman, so her refusals meant nothing.
My grandmother, like my mother, had a life that resembled a Dickens novel or woman’s weepie. She was always forced into circumstances not of her choosing, then forced to summon resources to make the best of these circumstances. Once her family immigrated to the States she fell wildly in love with a doctor—a J-Dub,* yes, but he was handsome and a good person and he’d proposed marriage, and they were really in love. But her father made her break off that relationship. He arranged for her instead to marry my grandfather, an SY man she barely knew. Within a few years, after bearing four children, my grandfather was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a sanitarium, and my grandmother was forced to support the family. She found a job stitching umbrellas in a factory but the work took its toll: she’d get so exhausted she’d pass out right on the sidewalk, right in front of her kids. And when he was released from the sanitarium my grandfather became impossible to be around. He was an intractable presence in his chair near the front window. He’d wheeze with his one lung, moaning like a ghoul for her to bring him food, bring him medicine. The illness left him unable to work—he couldn’t do anything really, so he became furious at life. His fury led him to bouts of intemperate violence. He’d explode in tantrums: smashing plates, throwing food, screaming and yelling in Arabic until his face turned color. When my grandmother’s cherished younger brother died in a car accident, my grandfather couldn’t bear the sight of her dressed in her lugubrious black clothes. It depressed him to see her in mourning. He demanded she change clothes, and when my grandmother refused, he ripped the clothes right off her body, as she screamed and wept in protest. For her children, who witnessed the screaming and the smashing of dishes, who were surely troubled by their mother’s slow deterioration, her fainting spells on the sidewalk—for them my grandmother was Mildred Pierce, or one of any number of characters Joan Crawford excelled at. It was a role at which women were forced to excel. She became an emblem of sacrifice, and for her children this elevated her suffering, it gave her misery a kind of logic. Life was something inflicted on a person, yes, but suffering could be its own reward.
By the time I was old enough to register her as a presence my grandmother had lapsed into senility and her body was eroded by disease. People were always plying her with plastic cups of orange juice so she wouldn’t go into shock. They were constantly injecting her with needles. My mother and her two sisters would gather every Sunday in her apartment off Kings Highway to help organize and collate her seemingly hundreds of pills into the cells of small plastic trays; the trays brimmed with pastel-hued pills for different times of the day to keep her heart from giving out, or the blood from solidifying in her veins. She’d become a collection of symptoms and physical ailments, and though the ailments were physical it was always clear that somehow this was the product of her life experience—that the pain and sadness abraded at her spiritually, and this spiritual trauma manifested in physical decay. In the shadow of this bleak erosion my mother and aunts would reminisce about how she used to be; how before she met my grandfather she was a flapper and a singer and an artist and bohemian; how she was full of fire and life and defiance, and that I couldn’t know—I couldn’t know how great a woman she was because her mind had been eaten by senility.
I never knew what to make of their long panegyrics, the claims about her greatness. I was forced to accept people’s testimonies about whatever glorious heyday preceded me, but by the age of nine I was starting to doubt the reliability of my narrators. They spoke about my grandmother like she was an icon in some far-reaching Italian peninsula where people made pilgrimages to visit, a saintly woman calcified in her sacrifice like a stone pillar.
I didn’t see her in that way. Her attempts at playing with me were pleasantly anodyne (“I’m gonna eat ya up,” she’d deadpan, tugging my fist to her mouth and making small, affectless chewing noises, like those zombies in midnight movies) but she seemed hollowed out to me, barely a person. She wore long thick woolen cardigans and stared expressionlessly out windows, picking at her emerald tray of intractably sticky and unmeltably hard licorice candies. She shuffled stiffly in her slippers, rotating her false teeth around in her mouth, her jaw retracting and resurfacing and endlessly blurring the planes and shapes of her face. When my grandfather was alive he would sit by the window with his little pot of Turkish coffee, and shout and make noise. But when he died it was quiet and she merely resumed his mantle at the window, as though picking up a long-burning torch—a phantom: dead and also waiting to die. Was that my destiny too? Would I become like her—my face a meaningless grid of planes and craters and contours? A ghost staring blankly out a window, drained by traumatic experiences?
My entry into the social world was not auspicious. My parents enrolled me at a yeshiva—a school for religious Jews—which posed a problem because my family was not religious. We were barely observant. We worked our way around the rim of Jewish ordinances as almost a formality. We ate kosher, sort of, and celebrated the main holidays, but that was the extent of it. My mother had wanted me to go to a French lycée: it was her dream to go to Paris and she ached for a Francophilic child. She wheedled and fought, but it was useless to fight my father, who felt my older siblings had been corrupted by Nashville and cheeseburgers. He told my mother he’d deprived them of a heritage but wasn’t going to make that mistake with me—that not only would I become holy by my teachings but I would provide everyone else in the family with a proxy Jewishness, and they would absorb my Jewish teachings by osmosis, a kind of religious trickle-down.
When I got to the yeshiva I’d never been to synagogue or even opened
a Bible. My father never explained the responsibilities I’d been assigned, the holiness I was meant to embody. There were no prefatory remarks of any kind—I was simply deposited in a classroom and left to figure things out. I didn’t know Hebrew. I didn’t know prayers, or who I was praying to, or why in my prayers I had to thank God for not making me a woman. I didn’t know why people kept kissing things: they kissed books, they kissed their clenched fists, they kissed slim silver rectangular boxes that hung near every door of every room. Boys kissed morseled bundles of satiny strings that hung from weird diaphanous shawls we were forced to wear under our shirts. There was something holy about all the kissing, but what? I knew this was my heritage but it felt alien to me.
For a brief spell, I put the Old Testament in the same category of Escape to Witch Mountain—a diversionary entertainment with supernatural elements. But I soon came to realize the Bible was a kind of history, a doctrine of belief, which disappointed me. Its stories rang false, and I found God very off-putting. He was a bully who inflicted psychological torture on people. And the Bible wasn’t spiritually edifying. It didn’t fill me with emotion, it didn’t make me want to bolt up and start singing or dancing or sobbing the way I did watching The Wiz and 42nd Street.
I knew, however, that people took these stories extremely seriously. A whole society was sprung from these stories—with schools and teachers and synagogues and holidays. An entire language was devoted to disseminating religious information, and there was a place called Israel where people made pilgrimages because it was holy and the epicenter of our heritage. Even though the religion and the biblical evidence marshaled by my teachers were patently unconvincing, they was effectively presented as reality, as something immutable and eternal, and I didn’t want to disturb that which preexisted me. Who was I, a small child, to dispute the colossus of Judaism, with its history and towering permanence? I began kissing things. I kissed doors and my fists and articles of clothing, I kissed the motes of dust in the air. I’d begun to accept that living would be a kind of honed falseness—that, like a broken bone locked in a cast, one’s inner self only existed to be grafted and reshaped.