I would usually ask for $100—in a check signed with my mother’s sweet signature. I would always get it. It seemed like a small amount to me. Around 32 or so, I continued to ask for money, but I began to treat it as a loan and I’d repay it—with a little interest, even. Except, of course, just four years later, when my arms suddenly broke and I began to feel like a poor person again, the most golemlike of golems and incapable of repaying anything.
Before that happened —my mother and I had fights, but I was so glad to get her new, big, hot love that I always came back. She clipped every single one of my articles from the Voice and any other venue I was published in, read it and saved it. She wrote an indignant letter to the New York Times Book Review when I was once criticized in its pages. I was pleased, but didn’t let her mail it because in the letter she called my writing “penetratingly powerful.”
I couldn’t bear her writing even metaphorically that I might be able to penetrate her. Still, I was touched.
Mom, I thought, had always been far more able to penetrate me. I could not get her out of my system or out of, sad to say, my sex organs. (When she made me angry, sometimes my labia would throb, not pleasantly, but with a strong rhythm.) My defense of public, radical sexuality in the Voice always made me feel a bit weird, because it was my mother whose annoying, in-my-face sexuality had in fact ruined so many of my days.
And how could people think I was brave to write about my sex life, when my mother loved everything I said and did in the land of sex? Like the time, at the Thanksgiving table, when my mother had defended my right to have sex with multiple women, anonymously, in the back room of the Wonder Bar in the East Village!
I had written about those nights in a giant feature article in the Voice.
Although I hated it when Mom said anything about my sexuality, however positive—I thought of it as my sex effectively being in her mouth—I had in fact brought up my sex article myself as we all were munching turkey.
I had begun telling my whole extended family the story of the trouble that my sex-in-bars article had gotten me into at my feminist karate school, before realizing that I would have to specify what the article was about. I have to admit I enjoyed displaying before my family the specter of my finger-fucking anonymous women in the dark. Especially, sticking it in the face of my mother and my aunt, the avatars of in-your-face female sexuality in my family. My aunt Natalie was like my mother but more cloacal, constantly trying to embarrass us by making loud jokes about sucking cock, overly-large vaginas, and doody.
My sister Aphra, who’s also gay, had looked at me sidelong with an astonished smile— had I found a way to be even more outré than Mom? Had I found a way to exhibit myself that could actually compete with the way my mother exhibited herself? And though my mom proudly endorsed my behavior at that 1991 Thanksgiving table, her voice quavered a little as she did so.
This was extremely gratifying.
But my victory, like all my victories in sex-land, was hollow. Something was always happening that made my mother the real transgressor again. Like the time my mother drove me to her house over the Brooklyn Bridge and suddenly misplacing her house keys on the car seat, in the middle of the bridge, searched madly among my upper thighs for them.
My thighs, in their skirt, were not hiding keys and did not have keys or keychains mysteriously sticking out of them. But my mother fondled and worried them as if they did.
“Be more careful when you’re touching my thighs! “ I suggested finally in a fierce whisper. We were still on the bridge, close to the Brooklyn off-ramp. The keys had already been found, in my mother’s pocketbook.
My mother saw red. “You’re calling me a sex pervert!” She continued shouting at me for an hour. “You’re nothing but a piece of shit. Just a piece of shit!”
But a week later, my mom was calling me up to tell me that week’s article was brilliant. (She used the word “brilliant.” She always did, with me.) And to croon how much she loved me, making sounds like tiny kisses across the phone. “I love you so much.”
I loved her tiny kisses. They were hot, and sweet, and sounded perfumed—oh, everything I wanted a mother’s kisses to be.
How could I not want to suck up as much of that love as I could?
