Growing Up Golem

by Donna Minkowitz

  Perhaps that was why one day, just a few months into our work together, when Edna surprisingly laughed and muttered, "Are you trying to turn me on?” , all I could do was very bewilderedly say the thing I thought she wanted me to, "Uh... Uh ...Yes. "

  I was telling her about a date. I’m not sure what words I used, what might have stimulated her, reader. I was not trying to turn her on, but she had asked the question so happily, smiled warmly. That was so rare that I wanted badly to come to common ground with her about something, anything.

  Even if it meant saying something false. I did want her to like something I said.

  I imagined, because I had understood from my college reading of psychoanalytically-influenced literary criticism that sexual feelings were usually hot and rife between therapists and clients, that "trying to turn her on” somehow meant a major advance in our therapy. I thought it meant the therapy was working. Now we were getting somewhere!

  And I thought, coming to a place of greater closeness. So I just coughed, blinked and just said yes.

  Years later, she told me that she found me "attractive.”

  Eventually, even peeing became an issue between us. I was always afraid to come up and use Edna’s bathroom before our session, because she liked me to wait for her to summon me upstairs in her majestic Brooklyn Heights duplex at the exact moment when she was ready for me. So I had to either hold it in or cut into my expensive session time by dashing off to the bathroom while the meter was running. This agitation of mine made me afraid about all sorts of physical needs and adjustments during therapy, so once when I felt hot I took my sweater off quickly, trying to defuse my "trespass” by doing it as swiftly as possible.

  Edna said immediately, "You did that so seductively! You look like you’re performing a striptease for me.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. But I became afraid of taking off my sweater after that, every time.

  Oh reader, we so seldom talked about my own dark golem longings, my own terrible, dusty thirst for love. I wanted to be married, binding my poor clay-pigeon heart forever to somebody’s real one. But I thought no one would ever want to do that with me. (Or if I did marry, I knew I would choose one of the lacerating women that I usually fell in love with, and be lacerated by her forever.) On the more mundane level of sex, I chose people like the woman who used to make love to me as though she were drilling through granite. Perhaps she glimpsed on some level that I was really an inanimate object, but my clay was not really that hard.

  Instead of talking about these things, Edna and I used to talk about how I could shine a nicer, warmer love on my mother, who was about Edna’s age.

  For the next three years, she tried to bring me and my mother closer. (“Why don’t you just trust her, Donna?” she would grumble at me.) But I felt a mystically monstrous thing happening in our therapy around 1990, when the rough and hairy hand of my mother's servant, Jane, intruded visibly into my own therapeutic process with Edna, like the fleeting glimpse of a werewolf.

  It was Edna herself who nonchalantly revealed Jane’s scraggly fingers on the scale. She said, "Jane told me you’re not paying enough attention to your mother’s illness. She had a serious meeting with me to say that your mom is very ill and you’re not acknowledging that.”

  Jane told her? It turned out not only that my mother’s therapist stayed in very regular contact with Edna, but that she was in fact her therapeutic supervisor, or according to a certain way of thinking, her boss.

  Jane actually was "the boss of all the therapists,” if by that you meant all the therapists in my mother’s world: my therapist, my sister Josie’s therapist, the shrinks my mother had found for her good friends Loretta and Bill. All the therapists answered to Jane, just as all their clients answered to my mother. Thus was the order of rule maintained, so that everyone in my mother’s sphere remained in their ordained places and the unique powers of my mother were preserved.

  As for my mother’s powers, they had indeed mutated during her long illness, but not in the direction of decreasing. Instead, they had, if it is possible, metastasized. My mother had said that she was "very ill” with a variety of lung diseases ever since her cancer operation in 1971, but she had never gone to the hospital for them, and the diseases came to seem more and more like a source of alchemical power, rather than a detriment to my mother’s body or mind. I believe the permanent hole in her neck served as a chakra for performing certain reverse or electro-negative operations in kabbalistic magic, from which she derived her powers.

