by David Adjmi
After that day, puberty and its stirring perils were my sole concern. Spidery black hairs began to cover my milk-white legs. I noticed a milky substance in my ejaculate that hadn’t been there before. Life was a nightmare and I couldn’t make the nightmare stop. My depression worsened. My scoliosis matured significantly. I walked with my hunched shoulders and with my coat on, always. I wore it like a carapace indoors and out, in warm and cold weather—it was my protective armor. I kept my gaze fixed downward, avoided eye contact. I was becoming a man, and manhood was destroying me.
My bar mitzvah was that spring, and the ceremony was at the Ahi Ezer synagogue on Avenue S. I remember sitting in the pews as a quorum of Jewish men wearing microscopic expressions hovered over me: my father, some uncle I barely knew. I looked like a boiled egg: my skin was impossibly white. My eyes beamed terror and discomfort. One of the men rolled up my shirt sleeve to reveal a naked white forearm with its sheath of incongruous tiny hairs. Then he and the others took turns wrapping my arm in a black leather strap connected to a black cube positioned near my shoulder. The cube, I assumed, contained one of those wrapped scrolls with biblical passages inscribed in miniature, and of course I would have to kiss it—I had to kiss everything—but the kissing was bereft of any affection. There was something uncaring in the ritual that reminded me of the strange hushed violence of my doctor’s exam, the frigid chill of a stethoscope pressed against warm skin. One by one, the men took a turn of the strap, wrapping the leather tighter and tighter as the pain scaled my left arm. I looked to my father for some sign of warmth or recognition but he barely noticed me, he was a faceless stranger; he’d fused with the cabal of men, any hint of individuation would break their grim unison.
When they were done the rabbi said something and the men chanted in response. He said something else and then a chorus of women (who’d been totally silent up to then, I’d forgotten they were there) thundered with surprising violence, forcing my eyes upward to the mezzanine. I looked for my mother but she was hidden in the tumble of raked hats. I imagined her up there, somber in her motherliness, watching mutely as I was taken from one column to another, from the world of epicene boys to the world of men, a border invisibly separating us forever.
I was led to a dais where I stood—legs shaking, my poor arm battered and violated—and dutifully wailed my haftarah portion, in my thin tiny voice. After the ceremony, as people congratulated my parents and my relatives all caught up and dispensed barbed endearments, I sneaked away to the basement where the DJ was setting up. The party room had a darkly lustrous feel, it was strangely pagan. There were fluted pilasters, a disco ball. Dim long walls were lined with panels of smoked mirror, each snaked with veins of pale gold. I stood before one in the Italian suit my father bought from some discount outlet in Long Island. My reflection intersected with beams from overhead light—monobrow and pimples on full display, the gap in my teeth a chasm that split my face in half. I hated the boy-man chimera I’d become. I felt humiliated by the ceremony, which wasn’t really for me. It wasn’t even for my parents. It was for some judiciary force that claimed our lives, a force I couldn’t see, only feel. I didn’t think it was God, it was something else. It was dark and ruthless and unforgiving.
When the party was in full swing, I hid at a table anchoring bouquets of red and silver Mylar balloons that matched the color scheme of the invitations. Richie and Stevie were smoking cigars with Morris Shalom. Debbie was vaunting about her calligraphy for the invitations. Arlene smoked Camel Lights and fended off compliments about her red dress she’d bought for ten dollars at Joyce Leslie because she had no money. She was very vocal about hating her dress. She said she felt low class. She didn’t even want to come to the party.
My sister was in a bad way. She was forced to move back home that winter because it turned out Charlie, in addition to being an alcoholic, was addicted to heroin, and on one occasion while inebriated (either drunk or on drugs or some combination) had an argument with Arlene, and in the heat of it nearly dropped their newborn daughter, Lauren, and for my sister this was the last straw. The penultimate straw came a few months prior, when she walked in on Charlie having sex with a prostitute. She wanted a divorce then, but a bunch of rabbis and men from both sides of the family persuaded her to try mediation so she didn’t turn out a fallen woman like my mother and Aunt Nina. Arlene decided, in the end, that she couldn’t live with a druggie, she couldn’t subject her daughter to that. I was thrilled she was back; it relieved the claustrophobia of living with my mother, but my sister was lost. She had no money, and no plan for her life. “You look stunning in that dress,” said Debbie, who was bouncing her daughter to the beat of “Vamos a la Playa.” “This dress is a piece of shit,” said Arlene.
