by David Adjmi
At his urging, I even mustered the courage to go to Charivari, an apogee of fashion in the mid-1980s. I always wanted to go inside but was afraid to sully the temple with my enfeebled presence. Howie went in first; I trailed obediently behind. I kept my composure and held my breath, studiously avoiding the gaze of any salesperson who might pock me with judgments. The space felt august like a Japanese temple. The salespeople were hieratic and very austere, shuffling up and down aisles like fish in a glittering koi pond. Howie and I clung to chrome balustrades, walked in terrified tandem up short staircases as Japanese music played. Everything was slick with white lacquer. Everything was teetering on the edge of everything else. Vitrines towered with luxuries. Charivari’s glamour was different from that of an ordinary clothing store. It wasn’t tastefully elegant; it was modern and bizarre. Men’s suits were monochromes in Yves Klein blue and fluorescent pink. There were weird puffy coats that looked like pieces of furniture. Everything was ripped or burnt or corrugated—the seams on a blazer were inside out, a sleeve was missing or mismatched. To what category of existence did these objects belong? Was this fashion? Was it culture? Was it even meant to be clothing? What was the ontology of an asymmetrical neon yellow blazer with cigarette burns? I didn’t know. I just knew I was being exposed to something godly and lacked the aesthetic refinement to really experience it. As I was feeling bad about myself and ruing all my deficiencies, I stepped momentarily out of my body. I saw myself standing there in my lime-green sateen jacket and my overgrown shag of a non-haircut and the whole scenario struck me as ridiculous. Just as I felt the impulse to laugh, I heard a faint buckle of noise, and there was Howie: his face glowing bright red with suppressed laughter. It was like a transmitter linked our brains. He was pretending to look at some sweater but let out an involuntary snort, which made me start to break up. When we could endure it no longer we made a beeline for the exit, hurrying past the vitrines and glamour and out the front door, where we collapsed into fits of uncontrollable laughter. The laughter lifted me out of misery and into an otherworldly sphere. Howie loved me unreservedly, loved me in a way my own parents didn’t love me—without conditions, with all my flaws and strangeness.
My mother didn’t approve of our friendship. She didn’t want me spending so much time with Howie. He, in turn, saw my mother as a camp icon. He performed endless vivisections on her: the way she spoke, the way she moved. As ever, he was able to zero in on details and tics no one else noticed, like her bizarre affinity for toothpicks. “Daaaaave,” he’d trill in razor-sharp impersonation, “whehe’s my toothpick?” He’d suck in his cheeks and roll his tongue around in vaguely perturbed but still luxuriant swirls, picking out imaginary pieces of food as I fell to the floor laughing. My mother never caught us making fun of her, but she could sense some untowardness. She thought Howie was a sneak and a bad influence.
Our treks to Manhattan grew more frequent despite her staunchly irrational warnings that she didn’t “want me” going to The City and she didn’t “want me” going on the train. My mother didn’t “want me” doing a lot of things back then—her maternal injunctions carried a poisoned strain, the taint of her own overcautiousness: Manhattan was terrifying, subways were terrifying. There was graffiti, there were muggers and squeegee men. Of course, she was right about all those things, but I objected on principle to my mother’s response to imminent danger, which was to shrink the size of her world so danger wouldn’t get at her.
Howie was baffled by my mother’s endless worrying. His mother, after all, encouraged him to be intrepid. She thought my mother was insanely overprotective, and told me so in long-winded diatribes laced with her broken English: “Of course you can go on ze subvey, Day-veed! Zat is so stupid what your maza says—it’s crazy!” Howie’s mother had a lot of issues with my mother and had no problem openly voicing them: Why was she so enamored of Lean Cuisine and frozen foods? Why didn’t she cook me dinner? Why did she string a house key over a soiled white shoelace and make me wear it around my neck? I defended my mother, or tried to, but had to eventually admit her demands were unreasonable, her anxieties infringing on my burgeoning manhood. So I resolved to defy her: I decided I would go to The City, I would take the subway. My defiance of my mother’s wants began to give me a perverse satisfaction, a counterweight to the obsessive control she wielded.
Howie’s mother was also controlling: she demanded a reverence from her children that bordered at times on cultism, but she’d bonded with them sufficiently so that they accepted her intense alliance. His father was kind but passive; he survived the Holocaust and now couldn’t really do anything but relax on the sofa with his sandals and his Hanes T-shirt tautly stretched over his giant spherical belly—but my friendship with Howie, with all its intensity and crazy exclusivity, was patterned on this other relationship.
