by Adam Ross
My favorite Uncle Saul story occurred in Miami. My father was thirteen at the time, already fitter and taller and stronger than his brother, growing in both stature and confidence. One day they went swimming together and, after idiotically racing fifty yards out, got caught in a vicious undertow. Boys are always nearly killing themselves like this, and of course there were no lifeguards present, so my panicked grandparents, seeing their children sucked down the beach and, for all they knew, out to sea, ran to the hotel to get help. The current drove my dad and uncle into a coral reef, which they climbed in exhausted desperation, cutting themselves badly. They were safe, though, and should’ve waited there for help, but since they couldn’t see their parents they panicked. Saul convinced my father that he could leap far enough off the reef to clear the current, or at least would have enough strength to swim through it, a remarkably stupid idea that my father accepted at face value. He was almost immediately slammed back against the coral, slashing his arms and legs to ribbons, only to pull himself up and, at his brother’s urging, try it again. His fourth attempt was interrupted by the hotel’s pool lifeguards, who’d paddled out in a rowboat. It was back to the hospital for my father, and the next year Saul went off to college, for all intents and purposes exiting his brother’s life.
Which brings me to my uncle’s death. After Saul learned he was terminal, he invited my father to spend a week with him in London. In his forties, he’d befriended a very wealthy cousin of ours named Lee who’d made a fortune in the car-wash business. They both liked food and women, serial philandering having blown up their marriages, and in many respects they were brothers who’d chosen each other. They spent the last decade of my uncle’s life carousing together and since by then Saul had only a month to live, this London trip was clearly the last fling, and Lee rented them a townhouse. My father and uncle hadn’t spent this much time under the same roof since their teens, and I had always been curious about this trip. During the two years that Kevin and I weren’t speaking, I asked my father about it, because I wanted to believe this might shed some light on my failed relationship with Kevin.
When I asked what he remembered about that week, my father thought about it for a long time and finally said, “Not much.”
“No talks you had? What sort of stuff you did?”
He considered this and then brightened.
“Well,” he said, “one night we went to these boxing matches at this private club Lee belonged to. It was a black-tie thing where they served dinner beforehand. They’d set up tables around the ring, so close that when the boxers hit each other you’d occasionally get sprinkled with sweat and blood. The room wasn’t that big, but it was oak-paneled and stuffy, and the acoustics were amazing. When a guy got hit you could actually hear the air getting knocked out of him, and just by that sound you realized how strong they were, how fast and powerful. It was the most beautiful and violent spectacle I’ve ever seen. And at the end, no matter how brutally they’d beaten the shit out of each other, they hugged at the final bell.”
Recalling this, he smiled, but he hadn’t answered my question. They’d arrived together at the end, after all, and I wanted to know what they’d said, if anything, whether there was a reconciliation, a last grasp at closeness, or if they’d even tried. He didn’t say, though, and I could tell he didn’t want to talk about it anymore, and this now makes me think of Kevin. Because these distances between siblings, I suspect, might be a birthright that’s as strong and arbitrary and ineluctable as love; yet because we feel we must honor this accident of our relatedness, we try to swim against it again and again.
After I left Kevin’s apartment that night, even before the elevator reached the lobby, I realized I’d forgotten my BlackBerry and cell phone on the arm of the couch. I went back upstairs and checked the door to make sure Ruth Ann had locked it. She hadn’t, and I stepped inside ready to reprimand them of how very dangerous this world had just proven itself to be.
And there they were: Kevin, Ruth Ann, and the kid who’d mugged us—the busboy from the restaurant with the do-rag. They were standing around the kitchen table with the money piled on it like a sandcastle.
I walked up the stairs, stared at the three of them for a second, then collected my stuff off the couch. “Can I have my watch back?” I asked.
The kid looked at it, then took it off his wrist and tossed it to me.
“He wasn’t supposed to take that,” Kevin said.
Ruth Ann had fixed her eyes on the floor.
“We needed a credible witness,” Kevin explained.
“I get it.”
We stood there for a time. With the gun stuffed under his belt, the busboy stared me down. I was still afraid of him.
“How do you know I’m not going to turn you all in?”
Kevin shrugged, then smiled until his lip split open again. “Because we’re starting from scratch.”
I turned around and let myself out, careful to set the latch bolt; then I closed the door and checked it to make sure it was locked.
It was breezy outside. Kevin lived near the East River, and when the wind blew the air tasted so thickly mineral that it was like you’d just put a penny in your mouth. I figured I’d hurry home, clean myself up, repack my nostrils, drink some coffee, watch the sun rise, and head in to the office. There is no early where I work, no “first one in.” We’re round the clock. But I would impress Chuck with my diligence, we’d bond over my wounds, and I’d work my way back into his graces.
Meanwhile, I’d leave the suit and shirt hanging on the door for the cleaners. I wished I could see their faces when they inspected this job, and that almost made me want to drop it off myself: the suit and shirt lying on the counter, the fabric starched with coagulation. For a while they’d wonder what the hell had happened. They’d pick up the pants at the waist, the jacket at the shoulders, shaking their heads at how they’d been set up to fail. It would be impossible to remove all the blood.
