“Now, Oran. There is no need to yell. I can hear you perfectly fine. She’ll call us when she gets home.”
Goddamn, that took long enough.
“What’s wrong with her?” asked Kyle. I, too, had no idea what was going on.
“Oh dear. I’ve been asking myself that same question since she was seven years old,” she said to herself. “Your mother’s a bit meshugenah is all. I don’t know what happened to that girl. She used to be so cute in her little dresses; everyone loved her. You should have seen her back then…the way she’d play that piano. Ah,” she sighed, “I can still hear her doing Beethoven’s Fifth from the living room as if it was yesterday. The proudest day of my life was seeing your mother play at Carnegie Hall when she was thirteen. Then…I don’t know what happened. She changed. Arthur and I did everything for her. I don’t know why she hates me so much.”
We had heard this too many times and we weren’t interested in what Mom had done when she was thirteen. We wanted to know what was going on now. It was no secret that they had a tense relationship, but while Mom could go on hour-long rants about what was wrong with Grandma, Grandma usually just called Mom meshugenah and went into some cute childhood story or another.
According to Ada, all three of us were nuts, but considering that Kyle and I were living everywhere from Guatemala to New Mexico, going to hippie camps, and living with a holographer, of course we were bound to be crazy. What other outcome could there be? None of this would have happened if Mom had just married a nice Jewish boy.
How could she turn out so meshugenah when both Grandma and our grandfather, Arthur, rest his soul, had done nothing wrong? They bought Mom the right dresses and gave her the right education, played her the right music, and took her to the right museums. All the things Ada never got growing up. Her seven brothers and sisters had raised her after their parents died in a car crash, and as far as she knew, she was the last one standing. Arthur had died of cancer when I was a year old, and he was one of the few people on the planet who Mom didn’t have anything bad to say about.
Mom just didn’t like cute little dresses, she didn’t like the right music, and she absolutely hated art as a result of being dragged to countless museums as a kid, all so that she be cultured enough to meet a nice Jewish man, settle down, and raise a nice Jewish family. Instead she became a renegade-feminist-antiestablishment-intellectual-new age hippie psychologist who was against everything Ada stood for.
Mom was having trouble lining up new living situations for Kyle and me. After living with Grandma at the hotel for a few months, we moved to an apartment in Tiburon. We tried to make the best of it, but none of us wanted to be there. Kyle and I weren’t settled enough to even think about going to school, and hanging out with Grandma twenty-four hours a day was tough, to say the least.
Fed up and stir-crazy, we somehow got ahold of a blow-up raft and paddled into the San Francisco Bay. Hours later, we washed up somewhere near San Quentin. It was already dark when, wet and shivering, we hauled our little boat over the huge black boulders onto the side of the road. We waited near the do not pick up hitchhikers sign, hoping that someone would pick us up and take us home. A woman stopped and was nice enough to drive us back.
After giving us endless big wet grandma kisses and then pinching our cheeks harder than ever, Ada promptly took out a knife and started stabbing the boat. Kyle and I grabbed a couple of steak knives and joined in.
Taking care of us, however, proved to be too much for the poor woman, and other arrangements were soon made. Mom couldn’t find anyone to take the both of us, so Kyle went to a foster home with a nice Catholic woman named Pam, and I ended up going to live with Fred. Five months earlier, I had known Fred as Surya, the Sufi clown who ran Camp Winnarainbow with Wavy Gravy. He was one of my favorite guys, but he had since renounced his Sufi past and converted to born-again Christianity. Mom didn’t seem so excited about my staying with them, but I had always liked Surya. The next decision was whether I should go to the born-again-Christian school with his kids or attend the public school near their house. I elected to go to the Christian school so as not to make any waves, but there was only one way Mom would allow it: she refused to sign the corporal punishment release required for admittance.
“Okay, honey. I want you to listen to me very carefully,” she told me after signing all the school’s paperwork. “You can’t tell them this, but I didn’t sign the release card. Most likely they’ll just assume I did and won’t even look. I absolutely cannot sign that thing, so if they find out, you have to go to public school.”