He was somewhat obsessed with his mother: with her beauty (she was once a model) and her cute German accent and charcoal swirl of hair. To me, her Teutonic harshness was frightening but when she barked commands at him in German, Howie snorted with laughter. He found her spikiness entertaining. If she asked an invasive question or made a blunt remark he’d hug her theatrically like she was a life-sized doll, and laugh wildly, and say, “Oh, Mommy!” smothering her with kisses while she grimaced and displayed not a whit of reciprocal adoration—though it was patently obvious she adored him, and more than that: needed him. And her need felt most pronounced at precisely those moments when her efforts to contain it were made visible.
I didn’t understand the calculus of her need. I knew she was depressed and alienated—that, like my mother, she had few friends and hated Brooklyn—and that she had an intense need for drama. She found the correlative to her need in trashy magazines like Star and the National Enquirer (both of which she read obsessively) and in prime-time soap operas.
Her favorite show was Dallas so it became Howie’s favorite too—the whole family had a standing date as a family every Friday night to watch it. It was on Shabbos but they discreetly closed the blinds, no one would know. I’d never seen these shows. Howie wanted me to catch up on the plotlines so we could watch them together. He relayed the whole sordid history of Jock Ewing and Digger Barnes and Ewing Oil. He spent hours and several cassette tapes recounting the entire season-by-season history of Falcon Crest as though it were a Homeric epic. Through the tapes (that I listened to repeatedly on my mother’s Sanyo boom box: it soothed me to hear Howie’s voice when I was without him, which I increasingly found impossible to bear) I learned about the evil Angela Channing, and how she usurped Chase and Maggie’s winery, and how the actress who played Maggie would always sigh during her line readings in dismay of some awful new thing Angela had inflicted on them. And how Terri came to town with her yellow Ferrari convertible, and was a slut, and went horseback riding in silk blouses through vineyards with Angela’s grandson Lance. And how Lance’s mother Julia became a nun to escape her mother’s evil turpitude, but one day disrupted a dinner party in her nun’s habit and shot her mother in the face. The plotlines were magnificently preposterous but at the same time, Howie could sense the real, and even tragic, underpinnings of the stories; he was able to distill the crackpot elements so they felt elemental and genuinely upsetting. Just as I understood Sweeney Todd as a parable of the banished father gone insane with grief, he understood Falcon Crest as a parable of the mother as monster, the mother as supreme creator and supreme destroyer. This was how his own mother became magnified in his mind. Everything about her was heightened, she was bigger than life.
She was always in battle—with one of her siblings or a distant relative or her husband’s relative or someone in the neighborhood. Her feuds would go for months, even years. She wouldn’t speak to people, or hatched sulfurous plans against them, plots that matched the revenge plots on Dallas and Falcon Crest. Howie became her emissary, her accomplice. The two of them needed enemies the way great empires needed to wage wars: it edified them, it bonded them together.
Howie�
�s mother taught him to be a vigilante. When in fourth grade his friend Alex Fogel turned against him, she showed Howie how to cultivate a rotten egg in a drawer of dirty socks, and instructed him to crack it over Alex’s books as punishment. Together they canceled the airline tickets and restaurant reservations of various nemeses, they plotted to overthrow women in the Ladies Auxiliary, they threw rocks and eggs at the next-door neighbor’s front window. As he detailed these exploits, Howie took great enjoyment from my scandalized responses. I felt like a square, but I’d never really known people in life to carry such vendettas, and certainly I’d never heard of parents colluding with their eleven-year-olds to carry out revenge plots on the neighbors.
