by David Adjmi
The following day, in the middle of science class, I was called to Joe Dreyfuss’s office (an order from a third-grade emissary punctuated with the dreaded and bring your books postscript that usually meant you were in real trouble). Joe Dreyfuss was a new hire, the head of general studies. He was clean-shaven and wore wire-rimmed spectacles, sweater vests, and Florsheim wing tips. I skulked into the office wearing my winter coat—even though it was now June—and sat uncomfortably hunched across from him. “Do you know why you’re here?”
“No,” I lied.
“I spoke to your friend, Howie,” he began—and as soon as he uttered the words, I knew I was doomed. The pretense of my evil collapsed like the façade of a burning building. Every emotion I’d capped to convince myself of the rightness of what I’d done came flooding out: shame, guilt. Surely, I would be made a pariah when it all came out. I could be beaten, humiliated. I could be made the subject of long parabolic speeches in synagogues describing the scum of humanity, and how to wash me and my ilk from the face of the earth. Tears streamed down my face as Joe Dreyfuss spoke softly to me. He wasn’t like Rabbi Bressler; he was sensitive. And it was clear from the gentleness in his eyes, the tone of his voice, that he understood how the flowering, protosexual feelings in young boys (because this was how he’d mistakenly interpreted the situation) were complicated, and, like the delicate involutions in origami, one false crease or fold could forever mar the shape of the thing. So he proceeded with a combination of avuncular understanding and neutrality, careful to sidestep areas about which he had neither clinical knowledge nor experience. He leaned forward and spoke in a gentle, sobering tone. He explained in his soft, eerily dulcet male voice that he would need to call my parents—to which I reflexively wailed “NO” in between sobs, as now that I was no longer evil I’d morphed into an insane person.
I got down on my hands and knees. I began, literally, to beg, saying things like “Please! I beg you!” as Joe Dreyfuss stared, aghast—for what could he possibly say? A thirteen-year-old boy was sobbing and pleading at his feet. I’d gone somewhat crazy and knew it. I tipped over the edge of civilized behavior. I’d never entreated anyone like this, never outright begged anyone for anything, but I couldn’t let my parents discover that I knew about sex—tampons and Maxi Pads—and, more critically, that I had unlocked the primal connection between sex and humiliation. My family would see me as a type of pornographer, a pervert, the lowest of human scum. I had to make Joe Dreyfuss see the magnitude of this situation, the urgency of my plight, but after several failed remonstrations it was clear my pleas fell on deaf ears. “I absolutely have to call your parents,” he said. “I’m sorry about that.”
When he picked up the phone—on instinct, and as a sort of coup de grâce—I reached for the phone cord and, in a single jerk, yanked it out of the socket. Joe Dreyfuss sighed deeply: “David, what are you doing?” Since I’d taken it that far, I kept going, and jerked the cord so the body of the phone flew toward me. Dr. Dreyfuss maintained his impressive patience.
“Give me the phone,” he said.
“No! I won’t!” I sat cross-legged on the floor of his office, cradling the receiver to my chest like it was a newborn baby. I was hiccupping and gasping and choking on tears. I was exhausted, worn out by days of plotting and humiliation and worry. Maybe he would feel sorry for me, I silently opined, as I shook and heaved. Maybe my little juddering lachrymal form would evince enough pity for him to release me with a tiny slap on the wrist.
Joe Dreyfuss stood—he was gigantic, he seemed to be seven feet tall—and then slowly, cautiously, like he was about to defuse a bomb, walked around his desk and kneeled by me. “I know this is not a good situation for you,” he said, “but this is temporary. You won’t feel this way forever. Right now, though, you must deal with the consequences of your actions.”