Middleman
In the fall of 1980, my parents enrolled me in seventh grade at the Trinity School—a tony, Episcopal private school in Manhattan that was all boys until ninth grade. So my two best new friends, Abe Herman and Kyle Duckworth, were thirteen-year-olds on the cusp of, among other things, coeducation.
Beanpole thin, with a chest so concave a dog could lap water from its indentation, Abe Herman had the gift of imparting debilitating self-consciousness upon anyone within ear- or eyeshot. We sat directly across from each other in English (discussion-based classes at Trinity were taught in the round), and I often marveled at how Abe could unseat the confidence of even the most assured students simply by shaking his head and piteously staring at them while they spoke; or, if he was really in the mood for disruption, shielding his eyes with his hand, as if stupidity that intense could somehow blind him, and looking in the opposite direction. You might think this was motivated by envy, that Abe was shy or inarticulate and his scorn was a preemptive strike against those who would scorn him, but that wasn’t the case. Abe was brilliant. Annoyed by his behavior and frustrated by his ability to silence anyone in class, our teacher, Ms. Cheek, would pounce on him in response, assuming an advantage in the element of surprise: “Well, then, Mr. Herman, what do you think Marc Antony is telling his countrymen here?” And Abe, leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed, would smile broadly to show off a mouth fat with braces. “I think that Antony is using irony to stab Brutus and Cassius the way they stabbed Caesar. I think he’s using his sharp tongue to rip their honor to shreds.” He would stare at Ms. Cheek, who, defeated like the rest of us, could only shake her head in unintentional mimicry.
But he was thin, as I said, and small—doomed, by cosmic justice, to a post–high school growth spurt, denied height when he needed it most—so outside the ordered confines of class he was often singled out for beatings by larger kids who were sick of his lip. You wouldn’t be surprised to see Abe getting slammed into a locker between periods, ineffectually pounding on the back of whoever ha
d tackled him, delivering rabbit punches and liver shots so weak you’d think he was throwing the fight from the start. We met when I lifted Sammy Munson and Ad Schacht off him, then knocked their heads together and kicked both in their respective asses with a karate one-two. (After seven years of public school, I knew a thing or two about winning a fight.) “It’s about fucking time,” Abe mumbled from the floor. He looked down at his shirt, buttoned his sprung buttons, then tamped his high head of thick, brown hair. “Well, help me up,” he said, sticking out a hand. After I pulled him upright, he gave his lapels a tug and slapped my shoulder. “Come to my bar mitzvah next weekend,” he said, and hurried to class.
I’d been to a number of bar mitzvahs earlier that year—bar mitzvah receptions, I should say. These parties were held in places like Leonard’s of Great Neck or the Tudor House, with entire floors dedicated to video games like Missile Command and Sea Wolf, all with unlimited credits, so the kids would leave the parents alone to drink for as long as possible. But Abe’s was the first bar mitzvah ceremony I’d ever been to, and I was awed. The raised bimah, with the drawn curtains of the Holy Ark behind it, reminded me of a stage. I had to wear a yarmulke, and I dug the costumes of the synagogue—the square tefillin like a little top hat, the tallith a varsity scarf. I was impressed by Abe’s fluency as he sang up there, the force and clarity with which he chanted the haftarah, how deep his voice sounded as he read the prayers—not that I knew the names of these rites or understood much of what I was seeing at the time. I understood only that because Abe had gone through this ceremony, he wasn’t just the center of attention, he was now a man. It was held in the morning, and afterward, all of us—Abe’s whole family and Kyle, the only other guest Abe’s age besides me—went to lunch at Adam’s Rib. I kept a loose tally of the gifts he received, the checks big and small, and, vaguely jealous of the whole affair, at dinner that night I asked my father, who was Jewish, why I had not been bar mitzvahed. Did that mean I wasn’t a man?
“No.” He wouldn’t look at me. He was focused on his baked chicken. He liked to eat the bones, which he was in the process of destroying. “You’re a man whether or not you’re bar mitzvahed. You’re a man,” he said, “because you’ve turned thirteen.”
So was I a Jew?
“Strictly speaking,” my mother jumped in, “no.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not. And it comes from the mother.”
“What are you, then?”
“I was raised Methodist, but I don’t believe in organized religion. Or God, for that matter.”
I let that conversation quietly sail by.
“Can I be a Jew?” I asked, thinking it was like joining a sports team or deciding on an activity at camp. My mother sat forward, folded her arms across her chest, and leaned her elbows on the table. She stared at my father and shook her head sadly, as if to say, I told you this was coming. And my father, who could look off conflict with the best pro quarterback, said, “We’ll talk about it”—like that would put an end to this.
