by David Adjmi
In his first year of business, Dad’s store was robbed seventeen times—and not just minor thefts, he was completely cleaned out each time. Early on, my mother tried to get him to shut down, cut his losses, but he refused. The hushos (the SY word for “thieves”) were relentless. They got in through the vents, through ceilings, and over transoms. After each robbery my father would lick his wounds, restock the merchandise, and reopen, but after a few rounds of this, insurance companies refused to cover him and he eventually went bankrupt. Dad surrendered to the hushos and resorted to painting window signs for stores on Fifth Avenue and Broadway, signs with prices drawn in neon red positioned next to figurines and Persian carpets. The sign painting business wasn’t terribly lucrative so my siblings were conscripted to get jobs after school to help out, and this cemented their status In The Community as second-rate. Where other Syrians lived lives of conspicuous leisure, we had only our nostalgia for past wealth. My mother rubbed it in: he ruined her life and she wanted to impress upon him the magnitude of this failure. To cope with her battering criticisms my father started to drink more. He’d enjoin the bartender at the local bar to hit him up with shot after shot of “Prune Juice”—his pet name for hard liquor. He had Prune Juice in the liquor cabinets at home too. He was downing more and more of the Prune Juice, getting ripped most nights, which infuriated my mother and made things much worse between them. It wasn’t ever a happy marriage, but the money had been a buffer and now that buffer was gone.
I was born once the money was gone and the family sank into ruin. I understood my family’s lost wealth only as a remote fact, but I believed I could one day recover that wealth and inherit it. I told myself I was a noble scion in the process of reclaiming his birthright—like a pauper in a Victorian novel who one day would claim his escutcheon, his coat of arms.
My parents knew a few people with money; sometimes they’d take me with them to beautiful homes while they had cocktails. It was in these houses I was able to glean firsthand wealth and its effects. I was often left alone in dens while adults in another room discussed numerology and Bob Dylan and Kahlil Gibran. The dens were thickly carpeted, darkly draped and strewn with small bibelots—the funeral-home style was ubiquitous then. I was impressed by all the solemnity and dark majesty, but the majesty felt remote, not something meant for me.
When I was six years old I locked myself in Frieda and Murray Cohen’s guest bathroom in their house on East Seventh Street. The bathroom was completely covered in mirror, which created a terrifying mise en abyme of doors and sinks and mirrored toilets, and I couldn’t get out. As I grasped for an ever-elusive crystal doorknob I could see myself in disorienting facsimile: rows of panicked little boys in a cold sweat, paddling the air and flicking with their hands, lost in a prism of parvenu wealth.
My uncle Al had gotten rich selling yarn in a shop just near the Aqueduct Raceway, and with the money he made he and my aunt Sylvia bought a house in Sheepshead Bay. Their house was like a palace. The rooms bulged with furniture, the walls were lined with soft quilted fabric in lieu of paper. The pillows on the sofa were tall, and when you sat they collapsed in slow deflation like giant marshmallows. There were needlepoints on the wall: Renoirs, girls in pastoral settings blowing large translucent bubbles that gleamed in the composite of tiny stitches. Two clay-white Grecian busts stood in the foyer on tall pediments. Everything was marble. Everything was cold and gentle at once. Everything resonated with antiquity, with a kind of sacred glamour that was just out of reach.
