At this point in the self-torture, Sam’s conscience spoke to him.
“What would you have done with the profit, bought yourself a 300 SL? Would you have used any of that money responsibly, to help others? You would have been hooked for life. All you would have been able to do is trade commodities. Is that what you wanted for yourself? Would this have fulfilled your dreams?”
After the conscience came the reasoning voice of his father.
“Maybe you would have made a couple hundred thousand over the years and built a new life. But where would you be if you lost everything then? SUICIDE? At least now you have the bookstore and a life for yourself.”
Sam continued to speculate on what might have been. Coupled with images of King Midas in a room filled with gleaming gold coins came other images from his childhood.
As a child Sam had often wondered about nature and especially the complexity of the human body. His father initiated this wonder with many stories about the world of nature. In particular Sam remembered his father telling him that men could not create a human in a laboratory. No matter how much they thought they knew, the sperm and the egg would be required. From that time onwards in his life, Sam wondered about the intricacies of the body. Not only about how much could go wrong and did not, but about such simple things as the infinite possibilities of motion in a human hand.
Throughout his high school years and even into his years as a biology student in college, Sam would often drift off at his desk by gazing at his right hand. Slowly moving his fingers through a maze of motion he would marvel that even in an age of electronic miracles, among a species that was sending a projectile 91 million miles into space, accurately coming within a few miles of the planet Mercury, no one had been able to create a machine capable of duplicating all possible movements of their own hand.
Once again Sam inhabited this world of wonder. As a result of his loss he ceased speculating for capital gains and began once again to wonder about those everyday occurrences that, in fact, are the only true capital of everyman.
SEVENTEEN
My Silent Brother
I remember the day they gave Jerome away. My uncle Murray was crying like a baby in front of the South Bronx tenement we lived in. All the neighbors were out watching; think Calcutta, a Satyajit Ray film. The little blond boy with blue eyes was only five. I was seven; my sister was nine. He was packed off like an animal to live and suffer and die in silence, alone in one New York snake pit after another. The “doctor” told my parents he would only live to age seven—he lied. The great man also told my parents “it would be better for the other children” to give him away. This created a lifetime of shame and guilt for me. I became emotionally responsible for discarding this helpless little boy, whom I loved more than anyone else in my entire life!
How I loved my little defenseless brother, born blind and deaf and unable to hold himself up! All those times I would secretly sneak into the kitchen where he sat propped up in his high chair.
“Don’t go in there. Don’t bother him. He can’t see you or hear you anyway.” But I would go and whistle to him, and his eyes would light up! I would see a sparkle where the “doctor” said there was only darkness. So I knew he could hear me whistling to him and see my shadow or smell me. He was alive, and they were told to exile him, for my sake!
After he was gone, the little apartment became more silent than when the silent boy was there. For years afterward, I would sneak into the dresser drawer where my mother preserved his little clothing and eyeglasses (they tried to see if they would work). I would hold one of his laundered shirts to my nose, pressing the fabric right into my nostrils to glean a few molecules of his scent. I even wore his eyeglasses, making the room all blurry. My brother! They took him away.
For decades (not just the two years she was told he would live) my poor mother took buses and subways all the way out to Staten Island or up to Poughkeepsie to visit him. Sometimes my sister went with her, but mostly she went alone. The new clothing she brought for him, on each and every visit, was never seen on him. They wheeled him out in the same institutional sackcloth. She would come home wrecked and hopeless for days afterward. The arguments between my parents started to get very bad after this, with both blaming each other, when it was really the doctor’s fault. There was some kind of medication given during pregnancy that damaged my brother’s central nervous system during development.
Finally, after about twenty years in one hellhole after another, he died, after being attacked and bitten on most of his body by a maniac, housed there with helpless, innocent souls unable to defend themselves.
Jerome is buried in the same cemetery as my mother and father: in hard clay soil, in an old, Long Island potato field. He was the Jesus of our family, who died for my sins.
Photo Section
The man who started it all. My grandfather Sam in front of his own tailor shop at 548 East 13th Street, New York City.
My father, Neversink River. The famous Abraham and Isaac scene.
I really did wear dead man’s pants! (Pictured here with my realist Russian aunt Bea.)
My silent brother, Jerome (in the snake pit they sent him to).
Me at fifteen trying to look tough during my weight-lifting phase.
High school yearbook.
Jamaica High School, championship rifle team (before kids went crazy on medications).
Plant-collecting years. Viti Levu, Fiji. My son, Russ, with the women who taught me their herbal secrets (1972).