“Uh-huh,” I agreed.
“This is the important part. If they let you in and you do get in trouble, you need to promise me that you will scream and yell as loud as you can that your mother never signed the release, and she will sue them and shut them down for good if they ever lay a hand on you. Can you make that promise?”
“Okay.”
“Good. Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that.”
AS SOON AS MOM dropped me off, Fred opened my bags and went through each article of clothing I brought with me. He was unfolding my E.T. shirt when, without any warning, he began dry-heaving, dropped a shirt on the floor, and started babbling in some unknown language that sounded a lot like baby talk. I thought he was having a seizure. Whatever was happening resembled an after-school special I had seen where this otherwise normal kid would fall down and start shaking for no particular reason. The kid on TV didn’t make the sign of the cross and start hissing at T-shirts, though. Fred backed away from the shirt, still holding his fingers in the sign of the cross until he made it out of the room. He returned moments later, still babbling in that weird language, with a pair of salad tongs he used to pick up the shirt and carry it to the trash.
“E.T. is in place of God!” he yelled at me. He offered no further explanation as he continued going through my stuff, and I tried to figure out what I had done wrong. E.T. was my favorite movie, and I too was starting to feel like I was stranded on the wrong fucking planet.
At grace that night, he made reference to the incident and thanked Jesus for getting him through it and giving him the courage to throw Satan in the trash and banish him from this God-fearing house. He threw out the salad tongs as well, since it was likely that Satan had time to enter them from my shirt. His wife, who had been completely silent since I had arrived, served us salad with forks and spoons.
Other than the impressions I got from my mom about Reagan, Nixon, Kissinger, and my dad, Jack, I knew next to nothing about Satan. Fred was the closest thing I had ever seen to my conception of the devil. Even more frightening to me was that someone could change so much in so short a time. I didn’t know my dad at all, really, but I couldn’t picture him freaking out over a T-shirt. I decided right then and there that I would keep my mouth shut unless opening it was absolutely necessary. I secretly thanked Ada for being Jewish. I had no idea what being Jewish meant, other than that I could not possibly be one of these people.
So that’s what I told everyone at school when we were out in the yard and everybody was arguing about who God loved more: Billy or Michael.
“God loves me more because my dad owns a Christian bookstore!” yelled Billy.
“Oh yeah, well, where was your dad on Sunday? I didn’t see him at church,” countered Michael.
It was insane. All over the school, everyone seemed to be saying the same kind of shit, except for in the hall next to the pastor’s office where all you could hear were the screams from the kids whom he was paddling. I wanted to talk to those kids, the ones who hadn’t gotten wrapped up in this nonsense, but after he had paddled them, it was too late. They sounded just like everyone else.
Whenever they tried to rope me into their God arguments, I responded by telling them I was Jewish. Again, I wasn’t sure how it was all related, but I said it anyway because it always got the response I was looking for.
“God hates Jews,” they told me matter-of-factly in the yard. In class, d
uring Sunday school, Bible study, and even from the pulpit, they had a slightly subtler way of saying it, but the implication was clear: Jews were bad. Thank the fucking Lord for that, I thought to myself as I watched a few hundred upstanding citizens babbling like a bunch of babies.
It didn’t take much to get the paddle, otherwise known as Big Bertha. They always did it with the windows open. You couldn’t see the kid getting hit because of the curtains, but you could sure as hell hear them. The thing reportedly had big holes cut out of it to reduce wind resistance, and it left marks in the shape of perfect circles. You could tell which kids had been paddled, because they would do a kind of jump-and-wince thing whenever they heard it.
One day before class, I pushed a girl who was drinking at the water fountain. The push was unjustified and admittedly intentional. I desperately needed some water before class, and she was taking far too long.
“I’m telling on you” was all she said when she turned around, and I could see in her eyes that she knew exactly what that meant: Big Bertha.
