In “The Whiteness of the Whale,” Ishmael, the book’s narrator, takes a break from the action of the whale hunt to provide a disquisition on the paradoxical meanings of whiteness. Whiteness represents the blank, featureless plane of nothingness, of the self blotted out. Whiteness also represents the oceanic merger with something larger, grander, greater than the self. Driven by Ahab, the monomaniacal captain of the Pequod, the crew is torn between conflicting drives. They aim to conquer the white whale, to prevail over it by destroying it. They seem equally attracted by the prospects of being subsumed by it in some final act of orgiastic surrender.
I could relate. I understood obsession. Compulsion. Monomania. Delusion. My father’s. My own. Like the crew members, I was terrified of dying and being reduced to nothingness. But I was also attracted to the prospect of being subsumed and merging with something larger than myself. After years and years of holding on, I longed to just let go. Ishmael’s description of escape through some glorious immersion in the All thrilled me. It reminded me of the girl in my poem who runs into the sea and drowns herself, only to have her consciousness continue in some amorphous, merged-with-the-ocean form. Before my notting compulsion had taken over, I had been able to achieve that sense of immersion and oceanic release through my writing.
In the middle of the night I thought about Moby Dick and I thought about death. In my father’s absence, our house was quiet at night—too quiet. I could hear the refrigerator’s hum from the kitchen, and the furnace’s occasional ping. My mother went to bed early; no one prowled the halls or hunted for sedating substances. No one was there to show me the skulls among the haberdashery.
I’d lie in bed and suddenly become infused with the panic of imagining my own death. It terrified me to think that my consciousness could just be over, obliterated in a poof of flour as my mother had said. At the same time, being in my body with its dysfunctional bowel and overactive brain felt like torture. I longed to get beyond the body, or at least my body.
Another possibility beckoned. Perhaps I could achieve a form of escape through merger with another, better body, preferably that of some beautiful teenage boy’s. I’d form crushes on one after another of the boys at school. Thinking about them could always distract me from my obsessions. I would just imagine a gorgeous boy’s face, or one particular ethereal boy’s gorgeous face and slinky body. He often stood in the same place during Nutrition break, high on the school amphitheater’s steps. I would position myself on a lower step and try not to stare too conspicuously.
The immediate obstacle was that none of the boys in La Crescenta wanted me. When I tentatively allowed any of them to see my interest, I’d be cruelly rebuffed. Not even considered in the game. At school dances, I’d stand on the sidelines, staring at couples slow dancing, my yearning inhabiting every cell of my body. If the longing showed, it only repelled the boys I sought to attract. Did they reject me because I was Jewish? Too exotic? Other? Or just because I seemed too intense, too driven, too needy, too nuts?
No one ever asked me to dance. I would get dressed up and keep going, nevertheless. My father had always told me I was beautiful, that I looked like Merle Oberon, one of his favorite actresses. Joey and Wendy seemed to agree that I was cute. Though the boys in La Crescenta offered no encouragement, I had enough residual confidence in my attractiveness, and this driving need for acceptance, to keep me hoping.
At school, the gentle, sensitive boys who talked to me or enacted scenes with me in drama class, felt off-limits. I would not understand till years later that the boys who had been kindest to me were gay and had their own secrets to hide, having no choice but to remain closeted in late-1960s La Crescenta.
It was the end of the week and, as usual, I had procrastinated and panicked, flooded myself with information, made pages and pages of largely incoherent notes, copied multiple quotations, and notted my words. Then I’d resisted the notting by reversing it, and so notted my own negations, to the extent that the night before the paper was due, I had not yet written a single word. Gathered around me on my bed were library books and scattered sheets of my own largely incoherent notes. My cherished Olympia manual portable typewriter that my mother had bought me in eighth grade, stood on a desk nearby, waiting. Though my understanding might have been beyond my ability to fully articulate it at the time, I got Chapter 42. For Ishmael and his fellow crew members, Eros and Thanatos converged in the white whale’s slippery mass.
As Ishmael described the internal tensions, his frustration created by the pursuit of that big, white, slippery whale, I grappled with internal pressures of my own. To not every word, or to let them all out in a splendid release of creation. I chewed my pen, bit my nails, twirled my hair, felt as if the words might burst out of me, but also bore down on their emergence with a lock hold of self-doubt.
Another issue was getting in the way of my writing this paper. I felt Ishmael’s struggle between my legs. Reading chapter 42—in fact, reading all of Moby Dick—turned me on. Melville’s description of the whale’s “dazzling hump,” the “fleecy, greenish foam” in which he “thrust his mass,” the “tumultuous and bursting sea,” “spout-holes,” “sperm whales,” “hooded heads,” and “blowing jets” were all too much for me.
The later the hour and the more I became frustrated by the density of the text and my own inertia, the more sexually aroused I grew. I didn’t have time to stop and masturbate, so I’d try to ward off my arousal by simply crossing my legs or to serve both mistresses at once by occasionally compressing my thighs to reduce my arousal while I kept on reading. That only turned me on more. I’d read a passage, underline it with all my might, as if underlining were the equivalent to composing my own words, and then one hand would mysteriously make its way from the book to my crotch, and before long I would have shut my eyes, dropped the book, and found myself face down on my bed in full-on masturbation mode.