The DJ from 92 WKTU was in full swing now, the dance floor was getting crowded. “Oooh, it’s my song!” cried Debbie when he played “Somebody’s Watching Me.” “Stevie, dance with me!”
Stevie wore a brown suit and he’d grown a thin mustache. His shirt was unbuttoned to the solar plexus, his neck crosshatched with gold chains. “Dance with yourself,” he said, puffing on his cigar.
She turned to me. “Dave, you wanna dance?”
I’d vowed to never dance publicly, though I knew how by watching Arlene practice disco at home. The idea of people watching and judging me, even if the judgment was positive and encouraging, filled me with dread.
Debbie’s body began to jerk and spasm and convulse with dance.
“Let’s boogie, Dave!”
She handed the baby to Stevie.
“Uch, no. I don’t want to,” I said, but it didn’t matter what I wanted or didn’t want, Debbie dragged me onto the dance floor. Everyone started clapping. The DJ made some comment over the speakers, my mother was saying Hillu, hillu. They could see my pimples. They could see the single undisrupted horizon of my eyebrows, like someone drew a thick line across my forehead in black marker.
There was no way to shield myself from the draconian judgments. I searched for some nuanced way of complying without making a spectacle of myself. I swayed neutrally. I made tiny unnatural movements with my arms and legs.
Debbie was shockingly uninhibited. She was windmilling her arms, whipping her head around at unpredictable angles to “Hey Mickey” and shaking her fists like they were pom-poms. Even post-pregnancy she had enormous reserves of energy. She was dancing slightly faster than the beat of the song, as if the song would catch up to her. Quantities of jewelry swung from her neck and banged in loud zirconium claps.
Debbie’s bravery made me slightly braver. I started to loosen up. The dance floor was getting fuller. Arlene was doing salsa moves in her ten-dollar Joyce Leslie dress—she was dancing with Howie, who was spinning and swinging his arms and wiping pips of sweat from his forehead. My mother and my father were dancing together. Ari Blume was dancing with my cousin Grace, who wore a lavender off-the-sleeve taffeta dress. The boys from my yeshiva were practicing their spins and pop ’n’ locks and various arthropodal break-dancing poses. Nechama Polin was dancing with Danielle Sibener, who wore a long prairie skirt, and was jumping in rigid vertical bounces and repositioning her clunky glasses every few seconds. I didn’t think people would show up, but everyone came. It didn’t matter that no one was really close, or got along with one another, or liked their outfits, or had enough money. There was something democratizing about the dance floor. Somehow, we became the purest truest versions of ourselves. When “Billie Jean” came on, the feeling changed in the room. It was a song everyone wanted to dance to. Though I couldn’t understand the narrative of “Billie Jean,” I felt the force of its urgency—there was something in the music that gripped the entire room like a fist. The song felt serious in a way that mocked the liturgy of the ceremony we’d just come from. The pressures encircling me lifted. I lost the feeling of being watched and became one with the music. I felt light as air; my skin melted away like dead weight. The dance floor was crowded with strange silhouettes, soaked bodies. Partner
s slid from one to another, whorls of refracted light showered the room like spinning bits of glitter. My hair was standing on end. My heart beat so hard I thought my chest would explode. I was out of shape, I thought I might collapse but I pushed my body to its limits. I became one with Michael Jackson. I became one with the gold chains, the slithering bodies and damp swaths of Armani. We were a single corpus, a single undulant body. We were bacchants, worshipping at the altar of disco. As I got more and more lost in the music I felt myself reaching for something—not physically, but inside myself. I was reaching for something I couldn’t name. A deep yearning broke open inside me like a dam.
The triumph of the bar mitzvah party lingered for weeks, as small triumphs do when one has been plunged in despair. Howie and I debriefed about the party constantly. He had brand-new material for his impersonations. He parodied Arlene being self-lacerating about her Joyce Leslie dress. He did impressions of Debbie and my mother’s friend Sonia. The powers that be at the yeshiva forbade him to wear the pinwheel shirt—which, being collarless, violated school rules—so we were again on equal footing.
