Growing Up Golem

by Donna Minkowitz

  But he did not strike me when I said that. I don’t remember which words of mine made him do it. He smelled so unbearably bad that we made some playful jokes at his expense about emergency deliveries of Odor Eaters, but he did not hit me (or my sisters, who for some reason he never hit) in response to that, but to other things that I really, really can’t remember, reader. Were they innocent things like “Would you mind leaving me some of the pickles?” Or mean things like “I’d never be as stupid as you!”

  Whatever I said to inspire him is lost in the fog that always overcame me at such moments, which has made me remember them utterly differently from all other events in my long life. Not as discrete happenings, but as one long, never-fading, continually present moment of getting hit (like a robot programmed to see a giant fist coming down on its head every nanosecond, so it must scurry to come up with a million strategies of avoidance, as long as its power is on).

  I did frequently call him stupid. But so did he call me. He never acted like my father, not remotely. We were always equals in the Minkowitz Family Consortium, except that he was four times my size and had a vastly stronger arm. My mother treated him like just another child in the family, albeit the one who was supposed to be hated.

  I was seven when he started, and he always hit my head.

  It hurt. And reader, it made me terrified in a peculiar way, of everything under the sun, and all creatures that flew in the air, and ones that crept on the earth, of all people and, of course, games engaged in by the arms.

  For years, the sound of keys disturbed me, I had no idea why. I think now that it was the sound of his keys in the door. I do know I was frightened whenever he was home, and felt safe when he was not.

  My plasticity came in handy, I think, because it made it easier for me to assume the roles as the equipment in the ballgames than a non-goblin individual would have found it. I was made of Things, after all, reader, a variety of largely inorganic and inhuman Things, and being treated as a thing could not have made as big an impression on me as it would have on a biological girl. Soil and paper and nails do not feel as much as humans do, and have never done. Not even muffin batter, the nearest thing I have to human flesh, and which I have only in a very small amount, feels anything like what human beings feel. This is the reason Rabbi Judah Loew was allowed to make a golem in the first place, and the reason he was allowed to destroy it, as Abraham was not allowed to destroy his son.

  Chapter 2

  The only problem was that I was ambitious.

  Even golems have ambitions, little reader—perhaps you think we didn’t? You probably think that slaves are happy, and dwarves don’t mind being tossed, and beings named Jack are fond of popping out of their boxes when their little crank is cranked. But as far back as high school (for even androids go to high school, if they require educating, and if their mad scientist-inventors insist on it), I had read the Village Voice, and wistfully, oh, so utterly wistfully, dreamed that I might someday write for it.

  Golems do not usually write for the Village Voice, reader. People assume we don’t have the creativity or the independence. People think we lack the necessary confidence, that pure human cojones. Homo sapiens’ sense of superiority gives even human women the balls and swagger necessary to tell other people what they think all the time in print. I had no cojones at all, nor even any human genes (unless my mother did cut her fingernails for me) to contravene my android weakness, my basic pallidness. My lack of a spirit blown into me by God.

  But the Village Voice itself was not a pure or normal institution in those days, and did not care a figfor God, or human beings’ sense of superiority. It didn’t even really care a jot about testicles. This was 1979—the peak of my high school days, reader. It was not a law-abiding time on any of the populated planets. The Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979. The Nicaraguans reamed General Anastasio Somoza a new one in 1979. In 1979, the filming of the movie Cruising was disrupted by angry, screaming gay men and lesbians (very few people had even knowingly seen angry, screaming gay men and lesbians before). The Venusians stopped mining their own sex-crystals for their overlords, and the Alpha Centaurians rioted over the suppression of irrational numbers. Other newspapers did not reflect the burningness and liberation of those times, but the Voice did. I had begun to get interested in the paper even as far back as 1977, 1976, for the Village Voice was funky, a cauldron, a kettle of truly rich, weird soup, and concerned with the most unusual bodies and minds in the universe.

