by Howard Bloom
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In 1945, World War II ended and the Navy returned my dad in slightly used condition. He still had all four limbs, both eyes, and another piece of essential original equipment, his nose—a large one. And he had gained a vague memory of what it had been like to type. But he had lost his hair. A devastating war injury.
I was roughly two and a half years old when my dad came back. And having him around was glorious. Briefly. One Sunday I woke up at an hour that two year olds think is party time for jumping beans, grasshoppers, frogs, and fleas who can leap to 150 times their own height. Not to mention Olympic tryout time for toddlers who want to shame all of these virtuosos-of-jump by springing from bounceable surfaces into low earth orbit. Alas, adults are under the sorry impression that 6:00 a.m. on a day off is a good time to get in an extra four hours of snoring. I opened the door to a room I’d never entered before, my parents’ bedroom. The sun, which goes to work early even on the day of the weekend that carries its name, was blazing through the windows. Ahhh, release from darkness. I mountain-climbed up the bed to the plateau of the mattress, where my mom and dad were deep in snooze-land. And I did what any sensible two-and-a-half-year-old intoxicated by sunshine and seized by the leaping instinct would do—I woke them up. How do you wake people who appear to be corpses supplied with musical snorts by artificial means? You use their box springs as a trampoline. And because you’ve had no athletic training, you occasionally trampoline on your parents’ backs, buttocks, and cheeks. What bliss. What joy. I finally had something I’d never experienced before—a family.
But remember the practice in my dad’s bloodline of rolling over on your wife from time to time in the middle of the night? In my granddad’s case, that nocturnal practice had produced five daughters and, at long last, my dad.
In those days just after my father’s return from his duties saving the world for democracy, my mom had not yet worked out the practice of keeping him at a respectable distance. And she had not yet installed two parallel single beds with a wicked gap of three feet between them.
This negligence had consequences. One day, shortly after my exuberance at finally gaining two parents had begun, my newly reunited nurturers announced that they had a surprise for me. Oh, goodie. Toys were rare in my life, so this was the first surprise they’d ever sprung on me. Alas, it was not a battery operated tank with genuine rubber treads that could climb over bedroom slippers. It was not even a GI Joe whose jeep jerked up and down like a cat trying to cough out a poisoned canary. In fact, as unexpected revelations go, it was not a good one. I was about to have a brother. And after what seemed like only one Sunday jumping up and down on my progenitors, along he came.
Since this was the first child my parents had experienced together, they treated him as, well, their first child. They put him on a table in the living room and changed his diapers with a beaming pride that defied belief. They gave him vivid, joyful, emotional attention. Something I’d never received. And here’s the capper. The table on which they changed him was, guess where? In the sunshine of the bay window. And where was I? In the darkness at the back of the living room, a few short feet from the corridor where I’d been imprisoned for the first three years of my life. This cemented it. The outsider role was here to stay.
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There was one thing that should have helped but didn’t. My grandmother lived on the first floor and occasionally let me into her apartment. And, yes, bounced me on her knee, called me “boychick” and taught me that cows go “moo,” dogs go “bow, wow,” and donkeys go “heehaw.” Essential survival skills for urban two and a half year olds who do not live on a farm.
She also spoke Yiddish a lot, and once or twice she put me into a stroller and wheeled me over to Hertel Avenue’s Jewish poultry shop, a little bit of the shtetl transferred to the streets of Buffalo. All the chickens, geese and ducks sat in cages chatting. In Yiddish. You chose your bird—alive—and came back later to pick it up, considerably less talkative, headless, and denuded of its down jacket. How it stayed warm from that point on, I do not know. The oven may have helped.
The poultry shop smelled of burning feathers. Somehow, none of the fowl realized that this should be construed as a warning, and that concerted militancy in the cause of social justice might have been a good idea. I mean, there were only two humans lording it over a joint filled with 150 flight experts. If the poultry had gotten their act together, they could have clapped the butchers into the cages and changed the place to a pet food store. You know, bring in your puppy, have him pick the butcher of his choice, come back two hours later, and he’s neatly packed in 300 Alpo cans. But political organization and entrepreneurship were apparently not big in the avian world at the time. All this has changed since the rise of the environmental and animal rights movements.
