by David Adjmi
And remarkably, her entreaties worked.
Winkler reversed course. I was allowed another chance.
“Do you have anything you want to say, Mr. Adjmi?”
“No,” I replied, staring through him. I felt stony with self-possession. My spine became erect. My little chair became a throne. I saw a tiny snarl of incomprehension in his face, for I wasn’t sobbing or hysterical. It was one of the rare moments I didn’t have to act or affect a sense of my own worth. I didn’t feel victimized or wounded, I was indignant. And with my indignation I began to feel inklings of other things: sovereignty, pride. Feelings so new to me, so alien, I felt them the way a pregnant woman feels a baby kicking. It was almost violent, like a bomb had exploded right there in the room: the very instant I stopped caring what happened to me, my life came jarringly into focus. I’d been dreaming all my life, and now I was certain it was all a dream. In the dream I was powerless. In the dream people were cold and cruel and I had to submit to their rules to feel safe, but I’d never been safe. These two men standing before me with their tweed and worn expressions and bemusement had no purchase on me, and on some deep level I believed they had. My reality seemed so colorless and bleak—but it wasn’t reality. They’d devised a reality for me to step into but I could just as easily step out of it. I could build a new reality. I could make it anything I wanted. Once I knew that, and not just knew it but felt it, saw it with bracing clarity—once that happened I could feel some invisible perimeter, some unspecific captivity I lived with and accepted all my life start to melt, and dissolve. And like the desert-trawling Jews in the Bible, my exile was transmuted into freedom.
Book II
A New Past
Eurotrash
WHEN MY EXPULSION was rescinded I exited the office, and asked my mother to wait in the lobby. I marched down a bunch of empty corridors, took the stairs to a mezzanine, found my locker, grabbed the books I wanted (The Scarlet Letter, some poetry anthology, a bunch of useless but pricey textbooks I felt obliged to keep) and lugged them in huge theatrical armload out the building. As I nudged the door open with my shoulder, there stood my mother at the foot of the steps wearing her little beret and puffing on a Kent 100. “Honey,” she said, “what now? What are all those books?”
“Where’d you park the car?” I wobbled down the small flight of granite steps, balancing the wall of books with my chin.
“Put those back in your locker.”
“Nope. I quit.”
“Put those books back in your locker right now,” she said. In my peripheral vision she looked like one of those tiny French dolls they sold in flea markets. I could feel my arms starting to give out so I picked a direction arbitrarily and started walking. My mother trailed alongside me. “You’re being very immature.”
I spotted her Chevy parked near the corner and stepped up my rhythm.
“Daavve,” she trilled in a plummy voice, “you’re not quitting school.”
“Then I’ll transfer to public school.”
“Your father’s not gonna go for that.”
“Then I quit!” I said. “I don’t give a fuck!” It was the first time I said “fuck” to my mother, but it felt important to estrange her from any familiar understanding she had of me. I was like a cartographer drawing new lines on a map and expanding its territory.
She unlocked the trunk, and I shoved the books in.
“You’re not quitting school,” she repeated, but this time I could detect the slightest note of resignation in her voice, and it was the slight note of resignation that gave me hope—from it I inferred my little gambit might go unchallenged.
Later that night she invited my father over for dinner, where we broke the news. And she was right: he didn’t go for it. My father said in no uncertain terms he wouldn’t hear of my going to some heathenish dirty public school. He said I’d be surrounded by crucifix-wearing gentiles, and get diseases, and have filthy congress with people who did drugs. He tried rationalizing away my predicament. “The rabbis wouldn’t answer your questions,” he said. “We have to find you a school where the rabbis are more open-minded.”
“But that’s not the problem,” I told him.
“Your teachers didn’t answer your questions.”
“But I don’t have questions.”
“You were frustrated because you wanted to understand the religion,” he said. “They wouldn’t answer your questions.”