I was fed up with the whole thing, so I pushed her again to make sure it wouldn’t be an empty threat.
Ten minutes later, the pastor showed up in my history class, where we were reading the Book of Genesis. I stood up the moment I saw him; he didn’t even need to call me.
“My mom didn’t sign the consent,” I told him as we walked down the hall.
“Nonsense. Everyone signs it.”
“Not her.”
“Everyone signs it,” he repeated as we entered the secretary’s office. I refused to go any farther, thinking that this was the perfect time and place for the secretary to look at her records. The file cabinets were right behind her.
“Let’s go,” he told me.
“Not until you look at the card. She would never sign that thing.”
“We’re not going to look at the card, and you’re going to come with me right now. I already told you, everyone signs it, otherwise we don’t let you in. That way we don’t have to look at the card every time some bratty kid thinks his mom would never sign it. So let’s go. Now!”
“If you lay a hand on me, my mom will sue you and she will shut this school down. She did not sign that card!” I screamed in absolute panic.
Mom’s plan was not working. Why wouldn’t he pull out the card? The next thing I knew he had me in a bear hug and was carrying me into the office. I was struggling, but the fucking pastor still managed to bend me over his chair and get my pants down. As far as I could tell, I was screaming louder than any kid I had ever heard, and he hadn’t even hit me yet. Just as he was about to come down on me with the wrath of Big Bertha, the secretary ran in holding the card.
“Stop,” she said to the pastor. “You need to look at this.”
He was still holding me with one arm and had to lay Big Bertha on the desk to take the card. It took a moment for him to figure out what he was looking at. On the line that Mom was supposed to have signed her name were written the words Do not hit my son in the same flowing cursive she used for her signature. He stared at the card, dumbfounded. He was literally an arm’s length from losing his fucked-up school. I squirmed out of his grip, ran outside, and pulled up my pants.
IN THE MEANTIME, Mom had moved to a houseboat in Sausalito. But whatever she was going through in Philadelphia had obviously come with her, and she was still unable to take care of us. Fred, who seemed to be under the impression that he had been some kind of positive influence on me, refused to drive me into the hands of the devil. Mom couldn’t be fucked with, though, and her threats of filing kidnapping charges finally turned him around.
On the way to Mom’s houseboat, I had to listen to him for an hour about how I was definitely going to hell, and that now he probably was, too, for delivering a defenseless child into the hands of Satan. He wasn’t even sure if he could get the taint of my sin out at the car wash, which meant there was a very good chance that his wife and kids were going to be dragged down as well, and it was all my fault for not rejecting Satan when he guided my hands toward that little girl’s shoulders and told me to push. I remained silent the entire drive. I was trying to remember whether I had packed my sticker collection during the rush to get out of there. Thinking about other shit was the only way I knew of to keep the taint of Fred away from my brain. I thought I heard him sniffling as he pulled to a stop in front of the docks, but I refused to look at him. I got out of the car without saying good-bye and walked onto Berth C looking for the blue houseboat.
I had been to the houseboat a few times on weekend visits, but the little floating community was so different from a regular neighborhood that I could never remember where her house was in relation to the seventeenth-century Victorian houseboat, the early Dutch-settler houseboat, or the one made out of bicycle rims and colored Plexiglas. If you ignored the fact that her house was floating in the San Francisco Bay, the place looked relatively conservative. It was a modern design, painted pastel blue, and it basically looked like the top story of a duplex, sticking out of the water. In my excitement over having escaped the Christians and of seeing Mom again, I was a little loud and clumsy when I entered the boat.
“Ow! Oran! Close the door!” I heard her voice in a kind of whispered yell.
“Mom!” I shrieked, excited to be hearing her voice again.
“The door. Please. Please close the door,” she implored.
Whatever it was my mom had been going through had now taken physical form. She was totally paralyzed on the left side of her body, and any light gave her excruciating headaches. I closed the door and felt my way through the dark to find her. When I did, I gave her a big hug and cried.