What sort of warmth did my grandmother inject into my life? The clue was in her baking. She made hard rolls so rigid that you could have used one in a hockey championship and, when the game was over, the roll would have remained undented. According to one of my aunts, my grandmother had the same quality. Warmth did not suit her.
What’s more, when my father got back from the war and my mother returned to household duties, I was terrified of my mom and didn’t exactly encourage the idea of a motherly relationship. And mothering was not on her list of urgent matters. Some women get joy from their babies and become addicted to mothering. Other women are terrified by this mass of body tissue that squalls for reasons no one can see. They flee the motherly role. My mom was in the flight category. She plunged into charitable endeavors, rapidly rising to the presidency of every organization in sight. Which meant that I was still left with cleaning ladies who loathed me. For some reason it never occurred to my mother that I might be better off in some day-care situation with the company of other kids. Maybe she was afraid of germs. Polio was fashionable at the time. Or maybe she had a premonition of another minor problem.
I was, well, how shall we put this, not exactly a social hit. At the age of four, my peers organized a group called the Hartwell Gang (named for our one-block-long street, Hartwell Road). Nominally, I was a member. But I was singled out for a uniquely privileged role. When the boys were playing games like house or doctor with the girls, I was discouraged from attending. One day, the kids erected tents made from their mothers’ sheets in Sheila Eisenberg’s back yard. Lord knows what game they had in mind. But they sensed a danger that could wreck their afternoon. Me. So they stationed a sentry in the driveway. When he saw me coming, he blocked me from leaving the sidewalk and heading up the drive to the back yard to see what was going on.
However, when the entertainment turned to beating someone up, I was enthusiastically invited to participate. In fact, I was indispensable. I was the beat-upee. On some days, the group got its aerobic exercise by chasing me around the block. On others, they became lazy, threw me into a basement, put a block of laundry soap on the stairs, and told me that if I attempted to climb out of my dungeon, I would slip on the soap and shatter my vertebrae. I believed them. My knowledge of physics, in those days, was less than rudimentary.
On top of everything else, as I’ve already hinted, I felt a need to wall myself off from my mother. I was desperate to protect my four-year-old feeling of independence. As a result of that, and the fact that my mother was the kind of person who longed for physical contact but didn’t know how to go about giving or getting it (she was probably as frightened of it as I was), there was no hugging in my life. Then one Sunday morning I was out on the sidewalk with my father. A dog licked my face. I was terrified and on the verge of tears. My father explained this mystery by telling me that the dog had kissed me. Well, that was it. I was hooked. Here was a way of getting kisses without giving up any independence or descending into the nightmare world of my parents’ interpersonal tensions. Animals! Animals who got a burst of joy out of your very existence. But more about the animals later. And we are not talking Eric Burden.
Dogs were not the only thing that saved me from a total interior freeze. If you don’t experience warmth in your childhood, you may spend the rest of your life chilled by a coldness deep within you. You may never believe that others can actually delight in you. Why? Most adults light up when they see a child. After all, children are born with what ethologists call “supernormal stimuli,” walloping, megaton triggers of cuteness. And adults are built with a corresponding biological ignition switch, one that lights them up and makes them smile, beaming like a bonfire the size of the US Capitol Building. If you as a baby kindled smiles, you are in luck. The capacity for joy and warmth is likely to flare in your heart from time to time for the rest of your life. But if all you got were frowns, woe be unto you. Your emotional core is likely to freeze over like a surplus bag of ice cubes abandoned by picnickers at the South Pole.