Overnight, I had become A Quantity at the Voice. My firsthand article about Republican delegates beating up ACT UP demonstrators at the 1988 Republican convention—my essay telling straight people why they should be brave already and support us—my how-to guide on lesbian safer sex (for I was sick of people thinking that dykes had no real body fluids) had transformed my social position from that of an emotionally crippled, fearful and awkward twenty-three-year-old to that of an emotionally crippled, passionate, enthusiastic, fearful and awkward twenty-three-year-old who was hailed as a good writer and had the power to change things in the world.
It was heady to call up officials and businesspeople and say, “This is Donna Minkowitz from the Village Voice.” They usually made haste to give me what I wanted, or at least to attempt to mollify me with reports, data, statements on the record that I could use to make them look bad, and (I had had no idea!) free books, film and show tickets if they were publishers or producers.
Sometimes I actually changed things. My writing about the vicious anti-gay murder of a twenty-eight-year-old gay male prostitute in Queens, Julio Rivera, made the police and district attorney take the killing more seriously and actually arrest the white teenage killers, who had confessed to witnesses. (They were all convicted, except the one who fled the country.)
It wasn’t just my writing that did it, of course. Not hardly. There was fierce and sustained activism from many people, including Julio’s best friend, Alan, and a lightning-like activist named Matt Foreman, and a new group called Queer Nation, which included a few of my friends. But what power I did have startled me.
I could do stuff.
Before this case, New York police and D.A.s had almost entirely ignored anti-gay violence, even murders.
After this case: I was safer. So were others like me.
Also: I learned how to write. Richard the giant sea-monster taught me how to do a lot of it, surprising me by how much he was willing to give of himself as he showed me how to lay down snazzy beginnings, build emotion, use structure. Like many editors, he even gave me some actual sentences I could use in my pieces, filling them in like glue in the cracks where things needed to be fastened together, clarifying my more amorphous thoughts as though they had been filtered through silver. Making my punches harder.
So. I became rather a well-known writer in a number of New York circles, reader. Not all of them gay! Oh sweet reader, forgive the sharp, pointy chip on my shoulder as I must insist once again that the Voice was a good paper in those days, that people adored it and followed its writing and politics intently, that straight people read the gay and lesbian articles and Italian-Americans from Bay Ridge the black ones and seventy-year-old Korean women the queer S/M ones and South Bronx Puerto Rican teenagers the English poetry ones. Looked at objectively (oh reader, you’re gonna think I am a narcissistic asshole!), the work I did was good and it made a difference.
People aren’t supposed to say that. But I am not actually a person—maybe I can say it? I am praying as I write this memoir for many things, that it be pretty, reader, that it be real, that it send, as Samuel Goldwyn would say, the right sort of telegram. On the deepest level, little one, I want this memoir to be truthful, so I’ve reported this fact even though it’s more than a bit painful now to say that my work made a difference, because my arms hurt too much now to ever be able to do that work again, because I am such a different person from the one who did that stuff so long ago, and because I’m afraid of people challenging it, making fun of me.
Let them mock me. I will mock myself! And do it first. But despite my heroic gay writing, I knew each day as I saved butch maidens and sweet fresh-faced gay boys that I was, in fact, a conjured assemblage of walking, rotting trash, the contents of a garb
age can that had somehow been made to stand and do gay-rights reporting in the shape of a human being. The ancient pagan and Jewish spells that my mother had put on me did somewhat to mask my mouldy-earth and rotten-egg odor, but I had been warned by several rabbinic authorities I had consulted that anyone who was walking by and thought about the stench above my head for two seconds would get that it was coming from me.
Magical beings and golems did not have any civil or human rights protections in those days—we have even less now, after 9/11 and John Yoo—and I was fearful all the time, knowing I could be discovered and deported straight to Hell, the home of recalcitrant magical beings since Yaldabaoth (Yahweh's true, unsacramental name) first put us there.
Knowing what I was, and why—a charmed bit of shit attempting to lead a human life—it was hard to take myself seriously as anybody’s human friend or lover or fellow worker or even acquaintance.
