She thought I wanted to make extra work for her.
“There is no problem with your arms,” she told me, enunciating very clearly.
It was my mother’s money—specifically, my mother’s “long-term care” insurance, along with an extra mortgage on her co-op—that was paying for the home health aides. But my sister Josie had my mother’s power of attorney and was the one who signed the checks, so Reyna decided it was not important to do what I wanted when I came, especially after Josie and I had our big falling out.
Let me backtrack for a moment, sweet pea. So many special powers are going up in flamesin this sorry chapter that I must take you back to Brooklyn for a while, away from my mother’s sad studio in Lake Success, towards my own one-bedroom in Park Slope, where I can no longer afford the neighborhood’s luxe lifestyle and am putting my monthly food bills on my credit card with the hope that the balance will never come due.
Did I say “special powers”? Perhaps you have been wondering what has been keeping me alive all this time, at least in terms of rent and bottled water. It surely can’t be the royalties from my book (for like most books, it does not earn back its advance), or my few freelance articles for Internet magazines, which I can only do a tiny amount of with voice software, and which pay lousy, anyway. It’s not my mother or my savings (negative), but an even more magical bit of sustenance that I have curiously not written about before.
My grandparents on my father’s side, the Minkowitzes from Russia, were members of the American Communist Party who at some point acquired shares in a fleabag hotel property on the Upper West Side.
I don’t say “fleabag” to disparage; the entire history of my father and my father’s side of the family has taught me not to disparage any of the smaller creatures often looked at with contempt, such as the flea.
When my father was alive, my parents were always daydreaming loudly about their future inheritance: how we’d all be rolling in dough when his parents died.
I didn’t exactly believe it. My mother was always telling us stories about our eventual superhuman glory in all spheres of life, how we would light up the world and be the ones to rule it and be accounted the brightest individuals in the history of the universe.
Part of me believed her about this, it is true. But then she would say I was a piece of shit, and part of me believed that, too.
Hearing my mother and my usually silent father crow about how we, the Minkowitzes on welfare in the roachy apartment, would be rich someday, seemed as untenable a prospect as the idea that my original name had been Kal-El and I was Superman’s cousin.
“Rich” was relative then. My father’s dream in the ‘70s was to open an Orange Julius, which was like a Papaya King except a little cheaper and more seedy. An Orange Julius might have been where a streetside drug dealer and a corrupt cop went to enjoy an orange slushy together, or where poor kids would quench their parched throats after blackout looting.
I pitied my father, especially when I was a child, that the furthest he could dream was an Orange Julius. My mother had instilled in us that art, literature, and philosophy were the only things that counted, that it was vaguely dirty to have a store of any kind.
Never mind that my father, the potato-chip salesman and massage parlor-promoter, was the one working to pay for our tickets to hear Ntozake Shange and Adrienne Rich.
He was silent. All I really remember him saying to me is “Farbissiner hint! [“Nasty dog!” in Yiddish], and “Piece of shit!”
Other than that, I seldom heard his voice, except for when he sang nonsense syllables like “chitty, chitty, be, chitty bam" and “bitty bam, bitty bam.” Until I was in my 30s and my father was long gone, I didn’t know these nonsense chants were part of a venerable Jewish tradition. I had read about something called a “word salad” in the psychology books Josie brought home and thought my father was just intoning those syllables because he was crazy.
I didn’t know that they were actually nigunim, holy Hasidic chants that Jews from the Ukraine and Poland had been singing since the Baal Shem Tov.
How was I stripped of anything connecting my father to what was holy?
I don’t even know whether my father’s family was Hasidic, in the distant past or even recently. (We always assumed his parents had never been religious, just because they were Communists). But the only book I ever saw my father read, after all, was My Name Is Asher Lev, about a young artist in a Hasidic family.
(Was he an artist? He had written a song and copyrighted it in his 20s. My mother was always making him sing it to us so we could all make fun of him for it: “In the spring, the flowers bloom,” in his sincere baritone, “Young lovers everywhere..." Maybe like a little-boy offspring of Sinatra and Johnny Mercer.
How could I have ridiculed that song? I prize it now.)
So what did my father’s slightly nasal, somewhat feminine baritone say, those two or three times, about our eventual windfall? “See, Biggie,” he would say to me smiling, “We’re gonna be rich. I’m gonna open that Orange Julius."
— How I remember, with a shock, that he did speak to me affectionately sometimes. He called me “Biggie” and “Butch.” Reader, I had never heard the word “butch” before and had no idea that he might have meant it disparagingly. I kind of liked it when he used those names, though I always found his affection hard to reconcile. Mostly, what I associated with him was painful punches, so when he’d look at me and say “Butch!” fondly, I would feel a mental disconnect. When he’d put his arm around me when we were sitting in the front seat of the car together, it was even worse. I think he may have meant it affectionately, but I was afraid of him physically, and I worried on some unthinking level that he might squeeze until I croaked in pain.
What else?
When I was four or five, he warned me against putting my fingers inside the grille of a room fan. I could tell he was agitated and upset at the thought. “My parents told me not to,” he said, “but I put my fingers inside a fan when I was little and I got hurt!”
