Long Past Stopping (9 page)

“Okay.”

“Good. Let's just hope it doesn't come to that.”

 

A
S SOON AS MOM
dropped me off, Fred opened my bags and went through each article of clothing I brought with me. He was unfolding my E.T. shirt when, without any warning, he began dry-heaving, dropped a shirt on the floor, and started babbling in some unknown language that sounded a lot like baby talk. I thought he was having a seizure. Whatever was happening resembled an after-school special I had seen where this otherwise normal kid would fall down and start shaking for no particular reason. The kid on TV didn't make the sign of the cross and start hissing at T-shirts, though. Fred backed away from the shirt, still holding his fingers in the sign of the cross until he made it out of the room. He returned moments later, still babbling in that weird language, with a pair of salad tongs he used to pick up the shirt and carry it to the trash.

“E.T. is in place of God!” he yelled at me. He offered no further explanation as he continued going through my stuff, and I tried to figure out what I had done wrong.
E.T.
was my favorite movie, and I too was starting to feel like I was stranded on the wrong fucking planet.

At grace that night, he made reference to the incident and thanked Jesus for getting him through it and giving him the courage to throw Satan in the trash and banish him from this God-fearing house. He threw out the salad tongs as well, since it was likely that Satan had time to enter them from my shirt. His wife, who had been completely silent since I had arrived, served us salad with forks and spoons.

Other than the impressions I got from my mom about Reagan, Nixon, Kissinger, and my dad, Jack, I knew next to nothing about Satan. Fred was the closest thing I had ever seen to my conception of the devil. Even more frightening to me was that someone could change so much in so
short a time. I didn't know my dad at all, really, but I couldn't picture him freaking out over a T-shirt. I decided right then and there that I would keep my mouth shut unless opening it was absolutely necessary. I secretly thanked Ada for being Jewish. I had no idea what being Jewish meant, other than that I could not possibly be one of these people.

So that's what I told everyone at school when we were out in the yard and everybody was arguing about who God loved more: Billy or Michael.

“God loves me more because my dad owns a Christian bookstore!” yelled Billy.

“Oh yeah, well, where was your dad on Sunday? I didn't see him at church,” countered Michael.

It was insane. All over the school, everyone seemed to be saying the same kind of shit, except for in the hall next to the pastor's office where all you could hear were the screams from the kids whom he was paddling. I wanted to talk to those kids, the ones who hadn't gotten wrapped up in this nonsense, but after he had paddled them, it was too late. They sounded just like everyone else.

Whenever they tried to rope me into their God arguments, I responded by telling them I was Jewish. Again, I wasn't sure how it was all related, but I said it anyway because it always got the response I was looking for.

“God hates Jews,” they told me matter-of-factly in the yard. In class, during Sunday school, Bible study, and even from the pulpit, they had a slightly subtler way of saying it, but the implication was clear: Jews were bad.
Thank the fucking Lord for that,
I thought to myself as I watched a few hundred upstanding citizens babbling like a bunch of babies.

It didn't take much to get the paddle, otherwise known as Big Bertha. They always did it with the windows open. You couldn't see the kid getting hit because of the curtains, but you could sure as hell hear them. The thing reportedly had big holes cut out of it to reduce wind resistance, and it left marks in the shape of perfect circles. You could tell which kids had been paddled, because they would do a kind of jump-and-wince thing whenever they heard it.

One day before class, I pushed a girl who was drinking at the water fountain. The push was unjustified and admittedly intentional. I desperately needed some water before class, and she was taking far too long.

“I'm telling on you” was all she said when she turned around, and I could see in her eyes that she knew exactly what that meant: Big Bertha.

I was fed up with the whole thing, so I pushed her again to make sure it wouldn't be an empty threat.

Ten minutes later, the pastor showed up in my history class, where we were reading the Book of Genesis. I stood up the moment I saw him; he didn't even need to call me.

“My mom didn't sign the consent,” I told him as we walked down the hall.

“Nonsense. Everyone signs it.”

“Not her.”