A few weeks before the end of the school year, we descended a staircase leading to the recess yard just as two popular Syrian girls were on their way up. As they were about to pass, the girls screamed in sudden revulsion, and, in perfect tandem, flung themselves against the wall: two bugs smashed by a flying windshield. I moved out of their way, trying to proceed along the lines of some etiquette I devised on the spot—but when I saw their revulsion yield to hysterical laughter it became apparent: this was a plan to inflict humiliation on us, to brand us with the inferiority of our caste. The girls locked eyes, they were delighted with themselves—they were laughing so hard they couldn’t speak. Then, one of them unpeeled herself from the wall. I could see her face now. She had strawberry-blond hair and freckles. She wore an expensive-looking suede jacket. The girl was looking right at me—laughing in my face, glaring at me with a brazenness I’d never seen in another person. Her gaze was like a fishhook. For a moment, I thought she was laughing with me, to show it was all in good fun—but her crisp smile and erect posture showed me that the laughter was not good-natured, that it was part of her punishment. The punishment wasn’t arbitrary, it was directed specifically at me. My presence in the stairwell was an offense, an infraction that demanded reprisal.
People were asking what was so funny and giggling in small clusters. Eventually the congestion in the stairwell dissolved. The girl was gone. “Come on,” said Howie. We sat at our familiar stoop in the recess yard. I felt too humiliated to address what happened in the stairwell, so we talked about other things. For a few minutes I couldn’t feel anything. The hurt was invisible, like a paper cut, until it materialized very suddenly and I was miserable. Howie tried consoling me. I wanted to take in his consolations, but was too steeped in my own pain. It was all so inexplicable—I didn’t even know this girl. I’d never spoken to her. I didn’t know why she should hate me so intensely.
Howie told me her name was Audrey Levy and she was in his English homeroom. He told me he’d secretly given Audrey Levy the nickname Rust because of her freckle-mottled complexion—a vast network of them spanned her face and neck. Her hair was rust-colored too. He tried making jokes about Rust to get me to lighten up. Howie was able to let it go, but he wasn’t victimized like I’d been. He wasn’t on the receiving end of her violence, that terrifying look in her eyes that made me feel like I was being stabbed in the face with an ice pick. I couldn’t concentrate during my classes that day, and later that night I couldn’t sleep. Audrey Levy’s face was burned onto my retina. I was tormented by the scene in the stairwell.
The following day I thought my pain and anger might dissipate, but the feelings began instead to grow and ferment. I tried focusing in class but couldn’t stop replaying the event in my mind. I couldn’t stop seeing that look in her eyes—the look that proved what I’d always suspected: that I was grotesque and subhuman and deserved to die. My heart pounded with despair as I shuffled from class to class, winter coat wrapped around me like a wet blanket. I sat on the sidelines during gym, chin bowed to chest, eyes glued to the floor. I’d consented to being an object of ridicule. I allowed some stranger to question my basic right to exist, my right to take up space—to use stairwells! As I sat sweating on the floor of the gym in my winter coat, a streak of insolence flared up in me. I suddenly had a focal point for my lifelong despair, someone to blame. And though my nature wasn’t vengeful, I had to get revenge: it was the only way to retain any self-worth. I had to cultivate new qualities, qualities advantageous to my survival—and people could do this. People could adapt, they could become who they needed to be to survive life: like my siblings, who spoke in Southern accents and said things like “y’all” until the SYs ridiculed them for it, and made a concerted effort to become Syrianized. They began speaking with thick Brooklyn accents and learned SY slang. If they could transform themselves, so could I. I wasn’t strong, but I could force strength. I could crowbar my strength into existence.
In my newly bedeviled state, using narratives watered down from soap opera plots and Sweeney Todd and Howie’s mother, I hatched a plan against Rust and embarked on my first truly evil scheme. That afternoon after school, I sneaked into my mother’s closet and located her cofferdam of Stayfree Maxi Pads. I pulled one out, unwrapped it from its plastic sheathing, and on it—with the two-toned marker Debbie used to address my bar mitzvah invitations—wrote in big block letters:
PROPERTY OF AUDREY LEVY
CLASS 306
My plan was to leave the Maxi Pad out in the hallway during lunch. Someone would find it and make a spectacle of returning it to Rust. She would be humiliated, reminded of the indignity of menstrual blood—an indignity that I, a boy, would be spared.
