by David Adjmi
I tried to fit in but didn’t know even very basic things about being Jewish, so I made gaffes, like eating an unkosher candy bar in front of people, or mentioning a plotline on The Love Boat.* By the end of second grade I was revealed to be a heathen. There was something flimsy about all my fakery and the other children could smell it. They enjoyed their heritage, they were growing and thriving in a soil that nourished them, but that same soil was acrid and life-choking to me and they could see it. Once it was clear I was the rogue element in the class they began to ostracize me. Like colonies of insects building their invisible societies, structures began to form, hierarchies emerged—and I was at the very bottom.
My mother went through a period of neglect around this time, and my father, who was often gone for long stretches on business trips, was gone for longer than usual. No one checked my homework; my hair was overgrown and uncut. Lunches were pell-mell or simply went unpacked. One day I was hungry and approached a circle of girls to see if they’d share their afternoon snacks with me. One girl dropped a fistful of potato sticks onto the floor. “Here you go,” she said, prompting giggles from the others. I knelt down and ate the potato sticks. The other girls shrieked and laughed. Then the first girl threw another handful of potato sticks. I ate those, too. Soon my classmates were all standing in a semicircle, throwing food at me—dried fruit and potato sticks and Twizzlers, and I ate whatever they threw. It didn’t feel like a compromise or humiliation, it didn’t feel like anything. I was like a bottom-feeder obliged to lick the scum from the bowels of the earth. I was required to grovel and beg. I was indentured to the whims of other people and it was pointless to ask why: it simply was. So I laughed with them, laughed at the absurdity of a boy eating off a dirty floor. A boy who had become a kind of animal.
Just after my ninth birthday the house emptied out. Arlene defied my father’s suffocating mandates and married Charlie. Stevie met a girl named Debbie; they got engaged in a matter of months. Richie was still living at home but he was almost always working or out with friends—and I had no idea what had become of my father, who’d been gone for at least a year, though my sense of time was probably distorted. He’d always been a flickering presence, I wasn’t overly attached to him, but a part of me wanted him back. When I asked my mother where he’d gone, her response was tantalizingly indirect. “On a business trip,” she said, lying badly, but I pretended to believe her like I pretended with everything. It seemed impolite to probe further when she’d gone very deliberately out of her way to lie. I silently congratulated myself on my capacity to withstand chaos. I saw my steely autonomy as a kind of brilliance. A few weeks after that my sister was over at the house and I asked if it was true (though I knew the prospects were slim) that Dad was on a business trip.
My sister’s expression turned grave.
“A business trip?” she said. “That’s what she told you?”
After a brief, uncertain interval, Arlene proceeded to fill in the bare outlines of what I already intuited. My parents were separated. My father had moved in with his brother, Meyer—it happened right after her wedding. “Oh,” I replied, downplaying my shock, “I thought they got a divorce.” I wanted my sister to believe I could easily assimilate whatever information she imparted even as it was being imparted—that this swiftness and facility was a gift I had, part of the Genius for which I had been so lauded. I wanted her to see that I could master preemptively any hairpin turns in life; that I was numb and strong, the way she’d been when she laughed so blithely at the psychotic killer in Maniac; that I possessed no wish or need for anything, and that my absence of need was further evidence of my adamantine strength, the miracle of my existence, which was a kind of unrecorded sainthood.
And just as the conversation was winding down and I felt reasonably assured I’d been successful in my aims, my sister abruptly took my hand. “Come with me,” she said. She walked me down a small corridor to my room, then latched the door behind us. Once we were alone, she leaned in close. “You’re too young to understand this,” she said, almost whispering, “but I don’t know what to do, because I can see you’re getting damaged, and I have to do something.”
“I’m not getting damaged,” I said.
“Yes you are,” she said, her tiny voice cracking. “You don’t know you are because you’re too young to understand what’s happening to you, you’re too young to even understand what I’m saying, but I have to say something.” Her lip was quivering and shaking; her face had turned a bright pink color and her pink eyes were brimming with tears.