  A strange lesbian named Jill Johnston wrote articles that I could not read because they had no punctuation or even paragraph divisions, but that I admired anyhow because she got away with writing that weird way, and with saying that she loved having sex with women and not men. A man named Arthur Bell, the Voice’s first gay-rights reporter, wrote columns that were far more conventional in form, but that I read eagerly anyhow because they were pumped full of an anger toward straight people that was similar to the stark anger I had often felt towards the human-born.

  I didn’t know before then that anyone was actually allowed to express anger toward the normal folks. Back then, I wasn’t even homo myself. (It’s doubtful, in any case, whether you could even say I had the “same” sex as the non-clay, biological humans to whom I was eventually attracted. Human vulvas are not the same as dust-and-magic vulvas.) But I flipped first to the Voice’s homo pages anyhow because they were so courageously perverse. Then I flipped second to the personal ads, where people wrote oddly and beautifully about their own unusual and beautiful, sexual and emotional needs. (This was a far cry from today’s cookie-cutter personal ads, reader, which have no literary value and no soul. Personal ads were glorious then, even radical, and the Voice was their hot, true home!)

  The hetero and homo ads were both radical in those years. It was new for people to say what they wanted, and—therefore!?—they allowed what they wanted to be truly new, surprising to themselves and others. “Cock and ball torture now!... Invent new rituals with me. Be my six-foot-tall bunny-monster, and I’ll be your beautiful forest.... Brainy, quiet but restless bi male seeks F or M for walking, conversation only... So, here’s the deal: I’ll push you away, and then you’ll get cold and distant. You know you want to! Let’s do it! Box 2154... I deeply value love, pussy, and music... Write a sestina for me and I’ll get you so high you can’t see straight.”

  I read these all, every week. I was eleven years old. We lived in Coney Island, across the street from the ocean, our eighth apartment in eleven years. It was a poor and dangerous neighborhood, the poorest and most dangerous that I ever lived in, to which my mother had apparently moved us because she thought the apartments in a new affordable-housing project there were spacious and pretty. Packs of emaciated and scarred stray dogs moved through the streets together, biting each other or sometimes, it seemed, fucking. (“Fucking” was the word used most often in my family, because my mother, as a magician, believed in using the most potent words always.) I had to do the grocery shopping every day, but I was scared of the packs of dogs and of the winos who made noises at me through the sides of their mouths, from the alleyways. The newspaper said that girls had been raped under the boardwalk, two blocks from our house. The day we moved in, boys from our project threw rocks at us, smashing my bedroom mirror.

  One night, I was lying in bed trying to sleep, with my door open in the summer heat. I heard my parents whisper low, and then my father yell suddenly loudly and with hate, “SHE’S LISTENING!! SHE’S LYING THERE LISTENING TO US! SHE’S LISTENING!” He was murderously angry at me, I was startled to realize, because he thought I was somehow trying to listen to my parents having sex. I didn’t understand what they were talking about until my father yelled his fury at me. I closed my door, furiously embarrassed and frightened.

  That year I also remember feeling sorry for my father for the first time, because I had begun to do the family laundry sometimes and I was able to see his socks and underwear.

  The rest of our family’s socks were f
ine, but my father’s socks made me terribly sad. They were shrunken things, far too small for him, with sticky stains in the toes. Little crumpled jots of polyester, and full of holes. As for his underwear, they were holey, too, but the main thing that made me sad was they were streaked with yellow lines and perhaps a few brown ones.

  Why did he take care of himself so badly?

  I decided to try to investigate my father, figure out why he was the way he was. People often kept secret things in their underwear drawers. So one day when no one else was home, I went into their fancy master bedroom and invaded his. Under the briefs, among the grieving socks, I pulled out two paperbacks:

  (I’d never seen him read, except Asher Lev that one time.) One was called Hot for Pain. The other little paperback was Miss Kitty’s Disciplining School. I read them, sitting on my parents’ bed. I’d hardly ever been in my parents’ bedroom before, in our eight apartments. I still remember how fancy it was, with a moderne, brown-wood bedroom set and a trio of pointy mirrors over the dresser. My parents had the fanciest furniture in the house.

