by David Adjmi
I began to spend more time with my father. My breakup with Yvette coincided with the end of my short stint as a religious person, so I stopped going to synagogue on Friday nights, but we shared secular entertainments, mainly dinners at the Genovese House. He resumed calling me silly nicknames like he did when I was a kid, and speaking in the weird baby voice, but he was also drunk much of the time. In his liquored-up haze he’d make halitotic confessions about my mother and how mean she was to him and how shitty his life was overall. Or, worse, he’d outline his achievements and good qualities for me. I’d bristle at his catechisms, which would come without warning:
Who takes care of you?
You do, Dad.
And who loves you?
You.
And who do you love the most?
You.
Who takes you for the best dinner?
You take me for the best dinner.
His rodomontade was sad and cheerless, but he’d beam with gratitude at my every rote affirmation. My father’s loneliness and despair mirrored everything I was running from in myself. It depressed me to be with him. He continued to harbor the desperate fantasy that my mother would get back together with him, and continued his decade-long pursuit of her—even with her thorniness, her moods, her pickiness about culture and luxury. He’d make unpredictable visits to the house. He’d show up drunk, caress her shoulder. He’d play with her hair while my mother fake-smiled and flinchingly endured it.
With my family mired in various states of rage and depression, and Howie increasingly consumed by Brenda, I lowered my standards and tried befriending anyone I could. While Howie was promoted to the high honors track at school, I’d been demoted to what was rather bluntly known as the “Dumb Class”—the sixth and lowest track—but my reversion from Genius to Dummy only slightly fazed me; I accepted the whiplash changes in labels and designations by then. And I began to see the Dumb Class as an advantage: there was less pressure to do well, and I found acceptance among my fellow dummies. The stigma bonded us together. Everyone in the Dumb Class knew they were in it—other students would say things like “Aren’t you in the Dumb Class?” right to your face. Teachers knew it and made little effort to hide their contempt for us. Something had been inflicted on us against our will, but once the initial humiliation wore off we started to embrace it. Since we were dumb, we’d start to act dumb on purpose—it felt subversive and punk. We’d say rude stupid things. We’d laugh at our teachers, mock them openly. We felt a new wayward freedom. We had nothing to lose and nothing could be taken from us. We’d erupt spontaneously in whorls of crazy kinesis in the middle of class. During algebra, Sophie Sasson drew freckles on her cheeks with a Magic Marker and did a shimmy on top of her desk. Inspired by a scene in a Bret Easton Ellis book, I jumped from a windowsill during a chemistry quiz as part of a feigned coke high. I got punished with suspension. I didn’t care. Caring was beneath me, beneath all of us, because we were dumb. Our teachers would futilely try to leverage their power to grade, to condemn, but we could not be curbed. Our immanent evil and dumbness had become a force. Our power was our anomie. Once in a while, a student would become spontaneously reformed: “Stop it,” they’d declaim in an outburst of spontaneous piety and compunction, “I’m trying to learn!” But these poor souls were pulling against the current of an unstoppable tide. Soon, like tiny seashells plucked from the shoreline, they were swept back into the current of prevailing dumbness.
The Dumb Class freed me to question orthodoxies. Since I was Dumb, I had the freedom to think anything. I became more confrontational with teachers. I learned how to rip down façades. I punctured all the flagrant contradictions in my Jewish Philosophy class until Rabbi Warhaftig kicked me out. When Lonny Braverman produced a pickled fetus in a jar during biology to make us pro-life, I told him it was propaganda. When he replied that fetuses had souls, I debated the existence of the soul until I was suspended from class.
Lonny had a sort of cult following among certain students, but for someone who held himself up as an example of moral rectitude, I found him sort of repulsive. He wore a yarmulke that had “Hell’s Bells” crocheted into it—a reference to the AC/DC song (which felt mildly satanic* though no one seemed to really care), and as the school disciplinarian he put himself in charge of conducting random skirt checks for girls; he was always touching their skirts, and staring at their legs. He was a creep—but he was also obsessed with rules.