Orgasm didn’t help much; the more I came, the more I wanted to come, each orgasm only contributing to my wound-up state. I kept wishing for that ultimate culminating paroxysm, the event like the final confrontation with the whale, that would release me completely from, and yet into, myself.
You’re a nymphomaniac, I thought to myself, hearing my father’s voice. As if I needed one more diagnosis. Before Ira’s hospitalization, when we’d walk down the street in Hollywood on the way to the Ontra Cafeteria, one of Ira’s favorite weekend dining spots, he would apply the label to every woman who wore tight capris and high heels who sent even a remotely friendly look his way. It wasn’t exactly an insult; it wasn’t quite a compliment either. My father loved women, and he had contempt for women. He wanted them to take care of him and then rebelled against their control. The label he reserved for women at the other end of the spectrum from nymphomania—frigid—seemed even worse. Frigidity felt out of the question for me, and I was not yet capable of forging a sexual identity outside of my father’s categories. Yet to arrive for me was the second wave of feminism that would help me to do so.
In the book, the white whale slips languidly and threateningly through the water, and I struggled to get something, anything, words or pleasure, to move through and out of me. As usual, everything felt stuck. Perhaps the years of constipation, the forced evacuations via enemas, had shaped my whole relationship to my body. Perhaps not being able to get something out had become the defining metaphor for my physical existence. Or maybe constipation was just one reflection of the way I was knotted up inside, unwilling to ever let go.
Moby Dick felt stuck in my brain, arousal stuck in my pelvis, the words stuck in my pen. At around midnight, when my hand and my genitals were finally so sore that I could scarcely write, when I didn’t have the energy to come one more time, when I could fully imagine the humiliation of not turning in my assignment on time, the paper finally came to me. In a hot white flash, in a flurry, in a frenzy, it dove and surfaced and finally blew its stack, nearly faster than I could type.
Three days later, our English teacher—a
good-looking, intense, tortured man known for doling out censure and praise in such unpredictable measure that nearly every student in the class was invested in a sadomasochistic relationship with him—stood at the podium with one student’s paper in his hand. The other hand rested in between the middle two buttons of his dress shirt. The romantic story that students told about him, that no one could authenticate or deny, explained the posture. He’d survived stomach cancer and held his hand there to mark the site of his residual pain, and it was that pain that made him so mercurial.
We wondered whose paper it was and what he was about to say. He cleared his throat. “Debbie Lott,” he said, “has turned in the finest critical paper on Moby Dick by a high school student that I have ever read.”
I beamed with pride over what I’d produced for only a moment before blushing with shame over the method I’d used to produce it. I wondered if my teacher could tell how I’d written that paper; could my classmates? Was the evidence there for anyone who read it? I wondered if masturbation constituted my new key to fluent writing, if this other compulsion could replace notting.
By the time I’d written the paper, there had been so much pent-up energy behind it that it had overcome my usual fear of dire consequences for writing the wrong words. And there were no wrong orgasms; all orgasms seemed inherently right. As the words had burst out of me, I’d felt too full of my own life force to even think about dying. While I’d been writing that paper, I’d felt immortal. I’d written about the tension between Thanatos and Eros. For me, for at least that evening, Eros had won.
The psychiatrists called my mother in for an update on my father’s condition. They told her he lacked “insight.” For all his years of professed Freudianism and interpretation of others, he seemed incapable of the introspection required for psychotherapy. He was too far gone. Psychotropic medications in those days were limited. The doctors recommended electroshock treatment, a series of twelve. My mother procrastinated, and then agreed.
With the sun already beginning to blast through the window over the sink, I stood beside my mother while she counted out half the usual number of spoonfuls of Yuban into the electric percolator to make half a pot of coffee—just enough for herself.
“They say it doesn’t have any long-lasting ill effects,” she reported. “And you know, Sonia’s cousin Frank goes in for shock treatments every time he gets depressed, and he’s right back to operating when he gets out.” Frank was a veterinarian.
As my mother went on, repeating back to me the psychiatrists’ bromides about the relative safety of the procedure, all I could hear were my father’s warnings about my mother, that she cowered in the face of authority, that she was naive, that she was easily intimidated, that she consoled herself by assuming that doctors knew what they were doing.
“There may be some short-term memory loss, they said, but isn’t that a good thing? He’ll forget all his crazy obsessions.”
“How do you know what else he’ll forget?”
The doctors’ explanations sounded smug and evasive and self-justifying to me. I remembered the day when Ira had taught me how to remember a moment. All these years he’d held onto that mental picture of that single uneventful day in his childhood in Detroit. Could it be wiped out in a single zap to his brain? If he lost that memory, I thought, then the apartment he remembered in such detail would be gone for good. His childhood, already over, would really be gone. Poof. As if it had never existed. What if he forgot the Robert Louis Stevenson poems we’d read together? What if he forgot me?
“You are betraying him,” I said. “Just like he said you would.”