This narrative that I was a Jew full of questions ossified immediately in his mind. Dad was stubborn in this way. He was constantly situating his kids in stories about our lives that had nothing to do with us, but somehow we ended up as characters in those stories. Richie was going to work in electronics (which he did), Stevie was going to be religious and live in New Jersey (and then he did). My greatest terror was that, like them, I would become a character in his story—that I was nothing more than a moving piece on a chessboard my father could situate and resituate at will, because I had no will of my own.
At our weekly dinners at the Genovese House he endlessly narrated my inner life to me, telling me all things I wished for and felt and believed. I found a strange comfort in being molded and fabricated in the moment by him, the way one can enjoy a slightly painful massage. I felt a compulsion to be something for my father, even though I didn’t really care for him as a person. When he insisted on my being a mansion-owning businessman I couldn’t say anything about my intention to be a filmmaker, because I wanted to please him. I wanted him to love me, even if his love confused my sense of self. When he smiled at me I felt reconstituted through his aura. I had to keep unpeeling myself from those dreamy smiles. I had to unglue myself, like he was flypaper and kept getting stuck to my fingers.
As he blathered on about rabbis, my mother sat in her robe, hair pulled back in a terrycloth headband. She was flicking her lit cigarette constantly into an amber ashtray. Her patience astonished me, but years of marriage inured her, I gathered, to his long, repetitive speeches. When he was done she put down her cigarette. “He doesn’t have questions for the rabbis,” she said, plainly. “He wants to go to public school.”
“HE’S NOT GOIN TO NO PUBLIC SCHOOL,” my father thundered back.
I didn’t like the way he shouted at my mother.
“I don’t believe in God,” I snapped. “I’m sick of pretending to believe in something because you want me to believe in it! I’m not doing what you want anymore!”
My father looked at me like he’d been shot point-blank. It was the first time I ever asserted myself with him, and I didn’t know any nuanced way of doing it so it came out blunter and colder than I’d intended. Dad nervously tugged at his gold pinky ring. The muscles in his face began to strain and contort, like he was blowing air into a trumpet. His eyes pooled with tears. Then he pushed his chair back and stood up from the table. “EVERYTHING YOU HAVE IS BECAUSE OF HASHEM!” he cried suddenly, raising and lowering his arms expressively. “MY HEART IS HURTING!”
My mother cut him a slice of pecan Danish. With her pantheistic tendencies—her subscription to the Daily Word and secret cache of Jesuitical icons—she was sympathetic to my rejection of the Jewish faith, but Dad was crushed. My disavowal of religion was a break with him, with his vision of spiritual reality. When he was done with his tears and quavering raptures and deeply felt evangelism re: hashem he slumped to his car and drove away.
We spent weeks in a détente. My newly admitted atheism forestalled any decision about school. My mother tried to play the ombudsman, she’d relay messages back and forth, but the messages were mainly to relay that neither of us would change his position.
In the meantime, I was elated not to be at the yeshiva. I stopped following their idiotic sumptuary code. I wore ripped jeans and started growing out my hair. I shaved my sideburns in ways that flouted Talmudic prescription. I vowed to erase the Hebrew language from my mind, to erase Rashi and biblical commentary. I felt brave and macho, for I’d stood up to my father, and did so even with the forfei
ture of his good opinion. Weinberger told me it was progress and a sign of my increasing health as a person. For the very first time, I felt ownership over my life.
Late one night, I was in bed half-asleep, when the phone rang on my private line.
“Adj! Are you awake?”
It was a woman’s voice. “Who is this?” I said.
“V.”
“Who?”
“David, it’s Vivian Goldberg. Am I cawling too late?”
I sat up in bed and turned on my bedside lamp.
“No,” I said, “it’s really good to hear from you!”
Vivian was an alumna of the Dumb Class who’d been kicked out of the yeshiva in the middle of freshman year. I forgot all about her quirk of calling people by their first initial—meant to be a cool trend, but it never took hold.
“G. told me you dropped out,” she said.