In my house carpets were not plush and soft: they were cheap and worn down. The wallpaper was not quilted, it was flat and metallic and peeling at the seams. The tiles on the floor were cracked. The steel banister was half-collapsed. Hallways were claustrophobic, bedrooms were tiny. Lampshades, however, were hypertrophically gigantic—their bodies all flecked with a lurid, ersatzly gold gold-leaf. Nothing matched from room to room; each was its own demented cosmos. There was a deco sofa and giant faux-oriental vases. A Degas needlepoint (the sister needlepoint to my aunt’s Renoir) abutted some odd garage-sale-type portraitures with languid unhappy women at markets or Japanese cats chasing balloons. Some rooms were so overworked they produced an impression of disorientation bordering on nausea. My sister’s room was a phantasmagoria of fluorescent yellow and orange flowers. Her shag carpet with its matted orange and yellow flecks matched the wallpaper, which matched the low-hanging chandelier, itself adorned with matching yellow and orange petals into which were nestled candle-shaped plastic cylinders meant to be stamens. It was all too much, but my parents kept adding more. For a while my father got some job that entailed trips to China (I never figured out what it was) and the house filled with even more crap: dimpled Asiatic sculptures and dime-store baubles, fake flowers and silk slippers, embroidered placards woven from silk and framed. My mother didn’t know what to do with all the crap my father brought home, she had no acumen for decorating and nothing went with the already incoherent decor, but she kept trying to be resourceful: she put a mirrored glass tray on her dresser and on it interspersed Lalique swans with pyramidal Lucite sculptures and miniature elephants and tiny ivory geishas in kimonos. She couldn’t order the disparate styles into a unified whole, so it all floated like a swamp of fragments.
The house was like an ideogram, a visual impression of my family. We were all sort of shoved together, and the rules were inscrutable. If you wanted to be heard, you had to scream. If you were hungry, you had to grab food before it disappeared. There were no chores, no punishment or discipline or order—everything was hanging by a thread.
One morning, I woke to a loud popping noise and violent shouts. I came down the stairs to the kitchen where I saw my older brothers screaming heatedly with my parents standing between them. The kitchen wall had a huge hole in it; there were pieces of wall* on the floor. Everyone was screaming over each other. I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
At one point Richie called Stevie a husho and screamed GIORGIO ARMANI in a tone that gave me chills. Then Stevie screamed I DIDN’T TAKE YOUR UNDERWEAR, COTO.† When my father called Stevie a bad kid, Stevie screamed I’M NOT BAD! so loud I thought his lungs would burst, and he ran out of the house.
“Where’s he going?” I asked my father, but he ignored me.
Stevie did not come home that night, or the next. A policeman came to the house one afternoon. “Where’s Stevie?” I asked my mother. “Don’t worry about it,” she replied curtly, which I took as a sign that he’d killed himself—because people in my family talked about killing themselves all the time. If my sister could “pinch an inch” like they said in the television commercial she’d threaten to kill herself right in the middle of the den.
Then, one afternoon, Stevie walked in the front door, plopped down on the sofa, and started watching a rerun of The Odd Couple. “Hello, brother,” he said, eyes transfixed to the television screen. A dead man had come back to life. That night we had dinner, and I kept waiting for someone to bring up the fight with Richie—or that he’d been gone, or that he came back, but no one said a word. Stevie’s absence and odd reappearance was the first time I began to feel something was horribly wrong—and not just with my family, but with life.
I clung in desperation to anything resembling a family ritual: family dinners, television nights—but being with my family mainly reinforced the feeling that I was separate. The age discrepancy between me and my siblings was glaring. They were more like young parents than peers. When I was eight, Stevie was nineteen, and Richie and Arlene were twenty and twenty-one. One night after dinner my brothers joked about how I was a mistake—and I caught the look between them. I knew right away there was something filthy about me. My existence felt like a mistake; I was born into the wrong world, the wrong life.
Every so often we’d sit together in the living room and sift through old photo albums, grids of tiny square photographs with white borders preserved in sheets of etiolated plastic. The photographs illustrated a family history that wasn’t
mine, a story of the past—a prequel to my family’s ruin: how in Nashville my father was a wealthy man. How the local sheriff insisted, despite his virulent antisemitism, that my father run for mayor. And how they all ate at Shoney’s Big Boy, and jumped on the trampoline in the backyard—the same backyard my sister, Arlene, accidentally burned down, but that was funny and amazing and indelible too. Even the instances of antisemitism they’d recount in moments of doleful retrospection—the “No Dogs or Jews” signs, interrogations on playgrounds about when their horns would grow in—those were also wonderful, because it bonded them, just as it excluded me, just like all the memories from their halcyon past excluded me—the past that eclipsed our miserable present, the one I had the misfortune to inherit.
