by David Adjmi
* He wasn’t actually advocating for people to pull themselves out of swamps of nothingness—in fact, he was mocking the idea, but I’d misread him. It was easy to misread Nietzsche, but I misread all sorts of important texts in college, and the misreadings led me down a whole bunch of blind alleys in life.
* He contradicted this idea elsewhere, as in The Birth of Tragedy, which contains the famous aphorism “become what you are”—suggesting an essentialist humanist notion of the self, with the “true self” locked inside the person like a piece of unsculpted marble. And in other writings he suggested that the past can never be eradicated, that we must accept and even will the “eternal return” of it—i.e., live out said past again and again like in Groundhog Day. There were lots of contradictions like this inside of Nietzsche. He had a Rorschach quality—he could be whatever you needed him to be. And I needed more than I could ever admit at that time. I conveniently (and shamelessly) read him against the scrim of my own prejudices.
* The process of my coming out—to both my parents—was complicated, and happened over the course of several half-forgotten conversations in my twenties, and even early thirties. The first time my father brought it up, it was because my mother outed me. “Your mother tells me you have tendencies toward men,” he said, using that weird clinical language from the 1960s, “but I wanted to say that I love you anyway.” I was still so self-loathing that even this grudging acceptance moved me deeply, but the acceptance was premised on the notion that my “tendencies” were no big thing, and I would eventually marry some SY girl and give him grandkids.
* Once the culture’s ideas about gay people started to pivot, my mother became more accepting of my sexual orientation, but even her acceptance was fraught. “Don’t you want to meet someone?” she’d ask, in the same accusing tone she used with my sister, or with me as a small boy, when I didn’t have fun or play. “Do you want to be all alone?”
* During filming, Fassbinder, who was rather infamous for abusing his actors, was rumored to have dressed like his abusive father, on whom the character of Helmut is reputedly based.
* I had a teaching assistantship as part of my financial aid package.
* In the mental hospital one of the nurses chastised her and told her Cathy was a stupid name, a little girl’s name, so she changed it.
* Howie was up at Yale—living with his boyfriend and studying to become a lawyer. I came out to him as “bisexual” my sophomore year of college, and he came out a few years later—once he fell in love with a waiter who worked with him at a restaurant downtown. Howie’s mother wrote long handwritten prayers to hashem and left them under her pillow and in her sweater drawer begging for hashem to please please make her son marry a girl, but when it was clear hashem wasn’t going to intervene, she came to accept it.
* Of course it turned out Sammy was gay. I became Facebook friends with Sammy later that year and saw he’d posted all these photos with his partner. I gathered that my sister was probably right, and my uncle really was distressed by the content of my play.
* A few years earlier he nearly went to prison for fraud. In 2001 Stevie opened a furniture store in Jersey (he’d switched from electronics, he’d wanted to try something new) and the store was an instant hit. In 2002 he opened a second branch. He and Debbie were living the SY dream, they were the toast of Deal. But customers began filing complaints with a consumer affairs organization, claiming their furniture hadn’t been delivered to them. And in 2005, Stevie and his partners were indicted and arrested on charges of fraud. He eventually pleaded guilty to third-degree corporate misconduct charges and was sentenced to five years probation.
* SY phrase that loosely translates to “Yeah, whatever.”
* But then the next morning, when Arlene called Betty in gratitude for her support the previous day, Betty fulminated in an out-of-nowhere tirade: “Don’t you thank me!” she shouted. “You need to stop being so selfish and learn to forgive!” Arlene lobbed as many insults as she could and hung up, shuddering and sobbing at the craziness and cruelty of these people.
† Since Arlene hadn’t gone out of her way to minister to a father who treated her like crap, they all saw her as a sinner and a shitty person.