  I sat on the bed, which smelled of Lemon Pledge, and read my father’s books.

  Hot for Pain was about a man who disciplined a set of women by whipping them and sticking his penis in them. Miss Kitty’s Disciplining School was about a woman, Miss Kitty, who kept calling a man named slave a “worm” and hitting him across the ass with a riding crop.

  The books turned me on, especially one of them, far more than the other. It is a point of great perplexity for me that I can no longer remember which of them turned me on more. I do remember I could not find it sexy to be called a “worm.” I had never, ever been turned on by reading before and it was upsetting to be excited by scenes of men and women getting hit. (I was only eleven and could count on three fingers the number of times I had been turned on before.) It was even more upsetting that my father presumably was excited, too.

  Was he excited when he hit me? The possibility terrified me. Was he more excited when he was hitting or being hit? Who was my father, exactly, and why did he never talk to me?

  Although people wrote personal ads seeking that kind of sex in the Voice, it was my mother, not my father, who brought home the Voice for us. The Voice actually cost money in those days, but we willingly paid for it—it was the best periodical around, except for maybe the New Yorker, which was outside our acquaintance, probably because of class. I started out reading mostly the personal ads—sometimes my sisters and my mom and I would read them aloud together, laughing. Aphra, seventeen, liked reading Jill Johnston, and would keep Jill’s lesbo treatises on the kitchen table and say how much she loved them.

  By fourteen, I myself was more in love with Jeff Weinstein and Ellen Willis. Ellen Willis wrote about her desires, even if they were ugly or unfeminine or antisocial or disturbingly self-undermining. She was fearless in a way that neither male writers nor feminists had been to that point; she ruthlessly exposed her own contradictions. Willis wrote that she could not simply dismiss the Sex Pistols’ sexist and nasty anti-abortion song, “Bodies,” although it was, she said, “an outburst of loathing for human physicality, a loathing projected onto women because they have babies and abortions and are ’a fucking bloody mess’ [as the Sex Pistols put it].” She could not just dismiss the song, she wrote, because “the extremity of its disgust forced me to admit that I was no stranger to such feelings.”

  I couldn’t believe anyone would admit they had disturbing and terrifying feelings that undermined their own deepest strength.

  I only had feelings of that kind, and I did not plan on broadcasting it. None of my feelings were connected to my source of strength, because golems are bred for self-disgust and a permanent discipline.

  Still, the Voice’s restaurant reviewer, Jeff Weinstein, did not seem to be disgusted by anyone or anything. He could even love food products that had actually been manufactured in factories. On one occasion, Jeff wrote a sensual and moving review of a canned spray that smelled exactly like the scent of a warm, buttery apple pie.

  He quoted Keats in order to praise that apple pie spray.

  That review spoke to me. Did not sprays have their poetry, too, and the tormented aluminum beings their own beating hearts?

  I lived in the world of poetry, despite having some industrial garbage in me and even some chemical food preservatives that, drying, had helped to form my faux-skeleton. Why couldn’t a spray can hang out at Max’s Kansas City and drink beers, and write its own occasional poetry, too?

  Some people had mindblowing sex with their TVs, so why should it be inconceivable that a being like me, a sort of extra-thoughtful, extra-passionate toaster, was capable of love?

  Fuck.

  There is—oh reader—inevitably—something more that I’m not saying. A thing I have to mention before I tell you what happened to my arms, and with the married woman, and the rest of this terrible story. It sticks in my throat.

  Or it inheres in the skin under my skin—I have always been quite confused about what kind of things are my body, and what kind of things aren’t it—what my mother attached to me with the extra glue left over at the end—how far my body extends into the world, and which objects are actually embedded in it and which are other than me.

  So: in the organs beneath my first layer of cleverly shaped imitation-human organs, in the old sheep-caul membrane she stitched inside as an extra structure on which to hang all that painted work (the taxidermy and papier-mâché that form my base), with nickels and Lifesavers and Christmas ornaments embedded here and there to spark the magic, there is an activity that does not like to describe itself.