Something about the warmth of his delivery calmed me. I conceded the phone and its cradle. I watched him dial, heard the familiar tones of my phone number. I heard my mother pick up, cringed as he relayed the sordid details. He used awful euphemisms like “feminine napkin.” I heard my mother shrilly voice her disgust and disapproval on the other end, and when he hung up, he relayed her message that I come right home after school (for I was meant to run some errands). But instead of going right home I skulked to the school basement, desolate by then. It was the end of the day, I was sure word had gotten out, and I didn’t want anyone to see me. I couldn’t begin to process Howie’s betrayal—and was eager to deny it, for my world was crumbling. I found an empty kindergarten classroom and waited there among the colored building blocks, dollhouses with their shapely cornices and vaults. On the radiator were a row of dolls lying supine, their eyes lusterless and dead. Through tiny rectangular windows near the ceiling I was able to track the bottoms of people’s legs, the departures of school buses. I felt like a sewer rat, hiding in a basement, biting my fingernails.
Once the traffic dissolved and I felt it was safe I exited through a side door and ran back home as fast as my legs could take me. I quietly crept into the house using the latchkey I kept on the soiled shoelace around my neck, hoping my mother would be gone or forget, or that her frenzy would have abated in the intervening hours. I tiptoed into the den. When I entered, there on the sofa sat my mother, smoking a cigarette that had burnt to a single pale gray ash. “You think you can hide from me?” Her tone was absolutely gelid.
“I’m sorry.”
“You shamed me. Don’t tell me you’re sorry—you shamed your entire family!”
“I know.”
“How am I supposed to show my face? Why would you do this? I’m ashamed to have you as a son.” I stood before my mother in mute hopelessness as she shouted and strafed and dipped me repeatedly in her vat of endless shame. The irony was I had wanted to see myself in this new way, as a villain. Now my mother saw me as precisely that—but it wasn’t even me, and she had no idea, and I had no way of telling her. I never felt more alone than I did that afternoon, listening to her lecture me about morals, branding me with her various permutations of shame. I was worn out from the awfulness of the day, and I longed for softness and quiet and calm. In all my emotional exhaustion I felt tears pool in my lower lids, but my sadness, as usual, enraged her. “I don’t care if you cry!” she said. “Your tears mean nothing to me.”* I remember thinking she looked beautiful as she screamed at me, but her beauty was like a porcelain mask, smooth and distant.
My mother warned that my father was going to “have a talk” with me—leaving me suspended in terror for days. I’d never been punished by my father. I’d never been subjected to any discipline whatsoever—the happy upside of neglect. It terrified me to think what punishment could be like. Whatever it was, I knew I was too sensitive to endure it. My brothers spoke about getting the belt when they were kids—I knew I couldn’t endure physical abuse. But when I saw him, my father gave me his winking approval. He thought it was all a kind of charming adolescent flirting. There was a short preamble, some hackneyed advice about girls and humanity, and that was it. It didn’t occur to him to ask why I’d done what I did, just as it hadn’t occurred to my mother. Like Joe Dreyfuss, and my siblings (and eventually my mother) he assumed I had a crush on Audrey Levy, and I didn’t bother to correct him. I never explained how she humiliated me in the stairwell. I didn’t want to have to tell my father about the shame I felt. Somehow having to articulate the shame would only redouble it—and anyway my motives weren’t relevant. It didn’t matter that Audrey Levy had calculatedly humiliated me that day in the stairwell. It didn’t matter that the nastiness of my actions was at war with my own feelings. People would fill in the motives with a story that suited their imaginings. My inner life was not relevant. All that was important was what was visible. And all that was visible to the adults conducting this human autopsy were my actions. I was buried inside these surface behaviors—crushed, as if by avalanche.
Howie called to explain that Joe Dreyfuss forced it out of him, that his
mother impelled him to give me up; that they’d have found me out regardless, and why should he be punished as well? I listened, half in sympathy with him. I didn’t really buy what he was saying but pretended to, if only to make my life easier. Deep down, though, I resented him. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but I blamed him for everything.