Portrait of the artist as a young father (1972). J. Weiner
Viti Levu, Fiji.
My face appeared in every subway station in New York City (1967).
Psych experiments. Reed College (1966).
My years as an Alzheimer’s researcher (with my private patron, Eric Estorick).
Kew Gardens, London. One of the hundreds of my ethnobotanical specimens in the permanent collection. J. Weiner
Arcadia. Honolulu to Vancouver (1971).
Father and daughter.
Father and son at the gun range (1980s).
Mama Savage in her little Queens kitchen where she cooked for an army (1970s).
In one of my home studios (2002). Leon Borensztein
The night we all lost. Election Eve (2008). Leon Borensztein
EIGHTEEN
The Electric Blue Saddle-Stitched Pants
In the seventh grade, my mother bought me the most incredible pants. We didn’t have a lot of money, but she knew I wanted these pants really bad. It was the “Elvis era.” Mama Savage saved and bought me a pair of electric blue saddle-stitched pants. I wore them to school—I thought I was Elvis himself.
On the very first day, a bigger, older kid just happened to be wearing the same pants, and naturally, we got in a scuffle. He pushed me down and my gorgeous Elvis pants were ripped in the knee. I thought it was the end of the world because these were the most expensive, beautiful pants I had ever had in my life. So, the rest of the day, I couldn’t sit through the classes. Whatever the teacher said, my mind was somewhere else. My heart was pounding: How am I going to tell my mother? How am I going to tell my mother?
So, I came home with the pants, hiding the rip under my coat. I said, “Ma, I ripped my pants.” She didn’t get mad. She said, “Let me see them. Don’t worry about it.” I said, “You’re not going to tell Dad, are you?” She said, “No, don’t worry about it.” So, all night long I couldn’t sleep.
The next day the women were talking it over, sitting around the little table in that little house in Queens, and they were moving the crumbs around with their bread knives and talking. They decided what to do: They took the pants to a certain tai
lor, and the word came back: “Don’t worry, Michael. The pants can be weaved.”
Now, I didn’t know what “the pants can be weaved” meant. I don’t think they do that anymore because clothing has become something different than it was then. We throw everything away. But I knew from that moment on that everything would be good—and it was. The pants were weaved.
That’s what a mother’s for, I guess: to fix everything but a broken heart.
NINETEEN
The Fly in the Tuna
When I was a wee lad, that would be between the ages of eight or nine, my father stood up for me. Skinny, polo shirt, dungarees, spring or summer, Saturday, probably working with Dad in the little store down there on New York’s Lower East Side.
He would send me for lunch out on the mean streets in order to toughen me up, because he thought I was too soft growing up in the suburbs. He insisted that I go walk alone in those horrible streets and learn how to fend for myself—dodging the garbage, the rats, the thugs, and whatever else was in the street. It was only dangerous up to a point. It’s not as dangerous as some kids face today in the average housing project, but it was a bad neighborhood in those days—and certainly different than the “Garden of Queens,” in New York, where we were living.
So, he would send me for lunch. There was a dairy restaurant, where they had dairy only and no meat. They would serve tuna fish salads, whatever. It was filthy dirty. If you didn’t want the meat from Katz’s Delicatessen that was down the street, this place was a “no meat joint.” So he sent me for a tuna sandwich. I came back with the tuna sandwich, and my father opened it up and there was a fly in it. He was enraged, so he took me by the hand. He was mad that they would give this kid, his son, a sandwich with a huge fly in the middle of it. He assumed they did it on purpose. They probably did; they were spiteful.
He took me by the hand, put down his work making lamps or whatever he was putting together for the day, dragged me up the street, with his neck bulging, veins bulging, eyes bulging. He went into the dairy restaurant and screamed at the guy, “How dare you give my son a sandwich with a fly in it!” The guy said, “Let me see the sandwich.” He opens it and sees the fly in it. He says to my father, “I didn’t charge him any extra. What are you yelling about? I didn’t charge him for the fly.” You know, it’s an old joke, but it wasn’t funny.
In a way Dad was standing up for me, I guess. I think that’s the one time I could say “quasi” standing up for me, because, other than that—truthfully, I mean—he even took our dog Tippy’s side after the dog tore my leg open, now that I think about it. It was like an Abraham-and-Isaac relationship: I think if he had the rock and knife, I wouldn’t be here today. Thank God he didn’t collect box cutters and that there were no large rocks in the backyard. That’s all I can say.