I cried because I had been holding it in for three months, and I cried because I was with my mom again, and I cried, and cried, and cried. And when I got it all out, I could see that she was crying, too.
“It’s okay, I’m back now. You can stop crying, Mom.”
But Mom was crying from the physical pain of hugging me, and crying because of the physical pain of crying, and crying because she couldn’t take care of me.
The next day I went to stay at Kyle’s foster home for a few days while arrangements were made for me to go back to Santa Fe, this time by myself.
six
In which he meets a girl and accidentally exposes his terrible secret
EVERY NIGHT BEFORE going to bed I told myself, This is the last time I’m going to smoke this shit. I’m going to quit tomorrow. And every morning I would climb down from my loft and root around in the trash for any remnants of dope that might be in there.
I was now a full-fledged self-hating heroin addict, but life seemed to be getting better. I had finally told the piano guy to fuck off, and at the suggestion of my mom, I wrote up a business proposal to build a recording studio down in my basement. Money was now turning into an issue. I was spending thirty to forty dollars a day on my habit, and the money from my dad wasn’t cutting it. As much as the dope was helping me imitate real human beings, I wasn’t so good at it that I could hold down a nine to five.
“Jack wants to know where you guys want to eat,” Mom asked while we were discussing Jack’s upcoming visit. I hadn’t seen him in at least a year, but he was coming to town for a few days to do one of his human-potential training sessions.
“Chez Panisse,” I answered without any hesitation.
“Whoa, Oran. That’s a bit fancy, don’t you think?”
“You know what? He can fucking afford it. We’ve lived three blocks away from it for twelve years and have never eaten there. He’s probably been there ten times without inviting us.” I was even more agitated on the phone than usual, probably because I was talking to my mom about my dad. Either of those situations alone was enough to send me in to a yelling fit.
“Okay. Calm down, I’ll ask him,” she said.
I got over to Mom’s house in Berkeley an hour before we were supposed to meet Jack, so she could go over my proposal with me. When Kyle and Jack were both there, w
e walked over to the restaurant. As a kid, I had stopped to look at their menu almost every day and would wonder what Rabbit Loin, Green Bean, and Rocket Salad with Roasted Figs and Basil tasted like. Or what a Grilled Wolf Ranch Quail with Stone-ground Polenta, Sweet Corn, and Torpedo Onion Rings even looked like. Since we were going for lunch, there was nothing so exotic on the menu. But for dinner that night they were serving a King Salmon Carpaccio with Farm Egg and Chervil; a Saffron Risotto with Shellfish, Lemon, and Prosecco; a Grilled Yellow-fin Tuna with Fennel Pollen, Braised Fennel, and Green-Olive Relish; and for dessert, Caramel–Ice Cream Crêpes with Summer Lady peaches. What the fuck?
We all ordered the salmon. They brought it out in a brown paper bag. I was skeptical, but it was the best salmon I had ever had.
“So how is the piano tuning going?” Jack asked, while we were getting our dessert.
I couldn’t believe they were charging twenty dollars for a peach, literally a sliced peach with nothing else—until I tasted it.
“Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that. Holy shit, where did they find this peach? You’ve got to try this.” I couldn’t believe it came off a tree. “Oh yeah. So the whole piano thing was a scam. The guy wasn’t teaching me anything. I quit.”
“What the hell am I giving you eight hundred bucks a month for if you quit?”
Normally I would have shriveled up and agreed with him at this point, but I had smoked just enough dope in my mom’s bathroom before lunch to keep my confidence up.
“Well, here’s the deal. I don’t like taking that money either, so I came up with an idea to start a business and stop relying on you. I would need to borrow some money to get started, but it would be a loan, and I would be able to pay it back in two years.”
I pulled my handwritten proposal out of my pocket and went over the itemized list of equipment, rent, building supplies, and construction deadlines. On a different sheet of paper I had drawn up a payment plan including a hand-drawn line at the bottom for my signature.
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