Hyper-chondriac (3 page)

 

Being hyper, I learned, seemed a surefire way to please my mother. It was certainly the method that would result in the least criticism and anger. Her chief complaint was that nothing she needed was ever done fast enough. And when you're lying in bed all day, it's tough to argue with that. Ironically, it would seem that since she didn't need to rush around and actually
be
anywhere at any given time, slow would be just as preferable. But it wasn't. Time became a different entity that was measured not in minutes and seconds but in units of pain and discomfort. Her theory (which was soon to be mine) was that there was no use in putting things off because you'd eventually have to do them anyway. So, at the tender age of eleven, I became ultra task-oriented. I made lists of things I needed to accomplish, and if a writing utensil wasn't handy to cross items out, I'd tear off the part of the paper that contained the task I had just completed, eventually rendering the mighty eight-by-ten-inch sheet into a fortune-cookie-sized sliver. I walked Rufus after he had barely started eating; if I was asked to vacuum the living room and load the dishwasher, each chore was done before anyone had even thought it was started; when assigned a book report in school, I'd read the entire thing that night (although by the time we'd discuss it in class, I'd have forgotten pretty much everything but the title); if it snowed I was outside shoveling as the first flake hit. As far as I was concerned, my mother's logic was flawless.

I wasn't too keen about Hebrew school. It seemed like a stupid, boring waste of time. Besides, with blond hair and blue eyes, everyone assumed I was Irish anyway. The kids at school referred to me as “Hitler's Favorite Jew,” which for a group of eleven-year-olds was actually quite creative.

Even as a prepubescent, the mere thought of organized religion spooked me. I actually flinched if someone even said the word “pray.” I didn't believe that begging God for things did any good; otherwise, my grandparents wouldn't have been beaten up in the Polish pogroms of World War I, my aunts and uncles wouldn't have been killed in Treblinka, my father wouldn't still be having Nazi nightmares and my thirty-seven-year-old mother would've been able to walk to the bathroom without the aid of two aluminum canes. But I went because (a) I had no choice in the matter and (b) Janice Jacoby was going and she already needed a bra.

I wish I could say that I enjoyed myself for those three years, but I didn't. I hated everything about Hebrew school—the musty smells inside the temple, wearing that tiny brimless hat, the assortment of phlegmy sounds everyone was forced to make. But apparently, I'd be less of a man if I didn't stick with the program.

Then there was the other issue. Every syllable leaving my mouth was slurred, mumbled and garbled. I'd been going to an assortment of speech therapists since first grade, and despite my diligence, my impediment had barely improved over the ensuing seven years. I just kept practicing the same verbal exercises with no guidance or adjustments from any of my therapists. It wasn't until I was a freshman in college that my designated instructor got to the root of the problem: my tongue was too big for my mouth. I should have realized this without any outside assistance since I could easily pick my nose with my tongue—a handy party trick to pull out in college, but not the boon with the ladies you'd think. “Not only is your tongue too large,” I was finally told, at age nineteen, by Dr. Sharon Reingold, “but when you speak, it's aimlessly flailing around in your mouth. Your tongue is unruly and hyperactive, dear.” Once again, my troubles stemmed from trying to do things too fast.

To avoid mumbling in Hebrew in front of my peers and family, I neglected my lessons, so much so that my bar mitzvah was in danger of being postponed. In her shrinking, bedridden world, my mother had a lot of time for overanalyzing. A belated bar mitzvah would embarrass the family, particularly her, and she would have no choice but to unleash her ire upon the chief culprit—me. She alternated between power yelling and the silent treatment with the speed of a changing traffic light. I couldn't have been more frightened if she had pointed a knife at me.

These tactics would be immediately followed by her unjustly blaming the entire situation on my father, who would then mope around the house like a miniature schnauzer who'd been hit with a Sunday newspaper, causing guilt to trickle back down to me a second time. Simultaneously, my mother would manage to scream about “your fath-er and broth-er!” to my three siblings, who would in turn yell back at me because this time I was responsible for igniting the powder keg of rage. It was easier to just bite the bullet and become a man on time.

Fortunately, my rabbi cut me a deal.

Rabbi Setzman was in his mid-thirties and proudly wore a large fluffy mustache above his lip. He resembled a Semitic Tony Orlando with a paler entourage.

“Brian, you need to put more time into this or you won't have your special day.”

“Oh.”