“Everyone signs it,” he repeated as we entered the secretary's office. I refused to go any farther, thinking that this was the perfect time and place for the secretary to look at her records. The file cabinets were right behind her.

“Let's go,” he told me.

“Not until you look at the card. She would never sign that thing.”

“We're not going to look at the card, and you're going to come with me right now. I already told you, everyone signs it, otherwise we don't let you in. That way we don't have to look at the card every time some bratty kid thinks his mom would never sign it. So let's go. Now!”

“If you lay a hand on me, my mom will sue you and she will shut this school down. She did not sign that card!” I screamed in absolute panic.

Mom's plan was not working.
Why wouldn't he pull out the card?
The next thing I knew he had me in a bear hug and was carrying me into the office. I was struggling, but the fucking pastor still managed to bend me over his chair and get my pants down. As far as I could tell, I was screaming louder than any kid I had ever heard, and he hadn't even hit me yet. Just as he was about to come down on me with the wrath of Big Bertha, the secretary ran in holding the card.

“Stop,” she said to the pastor. “You need to look at this.”

He was still holding me with one arm and had to lay Big Bertha on the desk to take the card. It took a moment for him to figure out what he was looking at. On the line that Mom was supposed to have signed her name were written the words
Do not hit my son
in the same flowing cursive she used for her signature. He stared at the card, dumbfounded. He was literally an arm's length from losing his fucked-up school. I squirmed out of his grip, ran outside, and pulled up my pants.

 

I
N THE MEANTIME,
Mom had moved to a houseboat in Sausalito. But whatever she was going through in Philadelphia had obviously
come with her, and she was still unable to take care of us. Fred, who seemed to be under the impression that he had been some kind of positive influence on me, refused to drive me into the hands of the devil. Mom couldn't be fucked with, though, and her threats of filing kidnapping charges finally turned him around.

On the way to Mom's houseboat, I had to listen to him for an hour about how I was definitely going to hell, and that now he probably was, too, for delivering a defenseless child into the hands of Satan. He wasn't even sure if he could get the taint of my sin out at the car wash, which meant there was a very good chance that his wife and kids were going to be dragged down as well, and it was all my fault for not rejecting Satan when he guided my hands toward that little girl's shoulders and told me to push. I remained silent the entire drive. I was trying to remember whether I had packed my sticker collection during the rush to get out of there. Thinking about other shit was the only way I knew of to keep the taint of Fred away from my brain. I thought I heard him sniffling as he pulled to a stop in front of the docks, but I refused to look at him. I got out of the car without saying good-bye and walked onto Berth C looking for the blue houseboat.

I had been to the houseboat a few times on weekend visits, but the little floating community was so different from a regular neighborhood that I could never remember where her house was in relation to the seventeenth-century Victorian houseboat, the early Dutch-settler houseboat, or the one made out of bicycle rims and colored Plexiglas. If you ignored the fact that her house was floating in the San Francisco Bay, the place looked relatively conservative. It was a modern design, painted pastel blue, and it basically looked like the top story of a duplex, sticking out of the water. In my excitement over having escaped the Christians and of seeing Mom again, I was a little loud and clumsy when I entered the boat.

“Ow! Oran! Close the door!” I heard her voice in a kind of whispered yell.

“Mom!” I shrieked, excited to be hearing her voice again.

“The door. Please. Please close the door,” she implored.

Whatever it was my mom had been going through had now taken physical form. She was totally paralyzed on the left side of her body, and any light gave her excruciating headaches. I closed the door and felt my way through the dark to find her. When I did, I gave her a big hug and cried.

I cried because I had been holding it in for three months, and I cried
because I was with my mom again, and I cried, and cried, and cried. And when I got it all out, I could see that she was crying, too.

“It's okay, I'm back now. You can stop crying, Mom.”

But Mom was crying from the physical pain of hugging me, and crying because of the physical pain of crying, and crying because she couldn't take care of me.

The next day I went to stay at Kyle's foster home for a few days while arrangements were made for me to go back to Santa Fe, this time by myself.