“I went to see a therapist,” she continued, “and when I told him about Mommy and Daddy he said they were crazy. He said Daddy is a pathological liar, and that Mommy has something called narcissism. . . .” She tried to continue speaking but her words got broken up with juddering sobs.
“I know,” I assured her, trying to take all this in with my studied absence of sentimentality.
“You’re too young for me to be telling you this,” she repeated, “but I just don’t want them to screw you up.”
“But they won’t.”
“They’re already screwing you up! I can see it and I don’t know what to do!”
I hated to see my sister so despairing, so mired in helplessness; I hated that I was the cause of it. “I already know they’re crazy! I don’t care!” I said, almost swearing it like an oath.
“You’re not having a normal childhood.”
“I don’t need a childhood,” I said and believed absolutely, as I only understood childhood as a sort of exhausting performance. Since I was a Genius, and was known by then to have a kind of suppleness and acuity and intelligence that belied my years, I could see my sister trying to absorb this statement: Did people really need childhoods? Maybe I was different. I could see my sister trying to ascertain what I did and did not need, what the limits of my prodigious abilities were. As she looked at me I could see the pain in her eyes start to congeal into a kind of haze, a grayish blur.
When my father left, his absence triggered a jarringly intense depression in my mother, even though I later learned that for years she’d been planning to divorce him—she’d been plotting her escape but white-knuckling it. If she divorced, she’d be a fallen woman like my Aunt Nina, and no SY would want to marry the child of divorced people. So she decided to wait until her kids were married off. For twenty-five years she lived in a terrified camouflage of modern appliances and B’nai B’rith meetings and fur coats and hairdos. She gave herself leisure activities: she joined clubs, played tennis. She learned to compensate herself for sacrifices she’d been forced to make. When those dilatory tactics wore thin, her survival instinct began to manifest in spasms of wild anger. At the slightest infraction she screamed at the top of her lungs. She wildly smacked my brother with the heel of her slipper until it broke in half. She roughly pulled my sister’s hair as she brushed its knotty tangles into a more manageable frizz. She’d subject my father to nonstop querulous litanies like a pianist practicing scales. Decade by decade, her isolation and misery grew more and more intense until she couldn’t take it—she didn’t care if she’d be a fallen woman, she told my father she wanted him out.
But now that my mother had the freedom she prayed and pined and wished for all those years, she was rudderless. She couldn’t simply resume who she was. There was no self to resume. She was married at sixteen; it was a child’s folly. When she turned seventeen she came back home in tears, the bubble of her teenage fantasy pricked. She told her parents she’d made a horrible mistake, that she couldn’t stay married to this man, that it was awful and unbearable, but her father was unmoved. “This isn’t your home anymore,” he said. “Go home to your husband.” So my mother had to wipe her tears and go back.
Now she was in her forties. She was just a space in brackets, a placeholder with nothing to fill it. My father’s absence stared back at her like a mirror. More than once I overheard her sobbing alone in her room with the door closed, or on the phone, weeping bit
terly and saying, “What am I going to do? I don’t know what to do!” She was usually careful about shielding me from her tears—not so much for me as for the sake of her own privacy—but she did cry in front of me, once, in a moment of fleeting intimacy. I hugged her, and my heart melted with empathy. I felt her suffering as if it were my own. My mother wasn’t used to being hugged, but she was so worn down, so grateful that someone could see and empathize with the suffering she was no longer able to conceal, that she let me. Her sobs were like loud claps of thunder. I felt swallowed and rocked by them like we were both at sea and lost in a violent storm.
After that she never cried in front of me again. Instead of being sad my mother became moody and erratic. The terror and loneliness all hardened into rage, like a kind of cement. Her moods frightened me, and I hid in my small room with its garish red-and-black shag carpet. I hated the peeling wallpaper—the buff patches of empty wall depressed me—but at the same time I found myself mesmerized by its ragged patterns. When I was bored I’d make a Rorschach in my mind out of the cracks in the paint and rips in the wallpaper. I’d trace animals and birds from the negative space, little uneven chimeras that could be anything. I was lonely, but I couldn’t identify the source of my loneliness. I craved some kind of family life but families made me anxious.