In retrospect, I value his warning so much. Because it was one of the only times he ever tried to protect me.
He gave me one other piece of fatherly advice, when I was fifteen. I had just come out (as bisexual, incidentally, not gay), and my father wanted to tell me sincerely that he thought it’d be bad for me. “Donna, your mother and I have a great sex life! I’d be sad to know you were missing out on that!”
I’m still horrified he brought up their great sex life, and angry that he didn’t want me to be gay. (Also annoyed that he failed to notice I liked men, too.) But it was also one of two things he ever said to me that a protective guardian might say, reader, so I also kind of treasure it.
Later when he was white and skinny from cancer, he wept when I said goodbye to him at the Amtrak station, going back to Yale. It was the last time I ever saw him, and it was important. (Thanks, Dad.)
My father’s mother, Shirley, died a month after he did, which meant Josie, Aphra, and I inherited directly from her. She had stayed largely unvisited in a nursing home for nine years, after my mother had literally sent her packing from our Co-op City apartment. (She’d pushed Shirley out into the hallway, then tossed her packed suitcase right behind her. I was there and I saw. Finally, my mother’s threat to pack somebody’s suitcase had been made good on!)
Shirley had lived with us for only a few months, after Daddy’s father died in 1973. It was in the middle of my family’s worst time, I know—my mother’s larynx had been removed only a little more than a year before, and my father had started hurting me. I moved onto the yellow loveseat in the living room so that Shirley could have my room, and on that loveseat I began to stay up all night.
I was terrified of what I might dream if I let myself sleep. For the first time, I was afraid of vampires, werewolves, and grinning skeletons, and terrified that if I was dreaming I would think they were real. I numbed myself out with TV every night so that I wouldn’t sleep.
When Shirley mov
ed out, I stayed on in the living room. Claimed to like it. Let Josie have my old room. (Shortly after she threw her out, my mother pretended to “relent” enough to drive Shirley to the nursing home.)
When my father’s mother was dead, and Daddy, too, Aphra, Josie, my mother, and I went to meet the lawyer who was the executor of her will. The lawyer—and my mother, too—emphatically urged my sisters and me to endow my mother with her own slice of our inheritance. (For surprisingly, Shirley had not left her anything.) My sisters and I were twenty-three, twenty-two, and eighteen, and we did give my mom her cut, of course.
Afterwards, the four of us were gleeful. We went out to a more expensive lunch then any of us had ever had before—glorious baby lettuces, cold poached WASPy salmon. The lawyer’s office was in Rockefeller Center—even more glorious!—and we ate in a cafe overlooking the golden statue of Atlas there.
The money: in the beginning it was only $400 a month, but it was free money, reader, and as such had a curious odor of adventure and freedom associated with it.
It was my freshman year in college, and the first thing I bought was a black leather jacket ($90). I had always, always, always wanted one.
A woman I was in love with at Yale said of the jacket, “Delicacy, elegance—and shoulders!”
I didn’t buy much else with the money until four or five years later. I was working at the Columbia University law library, a job that made me feel like Bartleby the scrivener. I was the Bindery Assistant, meaning I was supposed to send periodicals to get bound with other issues of the same periodical, and in an appropriate color. (I made all the Marxist law journals red.) I had a part-time, work-study graduate student who was supposed to help me carry the books, a man who was older than me and would stand much too close to me in the desolate Bindery Elevator and smile broadly. I could not think of what to do about it because the grad student was from Africa and I was officially in a position of power over him.
But I left after six months so I could try to write for the Voice, where I had sold a few pieces already. I took a half-time job as a receptionist at the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, then I ditched it for a quarter-time job answering the phones at a female executives’ group so I could write more.
Eventually, I did not need to have a day job at all.
Are you hating me already, reader? Bear in mind that I have always hated rich people, too. And I did struggle with an obligation I then felt to hate myself. (Also I felt a duty to “earn my keep,” because those who earn passively from stocks are supported by the rest of society that works. That was one of the reasons I became a radical journalist.)
But in fact I had not become independently wealthy so much as independently working-class. (For my Voice income by itself paid for my Kmart wardrobe of butch T-shirts and that was about it. ) But then, as real estate prices began their inexorable rise in Manhattan, I gradually became independently middle-class.
Another special power I can elucidate further here— when my father hit that sergeant and got put in the U.S. Army stockade, my mother, who told the story to us, said that he had “gone berserk.” Berserk means “bear shirt,” I have just found out. Reader, I was actually right when I said that he had been bearbaited! That was just a lucky guess! (Exactly what William Blake had in mind when he said, “What is now proved was once only imagined.”) In the Norse sagas, berserkers were men who wore bearskins and became like the bear, crazy with rage, striking trees, boulders, and their own families and friends as well as the enemy. Some of them may well have been historical men in whom their kings deliberately induced this rage.
They were very good at frightening people, which is why the kings kept them around.
Berserkers thought they were impervious to wounds, because they could not feel them in their mad state.
Sometimes they took off their shirts and went naked into battle, because they were so sure they could not be hurt.