As an activist or a journalist, it was different. I had a purpose. But in the solely human and personal world of relationships with lively, warm, unmanufactured human beings, I knew I was a washout. So I hardly ever attempted them. Even though I wrote passionately on behalf of ACT UP—and I came to every meeting, ACT UP girls were far too sexy for me to imagine I might do anything with them. Too sexy and interesting and cool for me to even befriend.
Human lesbians in general were terrifying for me. Unless, perhaps, they were very unattractive. Even then, it was not easy. Gay boys were much easier, and my sweetest associations in ACT UP were with them, a nice talk on the way to a demonstration, a chat about the joys of rimming with Saran Wrap on the bus ride home. But even with them, my relationships did not grow to a dinner, a house visit. With my straight friends, there were dinners but little intimacy. There were drinks, but a lack of anything profound.
I did have a couple of dyke friends from feminist karate school—I somehow forced myself to be in that environment, so that I would have to relate at least part of the time to human lesbians. Our Goju-ryu school ("hard and soft,” our karate style meant in Japanese) was at least 90 percent human dykes, most under the age of thirty. They frightened me because, dear reader, they might induce me by their voluptuous muscles and soul-stirring availability to have sex with them, and that was something, love, I was very scared to do.
Chapter 5
OK, late that year, after writing for the Voice for some eight months, I finally got up the courage and went out with a cute but acerbic dyke who’d noticed me in karate. Jen made the point of telling me, though, that I’d only been her second choice. Mean little Annabel didn’t want her, Jen informed me, so I had the chance to date Jen even though I didn’t quite rate.
Because I knew that a large part of me was composed of fecal matter that had been sung to with the dulcet melodies of Romania, I didn’t mind. I felt lucky to be dating Jen at all. I had spent my entire time at Yale and the two years afterwards not having any sex at all.
I didn’t know why I'd been alone during those six years— I’d really wanted to meet someone— but Kieran, my evil high-school girlfriend, had broken up with me right before freshman year and then gone with me anyhow to Yale. Then my father died. College had been sterile for me in every way, but especially in a physical one, so that I’d barely even noticed the buds on the trees in springtime or the tastes of foods. It was as though I’d never read the Village Voice at all. And for the first time, I’d drank to the point of being really drunk, often.
In high school my friends and I had drunken small amounts of wine while eating delicious voluptuous runny cheeses and fat juicy grapes, and celebrating Bacchus by declaiming aloud in ancient Greek and kissing one another. At Yale, the home of boarding-school kids more practiced in the colder arts of invading liquor cabinets and getting into Upper East Side bars, there had been something called "neutron bomb parties”—this was during the Reagan presidency—where you were supposed to "destroy yourselves but leave the buildings intact.” The buildings were historic and beautiful, after all.
Also at Yale, I stopped writing poetry. And, while I’d never been able to masturbate—it is unclear whether any golems could, but my mother had certainly built me with that capacity disabled—my furious efforts to try harder while at Yale had met with no success. It just never seemed to work. Sometimes, I just felt a little pain. No pleasure ever, except at the very beginning. Still, Yale was the first place where I had ever felt dry through and through. My mother made me inhuman but she did not make me inorganic, at least not mostly. (There were not many preservatives. In certain terrible situations I had to take care, like the Wicked Witch of the West, not to melt.) Yet there had always been water inside me, even if not a soul. "Swimmer in the desert/needs to do T’ai Chi," I would read from Olga Broumas in my room in Morse, the ugly, modern dorm that had uncanny angles in the floors, and icky, hexagonal gray stones all over, inside and out, like a building arranged for evil sorcery. “To keep/in shape by moonlight, airstroked/ spitshine on the lip. So dry inside/the landlocked boat to dreamlife.”
