Thrill-Bent (7 page)

When at the age of seven my father began exhibiting odd behaviors, such as excitedly bobbing his head or punching wildly at imaginary enemies, my grandparents were mildly annoyed. They wanted him to know that it wouldn’t pay to break the most hallowed family tradition: the art of blending. So they ignored his pleas for attention. When he’d break into one of his air-boxing matches, they’d turn their backs and continue their conversation facing away from him. They’d barely pause their forks between bites if he’d start braying in the middle of dinner. But the quirks and peccadilloes of my father’s body proved more tenacious than they had bargained for. They thought he was testing them to see how much jaybird shimmying he could get away with before they lost their protracted tempers. They entered into the battle of wills. They shook their heads and smiled at each other conspiratorially. Even-keeled and unreadable, they bargained coolly with my father.
If you cease that ridiculous dance, they said, we will give you five dollars and a new baseball glove. If you continue to annoy us with your incessant gyrating, they added, you will not be allowed to join the baseball team this season, nor will your brother.
This last bit was thrown in to kindle another longstanding family tradition: sibling loyalty. They knew my father revered his older brother, and that the threat of a tandem punishment would paint the situation quite differently in my father’s mind. Also, they weren’t absolutely certain that their self-restrained, non-convulsive eldest son, with whom my father shared a bedroom, had not masterminded this convoluted plan to overthrow the family hierarchy. In reality, my uncle, while being very smart, was also artlessly honest, honest in the sort of way that could not conceive of guerilla tactics or manipulative strategy, honest to a degree that could only be due to extraordinary spiritual alignment, which his parents would have noticed had they been paying attention.

Don’t get me wrong. My father’s parents loved their children. But they were warriors. Middle-class, bridge-playing, atheistic Jewish warriors, and yet, yes, fierce. They viewed each of life’s circumstances (and their children, after all, were among life’s circumstances) as an opportunity for battle, and they felt justified in teaching their children this view, since those with the most military skills would survive the war. In any war, the best strategy is to listen carefully to your commanding officers.

My father tried. He spent the entire baseball season of his ninth year trying to control his outbursts. He already knew what a tricky quality “control” was: he had learned early to circumvent his desires in order to have a better chance of obtaining them. If, flipping through the Sears catalogue, his impulse was to point to the picture of a pearl-blue motorized miniature race car and run through the house waving it over his head, crying, “I want! I want!”, he knew it was wise to sublimate that impulse. Instead, he would casually leave the catalogue flipped open to the page in question on the coffee table or near his father’s workbench. When someone asked him if he found anything interesting in the catalogue, he would say, “Oh, sure, lots of things,” and wait to be questioned further. It wasn’t that you couldn’t want, he’d learned, but that you couldn’t want directly, or ostentatiously. You had to want in such a way that the outcome of your wanting ceased to be of immediate concern. And yet his attempts to curb the episodes of twitching failed miserably. He tried to squelch the fits as he felt them coming on, but he soon dropped this method, as his body’s compunctions proved infinitely stronger than his mind’s thin disciplinary efforts. When he felt the urge to tremble or curse, to knock his arms back and forth across an iron railing again and again, there was no time to stop and weigh the options. The momentum had begun; it would be like trying to stop a bowling ball after it had left your outstretched hand. He was obliged to complete an action once it had blipped onto the screen of his consciousness.

If he had to go to the bathroom while playing a game or listening to a radio program, he could hold it until a more convenient time; sometimes he could even go to bed needing to pee, and deciding to wait until morning. If he woke from an unpleasant dream in the middle of the night, he might consider creeping silently into his parents’ bedroom, tiptoeing over to his mother’s side of the bed, and seeking solace in her arms, but that instinct soon vanished when he fleshed out the fantasy with its tangible details: the shadowy, underwater dark of the house at night, his parents’ strange, animal breathing as they lay in their lumpy lair, his father’s violent surprise, the scolding that followed, the shaming. So he would squeeze his pillow into a little ball and push it tightly into his belly, wrapping his body around it like an oyster around a pearl. If a dream had been truly terrifying, he would wake his brother and whisper the details, under the pretext of the freshness of the memory. Sometimes, my uncle would wake my father for the same reason: an elaborate telling to remove the poison from sleep’s untamed claws. But it was clear to my father that this new game, this urgent duty of his body’s to twitch and shout, had different rules entirely.

