So I was terrified, each time I came close to anything I needed, that it was going to be snatched from me like my mother snatching the life-conferring paper out of my mouth. My ticket being snatched. Dying again, the way I did every afternoon washing my mother’s back.
Given a hope of living, and then frustrated.
Chapter 3
I have always understood that I had to use special means to get ahead, as a non-human with a divided self. (Half of myself was Mom’s, and half my own.) I had special deficits, I knew—the very opposite of superpowers. Don’t ever put me near a flame, because I’d go up like a straw doll soaked in kerosene; don’t tap me even lightly on a special panel in the middle of my back, because that would turn me off until you chose to turn me on again. I had to lie as hard as I could so that no one ever found out.
So when I first came down to the Village Voice at twenty-two, I took over one of the two "free” computers intended for all freelancers, seized it as my own. I’d put my files and my coffee cup there, my own guerrilla seizure just like Fidel or Che. Everything I did felt like a revolutionary appropriation to me then, or some sort of theft. I was the best freeloader in Brooklyn. I would sponge $20 from a friend with no intention of paying it back ($20 in ‘80s dollars, that is), or bagels and hummus and salad from the buffet of a conference I was not attending. I used my sister Josie’s credit card, with her permission but no intention of paying her back on time. Since she made more money than me, I thought it was fine to make her lay it out until I paid her. If you want to know my mindset, think of my kinsman the Gingerbread Man, running and successfully getting away from all those sets of lips and teeth.
When another freelancer objected to my taking over the computer—only one ever did, though sad to say it was the one who later won the Pulitzer—I played dumb. “Yeah, that’s my stuff,” I said politely, smiling. “Oh, is it not supposed to be there? I’m sorry.” But I’d kept it there.
I needed my own recognized place at the Voice, and I also needed what that place would signify: that I was a “real” and legitimate writer for the paper, one who was entitled to a private desk and phone line. I pretended that I had these already; I expropriated them, or, to use my favorite phrase, I “liberated” them. There was a phone line at the “free” computer; I told the Voice phone operator to put my calls through to me at that extension, and it became “my” phone line.
Folks like me have always had to be good at acting. All the golems in Jewish history had been ordered to dress up as goyim in order to investigate who was behind the blood libels. (Of course, the golems had had to pretend to be human beings in the first place, even before they put on their special goyim suits.) Previously I had pretended things because my mother forced me to, but now I was acting for my own purposes. I knew nothing about reporting, not even that one ought to tell the truth.
My mother had taught me that truth is a matter of fighting for one’s interests, not revealing secrets for nothing. The Gingerbread Man became my model: he looked like a person and so effectively became a person, until someone finally caught and ate him.
My plan was to write for the Voice as much as I could until that happened.
Soon—as they say in bountiful 12-step—I “acted as if” I should be given a column. The Voice, ridiculously, obliged! The column was called “Body Politics.” Oh, if you insist on holding me to petty accuracies I must reveal that I shared the column, alternate weeks, with a cantankerous and talented sea-monster named Richard Goldstein. Richard, seventy-three feet long and colored orange with big, unpleasant, gray constricting coils down the length of his body, was my editor. Everyone else was afraid to work with him. Everything gay in content had to get past Richard before it could be allowed into the paper, and he was a terrifying guardian. He was also a brilliant writer in his own right, but he didn’t start writing about Gay Love till I was in college, when I read him for the first time and wanted to lick his throat and hands for hours. I didn’t know he was a sea-monster and didn’t have a throat or hands! His writing was so good that I would have sucked his monstrous coils.
Richard was rather like my mother but with a penis, and with less narcissism about his personal appearance. He was the most dominant person I have ever met, but then, at 22 I was most accustomed to interacting with dominant and terrifying persons, and it was probably more comfortable for me to go into Richard’s office and have him wrap his tentacles around me and squeeze, than it would have been to have a gentle, kindly editor.