Howie’s mother harbored a special loathing for the next-door neighbor, Hildy Tasimowitz. The pattern was similar to all the other hatreds she cultivated. At first, they had a congenial friendship: Hildy was sympathetic to the plight of an immigrant woman from Germany with two kids and a depressed husband trying to make a new go with a nascent wristwatch business she operated out of a basement. But the friendship was quickly warped by vendettas and turned into a full-blown war, a war between two families, like the Ewings and the Barneses. Howie characterized Hildy Tasimowitz as a witch who walked with a limp and had gnarled fingers. He said her fingernails were grotesquely long and curled at the edges, and that she had a revolting degenerative disease on her arm—that the disease ate right into the bone and had to be regularly swabbed with a Kleenex to stanch all the revolting ooze. Hildy Tasimowitz was deep in Howie’s unconscious, the Orthodox Jew cognate to Angela Channing—only Howie’s mother was also Angela Channing, and so was Mrs. Birman and Little Chaya from the front office and a whole bunch of other women—and it was hard sometimes to know if Howie adored or despised these women, the feelings seemed to spin in a confused exhilarated whorl in his mind. But he was so detailed and merciless in his characterization of Hildy Tasimowitz that I too became terrified of her; I too pledged to make her my enemy. I couldn’t bear the thought of oozing, melting bone: she had to be evil.
One Friday afternoon, after school, we caught sight of Hildy Tasimowitz walking down Avenue J in her lavender sweatpants and smoking a Virginia Slim. I’d never seen her in person, I’d only heard the stories. Howie gripped the sleeve of my shirt so hard it wedged between his knuckles: “It’s Hildy!” he said, thrumming with adrenaline. He spun around, pulling me with him, and together we ran back in a panic. We rounded a corner and kept running until we were safe from her terrifying contagion. “Did you see her swabbing her disease?” said Howie. “Yes!” I cried. “With the Kleenex?!” “Yes! Yes!” I screeched in overheated delirium, like one of the girls from The Crucible professing to have seen the devil—though I wasn’t sure if I’d really seen the suppurating disease or just imagined it. I wanted to see what he wanted me to see. My loyalty tendered imaginative lapses in perception. I’d ally with Howie however he needed, even if I never quite knew what was real or what was in his mind. It didn’t matter to me what was real, because my loneliness was alleviated. We lived in a bubble where true and false increasingly dropped their distinctions. It was the space of fantasy, and that space felt holy to me, just like the clothes at Charivari felt holy—clothes that were made for some fantasy body, a kind of personhood yet to be invented. The clothes opened the space for this person to spring into existence, just as Howie’s stories opened the space for us to become characters in them. The stories bonded us together—for if you shared the same fictions you shared the same reality. Our friendship forced open the limits of reality, so I was somehow on equal footing with JR and Angela Channing. My mother was no longer my mother, she was layered with all the impressions and camp embellishments Howie gave her. I was no longer merely human, I was a blend of fiction and reality.
This blurring of categories was intensely freeing to me, so when I noticed Howie tipping the moral scales, pushing his crazy fantasies and stories into the realm of outright falsehoods, I didn’t know how to react. But it was increasingly clear: Howie was a liar.
His lies were often arbitrary, and usually revealed some buried wish or odd flamboyant fantasy. In Rabbi Lipnick’s class, Howie handed me a fifteen-page note written in his immaculate purple and light blue bubble script in which he described, with a level of detail verging on the forensic, a party his mother had supposedly taken him to at Ricky Schroder’s Connecticut mansion. He boasted of winning tickets to Cats in a radio contest. He talked extensively about how his science teacher brought a life-size Barbie doll head to class and taught all the students how to shampoo her hair. He fed me ham and said it was a kosher meat-like substitute made to taste like ham. For Mrs. Birman’s class, he made up a fake book he titled Bamboo and Nucama (about an African boy and his best friend who was an elephant) for which he got an A+.
Howie’s mother corroborated all his lies (I hadn’t yet learned of the full extent of their collaboration) but after a lot of prodding and interrogation I uncovered them, one by one. Each time I felt a fresh sense of betrayal. But if my mother flat-out said she would mourn me as if I were dead for my moral failings, I would love Howie unconditionally for his. And though I cared about morality, whatever betrayal I felt being lied to was trumped by the rapture Howie himself took in his own fabulations. His delight fused with my own feelings and eventually became indistinguishable from them: feelings and opinions undulated between us like we were a single organism. I had the same need for fantasy he did, the same flamboyant insistence on what reality must yield for it to be endurable.
By the end of the school year we were regularly creeping into rooms and offices we shouldn’t be in, peeking at secret files and filching notes, coupons, slips of paper, anything we could get our hands on. The lure of the forbidden was too irresistible to him, the blanket of injunctions at the yeshiva too suffocating. Of course, he needed an accomplice for all this: he was raised by his mother to believe that vengeance required an amanuensis. The days when I flattered myself to be some kind of svengali were long gone: now I was Howie’s underling.