“Yeah, last month.”
“Lonny’s gonna drag you by your collah, that piece a shit?” I could hear the metal grill of her braces thickening all her consonants. “He’s a freakin psychopath.”
Vivian and I weren’t great friends, but we liked each other, and I felt grateful for peer support and for the opportunity to say volatile things about Lonny. Even Howie hadn’t called to ask how I was holding up; our friendship was all but gone by then. He found a new best friend named Andy and that was that. I was heartbroken, but in some sense it made things easier. I wanted to have a clean break with the past.
“I’m trying to convince my father to let me go to public school.”
“Don’t go to public school,” said Vivian. “Come to my school!”
“Where?”
“York Prep.”
“Would I like it?”
“Adj,” she cried, “you will love it.”
“Really?”
“We don’t have a principal, we have a ‘head mastah,’ and he’s British.” The instant she mentioned him, the image of a British man running a high school materialized like a mirage, it slaked a thirst I never knew I had. “His wife is a famous college guidance counselor,” she continued. “She can get you in anywheh.”
Vivian drew a mental picture of the life we’d have: lunching together, going to movies and art galleries. She described the other students—French expatriates, people who lived in sharp prewar apartments with doormen to buzz you up. As soon as I hung up the phone, I knew York Prep was the nonpareil of schools, and made the impulsive decision that this would be my new life. When I brought up the idea with my father, I made private school seem a compromise—less sullying and degrading than public school—and, after a lot of persuading, and once it became unambiguously clear I was willing to be a high school dropout and destroy my life if it came to that, he gave in. My mother drove me into The City for my placement test; two weeks later I had my first day.
I wore my best Lester’s ensemble—an oversized Williwear cardigan and satiny houndstooth baggy pants I considered au courant—and waited in my mother’s living room, checking through the huge protruding grid of windows for my father. It was a long subway trip to the Upper East Side, so Dad (who worked in midtown now) committed to driving me in the mornings. I spotted a pair of low beams enter the darkened driveway and went out to meet him.
I could tell my father was excited by our new ritual; he kept fussing over me. You comfortable, honey? You need more heat? My father was, for the first time, committed to me in some semiregular way—not just as a signer of checks or inveigher against bad morals. I felt like a prince in his Lincoln Town Car, with its heated seats and automatic lumbar adjustment. And it felt majestic going to school in The City. When we crossed the Prospect Expressway I gazed across the river at the skyline and traced the beams of light animating the towering glass buildings, beam to beam. The light was so perfect at six in the morning, like a cup of barely steeped tea.
To cope with my atheism my father told himself it was “a phase” and if I had the right instruction, I would gravitate naturally back to Judaism the way a plant gravitates to sunlight for nourishment. He pushed his new narrative about me: that I was more religious than lots of people he knew, that I was very spiritual, and very pure—that I was a good person and he didn’t care what anyone said, or even what I said, because he knew me better than I knew myself. And because he was compulsive and couldn’t help it (but also because the overlap of our interests was extremely limited, and we’d otherwise have nothing to talk about) he forced one of his catechisms on me: “You didn’t think I’d let you go to Yohk Prep, didja, Dave?”
“No.”
“But who takes care of his boy?”
“You.”
“You were shocked that I let you go.”
“Yeah.”
“But I’m more open-minded than you thought.”
“Much.”
He’d already begun revising history, manufacturing a new narrative that cast him as the hero of my life story, but I didn’t care—and in some sense, it wasn’t untrue. He’d opened a door for me, for my life to change, and I was grateful for it.
