by David Adjmi
His eccentricity delighted me, but the rest of the Blumes were all straitlaced and conservative. I don’t think they knew what to make of me—with my shirts perpetually untucked, my pants ineptly hemmed and permanently wrinkled, my hair overgrown into a mongrel shag. I was nervous and shy around adults, and I think my shyness made me come off as somehow untoward. Ari’s father barely registered my existence, but his mother made no effort to conceal her distaste for me: surely the godless, oily-faced wastrel hanging around their living room was a bad influence on her son. When I was over, she’d clamber around the mansion, clanking her keys, eyes sandbagged with weary contempt. She’d scold Ari in terms that felt violently intimate, as though I weren’t there, and would find coded ways of getting rid of me: “We’re having dinner now!” and “Time to get moving, Ari!” One afternoon we were playing in his yard when she came through the front gate with her clanking keys and her various briefcases, and, upon seeing me, shouted, “GET THAT GODDAM CHILD OUT OF MY HOUSE!” pointing her index finger like I was some ungainly spill on the carpet.
His mother’s apparent distaste for me wasn’t enough to doom our friendship—not in itself—but in the first week of sixth grade there was a shocking turn of events, for I made a new friend. I did so without any help or encouragement from my mother. I knew Howie Blum peripherally from the neighborhood, but like Ari, he wasn’t someone I imagined myself speaking to, much less befriending. Even with my notably low status at school I felt I was above Howie, who was obese and sweated too much and was ungainly in every way. His hair was a worn-out Brillo pad. His face looked swollen with mumps. His mother dressed him in cheap-looking cotton shirts, ecru and plum. I used to see him on Ocean Parkway jumping rope with social pariahs like Judy Shamula and Tanya Applebaum and the spectacle of it repelled me: an obese boy playing jump rope alfresco with two miserable-seeming girls. But when he struck up a conversation with me (in gym class, on the sidelines; we were both refugees from dodgeball), we had an intense, instant connection. Within minutes of our meeting he launched spontaneously into incredible satiric impersonations of our teachers. His observations felt ripped from the inside of my own head; every secret thought I held he made explicit, right there in the middle of the gym. He laughed easily and copiously, and it was contagious. The laughter felt explosive and secret, a barely capped hysteria. I sensed the laughter belied more primitive forces, that it opened into giant amphitheaters of rage and despair, but I was too swept up in the delirium to care.
Howie’s family was German, and they’d recently emigrated from Munich. They lived in a two-family house on Ocean Parkway, just a few doors down from Ari Blume. I thought it was a boon to have two friends right on the same block—and we were all in the same Hebrew classes. But soon after meeting him Howie confessed to me that Ari was, to his mind, “sickening.” He thought Ari looked funny, and behaved like an animal (he even came up with a portmanteau to this effect, “Ari-mal”). He repeatedly urged me to break off my friendship with Ari. He worked to instill in me the notion that Ari was disgusting. Though his mother seemed to despise me I still liked Ari—I liked his strangeness, there was nothing sickening or disgusting about him. I’d never been in a position to reject anyone, and felt it was unfair to have to choose between friends, but I did want to please Howie. I was impressed by his ardor, his determination to extract an exclusive loyalty from me. No one had ever wanted so eagerly to win my friendship, so I felt in debt to him for that. And with Howie’s repeated insistences I felt less and less bound to Ari: maybe he really was disgusting, maybe I’d been lax and indiscriminate about my friends. Who needed Ari when there was this font of nonstop hilarity and charisma in the person of Howie who wanted me and only me? And yet Ari had done nothing wrong. I liked his friendship and didn’t want to lose it.
My moral quandary plagued me for weeks. Howie continued to make aggressive bids for my friendship—and it was no ordinary friendship he wanted, it was something more symbiotic and intense. I’d never experienced anything like seduction, but that’s what it was. I was being initiated into a new order, a new way of living. I was being groomed, courted—whatever it was, I was ripe for it. I was ripe for some form of escape.