“But I'm willing to stay late and meet you here a few nights a week so you can learn your haftorah. All you have to do is promise to continue coming to temple for another year after your bar mitzvah.”

That didn't sound like a very good deal. The rabbi would give up a couple of his boring rabbi nights and I'd have to sacrifice another year of my effervescent adolescence. But I couldn't afford to haggle with the mustachioed Jew. We shook hands as if we were at a Camp David summit and the deal was done.

After several weeks of one-on-one tutoring—which required transporting truckloads of saliva from the back of my throat to the front of my mouth in a language I didn't speak nor would ever use outside the temple walls—I pulled it together and my big day was back on schedule.

“You really came through.” The rabbi smiled. “I'm proud of you.”

“Thanks,” I mumbled.

Then he reached into the inside pocket of his tweed sports jacket and handed me a small box.

“This is for all your hard work.”

At first I thought I had committed a faux pas by not getting the rabbi anything, as if we had drawn each other in Secret Santa.

I opened the box hoping there was a Tom Seaver baseball card inside, which was unlikely since Tom Terrific wasn't one of the Chosen People. But I'd certainly settle for a Kenny Holtzman rookie card. On either account, I was far off the mark.

“Wow!” I said with mock appreciation. “A Star of David! On a chain!”

“It's pewter. Go ahead, try it on. One size fits all.” The rabbi chuckled.

I wasn't much into jewelry. This was at least a decade before even the coolest of kids had earrings and I had never been one to wear a bracelet, or even a watch. But there was something about this star that was special. I put it around my neck and felt proud. It was a symbol of all my hard Jew-man-like work and I had no plans of ever taking it off. I was now officially in the same club as Hank Greenberg, Dolph Schayes, and several other obscure athletes in the
Great Jewish Sports Heroes
book (actually more like a pamphlet) that I had purchased in the synagogue gift shop.

I walked around our house with my chest arched forward like a peacock, so nobody could possibly miss my new accoutrement of splendor.

“Hey, whatcha got there?” Mark asked.

I was always cognizant of keeping my answers to my brother terse, so he would have fewer of my unintelligible words to mock. It seemed that anything I said was easy prey for Mark's perfectly pitched, deep radio voice—which he would later use on-air in his career as an oldies DJ.

“Rabbi gift.” I figured two words would limit his ammunition.

“Cool beans!”

I never understood exactly what this meant, but he said it a lot and it was apparently a good thing.

After being home for all of ten minutes, I began doing something that would haunt me for the better part of 1977; I began grinding that six-pointed star of pewter directly into my sternum. Over and over and over again. Really really hard. And I couldn't stop. When I tired of grinding one of the points, I had five others at my disposal. I would then rotate the star counterclockwise and continue my cleavage rampage.

Nervous habits were nothing new for me—I'd always had one. I bit my nails for three years. I twirled my hair for a summer. But neither of those habits seemed very original. Or heterosexual. Besides, there was something oddly soothing about all the star-induced discomfort. Perhaps it was a feeble attempt to compete for my mother's monopoly on pain. Or, as others now tell me, a cry for attention. Bottom line, it felt damn good.

My bar mitzvah day arrived and I fumbled through numerous sections of the Torah, occasionally forgetting to read things right to left, but I suspect only the rabbi and a distant relative from Tel Aviv knew of my incompetence. Off the pulpit, I was even less smooth. Because I hadn't been schooled in bar mitzvah etiquette, I soon learned that one is
not
supposed to open up the card and pocket the cash the moment a guest hands you an envelope. However, despite my collection of temple gaffes, I could now open a savings account. Janice Jacoby had commemorated the event by wearing a tight red frilly shirt. It was definitely all “cool beans.”

A week later, my father got a telephone call—which was unusual in itself. Even though he's one of the nicest, kindest, friendliest humans ever, my father had no friends. Zero. His life was way too chaotic to leave time for anyone outside the family. I had heard about his best friend from childhood, Chopsie, who now lived in St. Louis, but I had never met the guy. I don't even remember Chopsie ever calling the house, nor can I recall my father ever calling him. Perhaps it was better to have no friends than one friend named Chopsie. Once in a while my father would get a call from a stranger who had received his self-published comic book catalog in the mail and wanted to see if Spider-Man number 11 or Fantastic Four number 36 was still available to purchase, but that was the extent of his phone life. And I'm sure of this because it was really easy to monitor his phone calls.