TWENTY
Tough High School Geometry Teacher: Two Fingers on His Right Hand
I had a geometry teacher in high school with only two fingers on his right hand. He was a tough guy. He was an Irishman and real tough, but a very good teacher—the kind of teacher who made you come up to the blackboard and perform. If you didn’t, he ridiculed you. He didn’t curse you out, but he called you a dummy. As you stood there sweating, he might say, “Now what’s the matter with you today? Is your brain not functioning?”—that kind of thing. Believe me, you didn’t want to wind up in front of that blackboard not knowing your stuff, because you didn’t want to be humiliated in front of your peers.
Today, of course, they take any moron off the street, any idiot who has one eye going up, one eye going down, who can hardly speak, and they tell you he’s smarter than you are. If you dare be smarter than him, you go to the back of the class. But in those days, it was very clear: If you were smart, you were smart. If you were stupid, you were dumb, and that was the end of it. No one changed anything.
He had a left hand with five fingers and a right hand with two fingers. The two fingers were stubs, but he could still put chalk on the board. When he said to you, “The midterm exams are back,” he would read out every name and every score—publicly. Now, why do you think he did it? Because he understood that by doing well, you were proud of yourself and the other kids looked up to you; and, by doing poorly, you were ashamed of yourself and you would try to do better. But now, because the liberal nuts took over the schools, where they try to put perversion ahead of everything else, they have now taken dummies and tried to make them better than the “smarties.” Consequently, the schools can’t even teach Johnnie how to add or read—and if Johnnie isn’t smart enough and he can’t focus at all, they put him on Ritalin to dope him up and turn him into a sissy and a dumbbell who can’t do anything except sit in a cubicle for the rest of his life and possibly jump off a building when he’s twenty-five.
Now, how Mr. W. lost his fingers is another interesting story. We all heard the rumors. It was whispered in the halls of the high school that he lost his fingers—and I’m not glorifying it—planting a bomb for the IRA. Now, I don’t know whether it was true, but it was certainly enough to make us understand not to mess around with this teacher, and we didn’t. We respected him. Whether it was true or not is irrelevant. That’s who we had for teachers in those days: many tough men, most of them vets from World War II.
TWENTY-ONE
Happy and Sad Cuff Links
No question, if I was a kid in school today—let’s say, in the sixth grade—they’d put me on every mind-controlling drug imaginable. The mean-faced, clipped-haired women would say, “That little Savage, he has shining eyes and he talks too much. Put him on Ritalin. Put him on Prozac. Put him in a straitjacket. He shows all the classic signs of maleness. We must kill it. Kill it! Crush it!”
I believe most mothers don’t even know what their poor boys go through in school. When I was a young boy, my mother bought me a pair of cuff links. They were a set of the thespian masks—you know, one was a sad face and one was a happy face. I loved those cuff links. I’d look at them when I was bored in class. On my right cuff I had the happy face; on the left sleeve I had the sad face. Some days I’d switch them around and put the happy face on the left sleeve and the sad face on the right sleeve.
Many days I was so bored I didn’t know what to do. I’d look at these cuff links for hours in the classroom while the teacher was going on and on about George Washington and the Delaware River. I was so bored, I spaced out. I learned that George crossed the Delaware, he saved the country in Trenton, he overthrew the British—I got that the first week of kindergarten! They’re still teaching it to me in the fourth grade. In the fifth grade, I learned what a peninsula is. In the sixth grade, it took them a year to teach me what an island is. I couldn’t take it!
So, I stared at the cuff links: the happy face, the sad face.
When I got bored with the cuff links, I’d start pulling hair out of the skin on my arms. Today, they would have put me on Ritalin or put me in a nuthouse. They’d call my lack of attention a disease. It wasn’t. It was called boredom! I’d inflict pain on myself rather than listen to the teacher bore me one more second.
Rather than improve the curriculum or place bright kids in special classes, teachers today might say, “Oh, your son has something wrong with him, Mrs. Savage. We found out that he looks at cuff links instead of listening to the teacher talk about how evil America is and why white males need to be put in the pillory. He’s pulling hair out of his arm, and we suggest you put him on a moderate dose—just a moderate dose—of Ritalin on the first day.” That’s for starters. Soon, the teacher might say, “Let’s put him on Prozac.”
Now, I’d be the first to admit that teaching is a tough profession: Keeping the lesson engaging day after day takes everything out of you. As long as I live, I’ll never forget the day I first walked into a classroom to teach. Maybe I’ll write a book about it one day. You know, something for the students. I could call it The Savage Guide to Surviving Teaching.
Train Tracks Page 11