I wooed him—this was the word I always used for what I did with Richard—I was a persistent suitor, once I’d found out he was the Cerberus of Gaydom, and I wooed him with the fierce young demonstrators in my articles, hot boys and girls from the Free Queer States, radical commentary and doggie treats until he sighed, contented, like a mesmerized hogfish, and rolled over.
My power to sing Richard to sleep was only partial, of course. Sometimes he would lick story ideas from my hands slowly and rhythmically for hours only to stir suddenly and leap ferociously for my throat. The copy editors and fact-checkers hated him because they were the least powerful people at the paper and he was rude to them, kept them waiting for hours, and often prevented them from doing their jobs on pieces he had written or edited, overruling them in the exercise of the only authority they had. The copy editors and fact-checkers were mostly my age (I had been a freelance copy editor in their ranks during the whole time I’d wooed Richard) and they were all also writers, but unlike me had won over no monster-editor to their side. I would smile inside whenever Richard was rude to them, feeling the cosmic joy of being preferred by a parental sea-monster who was nasty and hurtful to all the other children.
I flattered myself that he was never nasty and hurtful to me. In fact, he was—many times— but I trained myself assiduously not to notice. I told myself that I knew how to talk to Richard, knew how to endure him and how to deal with him, because we had both had particularly unpleasant spells put on us by our parents. Richard had told me about his own underwater childhood less than a year into our writer-editor relationship. First, my mentor had told me a piece of news about myself that shocked me.
“You’re obsessed with violence in your writing,” Richard told me, after I had turned in a piece about a lesbian who had taken her lover, who'd just been raped, to the emergency room, only to be set on by hospital security guards who dyke-baited the couple and beat the crap out of both of them. It wasn’t just the subject of the piece, which was my firstlargearticle for the Voice. It was the graphic—almost pornographic—quality of the writing, where I mentioned every bruise on the rape victim’s lover, how many inches each had measured, according to her doctor, how her lover, who’d been anally raped, had been sitting in the emergency room covered with shit.
Reader, I took it as my duty to report on the size and location of the bruises and how many times they hit her because I was afraid no one would react with enough outrage. I was afraid people wouldn’t think what had happened was as bad as all that. You could say I was responding like a golem, protecting my community from the pogrom that encircled it.
In fact, after the Voice published the article, ACT UP demonstrated inside the entrance to the emergency room where the employees had beaten up the women. Four hundred people chanted at the top of their lungs inside that entrance, and left the wooden statue of Jesus on the wall covered in Silence = Death stickers. It was as though I myself had summoned a golem, a golem named ACT UP, that had toddled into the hospital and, with the weight of its enormous body on the floors, made St. Vincent’s quake.
The hospital initiated reforms after that.
St. Vincent’s was the main medical facility in the Village, and the place where most people with AIDS went then when they were ill.
It was only after the article had been published that I considered the fact that the rape victim’s lover was an extremely belligerent, indeed a violent person who just may have started the fight. It didn’t make the guards’ assault on the couple
less outrageous and unjust, just less telling about the utter egregiousness of homophobia at the hospital.
(Actually, a few years later, the lover, who’d been so impressed by how powerful a golem ACT UP was that she joined the group, threatened me at the crowded ACT UP meeting. I’d said “Shh!” to her when she was talking loudly and I could not hear the speaker. “Don’t ssh me!” she yelped. “If you know what’s good for you.”)
When Richard informed me back in 1988 that I was obsessed with violence, I took a deep breath.
“You’re right,” I said, and began to think about all of the other reported pieces, essays and poems I had written about violence. There were at least 380 of them in the years since I had first started writing in sixth grade. I wrote a column called “Body Politics," after all, because I knew what it was like to have a body that had been shaped to serve. My different, actionable, pressable, queer body had been, I believe, badly battered by the very process that created it—not by being made gay, Lord knows! but by being made with a body that my owner intended to control. It is nauseating just to inhabit a body designed to do the will of another, and the vertigo I experienced whenever my mother moved my parts for me made it hard to touch the soul that was inside me.