I’d sit at the edge of the sofa, laughing along in vicarious remembrance as they relived the past of which I had no part, turning pages of the photo album as if unwrapping an ancient tablet or scroll. Every so often my sister, steeped increasingly in nostalgia, would stop at a particular photo and rub her thumb transversely across its bordered corners. Remember this? she’d say to no one in particular, and the dreamy look in her eyes made me feel as though I did remember. Somehow the stories filtered and impressed themselves into me. The stories formed pictures in my mind like travelogue images from a slide camera—static scenes from a life that seemed to be mine, with the mental picture a kind of trophy or souvenir of the experience, an object over which I could take permanent ownership. But the mental pictures would every so often reveal themselves as implanted and false, and I would feel confused about who I actually was.
I memorized any details people used to describe me so I could feel connected to something. From a very young age, I was told that I was a Genius. I was a child prodigy, they said—my I.Q. was off the charts! I could read the New York Times by the age of two! Sometimes The Genius made me feel like a prince, I was so happy to be in possession of it, but at other times it was presented as a kind of ugly distinction—even a basis for discrimination. I caught my mother more than once regarding me like I was an objet my father brought from one of his transcontinental trips, a jewel with strange terrible facets. “I don’t know how to take care of you,” she lamented in a moment of sad candor. She was staring at me from a gauzy remove, like I’d been orphaned and was grievously immune to any help or love she could offer. I felt so separate from my mother then, but I was supposedly a Genius, so on that basis alone I had to accept the fact of my separateness. My mother characterized my very conception as a Christlike annunciation. If I ever complained about my lot in life she’d start speaking with cryptic foreboding: “You wanted to be born!” she’d say. “There was no way it could have happened otherwise! Trust me—it was impossible!” She gave these utterances a mystical air, like she was channeling from a deep font.
My inner life began to organize itself not so much through feelings as attributions: I was someone who read the New York Times when he was two, someone who desperately wanted to be born! I became more and more fixated on external cues for who to be, but the cues shifted constantly, and when adults stopped paying attention I was like a machine suddenly unplugged, there was nothing to animate me.
The one thing that made me feel alive was culture, so I wanted to drench myself in it: I believed that with repeated exposures to The City my life would change. I held the belief that culture was like a vitamin you could ingest by merely looking, a kind of protein that would make you bigger and stronger by its additive.
A week or so after Sweeney Todd, I stood in the kitchen as my mother did her crossword puzzle. She had her hair up in an irrepressible ponytail and wore her reading glasses. She was imperially robed in pink satin, drinking her savarin from a china cup whose rim was embossed with a pattern of lime green flowers.
“Can we please see Elephant Man?”
My mother reclined her head against the wall, just below the hole Richie punched in it. “What now?”
“It’s a play,” I said.
“Elephant who?”
“It’s about a man who becomes an elephant.”
“Honey”—she set down her pencil—“I can’t afford to take you to the theatre every single second. You think your father gives me that kind of money?” Her cigarette was expressively charged with orange and white embers.
“Can we go to the city and walk around?”
“Parking is expensive, honey.”
“We can take the train.”
“We’re not taking the train.”
“Why?”
“Because the train’s dangerous, that’s why. You wanna get mugged?”
“No.”
“So go watch television.”
She swiveled her chair and went back to her puzzle. Her sudden indifference to culture was jarring. My heart sank—it was like someone cutting off my oxygen supply. Sweeney Todd was the end of a golden period.