I started to think about swallowing pills, as my sister had done. At the time there was a celebrated play on Broadway called Whose Life Is It Anyway? I’d seen a portion of it on the Tony Awards broadcast. It was about a man who wanted to kill himself and felt this was his moral right. Maybe it could be my moral right, too, I silently opined. I locked myself in the bathroom, slid open the door to the medicine cabinet, and panned through the different medications in preparation for my suicide attempt. Would Ex-Lax do the trick? Milk of magnesia? Ultimately, I was too scared of getting my stomach pumped like they did to my sister, and a part of me still wanted to live. The bleakness and extremity of suicide felt less empowering the more I imagined it as a reality.
As I was deliberating whether to kill myself, my mother felt a sudden urgent need to start living! She made plans to go on dates—restitution for those teenage years she wasted on my father. She had divorced friends, friends who wouldn’t besmirch or look down on her for her marital problems—Sonia, Stella, Sonia’s cousin Barb—they could go out together! She was going to dance and socialize and drink cocktails and have a good time!
Night after night, I’d watch my mother at her makeup mirror as she feathered her hair or tested new permutations of eyeshadow. Her friend Claudia Terzi started her own makeup company, Highline Cosmetics, and gave Mom in-home lessons. She taught my mother about lip liners and contouring sponges; now my mother used contouring sponges all the time. She bought a new makeup mirror with different tinted settings that correlated with how you might wear the makeup: to a disco, to a bar. Daytime makeup, nighttime makeup. My mother was on the cutting edge of makeup. My mother was the toast of the town. Every night she was out at some hot spot: Regine’s, Stringfellows, Maxwell’s Plum. I’d glean information as I often did from eavesdropping on phone conversations—or after the fact, from matchboxes she left around the house. I hated having a babysitter and told my mother I could take care of myself, so she stopped hiring one. When she did, I was terrified: I didn’t think she would actually listen to me or take anything I said as an actionable directive.
One night I heard her heels angrily clacking down the hallway to the front door and made the mistake of asking where she was going. “Out!” she shouted in reprisal, slamming the front door as angry punctuation. She didn’t have to answer to anyone now, certainly not to a nine-year-old boy. Her rages were mysterious, but I was determined not to confront her about them. I wanted to project complete autonomy. And I knew she was too fragile and beleaguered to care for me. She had to defy someone and I was the only one around.
With no one around to look after me I learned to care for myself. I bathed infrequently, checked my own homework. I taught myself to cook using whatever ingredients I found in the cabinet; I made my odd decoctions with Wesson oil and garbanzo beans and red-wine vinegar. I’d watch television for hours on end, locating myself in identifiable fragments from various shows, forging a sentient life in the kiln of popular culture. I mainly watched sitcoms, many of which involved omnipotent children who were cleverer than all the adults. There was a power in their not needing things, not needing explanations or intimacy or attention. Power could compensate you for the anguish of feeling unloved. I wanted that power and autonomy.
But then I wanted the opposite, I wanted to saturate myself with anguish and loss and powerlessness—and these cravings, too, could be satisfied by television. I’d watch the movies of the week and act out scenes that mirrored my own sadness back to me.