E
VERY NIGHT BEFORE
going to bed I told myself,
This is the last time I'm going to smoke this shit. I'm going to quit tomorrow.
And every morning I would climb down from my loft and root around in the trash for any remnants of dope that might be in there.

I was now a full-fledged self-hating heroin addict, but life seemed to be getting better. I had finally told the piano guy to fuck off, and at the suggestion of my mom, I wrote up a business proposal to build a recording studio down in my basement. Money was now turning into an issue. I was spending thirty to forty dollars a day on my habit, and the money from my dad wasn't cutting it. As much as the dope was helping me imitate real human beings, I wasn't so good at it that I could hold down a nine to five.

“Jack wants to know where you guys want to eat,” Mom asked while we were discussing Jack's upcoming visit. I hadn't seen him in at least a year, but he was coming to town for a few days to do one of his human-potential training sessions.

“Chez Panisse,” I answered without any hesitation.

“Whoa, Oran. That's a bit fancy, don't you think?”

“You know what? He can fucking afford it. We've lived three blocks away from it for twelve years and have never eaten there. He's probably been there ten times without inviting us.” I was even more agitated on
the phone than usual, probably because I was talking to my mom about my dad. Either of those situations alone was enough to send me in to a yelling fit.

“Okay. Calm down, I'll ask him,” she said.

I got over to Mom's house in Berkeley an hour before we were supposed to meet Jack, so she could go over my proposal with me. When Kyle and Jack were both there, we walked over to the restaurant. As a kid, I had stopped to look at their menu almost every day and would wonder what Rabbit Loin, Green Bean, and Rocket Salad with Roasted Figs and Basil tasted like. Or what a Grilled Wolf Ranch Quail with Stone-ground Polenta, Sweet Corn, and Torpedo Onion Rings even looked like. Since we were going for lunch, there was nothing so exotic on the menu. But for dinner that night they were serving a King Salmon Carpaccio with Farm Egg and Chervil; a Saffron Risotto with Shellfish, Lemon, and Prosecco; a Grilled Yellow-fin Tuna with Fennel Pollen, Braised Fennel, and Green-Olive Relish; and for dessert, Caramel–Ice Cream Crêpes with Summer Lady peaches. What the fuck?

We all ordered the salmon. They brought it out in a brown paper bag. I was skeptical, but it was the best salmon I had ever had.

“So how is the piano tuning going?” Jack asked, while we were getting our dessert.

I couldn't believe they were charging twenty dollars for a peach, literally a sliced peach with nothing else—until I tasted it.

“Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that. Holy shit, where did they find this peach? You've got to try this.” I couldn't believe it came off a tree. “Oh yeah. So the whole piano thing was a scam. The guy wasn't teaching me anything. I quit.”

“What the hell am I giving you eight hundred bucks a month for if you quit?”

Normally I would have shriveled up and agreed with him at this point, but I had smoked just enough dope in my mom's bathroom before lunch to keep my confidence up.

“Well, here's the deal. I don't like taking that money either, so I came up with an idea to start a business and stop relying on you. I would need to borrow some money to get started, but it would be a loan, and I would be able to pay it back in two years.”

I pulled my handwritten proposal out of my pocket and went over the itemized list of equipment, rent, building supplies, and construction deadlines. On a different sheet of paper I had drawn up a payment plan including a hand-drawn line at the bottom for my signature.

“So, what do you think?” I asked, as he was looking it over.

“Sure, it sounds great, but I have two concerns. One, what happens if you invest this much time and money into it, and for some reason you lose your warehouse space? And two, I hate to say this, but you just don't have a good track record with money.”

“Listen, I'll pay you back no matter what. The worst-case scenario is that I have to sell the equipment and get a job. Either way, you still get your two fifty a month.”

“Okay, I'll do it,” he said hesitantly, pulling out his checkbook. “But if you don't pay me back, I will never lend you money again. If you do, maybe this could lead to something bigger.” He then handed me a check for ten thousand bucks.