In sixth grade, the yeshiva separated boys and girls during Hebrew classes so we could each learn the moral proscriptions of our gender. Boys had to study something called the Gemara, which involved the painstaking, exhaustive unknotting and regurgitation of lots of small thorny moral questions and debating them endlessly: Were you morally obliged to shut a window if someone in the room was cold? Must you give up your seat on the bus to an old woman? It was hard to take notes or pay sustained attention to all the various conundra about debts and mules and cows and crops, and I hated our teacher, Rabbi Lipnick.
Middle school seemed to occasion a new cruelty from the faculty. All the teachers were suddenly sarcastic and hateful, but he was the worst. Rabbi Lipnick hurled nonstop abuses at us. He smashed his fist against the desk so hard the blackboard shook. He threw erasers at us and called us morons and animals. He mashed gum in people’s hair and threw cereal down our shirts. He weighed about three hundred pounds but despite his obesity he was quick, he had a lupine energy. He’d bound in swift strides, stalking the room and screaming at us with his parts pulling and whooshing in different directions like a giant water balloon. He sweated profusely even in winter: when he wrote on the blackboard, gouts of his sweat mingled with traces of chalk to form a thick mineral slush. He didn’t have enough hair to clip on his yarmulke, and the sweat effected a lubricating slippage so it would keep falling off.
I despised Rabbi Lipnick but I’d had other terrible teachers and always found a way to pay some form of attention in class. Howie, however, spurred my dereliction. He didn’t seem to care if he failed any tests or paid attention, so I didn’t either. We began passing notes that lampooned what was happening in class. We dissected Rabbi Lipnick’s every move, his odd animal growls and snarls. We broke down social dynamics of different cliques in school, we gossiped about people we liked and didn’t. The notes got longer and more elaborate. Howie got in the habit of starting them the night before, so they became more detailed and took on a formal epistolary quality. The notes were like manna to me. They made life feel new. The soul-killing repetitiveness and crushing routine that seemed a permanent feature of my existence up to then vanished. Each time I sat with his immaculate swooping cursive, its twisting bubbles and loops, I gained privileged access to his inner world: it was a kingdom and I’d been given the silver key. I was led into the interior of something, when up to then I’d only viewed surfaces and exteriors. I felt for the first time in my life like a human being—it was a feeling I never imagined for myself, a feeling that filled me up completely. I didn’t know how starved for my own humanity I’d been up to then—for joy and pleasure and life. The belonging was so meaningful to me, so profound and unprecedented, I wanted Howie to know I didn’t take it for granted. I wanted to give something back to him. But what would equal the impossible beauty of those notes, those dispatches that reached the elusive inner chambers of my own heart?
One day, on impulse, in the middle of class, I pulled out a sheet of loose-leaf paper and in my sloppy bad handwriting scrawled, “I hate Ari’s guts!” It was one of those craven moments in life where one does the thing one least wants to do, but at the time it made a loose sense. Just as I was passing the note to Howie, a fat hand intercepted it. “What do we have here, gentlemen?” said Rabbi Lipnick. “It must be fascinating, fascinating!” As he unfolded the note and read it silently, sweating and dripping all over it, I felt my heart sink. He lifted his head. “Ahhhhhri,” he announced in his thick Israeli drawl, “David Adjmi hates ya guts.” He balled up the note and threw it in Ari’s face. It bounced off his forehead and onto the floor. The class erupted in laughter. Ari laughed too, but his face reddened and his eyes were flushed with sadness. I felt ashamed about what I’d written in the note. It was cruel and it wasn’t even true, but I didn’t know h
ow to explain my actions to Ari—I couldn’t explain them to myself. When I saw him at lunch, or in class or in the hallway, I never apologized or even acknowledged what I’d done; I’d learned from my family how to dodge unpleasantness.
Howie and I walked home from school together every day, we did homework together, we talked on the phone for hours. We were together every weekend. We wrote and recorded radio plays about people in our class. We went shopping and rented videos. I never had any money—my parents didn’t give me an allowance—so Howie would pay for my bus fare. He bought me pizza, and soda, and tickets to movies. Almost right away we began to twin each other, though we looked nothing alike—it was a kind of spiritual twinning; we were two halves of a whole. People started to confuse us: they called me Howie and him David. It became a joke at my school, that we were interchangeable, but I felt our point-by-point isomorphism as a relief. The burden of selfhood had grown so oppressive, and now I had a supplemental self. And where we weren’t alike I started to reshape myself to match him. I wanted our connection to be smooth, frictionless. I wanted no separation between us. Even though we were outsiders, together we built a world where other people were outsiders and we, cocooned together from the inside, could laugh at them. Popular students were caricatures of human beings. Adults were gorgons and monsters. Everyone was grotesque and ridden with warts and disease.