I didn’t understand how it could be good to run bolts of electricity through my father’s already disturbed brain. This would be his worst paranoid fantasy come true. Doctors not sticking objects in his penis or rectum but invading his brain. I’ll never get him back, I thought. He will never be the same. She’s taken him; she’s letting them take him. There would be no chance of recapturing the father of my earlier childhood, the father I had adored and respected and trusted.
“Betraying him! I’m trying to save him,” she said. “What do you want me to do instead, smarty pants? You got any bright ideas? Tell me what you think I should do because I don’t have any more ideas left.” My mother started to weep. She loved him; of course, she loved him.
“I don’t know what we should do instead,” I said. “Are you sure he’ll be all right after this?”
“He’ll have to be. We’ve run out of other choices.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Visiting Hours
When Ira had completed half of the twelve shock treatments, we started to visit him regularly as a family. He smelled of antiseptic and had a vacant, fragile look in his eyes. “Just give him a pep talk,” my mother advised before our visits. “Tell him he’s looking better, getting better every day. Be upbeat. He needs cheerleaders.”
Already she had begun to rehabilitate his reputation. He’d never really been psychotic, she explained, not psychotic like other people who were psychotic; he’d just been an endearingly neurotic man who’d gotten depressed when his mother had died and had a breakdown. He wasn’t really a drug addict either; he just liked taking too many pills.
We sat in one of the public areas, a sort of living room with low-slung couches. I tried to ignore the ashen-faced man in the corner who talked in circles, the woman with the deeply lined face who couldn’t stop wringing her hands. Most of the other patients in the facility seemed profoundly depressed or were alcoholics on their third or fourth admission. None seemed any worse off than my father. He might have been the most deranged among them.
My mother clung to trivialities. “The nurses seem nice in here,” she would say, or “Looks like you can get a baked potato with lunch if you want it.” It was maddening. What did any of that matter? She was letting them wipe out my father’s memories; who knew what would stick and what would go? I felt guilty for abandoning him and yet, hadn’t he abandoned me first? What could I do to save him? I was only sixteen. My mother was in charge. I was struggling to save myself.
That spring of 1968, my brothers and I volunteered to serve in Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Ben would drive us to the campaign headquarters on Carondelet Street near MacArthur Park in the city. We’d fold fliers, stuff envelopes, cross names off lists, make phone calls to get out the vote.
When Kennedy was scheduled to appear at the Greek Theatre, the volunteers were invited to usher. I felt important, out of La Crescenta and in an urban environment, part of a movement to change the world. I was meeting young people from all over the city, collaborating with them. After we’d seated everyone else, Paul and Ben and I got seats up-close with the other volunteers. I watched Kennedy carefully, trying to discern if he was for real. The young people in Gene McCarthy’s campaign said Kennedy was ruthless, an insincere opportunist who’d only decided to publicly oppose the war in Vietnam after McCarthy had proved it a winning proposition.
I didn’t want to be fooled. I had become wary of my own gullibility. I was beginning to realize how my father had taken me in, and the negative effects it had had on my life, and yet . . . and yet . . . a part of me still wished to fall under a trance, to believe wholeheartedly in someone. Part of me still wished for a good father who would stay true to his word to take care of me.
On stage, Bobby looked fragile, not polished. Thin and a little hunched over. His eyelids twitched and his hands shook as he spoke. His shaking reminded me of my father’s. He had the hint of a stammer. He kept pushing a wayward shock of brown hair out of his eyes. He seemed more than a little anxious but didn’t let the anxiety stop him. At the same time he seemed exhilarated. After a while, his passion overtook him and he lost his nerves. He sparred with the audience. He was spontaneous, funny. He seemed the opposite of calculating to me; he seemed to be making it up as he went along. And including us young people in the process. It was as if he already knew that he was doomed, and that knowled
ge had set him free. It was as if he’d come through something so terrible in losing his brother that he had nothing left to lose.
As he spoke, I imagined myself planted among his offspring in the footage I’d seen of him rollicking on the wide lawn in an impromptu touch football game. In that fantasy he was my father. In another, I imagined myself holding hands with him, kissing him. In that fantasy, he morphed into the lover who appreciated all my talents and abilities and never rebuffed me.
I fell in love with his spontaneity and his vulnerability. I fell in love with being embraced by a big noble cause, bigger than my family, bigger than my school, bigger than my own obsessions, bigger than La Crescenta. Under Bobby’s leadership we could bring justice into the world for the poor, the oppressed, for black people. We would end the war in Vietnam and bring the troops home. We would seek a fairer world, a more just world, a better world, as he’d laid out in his book.
That day at the Greek Theatre, I committed fully to the campaign. I pinned a Robert F. Kennedy button on my clothes and didn’t take it off, even when I went to school, even though I knew it would garner me ridicule or worse. I let myself love him without reservation or fear.
I remember what I was wearing when we went to visit my father that Tuesday night in June on our way to the Ambassador Hotel: a short, pink, full skirt with petticoats, a resurgence of a fifties style, brought into the sixties with a round silver buckle at the waist. The petticoats rustled in a satisfying way as I walked. I wore a ruffled white blouse. Riding up in the elevator to the locked ward, I kept looking down at my own waist to catch a glimpse of reflection off that buckle’s shiny surface.
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