We ate in silence for a long time. You have to picture our dining room. First of all, it wasn’t actually a dining room. It was an area just off the kitchen—a sort of gigantic nook. There was a long row of windows to our right. We lived on the Upper West Side, and the view from our third-floor apartment was primarily of the giant blue-brick Con Ed power station across 66th Street. To make the space seem bigger, my parents had installed a mirror that covered the facing wall, which had the side effect of making me horribly vain. I looked at myself constantly. I was looking at myself now—my brother was sleeping over at a friend’s house, so I had an unobstructed view—and at my parents’ profiles. I had my father’s curly hair, though it was brown, not black, and his unevenly aligned eyes, the right set slightly lower than the left like some Cubist deformity. I also had a big head. I don’t mean in terms of ego, just outsized, blockish, like The Thing’s or John Travolta’s. (You were a forceps baby, my mother was fond of saying, as if to regularly remind me that tools were required to pull me from her vagina.) And yet my father and I were both in denial about our proportions. We looked terrible in baseball hats but often broke down and wore them. From my mother, I received her bright blue eyes and, because I could spend hours drawing, zitzfleisch, according to my father. Yiddish, he translated, for “sitting meat,” but clearly not for my curiosity, since I didn’t ask him to teach me any other words. All of this is to say that I knew myself as partly them, physically and temperamentally. But there had to be more.
“Is my name Jewish?”
“Jacob is,” my mother replied, “yes.”
“What about Rose?”
“That’s a stage name,” said my father. He had literally cleaned his plate.
“What’s our real name?”
“That is your real name.”
“What was it before?”
He shrugged his shoulders like he could barely remember. “Rosenberg.”
“I like that,” I said.
“Do you?”
“It’s distinguished.”
“You think?”
“Maybe I’ll change mine back.”
For reasons unknown to me, my mother found this hysterical. So I did what I normally did when I didn’t get a joke and laughed along with her. As for my father, well, he excused himself from the table by saying, “I have to make a call.”
Of course, asking to be Jewish didn’t mean I wanted to be Jewish. That particular night, I just had Jews on the brain. Beyond what I’d seen that morning, I didn’t know a thing about them. And when I told Kyle I wanted to become one, he talked me out of it.
“You don’t want to be a Jew,” he said. “If you became a Jew you’d be a convert.”
“What’s wrong with being a convert?”
“Converts are boring. They only talk about one thing.”
“What do they talk about?”
“Being converts, idiot.”
“Check.”
“Plus everyone wants to kill them.”
“Converts?”
“Jews.”
“Like who?”
“Like Germans, for one. Palestinians. And I’m pretty sure Egyptians.”
It suddenly made sense to me why my father changed his name.
“Would you really want to be someone everybody else wants to kill?” Kyle asked.
I shook my head.
“Good,” he said. “Then it’s settled.”
Which brings me to Kyle. Close friends called him Kyle, upperclassmen called him Duckworth, but on all athletic fields he was known as Duck. The name was a mark of respect for his speed, like calling a 150-pound Rottweiler Baby. He was one of the city’s top cross-country runners in his age group, a must-pick in the touch football games we played on Trinity’s rooftop AstroTurf, and had a starting slot waiting for him on the high school lacrosse team his freshman year. He was blond and slit-eyed, with high cheekbones and a pronounced jaw, a puka-necklace wearer who, after returning from his Christmas vacations in Barbados, was accused by Abe of bleaching his hair. “It’s the sun and saltwater,” he protested, though his mop was as white as Billy Idol’s. “I swear.” He was also a daring clotheshorse who affected a preppy style at school that flirted with multiple dress-code violations: loafers with no socks (questionable) and corduroys that bordered on jeans; Lacoste shirt (illegal) with the collar turned up, over a turtleneck (legal) and under a seersucker suit or blazer—the various color combinations of which he wore year-round.
As for myself, I was “full of potential,” according to my teachers, but didn’t have the mind that Abe had; athletic as well, but no champion like Kyle. I was shorter than the latter, taller than the former. My claim to some distinction was that I was an actor, like my father, who made a living doing voice-overs. I’d done commercials and radio dramas—Mystery Theater, The Eternal Light—and I’d had parts in a couple of motion pictures and Afterschool Specials. Just that fall, I’d starred in a Saturday morning series on one of the n
etworks that was canceled almost as soon as it aired—thirteen and out, as they say. My career wasn’t born of some driving, Jodie Foster–like talent. I just fell into the business. Through a friend of my dad’s, I’d gotten a nonspeaking part in a made-for-TV movie that became a speaking one by the end of the shoot, and that started the ball rolling. Admittedly, I had no real gift besides precociousness and the ability to listen and follow directions—which is all your average child actor needs. Perhaps the fact that show business was, in a manner of speaking, a family business made the whole thing seem relatively banal to me (We can’t live on love alone at City Center, I heard my father say every morning on NPR) and made almost no impression on Abe or Kyle. Still, because I had spent so much time among adults, with grown-up responsibilities and a salary to boot, there were skills I possessed in excess, namely a willingness to perform when necessary and the fearlessness that required. And if there was a quality I had in spades, it was confidence—without correlative achievement, maybe, but confidence nonetheless.