  Jane had told Edna that my mother was going to die soon, but I think she was deluded by her mistress, whom she was helping to focus as much public and private attention as possible on the hole. Meditating on holes is a well-known energy focus in so-called "black” magic, which gives the potencies of death-in-life to the practitioner.

  Her neck-hole looked rotten in some lights, and it stayed there uncannily in her neck while she lived on; as though its decaying force somehow allowed her to prolong her life unnaturally, like a vampire. Like the Burning Bush, my mother had a permanent fatal wound in herself, but she was not consumed. It was like an ongoing fountain of death.

  When Jane spoke to my shrink about my mother’s "impending” death, I was furious that my mother’s attendant had poked her calloused hand into what I had thought was my independent therapy with Edna. But I did not know whether or not to believe that my mother was dying. Because she might be, because Jane might be right and I did not want my creator to die without my having given her love, I changed my rebellious ways and began to see her much more often—about once a week —and I began to be as agreeable to her as possible in all things.

  It was like my earliest days of golemhood, before I’d become a radical reporter.

  Indeed, I had recently been fighting with my mother at whiles, and opting not to see her for long periods, but now I softened and called her or allowed her to call me once a day. Edna had convinced me that my maker was entitled to this by all the moral strictures that I knew.

  My therapist was very, very pleased by this new change in me. As it turned out, I came to have my doubts about my mother’s imminent departure over the years (my mother did not actually pass, if you want to come right down to it, until 2002). So I talked to Edna once, I think around 1993, about the possibility of breaking off contact with my mother, who over time seemed more and more to be poisoning my life. Edna just looked at me grimly on that occasion and said, "You and I both know you don’t want to do that.”

  Suddenly, my throat got very tight and I "knew” in a strained way, somehow, that I didn’t want to. It can be difficult for golems to resist a human command, or even a bare suggestion. Our minds are made in such a way that we interpret everything as commands: only the powerful harnessing of my ancient rage toward my mother, along with focused meditation, had allowed me to oppose her in the first place.

  Now Edna was hinting—commanding, if you’re asking how I perceived her words—that I give up this herculean effort. The suggestion was so seductive, reader: it felt tremendously desirable to just let it all go, to give in. Peace and love. Intercourse and harmony.

  So I did. Now, finally, my mind would be on a correct foundation, that of boundaryless intimacy and integration with all living forms.

  Edna trained me further. Not only was I to love my mother, I was to love all my enemies, as Jesus commanded (Edna and I were Jews, but both highly susceptible to the Jesus message, for some reason).

  I was to love and be nice to every single person who tried to do me wrong—and this was the true golem-whispering, the kernel of all of Edna’s teaching to me.

  Christian-right homophobes? Homeless men who said they wanted to fuck me? I was to project myself into their heads and adopt their intentions as my own.

  Edna got me, against my own will in the matter, to always give my mother the numbers where I could be reached on vacation. Later, I told her I was struggling with a request from my mom that I act as her "voice” and read
all her poems aloud for her at her many poetry readings.

  "Come on,” Edna whispered. "Can’t you just do it for her?”

  I could. In fact, I did.

  In the end, we crashed and burned, my golem whisperer and I. For some reason, Edna could not quite keep her control over me after my first book was published in 1998, and things began to come undone in every quadrant of my life, as though the golem-spell holding me together were starting to unravel after so many years.

  This is how it happened, best beloved: I was about to turn thirty-five (just a couple of years after thirty-three, when hobbits have their "coming of age,” but golems, as far as I know, have no official coming of age, because they are understood to remain the same age at death as at conception. In Hebrew, one of the original meanings of golem is embryo.) My book Ferocious Romance came out but did quite badly, my compassionate reader. That is to say, it got some wonderful reviews, and even an award, but few people bought it.

