Attempting Normal (7 page)

The most peculiar, sad, and entertaining part of living with a manic-depressive is the timing of erratic emotional behavior, whether it is up or down. My father has had some really impressively timed mood events.

The day I graduated from college my parents came to Boston for the commencement. It was a kind of miracle that I finished. I had the potential to be a perpetual student, the kind that would eventually have an office of some sort at the school. I did five years undergrad and there was really no way I could have strung it out any longer. I cobbled a major and minor together from the classes I took impulsively: English literature with a concentration on the Romantics, with a minor in film criticism. I don’t even remember going to the yearlong Romantic poetry class because it was at 9
A.M
. I have a vague recollection of cramming “Ode on a Grecian Urn” into my head and trying to read
The Cenci
in a night. I related to the poets, not necessarily their work, and that’s
what I wrote about in that class. I thought that was valid and I sold it. I graduated with honors, which was ridiculous. Charm goes a long way in the liberal arts.

My father was the valedictorian of his high school class. He came from a lower-middle-class upbringing and received a scholarship to college, then went on to medical school. His father was an odd-job bookkeeper and his mother was an elementary school teacher. I knew my grandparents a bit when I was younger. My grandmother seemed to be consumed with dread and worry and always in a panic about something. My grandfather didn’t talk much and most of my memories of him involve him sitting quietly on the couch in his boxers with a bowl of summer fruit, eating nectarines with his large distended testicles hanging out of his shorts. My brother and I thought this was hilarious.

My father was the center of his family’s attention, the wunderkind. His sister sort of faded behind his glory and became a teacher like her mother. He was mythic in the family. The doctor, the genius, the golden one.

I had lived with my father’s erratic, selfish, sometimes abusive behavior all my life. It was always about him. A midlife diagnosis of bipolarity seemed to be his way of taking an easy out, at least in my mind. Initially I didn’t buy the diagnosis. Even now, sometimes I don’t know. It’s very hard to determine the validity of a mood disorder when someone is as plain old narcissistic as my dad. I thought he was just a man-child who refused self-awareness and defied wisdom even as his life fell apart around him. When necessary he would blame the “illness.”

When my folks showed up in Boston for my graduation, my father was close to despondent. It was supposed to be my day, but when we had a moment alone in the car, me sitting there in my graduation robe, my father looked at me and said, “I don’t want to live anymore.” Being used to this line of conversation, I said,
“You think you can make it one more day? I’m about to graduate.” I could usually make him laugh even at his lowest. That was sort of my job.

What pissed me off about his timing, and I do believe it was deliberate, was that if there was any day that really could revolve around me it was this one. Instead, he disappeared that afternoon into the city. My mother and I wondered if we should call the police or check the bridges. While we paced around the street panicking, he wandered back, just in time to suck the energy out of the entire commencement ceremony. I believe everyone felt it. Boston University president John Silber, who gave the address, didn’t have half the impact he would have had my father not been sitting in the stadium. We’re probably better off. Silber and a stadium could have led to something collective and dubious. It’s possible my father’s involuntary needy Jewish dark magic saved lives that day.

He also hijacked my first wedding. By then my parents were divorced and my father, though he was there with his new wife, kept pestering my mother. He wandered around with a loose-leaf binder of poems he had written, asking people if they wanted to read them. The poems were horrible.

My father needs to have an effect on people. He needs to either drag them down to his level or blast through them with his anger. If he is in depressive mode, he is a gravitational force that pulls all attention downward, toward him and his suffering. In manic mode he needs other people to stop whatever they’re doing and regard him as a sage or wizard. I don’t think this is unusual with doctors, especially surgeons. When he is level he is just self-involved and detached. The bottom line with my old man is that he is an emotional terrorist. I love the guy, but it took a long time to seal up the damage from the paternal storm that I went through
to get to my island. After a certain point I tried to focus on the positive elements of sharing genes with him. He’s in his seventies and still has a lot of energy. He’s very curious about things and speaks his mind. He doesn’t have anything like the wisdom of age or hindsight. He’s a biased historian of self, an emotional revisionist. We all are, for the most part.

What you don’t know about your parents is what becomes fascinating as you get older. They had a life before you were born and while you were growing up in the room down the hall and that was their business. My parents were very young when I came along, so the life before was limited to high school and college and whatever the hell went wrong in their childhoods. As to what happened to them after I was born, I’ve only gleaned bits and pieces, slipped moments.

I tend toward darkness in my amateur psychoanalytic practice. Since my parents are so crippled emotionally, I want there to be sordid sources for their behavior so I can respect them more and empathize instead of feeling mad and jilted. Obviously I will never know the most of it. I’m not sure they even do anymore. Things get lost as time dims the lights.

I’m curious and even inquisitive, but there’s some stuff I really don’t want to know about them. Parents seem to believe that there’s an emotional statute of limitations on their secrets, but I think that’s wrong: There’s some stuff they should never tell you. But after a divorce, or years of bad blood, or a supersaturation of shame, or just old age, parents think the statute is up and they will dump some toxic garbage on your psyche’s front lawn. For instance, I now know my father was a philandering madman. I’ve got details I can’t even disclose here that involve guns and pissed-off husbands.