My mom frowned when she looked at me. The spontaneous smile of a mother never lit her face. And my dad was absent. Working. Dogs, on the other hand, danced with joy when they saw me coming. Heck, they even wagged their tails. But they were not alone. A twelve-year-old cousin traveled the 408.5 miles to Buffalo from Asbury Park, New Jersey, my father’s homeland, at the end of her eighth-grade school year. I was roughly three. My father’s oldest sister, my Aunt Beck, had noticed that my mom was struggling with life, motherhood, and me. “When you get out of school,” she said to one of three gorgeous nieces she was raising, “I want you to go up to Buffalo and help Ann.” And help my mom, my cousin Jackie did. How? When she emerged from her seven-hour bus ride, arrived at our shoebox of a house, and saw me, she thought I was the cutest thing she’d ever laid eyes on. So her smile ignited like a match factory doused with lighter fluid. Her visit only lasted a week, but it helped.
Then came something that would have repercussions way, way down the line. And in a far more psychedelic time. My mother’s younger sister, Rose, invited me to the apartment she shared with her new husband a half a mile away in an almost-block-long, three-story Tudor apartment complex on Delaware Avenue. When I arrived in Aunt Rose’s living room, she had the afternoon planned for me. She loved the arts. So she took me to her phonograph and played me one of her favorite pieces of music, Peter and the Wolf, a symphony that the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev had written for Moscow’s Central Children’s Theatre in 1936 to introduce kids to the instruments of an orchestra. But Peter and the Wolf is not a heavy-handed, Stalinist piece of music. It is rich in melody. And it has a plot. Peter and his animal friends have to avoid the clutches, teeth, and stomach of the wolf. And one of those animal friends, the duck, lands in the wolf’s belly…then is saved. Sort of. The wolf ends up in a zoo, and, “If you listen very carefully,” says the script, “you’ll hear the duck quacking inside the wolf’s belly, because the wolf in his hurry had swallowed her alive.”
But that wasn’t all. Aunt Rose wanted to introduce me to literature. Sort of. Walt Disney had just made a movie and an accompanying record album out of an adventure story written by Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson in 1881. The tale featured Long John Silver, a pirate with a peg leg and a parrot on his shoulder. And it had an oddball hermit, old Ben Gunn, who climbed mountain cliffs with an agility that made all the local mountain goats stop chewing, take the grass out of their mouths, poke each other in the ribs, and say an astonished “well, I’ll be.” Peter and the Wolf would show up one distant day down the line in my sexual enlightenment. And Treasure Island would appear in a peculiar form the first time I took LSD. But that’s in the distant future.
Most important was this. Let’s go back to the smile that lights you up when you see a little kid and you think he or she is adorable. The smile that makes you one of the rays of sunshine in that child’s life. My mother never had that smile with me. But my cousin Jackie and my Aunt Rose did. Jackie’s only lasted a week. Then she took the bus back to New Jersey. And Rose’s only lasted one afternoon. Then she had kids of her own, her life got serious, and she became somber. But dogs’ tongues and those two smiles installed a potential for love deep inside of me. However, the emotions they inserted would be seriously challenged before they could fully, well, ummm, bloom.
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When I was eight, Buffalonians were apparently drinking themselves into a stupor, because the wealth was beginning to roll in. We moved to a big Tudor house overlooking a forest of five-story-high trees in a 506-acre, Frederick Law Olmsted-designed park with a zoo a few hundred yards away, hidden by the woods. Frederick Law Olmsted, who began work on Delaware Park in 1868, was the greatest park designer of all time. And you could tell. His park was a wonderland. And it was in front of our new house. In the back, on the other side of our backyard fence, was another masterpiece: a low-slung house of gorgeous simplicity and huge windows designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. So I was sandwiched between two amazing pieces of design. What’s more, I woke up every morning to the sound of lions roaring, elephants thundering, and peacocks mewing (yes, peacocks sound exactly like crucified cats trying to meow two words—“help me”).
The walk to school was nearly a mile—the length of the Lewis and Clark expedition by eight-year-old standards. I was just as welcome socially in my new neighborhood as I’d been in my old one. One day the boys who made fun of me at school were in an empty lot dividing up into teams for a ball game, palavering over who would be on what team. Then they saw me coming. They literally picked up their gloves, balls, and bats and headed off to find another place to play, one where I would not be able to find them. The same crew also blackballed me from their informal after-school social club.