He punished me constantly. I was suspended for eating nonkosher pizza, and for wearing the wrong color shirt on some Jewish holiday. I was suspended for gyrating too wildly in the school production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (I played a character modeled on Elvis). There were so many rules they became nearly impossible to not violate. The rules seemed designed to trap me, to make punishment inevitable. And Lonny was only happy to administer punishments from his high plinth of Jewishness and moral authority.
I don’t remember the final straw, but somewhere in the thick of all these suspensions and arguments about fetuses I decided to become an atheist. And it wasn’t just God I stopped believing in—I stopped believing in anything. If I didn’t believe in God or religion, I couldn’t believe in souls. If there was no soul, there was no self. If there was no self, what was I doing on the planet?
The difficulties a life of atheism presented felt insurmountable, so I waffled constantly. I was desperate for a foundation for my life but now a godless chasm of existence yawned before me and I hated it. And I didn’t know a single other atheist: I had no community, no one to turn to. When I could, I ignored the subject of God, but I was confronted with religion and God on a daily basis. For a brief moment, I panicked and started going to the synagogue again, but my native skepticism resurfaced. My doubt kept plaguing me. I was in constant war with myself. A pressure was building uncomfortably inside me and it found no release—until one afternoon, in the middle of a car-service ride with Sophie Sasson, on our way to shop for records, I blurted my evil truth: “I don’t think I believe in God,” I said.
I don’t know what made me say it; I hadn’t planned to bring it up.
Sophie turned to look at me, squinting exaggeratedly as though threading an impossibly tiny needle—it was a look Syrian girls had when they meant to refute or diminish you. “What are you tawking about?”
“I don’t know,” I said, backtracking lightly. “Don’t you ever wonder if this stuff is made up?”
Sophie’s jaw hung open. I could see the fluorescent wad of gum, the saliva pooling around her tongue. “Whaddayou mean you don’t believe in God? Like, what are you saying ta me?”
The plastered expression on her face mirrored back to me the radicalism of my confession. “Fagedit,” I said, now chewing on a fingernail.
“So basically your life is a lie. Is that what you’re saying? Your whole life is a lie?”
“Just fagedit, okay?”
“Well that’s what you’re saying to me!”
“Well I’m SORRY!” I shouted. “I don’t believe in the BIBLE! I CAN’T HELP IT!”
My intimate revelations were marred by my shouting, and I hadn’t meant to shout—I knew we didn’t have a foundation of closeness that warranted violent emotion—but it was a reflex, a defensive measure I’d taken unthinkingly.
“Fine,” she said, staring through the stitched headrest of the driver’s seat.
We sat for a while, buried in a thick, awful silence. I imagined at any moment she might fling open the door and rush into traffic to escape the mephitic evil I spontaneously came to embody in the back of the car service. Was this the end of our friendship? We’d never had a deep conversation, certainly we’d never said anything controversial to each other, and now we were in uncharted waters. Would she tell everyone in the Dumb Class about me? Maybe they’d all turn against me, and my one remaining source of companionship would be lost.
I feared making things even worse, but I felt desperate, so after the lengthy silence I should have already acc
epted as her answer, I repeated my question: “Do you?”
“Do I what? Believe in the Bible?”
Sophie scanned my expression, then looked down at her watch momentarily. When she bowed her head I thought I heard a small “no” escape her lips. “What was that?” I said. Her expression relaxed for a moment. Then very suddenly she erupted in spontaneous laughter. Sophie reached out and squeezed my arm, and, still squeezing it, doubled over in the back seat of the car with laughter. “Religion is totally made up!” she said, now laughing so hard she was gasping. “I just pretend!” For a brief moment, I thought she was putting me on. When it became clear that she wasn’t, I started laughing too. It was a relief to laugh, a relief to have found someone who saw what I saw, who didn’t think I was crazy or awful for seeing it. Someone who built a life from pretending, just as I’d done. With her admission, Sophie became very chatty; she talked a mile a minute—the kind of garrulousness that comes from sharing a long-buried secret. “How stupid do you hafta be to think Moses parting the sea is literal?”