My joints were weird, scalloped, and vulnerable, like the ones on the G.I. Joe I had gotten as a hand-me-down from my mother’s little brother Henry. The G.I. Joe had long joint-holes in his wrists, neck, ankles, knees, and elbows, which, at nine, I could think of only one thing to do with—torture him. I put knives and pen points in his joint-holes, one by one, lovingly, relishing what I imagined it was doing to him.
As an action figure myself, I had felt the same. In point of fact, all action figures feel vertigo when people move their parts around, playing with them.
My father had moved my parts for me, too, when he hit them, rather like the New York State prison guards I’d also written about who had manipulated the parts of a man imprisoned on the Special Inmates Block until he died. (Those who play with marionettes have to be fanatically careful, or they just fall apart.)
The Special Inmates Block at the upstate prison in Clinton, New York was for mad, developmentally disabled, or simply distraught inmates. The guards would amuse themselves by smacking the prisoners all day, and posting jokes and cartoons about hitting people on their bulletin board. ("Beetle Bailey" has an awful lot of jokes about Sarge beating the shit out of Beetle, so it was the guards' favorite.)
My poor father had in fact been imprisoned in a kind of Special Inmates Block at a U.S. military stockade in Hamburg, Germany. I didn’t know very much about it, but according to my mother he'd been put there because he had “gone crazy” and beat up his own sergeant, after the sergeant had kept calling him a dirty Jew.
I was eight when my mother told me. By happenstance, there was a book in our living room at the time called Military Justice Is to Justice As Military Music Is to Music and I read it cover to cover in the bathroom, passionate to know about him. The book said that for decades, U.S. soldiers in U.S. military prisons had been brutally beaten daily, as a matter of policy.
My father never spoke of any of it.
At the Voice I lived to punish police and prison guards, and anyone anywhere who fractured people’s bodies. I wrote about sexual abuse, rape, baby- and wife-beating. I created article after article out of what Lenin—a journalist originally!—called “exposures,” revelations of horrible things that were being done to human beings, and must stop (as he put it so eloquently in his essay “Can a Newspaper Be a Collective Organizer?” 1902.)
But mostly I wrote about being queer, because that was a good metaphor for my own extreme physical disenfranchisement. My body was supposed to do the will of others, not its own. Like Pinocchio’s body, made of trees, it was supposed to obey, and never play. Pinocchio was told that if he obeyed completely he would finally be allowed to be a real boy, but as for me, I doubted (despite Lenin, despite what I was able to accomplish with St. Vincent’s) that I could ever be real.
Chapter 4
Hamlet was very likely also a magic action figure that someone had enchanted. Why else would he say, “Othat this too, too solid flesh would melt”? The bespelled fleshwas too disgustingly solid to let him float away into the world of Play, where he should have been allowed to stay in the first place. It is very magic-action-figure, in any case, to think of life as a “coil” that one itches to take off.
My own body was also stuck between the worlds. It was neither fish nor fowl; it belonged neither to me nor, anymore, to others.
My father had died in my freshman year of college, of a sudden cancer. He wasn’t around to read all my exposures of the prison guards, no matter how many of them I made. And my dad, a concerned Jew underneath all his enchantments, wasn’t around to rejoice in my beating back the pogroms. As for my mother, now that I lived on my own I wasn’t sure whether she still owned my body, but she seemed to command it from afar by remote control. What was that line from Emily Dickinson? “The absence of the witch does not/Invalidate the spell.” Anyhow, I still saw my mother all the time. I allowed my body to go inside her house, and allowed hers inside my own.
My own. My body: sometimes it seemed I could command it for five seconds—10—maybe 15 if I pushed it, but no longer than that. Nor did my father’s sudden absence invalidate the spells he’d unknowingly cast on me himself, from the poor witless isolation of his foul juju’d monsterhood.