With all their free time that baseball season, my father and his brother constructed a mathematically correct model of the Milky Way in their bedroom, a painstaking thread-and-tinfoil spiderweb strung together on a coathanger infrastructure, that bobbed and glittered above their narrow twin beds. My father’s nervous system percolated more often and even more grotesquely than before.

“I see you have been improving on your already good looks,” Dr. Berger said, his buoyant hint of sarcasm not lost on my father, who glared at him from under his new haircut. The doctor waved him into the office, gesturing toward the couch. “But seriously, Mr. Richman, how does it feel to have a clean neck? Do you feel in some way as though your conscience has been cleared of a tiny bit of gunk? As Catholics must feel after they go into the little room with the priest?”

“Gunk?” asked my father, as he carefully sat on the edge of the sofa. “I don’t feel gunky when I go in. It’s after I come out of the shop, with all that powder and oil and goo they slap all over me. To tell you the truth, it’s kind of spooky, a haircut is.”

“Spooky?” Dr. Berger leaned back and crossed his legs.

“Well, the whole idea is to sit real still while some guy brings a sharp razor right up close to your brain. I gotta watch myself in that place.” He shifted his position on the leather, slapped the smooth cushion beside him nine times hard, and murmured, “Goddamn it, goddamn you, goddamn it, goddamn you,” under his breath.

“It would make anyone crazy,” he said when he looked up, smiling at his own quip.

The doctor laughed. “Ah, even a psychoanalyst like myself, perhaps. But tell me, why did you just say ‘Goddamn you’? I seem to be the only ‘you’ in the room. Are you feeling angry at me?”

My father looked down at his corduroy pants. He picked one thin wale on his thigh and followed it all the way down to his ankle, squinting to make sure he didn’t lose it in the soft fold over the knee.

“Mr. Richman? Did you hear my question? Or have you become suddenly deaf?”

My father never knew how to answer such questions as to
why
he did what he did during one of his episodes. He didn’t know why, any more than he knew why the earth revolved around the sun or the Brooklyn Dodgers lost the 1936 pennant. What he wanted to know was why perfectly normal people were always asking him this question.

“Why is your beard gray, doctor? Why does your waiting room smell like cornflakes? Why do you write in a red notebook instead of a blue one? Why? Why? Why? WHY?”

As my father heard his own voice getting louder, he took several deep breaths to steady himself. Sometimes in his dreams he experienced violent anger of the type that he could never express in waking life. Some misunderstanding with a faceless stranger would blossom in fast motion like a scene from a school science film about pollination, until it was a wreath around his neck, choking off any remaining goodwill or temperance. A kind of circling would ensue, not just the classic wrestlers’ ronde, but a turnabout involving the whole room, the whole universe. As my father’s anger grew deeper, the earth seemed to spin off of its axis and tumble aimlessly through space. There was no still point. The more he tried to fix his attention on the faceless stranger, to find and follow the movements of his opponent, the wider and more uncontained the arena became, everything whirling at once, a spinning top inside a merry-go-round inside a house inside a hurricane. Every punch he threw came up empty. He was left incomplete, boiling mad, clinging to one strand in the unraveling coil of reality, screaming hoarsely or only trying to scream, unable to make a sound. He swung and jabbed, shadowboxing, having lost sight completely of that elusive stranger,unable to remember what had set him off in the first place.

He shook his head to clear it. “I’m not mad at you, Doctor. I apologize if I said anything wrong.”

“Mr. Richman,” the doctor said, “Look at me.” He rose from his chair, unfolding his tall body in stages, first the barrel-shaped torso straining against its vest and jacket, then the long legs that rose above his enormous, hand-cobbled shoes. He stood towering over the desk for a moment, his large white hands spread out at his sides as if to display his glory. “Do I look like a poor weakling to you? Like a man who cannot take a little bit of anger?”