  I had not expected this. In order to write the book, and also because the Voice’s new editor had refused to provide me the regular salary with which Voice writers were sometimes rewarded after years of being listed on the masthead as "contributors,” I had stopped writing for the Voice.

  It had taken two and a half years for me to write the book, and in that time I had become less famous. Much less famous if you want to be precise, gentle reader, so that you have probably never heard of me, but if you lived in New York in the late '80s and early '90s and were an artist or an activist or queer, you likely would have. Charlie Rose put me on his show! Now, having lost public knowledge of my name, and losing still more oodles of potential recognition because no one wanted to read my book, I was trying with my last bit of energy to have a sexual relationship that was sexually satisfying. If I couldn’t get people to read my book, I could at least have sex, right? A journalist I barely knew had set me up with one Warda Hueppenstech, who was not especially attractive or nice but who wanted to go out with me. Was I desperate? Reader, you be the judge: I canceled a late-in-the-game book reading in Boston to have our date, because Warda was going out of town for a month after that.

  On our second date, Warda insisted that we see Todd Solondz’s Happiness even though I told her I was really not in the mood for a movie about a generally nice man who sexually abuses children. “I don't think it's a great movie for me to see on date night.” Warda insisted, and I gave in with my customary goodhearted golem goodwill. When we went back to her apartment, Warda and I started having sex, but I became upset and told her the movie had dovetailed uncomfortably with my training at home. Warda decided to plunge right ahead by speaking erotically to me about rape and sexual abuse and telling me how much she wanted to fuck me and take me over. She said she knew from reading my book how much I wanted to do whatever any of my partners wanted.

  Reader, I told you that I was a golem: perhaps you’ll understand then why I stayed in her apartment, allowed her to fuck me that way, and felt great pleasure along with a shivery sadness and sense of doom.

  I didn’t want to have a third date with her. Despite all the pleasure, I knew that Warda was a boor, perhaps the least sensitive person I had ever been with. She was too dangerous to entrust my feelings with. I told Edna that a few days later in therapy.

  Edna was furious. "You’re not giving Warda a chance!” She made it clear that she wanted me to go back for another date with Warda, more dates, a whole run of them! She said my expectations of women were too high.

  I went back out there to Warda for a couple of shivery months. She fucked my sweet golem body and it felt wonderful physically and very, very terrible emotionally, so that my inner cavities resounded with a feeling of utter occupation, and bedevilment. And I knew I never again wanted to be that intimate physically with someone I couldn’t trust.

  Edna and I fought about it. She was convinced I wasn’t opening myself enough, and it was that matter of argument that ultimately ended with Edna throwing me out of therapy.

  Chapter 7

  When Edna dumped me, reader, I felt abandoned like a motherless animal, but also curiously free. In short order, all the other spells in my life began to unravel, too: I dumped my best friend, Andy, the gay man I had always felt “married to” and who didn’t shtup me or call me back.

  I’d loved Andy, reader. Let me make that very clear. It is even as true as my name being Donna that Andy had loved me.

  Reader, first I’m going to describe Andy the way he actually looked, and then the more appropriate way he looked in my dreams.

  He wasn’t handsome, conventionally or otherwise. Tall, thinnish but a little lumpy, blond but balding in his late 20s. His voice was beautiful, though—soft but profound, a strong tenor with its own sure timbre. His body was storky, but I loved it because I loved him.

  Now, the way Andy looked in my imagination showed more clearly that he came from Faerie—for Andy was no more human than me.

  His long blond hair shone in ringlets like that of a sweet young king of fairyland. His look was kind but perilous, the way all the fairest of that kingdom look. His face was eternally hopeful, also smooth. His face really was hopeful, reader, with lots of light in it, but I must have been seriously deluding myself about the smoothness, because in actual obtrusive memory Andy almost always had a darkish beard.