We satirized our teachers endlessly. Our science teacher, Mrs. Birman, was a favorite, with her absurdly perfect posture and gratingly precise diction. We loved her dumb, sarcastic quips—like when she asked her students if they would like a zero in her book, as though it were some exotic special in a French restaurant. She had all sorts of catchphrases, and we turned them into musical numbers for imaginary Broadway musicals. We wrote a song detailing a wart on her face to the tune of Laura Branigan’s “Gloria.” We wrote plays and novellas in which she was assassinated, trounced in the jungle, thrown in an incinerator to ecstatic cheers. We thought it was absurd she could have power, but the world was an absurd place, and even buffoonish people like Mrs. Birman could have authority in it.
When my class brought a substitute teacher to tears one afternoon with our endless shouting and jostling, Mrs. Birman was dispatched to deliver a damning sermon and punishment assignment. Howie had put in a special effort to be on good behavior that day. He took offense at the blanket aspect of the punishment. “But what about the people who were good?” he asked.
“What about them?” said Mrs. Birman.
“I made a special effort to be good. Why should I be punished with the people who misbehaved?” he said. “It isn’t fair.”
Mrs. Birman’s spine elongated with sudden gravitas. “Fair?” she echoed, a tiny facetious smirk curling at the sides of her mouth. “No one ever said that life was fair, my friend.” She punctuated each syllable with a kind of filigree, as if to brand Howie indelibly with the unfairness—as if to say that no, it wasn’t fair, just like the tribulations of the Jews weren’t fair, or the Holocaust, or all the pervasive sufferings and cumulative miseries and trials of human existence weren’t fair but you still had to endure them, and once you endured them you were permitted to inflict their punishing embittering lessons on the next generation, and that it was Mrs. Birman’s job to impress this very fact upon us: that we were helpless in the face of an absurd universe, that her salutary punishments were lessons in Judaic humility, that her authority was absolute whether it was warranted or not. But this too became grist for our eviscerating satire. For months, Howie continued to hone his impression of her to my awestruck delight: “No one ever said that life was fair, my friend.” He sponged up every detail, every nuance of behavior, every twitch and incremental shift in her expression. He punctuated the routine with theatrical pauses—craning his neck, mimicking her every swivel and blank stare until I was breathless with laughter.
When I turned twelve years old that spring, I had to start seeing my father again. As inexplicably as he left, he was back, and I had to spend Saturday nights with him as part of some new improvisational custody arrangement between my parents. Howie was fascinated to be the friend of someone from a broken home. I thought he might judge me or reject me, but he openly pitied me—a response I found rather gratifying, as pity and love were interchangeable to me in those days. Richie, who was still my father’s champion, came out with me and my father that first Saturday to the Genovese House—which, along with Fiorentino’s of Avenue U, was one of two restaurants Dad liked. But my father didn’t order food; he just watched us eat while he sat back like a reigning monarch. “Go ahead,” he told us. “Enjoy yourselves, boys. Get whatever you want.” I sat quietly in a constipated rage all night, picking at my Caesar salad, speaking in angry monosyllables. I resented, even then, with my poorly defined boundaries, having to spend my Saturday night with this strange man and his coarse tonsure of hair and his Stolichnaya on the rocks. He asked loud general questions and spoke in broad declarative statements. He never bothered to explain why he left or why he was back. He was a phony and, to my mind, despicable.
After dinner, my father dropped us off, and Richie, who maintained his tropism toward unquestioned piety and loyalty, railed against me for being a bad son: “How can you treat your own father like that?” he cried. “Don’t you have any respect?” It didn’t occur to me to respect my father, and it didn’t occur to me to defend my position. I didn’t know I even had a position. I just had feelings—and they weren’t even feelings, just some inchoate preverbal jam, like stem cells. Later that night, I called Howie, who responded to my jeremiad with satisfyingly exaggerated expressions of pity and censure: “It’s like torture,” he exclaimed hotly. “How can you take it? Your father sounds disgusting!”