For weeks, I replayed and relived Ricky Schroder’s climactic scene in The Champ, in which his father, played by Jon Voight, lies on a gurney after having been brutally pummeled in a boxing match. The father is a washed-up prizefighter who devolves into an inveterate gambler and raging alcoholic. In a low point, he gambles away his son’s beloved racing horse but, as an act of redemption, attempts to win back the horse with the prize money from a fight. Voight wins the fight, but in winning he is beaten so badly it kills him. In the last scene of the film Voight is moribund, barely conscious. “Where’s my boy?” he mutters. “Wake up, Champ,” Ricky cries, stuttering in a panic. “W-w-wake up.” He shakes the Champ to resurrect him, but the Champ is gone, leaving Ricky alone, neglected and orphaned. Ricky’s face is stained with pink splotches, snot running down his chin in clear gouts—and as I acted it all out in the den for the first time I found I too could cry real tears spontaneously, I too could produce snot in clear gouts! “Wake up, Champ!” I cried, again and again. When I was finished I ran to the mirror in the bathroom to see my red, tearstained face: was it sufficiently imprinted with trauma? It was. The depth of my pain carried a tremulous power that surprised even me. By imitating the feeling inside the film—using it almost as a kind of stencil—I was able to give expression to feelings inside me I’d buried, that had no other outlet. Unlike the pretending and imitating I had to do in other parts of my life, this didn’t feel false—it felt truer than life, a distillate of what it felt like to be alive. The movie transformed Ricky Schroder’s pain into something beautiful, like the weeping angels in quattrocento paintings at the museum. And because it showed the beauty in the human experience, I was able to see something beautiful about my own pain, my own life. Like Sweeney embracing his cache of lost razors, I embraced my hidden anguish and held it to my breast like an old friend: I know you, I see you. I didn’t need to pretend to be indestructible, the way I did with my sister. I could feel my broken feelings. And I was not alone: millions of other people were watching the movie that night. I imagined myself fused together with them, as if a circuit hummed between us. The TV movie of the week was a way for us to be together. We were in life together. We shared a common humanity. I felt like those people at concerts when a singer sings their favorite song, and they light their cigarette lighters as if to announce to one another that this song is the Song of Myself, and the galaxy of tiny lights sways in the firmament of a darkened stadium, lit with communion.
I’d have moments where I felt connected in this way to some pulse, some essential part of life, but then all at once the feeling of wholeness and communion would vanish and I’d be paralyzed by fits of acute terror and worry—anxiety I couldn’t numb or expel. There had been a spate of robberies in the neighborhood: our house was robbed the previous year in the middle of the night, we were all asleep. I’d predicted it in a sort of vision I had one night just before falling asleep: a cheesy premonition from a B movie, replete with smoky fog and bad lighting. In the vision two faceless men held axes and peered into my room. The next morning the doors and windows of the house were wide open; the television was gone, they’d taken some expensive crystal vase. My mother asked my father to install an alarm but he didn’t
want to spend the money. And once he left, it happened twice more in swift succession. What would deter them from coming back? What would stop them from coming to murder a nine-year-old boy home alone? What would stop them from coming with an ax to murder me in my sleep?
I’d call my sister and tell her I was afraid, and she’d call my father to lash out against him, against both my parents—but then I would defend my mother: it was my fault, I was the one who said I didn’t want a babysitter. My sister just wept and said, “It’s all screwed up! They’re screwing you up!” I’d begun to latch every door once my mother was gone for the night. I patrolled the house with Richie’s baseball bat, the one he kept under his bed. I manned all the windows, the doors—always latching, always checking, reinforcing the house like it was a bunker. As I sat watching television, eating my impromptu meals of garbanzo beans and Wesson oil, I could feel the paper thinness of the walls; it was like a foldout house in a child’s book. There was still the crumbling lathe in the kitchen wall from the hole my brother punched in it. The whole house was like that—people could punch their way in, punch it down with their fists. At midnight or one in the morning, like a torpedo on radar, I’d instinctively feel my mother’s car pull up to the curb. Through the tiny window in the front door I’d see her emerge, the gleam of all her jewelry set off by the flare of acid-red brake lights. I’d hurriedly unlatch all the doors, quickly bound up the stairs, jump into bed and, when she’d check in on me, fake sleep. Eventually I’d drift off into real sleep where my fears carried over unaltered, and in my dreams, men attacked me with axes and thick knives.