My father dropped me off at the corner of Lexington and Eighty-Fifth Street, in front of a crappy-looking restaurant called Chirpin’ Chicken. I stepped over piles of chicken bones stacked on the sidewalk like kindling for a bonfire, and walked toward the school, a beige sliver wedged between townhouses. Outside, students milled about in freezing weather bumming cigarettes. No one shivered or seemed cold. The boys and girls were very touchy with each other in a way I was unused to. They were giving each other massages. They were hugging and sitting on each other’s laps and blowing smoke rings. The boys had preppy haircuts; they wore Top-Siders and bland, ugly pants. The girls wore baggy sweaters with vintage-looking motorcycle jackets and cowboy boots. They weren’t primped like the yeshiva girls—they were less delicate, and had an unwashed, oily-hair aesthetic that seemed to represent some kind of chic authenticity. It was a currency unfamiliar to me but I accepted it immediately. Whatever this was, I wanted to be a part of it.
When I entered the building I spotted Vivian at the end of the main hallway. She pumped her fist and did a cute little victory dance over to me: “Adj! You’re here!” She wore an oversized Mickey Mouse sweater and fluorescent green corduroys and looked about eleven years old. She hadn’t changed a bit. Her smile was the same wide flash of metal, her hair was cut in the same elfin bangs she’d worn since the fifth grade. It was a sentimental reunion, the fragile sweetness of it only slightly marred by the hard-to-ignore reality that we’d never actually been close friends in the first place. But whatever affection we did share seemed distilled now, its potency strengthened by our bond from the Dumb Class and our extradition into this new strange world.
Vivian toured me around the building, furtively pointing out various characters she’d mentioned over the phone: the straight-edge skinhead who lived in Murray Hill, the girl with curly hair who stole everyone’s boyfriend. “This is my cousin, David,” she inexplicably remarked while introducing me to one of them. Why was she telling people I was her cousin? Later, we had lunch at some pizza place she liked on Lexington Avenue and I asked why she invented the pretense. “Aduknow,” she replied, blotting the excess oil from her pizza with a paper napkin. “I thought it would be shahp.”
I contented myself with Vivian’s nonexplanation. On some level it made sense that she’d be eager to form a protective nonsexual alliance with another Jew. At the yeshiva we’d been repeatedly warned of the dangers of assimilation: now we were the dirty assimilants we’d been warned about. What if we assimilated parts of life that were dangerous? What if we unwittingly assimilated things that would kill or harm us irreparably? With all its rules the yeshiva kept us safe from unsavory gentile reality, and now we were imperiled. All that day I felt a deep, inexplicable longing for the yeshiva and my old life; yes, it was unbearable and stifling but it was all I knew of home. The City was surprisingly uninhabitable and unfriendly. I felt intensely lonely, and I hated having to start all over again.
Though the social scene was more balkanized than at the yeshiva, there was a small popular clique at York Prep. The de facto leader was Harper Goldfarb. She was in my English class. She wasn’t pretty or well dressed, but I could feel her penetrating jurisdiction when we met, some aristocracy of blood she seemed to possess. “You’re new,” she said, less a question than a label she was affixing to me. “Where are you from?”
“Brooklyn.”
“Oh,” she replied, openly disappointed. “Well, I’m Harper.”
When I repeated her name back, to make sure I’d gotten it right, her eyes contracted into little brown discs. “Not ‘Hahpah,’” she said, “Harper.”
“I said Hahpah.”
“No!” she said joltingly. “Not ‘Hah-pah’! HAR-PER!”
“Hah-pah,” I said, enunciating as best as I could. Harper bore into me with a tiny, vituperative sneer, then shook her head. “Forget it,” she said, and she walked over to a group of girls wearing expensive-looking stirrup pants.
I felt like I’d been whipped, and the lash was sudden and inexplicable. Afterward, I locked myself in a stall in the bathroom and quietly sobbed in self-pity and frustration. I knew Harper Goldfarb was right, and civilized people had a right to have their names properly pronounced—and I’d been trying. In the weeks leading up to my first day I practiced saying words in ways that sounded weird to me: “cahfee” instead of “cawfee,” “sahlt” instead of “sawlt.” I was desperate to shed my hideous, nasal Brooklyn accent—the very one I’d worked so hard to perfect just a couple of years earlier—but I hadn’t been rigorous enough.