“I know!” I said, more relieved and thrilled by the second.
“It’s literatcha. How is it different from Greek mythology?”
“Exactly!”
“It’s the same thing! It’s like Zeus hurling his thundahbolts! It’s the exact. Same. Ing-thay!”
At the record store, Sophie and I talked excitedly about hypocrisy and morality and religion and life. We made a pact to never tell anyone what we discussed in the car service—we had to resume our impersonation of devout Jews—but I’d spoken the words aloud to another human being, and it was as though a spell had been broken.
I knew the spell was broken because now I was furious all the time. My fury could not be abated. I was furious to be wasting my life, and studying a fake history, and learning a language I never intended to use. I was sick of Bibles and Rashi and mandated weekend attendance at Zionist parades down Fifth Avenue. I was sick of all those endlessly detailed stories about the tribulations of Jews in various stages of exile and persecution and crisis. I’d been made into a human calculus of disposable data; I was bloated and tired and disgusted with everything. The pressure of living a double life had become unbearable. People kept assuming my beliefs, and I felt myself falling again and again into the gutter of their assumptions. Now I needed to make a violent break with those assumptions.
At the start of tenth grade, when it was Yom Kippur and everyone else was fasting, I exhorted myself to go to an Italian restaurant on Coney Island Avenue. I’d never broken a fast before and this was the highest of holy days, it was the most profane you could get. Maybe once I desacralized it, the vestigial grip religion had on me would be broken.
The waiter seated me at a table with a little carnation, a tiny wick floating in liquid paraffin. I ordered a baked ziti. When it came to the table I forced it, hand trembling, shivering with terror, forkful by blasphemous forkful into my mouth. I chewed, I swallowed. I wasn’t hungry, but I cleaned the plate and felt sick immediately. I paid the bill (also a sin, you weren’t supposed to carry money) and walked to the subway station on East Sixteenth Street, the undigested brick of ziti weighing me down like an anchor. I took the train (also a sin) to the Benetton near Astor Place, where in my altered state I settled quickly on some sweater (I didn’t even try it on, I was too anxious and had a stomachache), paid for it, hopped back on the Q train to Brooklyn, and—to make a very deliberate point of my apostasy—walked the streets of Midwood with my Benetton bag. I loped in arrogant strides down East Eighth Street waiting for someone, anyone, to confront me about my Benetton sweater: I couldn’t wait to tell them their lives were all bullshit! But in a harrowingly immediate fulfillment—like a phantasm or wraith I’d summoned—there, walking toward me from the opposite end of East Eighth Street, were Richie and my mother dressed in their High Holy finest.
My mother wore her grape blouse with the sash at the neck, Richie was in his Armani tweed. Instantly, I regretted my bravado. I was able to make out quite clearly the shift in my brother’s expression once he eyed my bag. And now I had to walk the interminable length of the sidewalk to reach them—it was like walking to my death. Once we were face-to-face, Richie bore a hole in me with his gaze, his eyes small and black like a hermit crab’s.
“You went to Benetton?”
“Yes,” I replied, with shaky defiance.
“You went to Benetton on Yom Kippur? Don’t you believe in God?”
My brother’s temper intimidated me. He’d punched that hole in the kitchen wall—he once tracked down and threatened to beat the crap out of a delivery guy for getting his order wrong. He might physically attack me right in the middle of East Eighth Street. But I had to talk back to him: for I knew in that moment that freedom wasn’t merely a choice, it was a commitment, something you fought to have.
“No,” I said, my heart now pounding in my ears, “I don’t believe in God.”