My father might just as well have been the original golem. The men in the bear shirts had superhuman strength as long as the fit was on them, but afterwards grew much weaker than ordinary men and women.
They were very easy to control then. They also grew ashamed.
Coincidentally—no lie!—for many years I had thought of my father as a wounded bear, trapped in a net of humiliations and goaded so that he would rear on his hind legs, and dance.
That net became his major point of connection with my mother; whenever she touched it they both were spellbound.
Chapter 12
Now my mother began to grow weaker, smaller, and easier to put in a cage, too, if anyone had wanted to—like the bear-men when their fits had left them. It was painful for me.
I was surprised how awful it was the year she forgot my birthday. She had always gone all out for my birthday.
I told you, my mom had always thought I was a special one.
Sometimes I hated it: There was the year she hired the Yale Precision Marching Band to play for me, as a surprise, in the dorm common room when everyone was watching. I did love it the time in high school when she made an arrangement with an inexpensive florist to get me flowers every month for the whole year. That was amazing—one of the best gifts I've ever received from anyone. There were some ruby and diamond rings that made me feel like a whore, but also novels that got me interested in science fiction for the first time (Out of the Silent Planet, The Left Hand of Darkness, a picture-book about Poseidon).
What does it mean to lose your source of power?
I was lonely, even as I was trying not to demand from my friends what I had always demanded: that they take away my unhappiness immediately, as my mother’s Jane had done for her. I tried not to call people when I felt desperate, even though I almost always felt desperate. I tried to remember that my friend Eileen had children and they weren’t me.
Eileen was a really good mother, and I would have liked so much to be her child. Her children, Alma and Manny, always got to be as sad or angry or happy as they were.
I kept wanting Olive, my newish therapist, to tell me I was doing a good job, but she wouldn’t do it. “That sounds maybe like something maternal,” the therapist said, “and that is not a role that I should fill.”
Shit. I thought that was supposed to be the very purpose of a therapist?
I would take the long, cold express-bus ride out to Queens every week or so, where I would recite poetry to my real mother and sing old songs to her.
Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole to pole...
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul
(“Invictus” was my mother’s all-time favorite poem.)
Although I might not have a very present mother, I had the uncanny sensation that I myself had a child now—my Repetitive Strain Injury. It was as though I had carefully nurtured and birthed this condition, and I was now required to take care of it. I felt much more responsibility than I ever had before, for this bizarre RSI baby. What did it look like, my baby? Did it have craggy folds to its face, like a poltergeist? Was it prickly and rough-skinned and purple, one of those infants that looks like a cactus pear? I only knew that I had to take care of it. I dreamed it was sweet and warm, and that I had to learn to hold it as though it were a tiny baby, not a sack of potatoes. In the dream I carried it off my wrist in a little plastic Rite Aid bag at first, unsupported and unprotected.
My personal delicate-little-fairy routine seemed for the first time to be growing old. For one thing, it was much harder to pay the rent than it had ever been. My health expenses were high, and my income from the hotel failed to cover them, reader. I was shamed by this, and also by the fact that writing fast enough to work myself with magazine work seemed to be too dangerous for me now, even with my special disability software.
Clearly, I had been a rampant failure at preparing myself for times like these. Wordsworth, who was once my own favorite poet, would wonder every now and then why he expected other people to “Buil
d for him, sow for him, and at his call/ Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all?”
I expected other people to always spot me, too.
All the time.
I’d often thought of Wordsworth’s statement of nonchalant dependence on others, because golems are taught never to take any heed for ourselves, either. We are taught to jump in the sea and drown, to smother fires with our own bodies. We run into walls if the rabbi says to. The rabbis do take care of our basic bodily needs, but it is actually unclear whether golems have any. (That we are under the rabbis’ authority is not in dispute.) There was a way that my unearned income from my Russian grandparents’ property had helped keep me a child, which is to say a golem; “an unformed thing”; “an embryo.” In present-day Hebrew, the most common meaning for golem is “cocoon.” But was it a cocoon that smothered or that fed?
Now I had to use every card in my hand, and so, like the good bullshit artist I am,I vigorously used all my credit cards. Banks kept offering me even more of them! I taught three of my writing classes at once, and looked into writing gay male porn for a website owned by a friend of Andy’s. In the porno, I tried to turn Betty Pill, a Chinese-American, into a hulking, dominant, sulky Asian man, which I thought would appeal to all the non-Asian boys. "Ralph Wu glared at me. ‘Get down on the floor.’" The pieces remained too literary.
I traded writing classes to a poor student in exchange for taking out my garbage. I had lunch with my old editor at The Nation, trying to scare up work. I tried to manage doing freelance pieces like the one she actually gave me on the new, boring anti-gay ballot measure in Florida, while still protecting my arms (they got flared up, and The Nation most unfeelingly declined to give me a cover line.) I lunched with a boy I’d had a crush on in high school, who was now dean of a liberal rabbinical college, where I unsuccessfully lobbied to teach creative writing. An old ACT UP buddy of mine was starting to edit a magazine for people with breathing problems? Great! I let him take me out to a succulent lobster dinner and wrote a venomous screed about how much I hated smokers.
Growing Up Golem Page 17