There was something undeniably powerful in unkindness, but I couldn’t exactly muster the feelings of true meanness. It wasn’t in my character. I could prop the feelings up with proximal behaviors—the stealing of the Maxi Pad, the diabolical choosing of the offending Magic Marker—but I was just going through the motions of vengeance. As the night wore on I began to doubt myself. I called Howie during a commercial break from Knots Landing and told him my plan. “Holy crap,” he said. “That’s such a good idea!” His confidence restored my sense of mission. We plotted out details, just as he and his mother plotted to destroy Hildy Tasimowitz.
The following afternoon during lunch, Howie and I sneaked up to the fourth floor. We found the perfect spot in the hall—not too salient, but just enough—positioned the implement of vengeance, then quickly sought refuge in a darkened classroom, where we hid behind a row of cubbies. For a long time it was silent; then the hallway began to fill. I could hear people chatting, grabbing books from their lockers. They were so innocent of what was about to happen: their ignorance was my ambrosia.
Eventually, I heard a voice: “Audrey, did you lose something?” There was a slight pause followed by a small chorus of laughter. The chorus built in volume, more and more people joining in, until the entire floor was exploding with laughter. I was shaking, terrified. There was a jagged clatter—more students raced into the hallway to see what the fuss was about. Howie and I emerged from our hiding spot and followed them.
The hall was crowded—I could only vaguely make out the scene. As I strained to get a view, I heard a sudden crashing sound like a thunderclap, and another. The laughter died down, then came another crash. I tried to make out the source of the terrible sound. Then I saw it was Audrey herself. She was ramming her head repeatedly against the metal door of the locker and making an ugly guttural sound—a raw terrible cry that came from some odd foreign place inside of her. A couple of Audrey’s friends went to console her. A teacher came and intervened. Students reluctantly began to scatter. Audrey was sobbing uncontrollably, her fists mashed against her soaked face. I felt slightly sickened by what I’d done. It was true I hated Audrey and wanted her to suffer, but I saw in the rawness of her anguish a mi
rror of my own. I knew it was monstrous to make another person feel that.
Then I remembered the scene in the hallway. Was Audrey drowning in guilt and self-reproach over that? Did she feel sickened with opprobrium and guilt? I was sure it was just the opposite—that she thought fondly of my humiliation, that the memory of degrading me in front of all those people made her heart jump a little. This was why I had to get revenge—it was a matter of self-respect! I had to congratulate myself for the ingeniousness of my plan. I tried forcing myself to enjoy my victory.
My Damoclean happiness was cut short by a witch hunt set into surprisingly immediate motion by Rabbi Bressler, who made a special announcement on the school loudspeaker the next day demanding the offending party give himself up immediately or risk suspension. During recess, Howie told me two people from his class—Alisa Forgash and Ness Finkle—had been called to Bressler’s office for interrogation; I felt a pang of guilt. I didn’t want someone innocent to be punished. At the same time I didn’t have the courage to turn myself in. And anyway, life wasn’t fair—innocent people were punished all the time, that was how the world worked.
Just as I’d come to some kind of temporary resolve, I saw Poopa Menashe, the girl who found the Maxi Pad in the first place, bounding toward me from across the recess yard in giant denunciatory steps. She pointed her finger at me, arm extended like a war musket. “YOAH GUILTAAY!” she shouted in pitiless evangelical furor, “WE KNOW IT WAS YAOUU!” My slipup was the two-toned marker—which she linked easily to my bar mitzvah invitations. At the very mention of the marker, I began shaking like a leaf. I couldn’t bear to refute even the weakest shred of evidence. Howie stood and coolly began to remonstrate on my behalf. “What are you tawwwking about?” he said in a hard-boiled voice. He shook his head and laughed robustly but injected the laughter with a malign undercurrent like Angela Channing on Falcon Crest. “You’re acting like a fool,” he continued. “Oh pleassssse!” spat back Poopa with bilious contempt. “You know he’s guilty, Howway, just admit it.” The two of them went on like this as I made intermittent protests from my cowed little sideline, things like Shut up! and Mind your own business! Once she was gone, Howie devoted the remainder of recess to convincing me nothing bad would happen to me, but even with the balm of his assurances I felt uneasy.