  But I will tell you what it is.

  My mother put locks on her speech, on my speech, even the speech of some little gnomes and watchful ghosts we had around the house, but I have found a way to pick them all. I already told you I’m a good liar. I’m pretty swell at cheating at cards, lock-picking, and escaping, too.

  I am covered with oil; you cannot keep me tied. I am Houdini. I am Proteus.

  My mother—I feel stupid now for all the suspense, you probably won’t even find this a big deal—why am I breaking out the good olive oil for this? You'll probably just think that I’m a huge baby—well, she used to do things that turned me on sexually.

  It confused me. And ignited me. Both those things happened when my mother danced out in front of me with no clothes on, or in her most ecstatic panties, silk nothings tied with bows, or else exquisitely see-through red or black—filmy and beautiful—asking, “Don’t I look sexy?”

  She would model nightly for me and my sisters. There was a bra of fire-colored lace through which the cleavage was a heaven that I tried not to look at. There was a gorgeous blouse-and-pants set with an Edenic apple tree stretching wide across her breasts, a set my mother was wearing when, she told us delightedly, a man had mistaken her for a prostitute and asked how much she cost. The prostitute-mistaking had happened that very afternoon.

  The new clothes and the modeling began right after my mother’s surgery, when the new hole had been carved into the bottom of her neck. Her nose and mouth had been disconnected from her breathing apparatus. Perhaps this was the reason why she seemed to have become an entirely different person. For a few months my mother was only able to eat disgusting-looking, foul-scented foods she prepared for herself in the blender—spinach or chicken or liver puree, along with actual jars of baby food. I was much younger then—only seven—and my mother had suddenly changed her wardrobe and all her customs around dressing and undressing. She showed herself naked to us kids for the first time, and her newly-seen body seemed white-hot. No one in my family had gone naked to the others before then, except (presumably) my mother and father. Now my mother showed off her nipples to me, smiling as I watched. They were large and brown, luscious and disturbing to me.

  She wore a tiny yellow sundress that made her look exactly like the hillbilly dreamboat Daisy Mae in the Li’l Abner Sunday comic that I read each week with lust and confu
sion. Daisy Mae looked skanky but lovely, and her so-deep cleavage gave her a confusing, shameful power over all the men.

  I began to have a new job, every afternoon: washing my mother’s back in the bathtub. I never questioned why it was my job and not, say, my father’s, but I came to sit on the tub whenever my mother summoned me, dreading it. I was supposed to wash her back to prevent her from drowning, my mother said. She was afraid of accidentally getting water into her new “hole” if she washed herself. (Why she thought a seven-year-old would be better at not getting water there, I do not know. )

  My mother washed all of her other parts herself, including her lustrous long black hair. But her back—with creamy freckles all over it, a beautiful back, as my mother always told us, was for me to wash with a washcloth. I cannot remember any more paralyzing moment from my childhood than entering that bathroom and trying to avoid looking at my mother’s breasts. Or her vagina from under the waters, its hair gone smooth and luxuriant. I would cross that enormous expanse—from the bathroom door through the entire front side of my mother—and finally get to the back, which was less frightening but still too creamy and beautiful. I tried not to look at any other part of my mother but her back. I told my mother I didn’t like washing her back, but she said I had to or she would drown. I finally stopped doing it, perhaps by fourteen.

  As a result, reader: I was not used to having what I wanted. I was used to longing for what I needed and never, ever getting it. To staring at what I needed shamefaced, from the other side of the bathroom, in fear and regret and love and pain.

  All golems have faced immediate death at every moment, because their makers could kill them by writing just one letter of the alphabet on their bodies, or erasing one. By telling them to die, a command that every golem must obey; by pulling a holy scrap of paper out of their mouths, on which a secret name of God had been written; or by walking around the golem three times and saying God’s names backwards.