Then there was this conversation on the phone with my mother.

Mom: I just wanted to tell you I am going into the hospital overnight. Everything is fine. I just wanted you to know.

Me: What do you mean? What’s wrong?

Mom: Nothing. Don’t worry.

Me: Just tell me what’s up. I can handle it.

Mom: I’m getting my boobs redone.

Me: Redone? What? When did you have them done originally?

Mom: Nineteen seventy-six. Right before your bar mitzvah.

Me: Really, you had like the original fake boobs.

Mom: Yes, the doctor said they needed to come out. They’re calcifying.

Me: Okay, that’s enough info. Well, let me know everything is okay.

I felt like my entire life was a lie. All those years I just thought my mom had great tits.

There are things I don’t want to know about my parents, but I like knowing things about myself. This sometimes means tracking my behavior back to root causes, to my emotional legacy, which runs through my parents. Because of my mother’s eating disorder I asked her if she had ever been sexually abused. She has become much more self-aware and quite pleasant and proactive about it. When I asked her, she said, “Ya know, Marc, I keep trying to remember something like that but I don’t think so.”

She blames her mean fat grandmother for it because she made my mother eat. I can handle that.

My father is a mystery to me, outside of knowing that he was the center of his family’s attention and that he had a depressed mother, and perhaps a biological propensity toward depression. I never really had a sense of what his relationship with his father was. By the time I met my grandfather, Ben, he was a very passive man. My grandmother and the woman he married after my
grandmother died were both incredibly overbearing in one form or another, from what I could tell. As I got older my father told me that he lost his virginity when his father got him a prostitute. I also picked up here and there that my grandfather was a bit of a lady’s man and that caused some problems. That is really all I know. No real stories behind them, just information that I could enter into my emotional abacus. I’m always moving the beads around trying to figure out who I am.

With that said, I have never been able to explain to myself or anyone else what happened at my grandfather’s funeral. It is an event that has become the epitome of the dark poetry that defines my relationship with my dad and his with his father. He dismisses it. I can’t forget it. It defies meaning but craves it.

My grandpa Ben died from a stroke in 1992. I was on the east coast so I met my father at the funeral in New Jersey. I got to the funeral home to find that my father was manic, a normally strange disposition for a funeral, especially your own father’s, but par for the course for my dad. He was making the rounds, telling jokes, laughing, checking in with people’s lives. There was not a shred of grief in his behavior. To him it seemed like a fine time to be the center of attention. He was competing with the corpse and memory of his father. People act weird at funerals sometimes. Maybe he was consumed with sadness and this was a reaction to that. I don’t think so. After he had been strutting around spinning yarns for a while I saw my father approach the funeral director, who was a tall, young woman with glasses. I walked over to make sure everything was okay.

We were standing in front of the closed doors of the chapel where the service was going to take place. My father said, “Can I see the body? I’d like to check something.”

“Of course,” the woman said with the morbid politeness of a woman who chose a morbidly polite occupation.

Jews don’t do viewing. We do a plain pine box, closed. You remember
your lost loved ones for who they were when they were alive. That’s my understanding of it. But it is obviously a family member’s choice to see a body.

“I’ll go with you,” I said. Not really to support my father but to buffer whatever might happen. He was very socially unpredictable in his manic states.

I had seen a body before. My high school buddy Dave died in the middle of the night of an asthma attack. I and a few other friends flew in from Los Angeles for the funeral. We got high before we went. It was an open-casket situation, although it didn’t start out that way. In the middle of the service some guy just walked up to the coffin and flipped the lid. I walked quickly up to the casket and looked at my dead friend. The Jewish policy made sense to me in that moment. Everything I knew of Dave was erased in a flash and would forevermore fight with the image of the propped-up, overly made-up head now seared into my memory. Yeah, I got closure, but I had never doubted he was dead in the first place.

My father, the funeral director, and I walked into the empty chapel. The plain pine coffin was at the end of the room in front of the pews. We all stopped at the coffin. The woman stood to the side and lifted open the top half. My grandfather’s face and upper body were wrapped in his tallis. She pulled back the shawl from both sides of his head, revealing my grandpa Ben’s dead face. Eyes and mouth closed, lifeless. My father said, “It doesn’t look like him.”

I looked at my father and the funeral director, who said nothing. I let my father have his moment. My father then reached out his hand with a pointed finger and inserted his finger into his dead father’s mouth and pulled it open.

“Dad, what are you doing? Dad?”

“Is there a problem with the mouth, sir?” the woman asked.

“No, it doesn’t look like him.”

My father was a doctor, of course, and there was something clinical about his prodding but that didn’t explain anything. It was intrusive, disrespectful, and completely without boundary. I saw it as bizarre, a violation. Perhaps a small act of revenge for something I did not know or understand.

My father pushed the mouth shut. “It’s him.”

I was completely awed, stunned, and strangely energized by what Dad did.

“You can close it up,” he said.

I thanked the woman, and my father and I started to walk out of the chapel.

“You all right?” I asked.

“Yeah, I just wanted to see his teeth.”

We walked back into the main room, my father bounding ahead of me, ready to entertain the waiting crowd again.

  7