But his dying cut the legs out from under my family. When the fast, brutal lung cancer had eaten him through in about eight months, I was surprised to find I’d lost some kind of bulwark in him, my ogre. Somehow, he had been my mainstay against my mother. Because he was male, or because he wasn’t her, or perhaps because he was the thing she hated, I felt almost as though I’d lost my dick.
I had found my father’s cancer pretty pleasant at first because he had lost a lot of weight and had gotten much less frightening. He was now a pale, thin man like a piece of white asparagus from Europe, even his face no longer red like a meat slab with an anger problem. In the mild spring of my senior year of high school, I could come home from school and not be afraid if he was in the house.
When my father was closer to death it was a little different. Beyond losing the particular person he was (who was that?), whom I found it acutely painful suddenly not to have known, he’d been a wedge against falling into her completely.
Now, as I became the first golem in history to go to school at Yale, I was ashamed to discover thatthe loss of my father’s Minkowitz role was almost as great a loss as that original loss of him. With him gone, my family members found that we had lost a placeholder, a hate object, someone to cushion us against the realities of our bizarre family situation.
Never mind that he was part of our bizarre family situation—he was, more saliently for the rest of us, a cushion, a bit of armchair stuffing, a shock absorber. Everything started to hurt more with him gone, as though he had been a nice pillow shoring up the space against the impact of my mother. Even my mother felt this stuffing gap, I believe. Our family life began to be unstable, with open fights breaking out suddenly between the members and naked statements of doubt, and rage.
Now, in our post-high school years, my mother began suddenly to give my sisters and me way too generous gifts, as if to win us by other means now that Daddy wasn’t around to provide a comparison, a distraction. She had been so much better than my father that I’d had to love her.
Maybe my mother’s new kind of gifts were to make up for the past. They were some sort of supplement, whether for my father’s loss or for having to put up with himI wasn’t sure.
I think my mother secured her future as best she could by adapting. Well, perhaps that is too cold an assessment of it. My mother changed. Maybe she felt guilty. In a way it was just an extension of her extravagant manner of our childhoods, when she’d overwhelmed us telling us the plots of porno movies she’d just been to see (“the semen on her face cured the girl’s ac
ne!”), and exuberant kisses that always left sexy lipstick imprints on me like the ones adult men are supposed to get on their collars.
Now she was pouring out humdrum objects to win us. My mother had never been humdrum before, but suddenly she was like the mother on a cake-mix box, flooding us with homely necessities like socks, comfy robes, Dr. Dentons (those old-fashioned girls’ pajamas with the feet attached, given to us as adult women), chaste television cozies from L. L. Bean (a cross between a sweater and a blanket, for feeling safe while watching TV), warm flannel clothing for exercising or frolicking with squirrels, nothing remotely sexy, everything providing snugly comfort.
These motherly gifts were a shock of joy for me. The cotton softness of it all was ecstatic, like a wedding after a war, like finding yourself with a leg that had been missing from birth and jumping up and down on it to play with its impossible support. I felt five years old every Christmas now, opening presents and gazing back at my mother with a joy that felt nearly criminal. There were colorful but nicely butch women’s nightshirts in bright red and blue, down booties, warm sleepcaps in case I got cold. My gift pile was enormous and tied with beautiful bows, wrapped in paper with Santas or Disney characters, sometimes candy canes. The stack would feel like her mother love in wholesome, huge, emphatic form, a tad aggressive in its size and scale perhaps, but appropriate, I felt, given the insufficient and degraded versions of it I’d experienced before. She was now the source of all my sleep clothes, so she was there every night right next to my dreaming and to that quick moment of trust you have to have just before you plunge into unconsciousness.
My mother also gave me lots of little payments that I began to ask for in my 20s, starting from the time I began at the Voice. I thought of them, when I thought of them at all, as reparations, sometimes punitively but often in a friendly sense, as though they were a simple restoration, almost the repair of an oversight. When my bank account ran out, which happened frequently because Ipaid no attention to it, I would stop by.
Growing Up Golem Page 4