But I had an undeniable magnetism. As I took the long walk home, clusters of kids would trail me, pounce from behind bushes, pummel me around, and toss my school books in dog shit.
Nonetheless, I was spoiled rotten. I locked myself in my bedroom from the age of ten and read two books a day—starting with all thirty-eight Oz books (as in The Wizard of…). The Oz books assured me that every day Glenda, the Good Witch of the South, would take out her magic crystal, put away her Georgia accent, and scan the world looking for little boys and girls who deserved to be whisked to the Emerald City. I wasn’t doing particularly well in Buffalo, so I combed the pages of Frank Baum’s oeuvre, concluded that Glenda did her international youth inspection every day at precisely four, managed to sneak a Big Ben alarm clock out of my parents’ bedroom, and locked myself in my room every afternoon, where I squeezed my eyes shut for a half an hour at 4:00 p.m. and pleaded with Glenda to send me a magic carpet, a couple of flying monkeys, or just an airline ticket, and let me lick her toenails in gratitude. Apparently, the demand for Jewish children who hiked their pants up to their armpits was not big in the Land of Oz, so I never passed the kingdom’s admission requirements. Glenda didn’t even grant me her consolation prize—the pills that allowed Oz’s inhabitants to get A’s on all their report cards without studying.
Thus, I gave up on the country that had been so hospitable to Dorothy and Toto, and, at the age of ten, turned to outer space. There was no room for me on the earth, so I felt that there might be a spot for me on some cozy dwarf planet. It was the TV show Tom Corbett Space Cadet that clued me into the possibilities of extraterrestrial living.
Then something miraculous happened. One day I was sitting in the new, big Tudor house alone. I was still ten, and I was in the living room, which even at three o’clock in the afternoon, was darkened by thick velvet curtains closed so you couldn’t see the view of Frederick Law Olmsted’s astonishing greenery. I knew every book on the room’s shelves. They’d been in exactly the same location ever since we’d moved in two years earlier. Who knows if any of these tomes had ever been read. Then a book I didn’t recognize, a book that had never been on the shelves, appeared in my lap. It was one of those rare books that grabs you by the collar, yanks you into nose-to-nose contact, and announces, “Listen up, I’m talking to you.”
What message did this nameless book shout into my fac
e? The first two rules of science.
Rule one: the truth at any price including the price of your life. To illustrate its point, the book told the story of Galileo. And it got it wrong. It portrayed Galileo as a man so wedded to his truth that he’d have been willing to go to the stake and be barbecued for it. Complete with hot sauce. Sorry, that was Giordano Bruno, who stuck to his opinion that there was life on other heavenly bodies so stubbornly that he was roasted like a Cajun hot dog in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori, complete with a leather bridle gagging his mouth to keep him from uttering heresies. Why the gag? To avoid polluting the aural canals of the godly crowd, a mash of the pious who had gathered to see precisely what entertaining variations on your basic writhing Bruno would perform as the flames reduced him to a blackened straggle of meat. Galileo, on the other hand, made a deal with the Pope, who happened to be an old acquaintance. Mr. Galilei swore that everything he’d ever written was false. In exchange, he was allowed to live. But to live under house arrest in Florence for the rest of his life.
That was the sordid reality. But I was lucky. The book portrayed Galileo as a man of courage willing to be poached, toasted, and broiled in Mozzarella cheese and marinara sauce for his insights. That rang some newly sprouting longing for heroism in me. So in a statement about truth, there was an irony. The untruthful version was more useful than the facts.
Rule of science number two: look at things right under your nose as if you’ve never seen them before, then proceed from there. Look for things that you and everyone around you take for granted and hold those invisible realities up to the light. Question them. And question something else invisible, your own assumptions. To illustrate rule two, the book gave the example of Anton van Leeuwenhoek, the man who invented the microscope. Van Leeuwenhoek looked at pond water and saw a world of life that no one had ever suspected. He saw what he called animalcules, tiny beasts that we call microorganisms.