“You’re disgusting,” said my brother. He repeated the word “disgusting” for emphasis. And then, once he’d given me the requisite glare to punctuate unambiguously his utter disgust with me and my inexpiable failure as a person and Jew he made a volte-face, while my mother, who often just accepted whatever violence real or intimated men wrought, made some boilerplate condemnation of me and my “lifestyle” and walked off to soothe Richie’s hurt feelings.
I was determined to follow through with the actions I’d penciled in for the day, so I resumed my symbolic walk through the streets of Midwood. With every step, I felt a new surge of contempt for my brother’s pat moralism. He wasn’t even really religious. He just wanted to tick off the boxes of Moral Goodness. He was like my father, conformist and unthinking. I didn’t care if I shamed him, or the family, or my mother—with her fickle pantheism, her secret cache of Daily Words* in the drawer of her end table. They were all hypocrites. Hypocrisy was all around me. It was an ether, a poison. It was something I had to actively fight or I’d be lulled into its seductive slumber.
But I didn’t know what I was fighting for.
I finally found the strength to reject things, but I couldn’t find anything to fill the vacuum left by their absence. I didn’t have a belief system.
I found a bench on Ocean Parkway and took my sweater out of the bag. It looked and felt cheap. I knew I’d never wear it. There were some old men nearby idly shuffling decks of cards. I sat and watched them. I contemplated my fate until the sun started to go down. I watched the sun bathe the tall brick buildings in its waning light until we were all caught in its clambering shadow.
Lot Six
SOME TIME PRIOR to my conversion to atheism, near the start of my freshman year of high school, Howie and I got the idea to pool our bar mitzvah money and use it as the seed investment on a retail business. Our intention was to rival Lester’s: we’d start small and grow eventually into a behemoth of women’s retail. We’d use the basement of his parents’ new house on East Twenty-Ninth Street as a showroom—with the low overhead we could sell the clothes at a huge discount. Together we carried big yellow legal pads to midtown showrooms and pretended to take detailed notes on the collections as the sales reps (who were all pretty confounded, we were only fifteen at the time) went through their presentations. The shipments of clothes were delivered to Howie’s house: bright red stirrup pants, oversized shirts with too many colors and loud slogans, pseudo-nautical motifs, cutesy pastiches of 1950s iconography. We had no way to advertise (we were pretending to operate out of a storefront, it wasn’t exactly legal) so we’d solicit appointments from girls in school or relatives. We couldn’t afford shelving, so Howie enlisted his twelve-year-old sister, Helga, and her bucktoothed friend Mindy to be our models, and we devised theatrical presentations with dances inspired by Solid Gold. My mother brought my two aunts and their friend Stella to our inaugural showing. Mindy and Howie’s sister came out and danced in the outfits to Nu Shooz and Mr. Mister. While they changed into some other outfit in an adjacent room, Howie and I floated by in
stiffly choreographed cross formation from opposite ends of the room with permutations of pants and shirts to show how everything we sold could go with pretty much everything else. Then Mindy burst out from the dressing area spinning and modeling to “Dancing on the Ceiling” or some Gloria Estefan song. When the presentation ended, everyone bought a stirrup pant and maybe a rayon shirt—but aside from them we couldn’t find a clientele. No one wanted to be squadroned into a basement and held hostage to twirling twelve-year-olds modeling stirrup pants. The business was failing, our bar mitzvah savings siphoned away. And there were graver impediments: Perry from Lester’s found out about us. He registered his offense to the different wholesalers, who then called to question our legitimacy. Howie used his charismatic ability to lie and convince, and he calmed them all down, but then, in the middle of school one day, we were summoned to Mr. Winkler’s office. He’d had gotten a call from Lester’s too, and he threatened us with expulsion if we didn’t cease operations immediately. Both of us ended up consequently broke. We lost our entire investment. I ended up getting a weekend job at a clothing store in Sheepshead Bay called Jazz (the owner was a friend of my brother’s), but Howie couldn’t find a job, and Brenda was bankrupting him. He had to take her on dates and pay for spendy dinners at I Tre Merli and Canastel’s.