  Perhaps the skin next to the beard was smooth; I liked to think of Andy as semi-virginal, young, and preternaturally feminine. In my mind, Andy was an eternally beardless youth, a kouros from Greek mythology, with lips as red as his cherry must have been. Certainly, Andy was a femme—the kind of man that I like best—but his femininity was tempered with a rising masculine energy in his dark brown eyes and driving chin, and in his tallness, I told myself, like a perfect yin-yang prince here to restore empathy and wholeness to the world.

  Andy and I never had sex, but we told each other we loved each other all the time, fervently, as if we were 19th-century same-sex poets having a romantic friendship. We had long, weepy goodbyes at the entrance to the subway station, every time we got together—marveled at by homeless men who didn’t know what to make of our ardor, or our sexless, goopy kisses.

  I was so much closer to him than I had been to any lover.

  As for him, Andy had once told me that he loved me so much that if I ever left him, “he would stalk me.” (He didn’t, reader—didn’t stalk me when I left him, which actually left me not a little disappointed.)

  The first time I wanted to be Andy’s friend was when I saw him dancing on The Disco Bus, which was what the people riding on it called one of the three buses that the Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project had chartered for a raucous, five-borough demonstration against physical attacks on gay people. It was an intense demo, stopping at five sites where someone had been hurt sometime in the past two years.

  The Disco Bus was the most fun one, where a sweet boombox was playing the happiest and most body-oriented of disco tunes—“Funky Town” and “Ring My Bell,” songs from fifteen years previous, to which Andy was dancing giddily at the front of the bus.

  I had, most unfortunately, disliked disco during its heyday (when it was loved by the most conventional and homophobic kids in my high school).

  But now, watching Andy dance in raptureto “Ring My Bell,” I understood its beauty for the first time. “Ring my bell,” Anita Ward sang, and she wasn’t even a little bit ashamed. She wanted someone to ring her bell. Andy moved his long body to the song, announcing to everyone how much he badly wanted to have his own bell rung. He sang the lyrics along with Anita; I was transfixed. He seemed, there at the front of the bus, to be a one-person force for personal and sexual liberation. His dancing was flamboyantly feminine, and he didn’t appear to be scared or bothered by this at all.

  It was difficult for me, as you might imagine, reader, to put my body into dancing. Golems can’t dance, or perhaps it's that we are sick of dancing because we have danced for other people too damn much. I was amazed that Andy, someone who had even
more to lose by being feminine than I did, could so nakedly show all the people on The Disco Bus how excited he was to have things done to his body.

  Reader, how much I loved his bravery! I think I wanted to be Andy.

  The other reason I wanted to be friends with Andy was that Jen, the woman from karate I’d gone out with, talked about him constantly. Jen was the girl who’d said I’d only been her second choice; Jen, who had long since stopped letting me fuck her but was now a friend, now claimed that Andy was one of a special, radiant breed of gay men we had both been looking for, and trying to emulate, for most of our short lives. He had sex with hundreds of different men, she said, whenever he wanted to, different men all the time, and with no problems and no sort of sexual lack at any moment whatsoever.

  I had been waiting to meet someone like him since puberty.

  Oh, reader, I had never known the simple level of connection to and enjoyment of the body that the humans seemed to take for granted. I wanted to be as free as the humans were to command my own body, and to dance wildly in it. And I thought that Andy as a representative of this special breed of gay men was the freest of all, someone who could teach me to be free.

  And make me, finally, holy.

  (“Huh?” you’re saying. Gulp, this was a bit of a complex matter, reader. Somewhere I think I knew that connecting to my own body would actually be a holy thing. But there was another aspect to the overtones of godliness: I had always felt myself horribly lacking in the sacred joy of sexuality because I was unable to be as sexual as my mother wanted me to be, at every single moment that she wanted me to. I did not want to make erotic jokes with her or tell her how gorgeous her breasts were. I did not want to rejoice in her ass. I did not want to hear her say how bouncy and hot my teenage figure was in its tight jeans.)