Once my suspension ended, I had to wait in the lobby for Audrey Levy at the end of the school day so I could apologize—it was part of my punishment. I saw her walking toward me, her small body sandbagged by a heavy knapsack. Her hair was pulled back in a frayed ponytail, her freckled face frozen in a smirk. “I’m sorry for what I did,” I said flatly. It was a fake rapprochement but I was too broken and defeated to lard my words with contempt, to show her I wasn’t beaten, because it wasn’t true. Audrey stood there smirking with her sallow, sickly complexion. She said nothing—she didn’t have to say anything. I was no threat to her. I wasn’t part of The Community. I was nothing. Justice had been served. The cancer had been excised and destroyed. The stain removed.
It’s a Sin
MY FATHER WAS one of those men who, once their fathers died, became suddenly very religious. Later in life, I came to see this sort of libidinal transfer wasn’t uncommon, but at the time, somewhere around the middle of eighth grade, I didn’t know what to make of it. He started hanging out with rabbis, and was increasingly modeling himself on them. He started wearing a yarmulke all the time, usually under a beige fedora hat garnished at the brim with an unfortunate, rigidly flexed, and speckled feather. He kept saying things about hashem—that was his new word.* If he ate a piece of bread he thanked hashem. When he saw a tree on the sidewalk he thanked hashem for its arboreal splendor. His piety struck me as performative and fake, and I didn’t know if I even believed in hashem. My skepticism, which never really left me since those first stirrings in the second grade, troubled me, because I found no support for it at school or anywhere else.
I once confessed my ambivalence to Howie, who watched Dallas on Shabbos and ate traif—he even pressured me to eat shrimp cocktail at some business luncheon his mother took us to in the World Trade Center—but he’d already cultivated an amazing ability to move between contradictory points of view with untraceable swiftness. When I made my admission, he looked at me as though I’d shat on his most sacrosanct beliefs. “What exactly are you telling me?” he said. “I can’t believe what you’re saying!” After that, I went into a kind of latency about the matter. I tried to declare a moratorium on skepticism, to force belief because it was so much easier. And the truth was I wanted to believe. I wanted a moral foundation for my life. I wanted to make an investment in something bigger than myself. I wanted to be good—whatever that meant to other people, since based on the horrified responses I yielded I could tell I had no innate understanding of goodness. The moral code I tried to build for myself was impotent and insufficient, and only brought me trouble.
I started going to shul every Friday with my father. We went to his favored synagogue on Avenue P. It felt manly: a boy and his father, a chorus of men beseeching God on a Friday night. I tried to enforce the piety demanded of me, tried to not only speak the words of prayer and ape all the ritual behaviors but to feel the supposedly concomitant feelings that went with them. Submitting to religion gave me a feeling of safety. I felt sheltered by imposed boundaries; I felt potentially holy. Maybe there really was some rapture accorded to people who said and did these things. Maybe there was some gnomic element that, were I to open myself to the possibility—really open myself—I’d sense, and then my life would change, and I’d be transformed by my devotional acts. I kissed the little black cube with the leather strap. I squeezed my eyes shut and rocked on the balls of my feet. I sang incantatory songs in the melismatic Arabic stylings I learned watching old men as they wailed—practically sobbed—with devotion. They loved hashem so much they seemed like they might combust into flames. Religion suddenly seemed like a gateway to a new whole life, a life of moral rectitude. I wanted to change. I wanted to grow up! I made a radical decision to embrace the status quo in every conceivable formulation: I’d get married, buy a house in Deal. I’d get a job in an electronics store and work my way up to being a Ray-Ban-wearing business magnate with a Jaguar and Tenax-slicked hair. Somehow these all fell, along with my new religious devotion, under the loose rubric of “morality.” I had to become sexy and religious, and I had to narrow these attributes into a single delta of concentrated ambition.