For the rest of the summer I was stuck at home. I worked on developing my occult powers. I saw Escape to Witch Mountain on television and spent weeks trying to communicate telepathically with my dog. Inspired by a segment on Ripley’s Believe It or Not I sat in a corner of the basement and tried to levitate. I tried bending utensils with my mind. In the mystic religious joy of childhood I searched everywhere for God, for some lyrical expression of the divine. I wanted to unlock the secret of existence—the way Hayley Mills did in Pollyanna when she refracted light through a prism, breaking it into brilliant bands of color. I was desperate to go to the Magic Kingdom. I sent away for pamphlets and made a giant scrapbook itemizing all the worlds inside it. I felt in my tiny soul that Epcot Center with its silver galactic spikes and fractal cubes was a secret mirror of the universe, a totem of spiritual intelligence.
On weekends I trailed people in my family around. I looked for ways to insert myself in their lives. I sat in the backyard with Arlene as she worked on her tan, drenched in baby oil and holding a giant reflector to her face. I sat alongside her as she flipped through the pages of Cosmo, attacking all the models for their imperfections and mediocre looks.
Now that I was eight, I was given new responsibilities. Arlene would have me pinch different parts of her body to see if I could feel any fat, and she’d conscript me to assess her body parts: her nose, her eyes.
One day, we were watching television together when she lifted her bare feet up onto the coffee table. “Don’t you think feet are nauseating?” she said.
“Why?”
“I hate my feet.” She wiggled her toes and made a face. “Ert!”* she said. “Feet are disgusting.”
I looked down at my own bare feet, and could see what she meant. I felt a solidarity with my sister that day. I felt discriminating and grown-up.
Arlene wrote a song that summer called “Run Beth Run,” about a woman named Beth who was at the end of her rope and was going to die unless she ran for her life. Richie was writing songs that year too. He played one for me on his guitar called “The Better Way,” which was all about how people could achieve more if they tried harder and made better choices. I thought my siblings could start a band. Earlier that year, Richie started his own DJ business, Musique Magnifique. Every couple of weeks he’d come bounding into the house with some brand-new disco record and we’d squeeze into his room and dance together as he blared music on his giant Cerwin-Vega speakers. That summer turned out to be more fun than I’d imagined. We threw dance parties for Stevie and Arlene’s birthdays. We had barbecues and television nights. We’d cluster in the living room where my father would get happily drunk on amaretto and my parents would dance to Frankie Valli and Neil Sedaka. We’d tell funny stories and joke around.
Sometimes strange pageants materialized in the living room in which everyone would playact being small children—which, being a child myself, I found hilarious. Dad would be the one to instigate it: he’d raise the pitch of his deep voice to sound like a little boy. When he did the voice he’d float into some delicious purgatory where he was neither adult nor child. With the little boy v
oice he’d make promises and lionizing boasts to his children. He’d tell us about trips we’d take together, things he would make available to us from his position of limitless agency: “Who takes care a everything? Who gives you everything you need? Daddy! That’s who!” He’d work us up like he was whipping a bowl of cream into peaks, and we’d affirm his boasts, his strength; we’d get more and more excited—almost dizzy—like we were at an impossibly high altitude taking in rarefied air, delirious from his promises: “You, Daddy!” “You do, Daddy!” “You take care of us!” “You give us everything!” And with each affirmation we were lifted, ascended up from the sphere of the everyday, the ordinary, the lives we didn’t want into this magical place. With each chorus of affirmation, we were more and more bound by this invisible purgatory, this fantasy place my father could project with his child’s voice: Arlene would become a stuttering little girl; Richie and Stevie were prepubescent children, they were back in Nashville—they even slipped back into Southern accents. It was all so entertaining for me. In some crazy way, the pageants made me feel I was part of a family.
That fall, the energy in the house changed. My siblings started saying frenzied things about getting out of the house, they couldn’t wait to leave. Get me out of this house, they’d say. Get me out of here. They would scream it from inside their locked rooms. They’d repeat it over dinner like an incantation. Get me out of here. Get me out of here. They were all suddenly possessed with some terrible energy, and I could feel the energy coursing through my body like volts of electricity. Stevie ran away from home again. Richie became bitter and angry, he barricaded himself in his room and started playing screechingly loud rock music.