“Don't you want me to sign that agreement?” I asked. My voice was shaky from holding that much money.

“No. The ten thousand dollars is nothing to me. I don't care whether you pay it back or not. This is about you being responsible and keeping your word. If you don't, that's fine, but no more money from Jack.”

 

N
OT WANTING TO
fuck up my one chance at owning my own business, I got to work the next day. It took a week just to get all the materials from the hardware store to the storefront on Mission Street. I would leave them my driver's license in exchange for the use of their pushcart and spend the day hauling lumber and drywall back to my place. Next, I covered the floor and the walls of the basement with sheets of plastic, and then I started framing out the two new rooms. My dope habit was slowly getting bigger, but I needed it to get through the ten-hour days I was spending on the studio. On top of that, I kept ending up in more bands, including a garage band with Eli and Jibz called the Roofies and a Slayer cover band called Sleigher. We wore Santa Claus hats and wrote Christmas lyrics to all the songs. We played “Reindeer in Blood,” “Mandatory Yuletide,” “South Pole of Heaven,” “Seasons Greetings in the Abyss,” and “Angel of Mirth,” to name a few. It was the hardest music I had ever played, but it was worth it just to see people excited and singing along at our very first show. I was playing in four other bands as well, and I was still the token Jew in the Goys, which I hadn't managed to quit.

I was getting increasingly nervous about being the best man at Sean's wedding. Not that I had to do anything other than get him to the ceremony on time and make a toast, but I didn't have much faith that I was capable of either of those things. Waking up before twelve was almost
impossible, but I ended being so anxious about the toast, getting Sean there on time, and not dropping the ring that I ended up not getting any sleep anyway. It didn't help knowing that this girl Heather was going to be there. It's true I would get crushes on almost every girl I saw, but these were mostly phantoms I would pass on the street and never see again, or girls I would sneak glances at on the BART. Before we'd even make it through the tunnel we would have been married, had kids, and gone through an ugly divorce, and I'd walk to my mom's house with a resentment against them. I would also get crushes on girls I saw regularly in the neighborhood, in bars or at shows, but I would avoid talking to them at all costs. If an exchange of words was unavoidable, I would either get paralyzed and fuck everything up or they would say something idiotic, and I would lose my crush. If they didn't say something stupid, I would usually find some way to judge them, even if it was as minor as their platform shoes, which, for some godforsaken reason, had come back in style. And finally, if they had passed all these tests, it was pretty clear that they shouldn't be going after me. Something must be wrong with them, even if I couldn't figure out exactly what.

Heather was an exception to the myriad intentional and unintentional defense mechanisms I had developed over the years to keep myself lonely and miserable. She was smart, cute, cynical, funny, talented, didn't wear those fucking shoes, and most important, in the three years I had known her, had never once exhibited any interest in me whatsoever. She was perfect.

“Hey, Oran. You know Heather's going to be at the wedding. Alex, her ex, just moved to Spain. You can finally get your chance,” Sean had told me after rehearsal a few nights earlier.

“You mean my chance to fuck it all up?” I asked.

“Dude, you've been asking about her forever, and she's finally single. That's all I'm saying.” Sean loved talking to just about anyone, so he couldn't understand the paralysis I would experience in the presence of girls.

“Thanks for the thought, but you know how I get.”

“Goddamn, man. Just say hi to her, okay? She's awesome.”

“All right. We'll see what happens. I don't want to think about it anymore.” But all I could do was think about it.

I kept thinking about it till we got to the Japanese tea garden up at Golden Gate Park. I thought about it through the ceremony, and I thought about it some more through dinner. Actually, I was fucking obsessed, but I couldn't for the life of me bring myself to say hi to her.

The only reprieve I got from the anxiety of being around Heather was the anxiety of having to do the toast. I had come up with the first half of the first sentence and had drawn a blank. When it seemed as though it was getting close to that time, I ran to my room, smoked some dope, and managed to calm down enough to make my voice shake less. When I got back, I resisted every instinct I had to turn around and run away. Instead, I grabbed a glass of wine, tapped my spoon against it, and waited for the room to quiet down.