I spent the summer plotting my transformation. My father, newly obliged by my passage into manhood, set aside a budget for my expenditures—he had his own linens business now and was making pretty good money, so he could afford to indulge me. My bathroom cabinet was arrayed with all manner of ointments and unguents: creams to dispel acne, gels and mousses for my now Bumble and Bumble–coiffed hair. Dossiers were kept about what kind of outfits I needed: how many shirts and sweaters, and what brands, and what shoes. I had it all graphed in elaborate flowcharts on pieces of unreinforced loose-leaf paper I kept stacked pell-mell in my top desk drawer. I would return to it night after night, crossing out “shoes” and replacing it with “pants,” crossing out “pants” and replacing that with “shirt.” It was obsessive, but I’d become obsessive. I was determined to give an illusion of social competence. My insistence on becoming Syrianized was all I ever talked about—and I cajoled Howie into wanting the same thing. There were other Ashkenazi Jews taken in by the Syrian Community: he could become one of them!
At my urging, he went on a diet where he only ate salad and FrozFruit. He started doing the Jane Fonda tape and quickly dropped his excess avoirdupois. His face lengthened and thinned out, but this, to my mind, revealed new deficiencies—particularly with his chin, which, I was quick to point out, was now too egg-shaped. I suggested (because if I couldn’t tell him these things who could?) he get it surgically shaved down. In an act of tender largesse I bought him a value-pack of Seba-Nil cleansing pads so he could rid himself of the acne that, like his ovoid chin and too-protuberant forehead ridge, was ruining his otherwise good looks and chances at popularity. I had to be brutally honest, as I wanted for him the same gleaming perfection I sought for myself.
Together, we took the bus to Lester’s twice a week. We were like starving animals, greedily devouring new arrivals from the fall lines, rushing to the dressing room with our heavy armloads of WilliWear and Ton Sur Ton. Shopping made us anxious, it was work. The manager, Perry, would breezily reassure us that new shipments would be coming soon while the saleswoman—the rather butch, corkscrew-permed Hope—popped her gum, sputtering and confused by our endless obsessive shopping. There were limited selections at Lester’s, and we both wanted the same outfits, so we’d get into scabrous fights about who could buy what. Ultimately neither of us would forgo a flattering outfit to give psychic individuation to the other so we ended up with nearly identical wardrobes, but I didn’t care. By the time classes began I had all my outfits coordinated by days of the week. I felt almost a kind of military preparation.
On the very first day of school, after lunch, a Syrian girl struck up a conversation with me near the candy machines. “So, you’re an Adjmi,” she said. “Very interesting.”
She gazed contemplatively at her bangles, playing with the circumference of one until it lined up with the bones in her wrist.
“What’s so interesting about it?”
“It’s just interesting. That’s a good family, Adjmi.”
“What’s so good about it?”
“The Adjmis are a good family, everyone knows that.” She unwrapped a pack of chocolate Velamints and popped one in her mouth. “I like Adjmis,” she said, a contextless smirk plastered on her face. “Very shahrp.” She loudly clicked the mint around in her mouth.
The girl was very appealing. She had that marble-mouthed drone so prized among Syrians—nasal and cloying, but to me it was heaven. She was squat, somewhat chinless, but striking. She wore a white leather cowboy jacket with matching white co
wboy boots and an acid denim skirt that came down to her calves. Her frizzed hair was blown out into the requisite pin-straight helmet, fringed with long bangs that covered her wide (probably acne-scarred) forehead, and her lipstick had a bleachy, pearlescent whiteness to it—it seemed like a kind of sunscreen. We sat at one of the carpeted banquettes in the lounge and chatted some more. I learned her name was Yvette Sutton, and that she lived on East Third Street—a stone’s throw from the Avenue P synagogue, and just around the corner from a kosher deli my brothers liked. “Sa who ya releeted to?” she continued. “You know Donna Adjmi?”
“She’s my second cousin.”
“I love hah! Who else? I want info!”
The lines in her forehead compressed as she mentally mapped out my family lineage. The SY community was insular, but there was something comforting about everyone knowing everyone else—situating a person inside a matrix of blood relations was like finding a word in a search-a-word puzzle. I rattled off my list of blood relatives to her ecstatic cries of recognition. Then, out of nowhere, she took a sharp sudden inhale, like the building had erupted in conflagration: “Ya sweata is stunning.”