When my mother, brother or sisters got a call and someone else answered, the
second
they picked up the phone they'd yell the standard “I got it!!!!” and then wouldn't utter another word until they heard the person who answered hang up. But my father either didn't understand the concept of eavesdropping or didn't care if anyone else listened. If he got a call and I had nothing better to do, I would listen from another phone to the entire conversation (which, like I said, was always about whether Hawkman number 41 was
really
in mint condition or the specifics of Little Lulu number 23's spine damage). But I had a feeling this call was something even more important than superheroes because my father's phone voice was always monotone and for once he was actually transmitting a cadence.

All I heard him say was: “Hello? What? Jesus Christ!”

It was Marlene Oppenheimer from temple with some news. Rabbi Setzman had quit the synagogue because he was becoming an Episcopalian minister and moving to Woonsocket, Rhode Island, on Friday.

The entire community was shocked. Rabbis don't usually resign, especially those in their mid-thirties in good health. Only a month ago this guy had bar mitzvahed me! Torah this, torah that, Jews Jews Jews…blah blah blah. And now the ultimate betrayal. And what about our agreement? I had to promise to go to temple for an extra year, but Mr. Rabbi could just bolt whenever he pleased?!

What was it that made Setzman suddenly change his mind and switch religions? I mean, if he was having doubts about his faith, the least he could've done is quit the temple and mull things over for a while. He performed my bar mitzvah on a Saturday, quit the temple on a Monday, and by Tuesday renounced Judaism, dropped off his yarmulke collection at Goodwill and picked up a box of communion wafers to munch on the drive up to Woonsocket. That meant that he probably started to have a change of heart a few months
before
he actually converted—I mean nobody can just flip-flop that quickly. So while I was being bar mitzvahed, my rabbi was probably up on the pulpit thinking about Jesus! Not cool. No wonder God had punished my mother; we were being rabbied by a fraud!!! I removed the Star of David from my neck immediately.

But that didn't stop me from grinding something else into my chest. The index finger on my right hand immediately enlisted and kept up the onslaught against my sternum. And the dent kept getting deeper. Nothing could make me stop the violence against myself. It was as if I had sprinkled a healthy smattering of birdseed on my chest and then invited a woodpecker over for dinner.

Believe me, it's tough enough hitting puberty and getting horny for the first time
without
compulsively tapping the center of your torso every waking hour. I was a freak. Katie Berkal thought so, as did Marcie Kaplan. “Why do you keep touching your chest?” they asked. “Uh…” I stammered, “because I can't touch yours?” The real reason: I was a nervous wreck. And not the kind that lies at the bottom of the sea and quivers, like the joke on the Dixie cup.

My parents became concerned and sent me to the family physician, which I was pretty psyched about. Dr. Torino always seemed to have the right answers for my ailments. When I continued going to school week after week with a small Band-Aid covering wherever the largest pimple on my face happened to be, he prescribed extra-strength acne medication; when I contracted pityriasis rosea, a rare skin disease, he gave me some free erythromycin and Cortaid; and years later, when I was in college living in an ancient dorm that banned refrigerators because of the fragile electrical system, he wrote me a note claiming that I required fresh, cold citrus juices and I became the only student in the building with a legal Kenmore.

When Dr. Torino saw the small hole I was creating in my chest, he arrived at a simple solution: he taped a gauze pad over my sternum to cushion the blows. As he handed my father a large stack of replacement pads, he turned to me: “This should hold you for a while. In the meantime, go back to biting your nails or something.”

“I'll try,” I said as I discreetly sneaked my hand up my shirt to peck myself.

For the next week I walked around school with a gauze pad under my shirt. But little else had changed. I continued to grind my index finger smack into the center of my chest. Only now, the gauze pad made things worse. I took it as a challenge to break through the cottony square, as if it were the last level of Arkanoid. When it was evident that a single pad wasn't doing the trick, Dr. Torino suggested that we up the ante and add another.

Before long I was walking around school with four or five gauze pads stacked on top of each other and taped to my sternum under my Huckapoo shirts. People started to ask me what was wrong. “Nothing,” I said. “Just a little infection.” Marcie Kaplan pointed, stared and giggled. I told Katie Berkal that the pads on my chest were from the nurse, to dispense in case anyone hurt themselves. That was the last time Katie Berkal ever spoke to me.