One weekend, he convinced me to help him break into the nursery school at the yeshiva. It was a small building annexed to the main one. The doors were all unlocked, it was unmanned. We could just walk right in. Almost immediately he went on a sort of pogrom: ambiting quite confidently between classrooms, ransacking teachers’ desks, stealing cassette tapes, rolls of unused tickets to some expired raffle. I didn’t want to get caught and told him so. “Calm down,” Howie said, like he was a safecracking expert. He seemed weirdly natural ransacking things, like he was unveiling some secret hidden expertise. I was ashamed of my prudishness. Maybe his minor criminal acts were interesting, even an adjunct of genius. I wasn’t sure how to feel.
Shortly after our marauding of the nursery school, we raided his landlord Mrs. Schloff’s storage unit—another woman with whom his mother had a long-standing enmity. He was laughing hysterically as he hurled her books and clothes to the floor. He found a small pump dispenser, uncapped it, and squeezed out translucent pink gel, some sort of lubricant for doors or metal joints. I watched as he pumped thick globs of it on Mrs. Schloff’s clothes and books. He smeared gel on stray sofa sections, on the seat of a baby carriage. He laughed wildly at his own capacity for evil. He didn’t want to steal or plunder—he wanted to deface, to desecrate. The rage I could feel in those giant cascades of laughter when we first met was now uncapped. It scared me but it gripped me too—the rage inside him vibrated with some long-submerged part of myself. He became a conduit for all my buried feelings. Though I found his rages terrifying they bonded me to him even more closely.
By the end of the school year he was taking appetite suppressants and laxatives to lose weight. He was trying to become bulimic too, he said, but it was impossible for him to vomit, his gag reflex wouldn’t work. He took NoDoz to stay up late and filched pain meds from his father’s medicine cabinet to fall asleep. Each of these revelations was accompanied by a capriccio of wild laughter—he tried to pass it all off
as one big joke. And though I laughed along with him (by now an unthinking reflex), I saw he was becoming more unhinged, only I kept pretending not to notice. I’d ceded my instincts to him by then. My grades started falling, but if Howie didn’t care, I didn’t either. He started cutting classes, so I cut class with him, just as I did everything with him. It wasn’t even a question.
The door to the roof of the yeshiva was unlocked and it was easy to hide there between classes. He led me up there one afternoon. The roof was lined with tiny, heavy rocks. “Look,” said Howie, picking up a rock the size of a golf ball. He casually lobbed it onto the sidewalk. “Don’t do that!” I said. I looked down at the sidewalk, scanning the length of it with my eye. No one seemed to be hurt but that wasn’t the point. People used that sidewalk—actual pedestrians—they walked up and down that very sidewalk every single day, and it was just his crazy luck that no one had been murdered. But when I looked over at Howie he seemed relaxed, like he’d just taken a nap. He picked up another rock and dropped it over the edge. “Now you do it.”
“Someone could get killed,” I said, in a pitched emotional voice.
He smiled an odd, wobbly smile. “Don’t be so scared of everything, David.”
It was an echo of pep talks he’d given when I was afraid to walk into department stores, but in this instance I noticed something taunting—even slightly sinister—in his tone.
Maybe he was right. Maybe to become a man I had to contravene my own instincts, and this was my initiation. I took a moment to rid myself of any final hesitations. I picked up a rock, dropped it down, then stood for a moment in an insensate daze. Was this freedom? Was it a new kind of morality? Would the morality empower me to survive life? Howie saw my expression and burst out laughing. I laughed, but there was no joy in it; the laughter was for him and him alone. For the first time since I’d known him, I felt myself performing for Howie. I’d sacrificed some part of myself and it felt wrong, but I couldn’t bring myself to acknowledge the wrongness, because I couldn’t be without my friend. I couldn’t go back to the suffocating prison of loneliness. I needed to maintain our symbiosis. I needed to laugh—at anything. Our laughter was the golden laughter of salvation; it poked through and perforated the madness around and inside us. We were predisposed to laughing in restaurants, laughing at people on the subway—laughing in synagogues, in class, in school assemblies. The laughter was manic and unstoppable; it would come during dour ceremonies, and visits to the Holocaust museum on Avenue J. It would erupt during maudlin speeches about the PLO and Golda Meir, and in the middle of solemn prayers—as it did one day as Masha Bendikowski led the students in an a cappella end-of-meal prayer called birkat hamazon.