“When Eli first told me that the best man's job was to get the groom to the wedding on time, I almost asked Sean to find someone else. As we all know, getting Sean anywhere on time can be an impossible task.” I knew that line would be a success, considering at this point in the evening it was still an intimate gathering of bandmates and relatives, all of whom dealt with Sean's habitual lateness regularly. I wasn't so sure Sean would laugh, but he did. I went into some awkward ad-lib about how we met, and when it seemed like I had been up there long enough I ended with, “…but as you all know, Sean is such a talented musician, and good friend, that he has always been worth waiting for.”
Totally lame,
I thought to myself as I sat down and tried to forget about it.
And I didn't say anything about Christine. What an asshole
.

After dinner the party livened up pretty quickly. The band started playing, and everyone started getting smashed. The ceremony and dinner had been a small gathering, but not because Sean and Christine lacked friends. Sean had been playing music in the city for years now and knew just about everyone, and slowly but surely, the place filled up. I found Jake and just kind of stuck with him. I was pretty intimidated by this crowd of Mission hipsters who had taken over our house, even though I had a pretty good idea that I was one of them.

“So what's going on? You talk to Heather yet?” Jake asked.

“No, man. I can't do it. She freaks me out,” I answered.

“Jesus, do it for me then. You've been talking about her for how long now? It's driving me crazy. ‘I saw Heather walking down the street today…I ran into Heather at the store…Heather this…Heather that.' Just go talk to her. She's right there.”

I couldn't help glancing over to where he was looking, and I made eye contact with her by accident. I quickly looked down at the floor and turned back toward Jake.

“Damn,” I said under my breath.

While Jake was imploring me to just go over and talk to her, I heard a voice from behind me say, “Hi, Oran.”

I turned around and it was Heather.

“Hey, Heather, how's it going?” My heart was racing and sweat was starting to bead up on my forehead and upper lip, which made me more self-conscious and made my heart beat faster, and made me sweat even more. All I could do was stand there and try to look calm. I moved over a step, hoping to let Jake into the conversation, but he had vanished.

“I just wanted to come over and say hi, since I didn't get a chance all day.” She looked like a grown-up version of a Margaret Keane painting: big eyes, small face, little-boy haircut. So fucking cute.

“Your toast was hilarious. Someone needed to say that.”

“Yeah, well, I was just trying to be funny, but I was a little worried about bumming Sean out. That guy can be a little sensitive, you know?” I was surprised that my mouth was moving and words were coming out. I was calming down a little bit.

“Jeez, you're telling me? I'm in a band with him, too, you know,” she said.

“By the way, I wanted to tell you, that last show I saw at the Chameleon was great. You're an amazing drummer.”

“Yeah, right. What a disaster. Jeff Ray and his fucking guitars. It's like the Three Stooges up there.”

“But there are five of you,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, but the only way I can deal with it is to pretend that Tracy and I just happen to be onstage watching
The Three Stooges
. That way it's actually pretty funny seeing those three guys run around changing instruments and tripping all over their cords. Otherwise, I'd lose my mind. How's Optimist International doing?”

“Sean didn't tell you about San Pedro?” I asked her, kind of surprised.

“No. I knew you guys went down to L.A., but he didn't say anything about it.”

I told her a few stories from our recent tour of Southern California and noticed that my anxiety had all but disappeared. I was more or less able to be myself around her. We continued talking for a while, and I kept waiting for her to say something stupid, or me to say something stupid, or anything that might give me the slightest reason to judge her, but it never happened.

“Well, I think I've had too much to drink, but I need to say bye to a few people before I leave. It was good talking to you.”

“Yeah…okay.” There seemed to be a moment of awkwardness where we couldn't tell if we should hug, shake hands, or…then she walked
away, and my paralysis came back full force.
Shit. Did it go okay? Did I say anything dumb? Should I have asked her if she wanted to get a drink sometime? Fuck. I think I just screwed the whole thing up.
I needed to talk to someone.