I didn’t know why I never had a date. I’d felt really sexy in high school. At Yale I did try. I got crushes on straight women and invited them to dinner in the Yale dining hall. What we ate—nut-and-cheese casserole, bone-dry flounder—was as boring as the company. The food at Yale was terrible except for Christmas Dinner, when men in Elizabethan costume would bring in a boar with an apple in its mouth and they would have black women in maids’ uniforms serving spiked eggnog to us in the dorm library. I distinctly remember, over undersalted nut-and-cheese, reader, having a crush on one quite homely straight woman, Ellen, precisely because she was boring inside and out. (Sorry, Ellen!) I think her being boring made me feel comfortable with her; in my Yale days, boring seemed kind.
By senior year, I was doing better: I developed a crush on a beautiful bisexual woman named Annie but she was enjoying a wild affair with her Literary Theory T. A. and obviously didn’t want me. I pursued her anyway. That summer, redheaded, fineboned Annie Phillips sent me postcards from the socialist dairy cooperative we were both supporting in Nicaragua —with tantalizingly mixed messages. But she never kissed me anywhere but the cheek.
Just wanting Annie and her small but muscular wrists and maddeningly sexy, light musky perfume was the most exciting thing I did in four years at Yale. Before then, my bone-dry equivalent of passion went into demonstrating against U.S. policy in Central America and dutifully organizing gay rights demonstrations and speakouts whose presumed benefits I could not enjoy. I went to every gay and lesbian dance at Yale—every single one in four years, about twenty dances—because I thought it was my duty; I had a terrible time, each time.
On some level I knew that I wouldn’t meet anyone, and I didn’t. I danced with unattractive women acquaintances—on purpose, because I was more comfortable around them—or with gay men. I danced sadly, flirting with no one, till the dance was over, around 1:00 a.m. Each time.
I would have superficially close friendships with gay men. I spilled my guts to Winston Finch IV until the end of freshman year, when I abruptly stopped speaking to him. As a junior, I told everything to Lawrence, a gay boy who came from the suburbs, then barely said hello to him by the end of senior year.
Once, I danced with a famous young gay male writer who was a member of my class, at one of our gay dances. The writer confided that he was terrified of women’s breasts. I knew my breasts were no doubt jumping around while I was dancing, and I didn't know what to do.
I had in fact had sex with my high-school girlfriend, Kieran, but that had been—er—a complicated physical and mental endeavor for me. As I think first-time sex would necessarily have to have been for me, an imitation human being with a quite different chemical structure from the norm.
Reader, I am going to do something uncharacteristic here and throw a veil of shame up over my three years of sex with Kieran, because I don’t know you well enough to discuss it yet. We will keep my embarrassing first attempts at accessing human physicality wrapped for now.
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Karate, when I began to study it in 1986, was physical in a more profound way than the sex I had had so long ago with Kieran had been. Or, let us say that with karate I was able to master entering the world of flesh and blood, and interacting with it with my own clay and muffin batter, misshapen as it was. I had not been able to do this previously with sex.
I had never been a very physical child, because my mother had worked hardest at imitating the minds and thoughts of the humans, not their bodies. There had been no point in my doing sports, or even taking walks. Why should I attempt to feel like a human, or run about like a human, or even play like a human child, when the whole point was to entertain humans? Would a jack-in-the-box be designed so that it was able to run a four-minute mile?
I was an entertainment and connection golem, you must understand—not intended for defense except in the direst circumstances, like the very first golems that the rabbis had sent one another to demonstrate their prowess. My mother had taught me sleight of hand, but for us that involved Svengali skills more than hand-eye coordination, charm and deceptiveness more than any acute perception of spatial relations.
Organizing my limbs was indeed a trial for me as a child, because they and my trunk had been rather shoddily thrown together, if I may say so. (No offense, Mommy!) So if I moved my arms, my hips and belly would fling out like a rag doll. If I moved my neck, my head would bobble. But if I moved my head, my neck would seem to disappear.
It turned out that karate, which had been developed by people who saw past the flesh into the spirit, people who had been oppressed and did not have weapons, could be taught to anyone, human or golem, disabled person or triathlete or space alien.
Growing Up Golem Page 5