I relied on Howie to make me laugh, to show my life back to me in the form of a satiric cartoon. In some respect, he took on the job of raising me. He was more a parent to me than my own father. The care and attention he lavished so freely put pressure on me to give something back. I wasn’t used to someone liking me and didn’t know how to keep his affection. The only currency I had was my sophistication, the worldliness I learned from my mother. There was still lots Howie didn’t know about America, or Brooklyn, for that matter—his family was still new to the country—so I started to operate as a sort of concierge, a docent who could tour him through the civilized world. When I took him to Caraville for the first time his eyes lit up as if it were a fairyland. He’d never heard of cheesecake or rice pudding—he’d never seen anyone like Beverly the hostess, never heard a voice so polluted by nicotine. I taught him about Syrian foods, and SY slang, words he immediately appropriated—but not just words, a whole sensibility. He absorbed it instantly, and was able to not only play it all back to me but parody it as he was replaying it: he had the same binocular capacity I had. And with this binocular vision he was able to see me: I was visible for the first time.
Howie had never seen a play, so during winter break I led him to the TKTS booth one afternoon where we got tickets to some Neil Simon thing. After that we went to see plays together all the time: culture was back! To fund my habit, I used money I saved up from birthdays and holidays, and when that ran out Howie would pay for me, or I’d filch tens and twenties from my mother’s purse. Using her instruction as a guide, I exposed Howie to the dazzlement of cream tea in a little luxe parlor in the Trump Tower, salads at Le Train Bleu, apple pie à la mode in a dimly lit restaurant in a midtown Hilton. We went to the Met and the Guggenheim and Brentano’s. We screwed up the nerve to enter into hallowed temples of fashion, places I’d never been because they’d seemed so forbidding, like Bergdorf’s and Saks. The places seemed to dangle the promise of some initiatory bliss, a pleasure beyond ordinary familiar pleasure or beauty, almost a kind of spiritual ravishment. The subway rides back home were for debriefing and analyzing our findings, assessing what had indelibly happened to us. Our experiences were suspended in a vague cloud of art, culture—something exquisite, but we didn’t have a name for it. We wer
e pressing our fingertips against these alien surfaces and textures, and, in turn, every interface altered us, imprinted us permanently.
Once I had it I felt the obligation to maintain Howie’s view of me as a precious font of culture and experience. I was ashamed to admit when I didn’t know or understand or invent something. I wanted to appear magically self-contained, fully formed, causa sui. Whatever new foods he shared with me, movies he liked, I made a point to exaggerate my disinterest. I didn’t want to concede he could enlighten me in any way, as such concessions were signs of weakness. Sometimes, though, I’d lose my footing. My insecurities and anxieties would emerge—the mask would slip. I was pathologically fearful of very ordinary things. I was scared to walk into record stores, scared to buy subway tokens. I was afraid to call 411 and speak to the operator—what made me worthy of a reply? What if she hung up on me, sickened by my lack of personhood? Every social interaction addled me with panic. I felt shame in asking for things, terrified of asserting my existence.
But Howie was fearless—and he didn’t judge me for my neurotic fear of life, he found it charming and endearing. He’d repeat his soothing mantras: that there was nothing they could do to us, that they couldn’t have us arrested for buying subway tokens. “We’re allowed to walk into stores!” he’d say with comic exaggeration, and I’d laugh with him, laugh at my own irrational fears, laugh at the way my siblings laughed watching Linda Blair’s head spin in The Exorcist—for the horror wasn’t reality, it was an illusion.
I didn’t understand how the tenor of reality could change so drastically by seeing it through someone else’s eyes: how could someone make you believe in something so emphatically? How was a boy of eleven who was fat and badly dressed so remarkably assured? I couldn’t understand where he’d gotten the confidence, why he had it and I didn’t; but I was able, for a time, to live on borrowed confidence. His confidence made me braver.