My father smiled in spite of himself. “No, I just ...”

“You just thought it would be improper to yell at your psychiatrist.”

“Mmm ...”

The doctor sat. “From now on, Mr. Richman, you have my full permission to hoot and holler at me in protest whenever you feel the urge to do so. Please be assured that I will not break into pieces. Understood?”

“Sure thing,” said my father, laughing uncomfortably at the thought of punching Dr. Berger right in the pocket watch.

“Now, let us move on,” said the doctor, pulling at his vest. “Have you given any more thought to the behavior of the peacock? The bird whose colorful tail is displayed in order to court the object of his desire?”

“Well, I was thinking about what you said, about how he does that to show off for girls.” My father shrugged as if he were trying to shake water off his back, a shrug of dismissal, borne of incomprehension. “I don’t see how you can call it showing off. I mean, the way I see it, it’s not something he chooses to do. Those feathers are there, they’re gonna come out, it’s part of being a peacock. It’s not like he says to himself, ‘Hmmm, should I get her flowers, or should I show her my fancy tail?’” He mugged this last bit, this peacock imitation, and then rolled his eyes at the very idea of a “her” being that important in someone’s, even a peacock’s, life.

Dr. Berger sat staring at my father in silence for a long moment. “Well,” he said, “I must congratulate you for your scathing indictment of my profession, Mr. Richman. I myself am sometimes just as skeptical of the mind’s claims to omnipotence.” He gazed with respect and amusement at my father’s deadpan stare. “Do you know what this word ‘omnipotence’ is? It is all-powerful. So, perhaps we can agree that the mind of the peacock is not so all-powerful, that his body, his nature, shares some of the credit. How did you put it?” The doctor looked up at the ceiling, his eyes moving slowly across the arched molding. “Ah, yes. ‘It’s all part of being a peacock.’ No?”

My father shrugged. “Yes.”

“But perhaps we can also agree that there are certain things in life we must do—eating, for example. We must eat, or we die. But, unless we are starving to death, we have a certain number of options: we can choose when to eat, what to eat, how much to eat, etcetera. When you are sitting at a restaurant looking at a menu, do you let your body decide what to order?”

“I usually get a burger.”

The doctor’s eyes widened. “Interesting.”

My father looked up, surprised. “What’s so interesting about eating a burger?”

“Well, listen to what to you just said. ‘Eating a burger.’ What is my name, Mr. Richman?”

“Dr. ... uh ... Berger?” My father broke into a slow smile and laughed into his hand as though he had been told a slightly pornographic schoolyard joke. “Oh, I get it.”

“Do you? Do you get it?” The doctor clapped his hands in elation. “Do you understand your desire to devour me, to remove from your path any obstacle capable of assimilating you?”

The doctor had sprayed a fine mist of spit on the desk during his sibilance, and he looked down at it for a silent moment, confused, as though he’d wandered into an unfamiliar part of town. Then he removed and carefully unfolded a not-quite-white handkerchief from his coat pocket and mopped up the delicate constellation of spittle.

My father watched with mild astonishment. In all his weekly visits, he had never seen the doctor lose control. He didn’t want to eat the doctor in a sandwich with catsup and mustard, and he didn’t know what “assimilate” meant. But he recognized the look of panicked isolation on the face of this towering, brainy man, who was now pecking persistently at his brow with his handkerchief.

“Dr. Berger, are you okay?” asked my father with genuine concern.

“Oh yes, yes, I am quite fine, thank you,” said the doctor, revived from his sudden transformation by the slightly hoarse voice of the boy, which now lacked any hint of ironic contempt. The doctor smiled wearily at my father, a smile like a white flag, crinkling at the corners and wavy, windswept in the middle. He refolded the handkerchief and tucked it away in his coat pocket. “I’m afraid that concludes our time for today,” he said.

For two years my father was paraded to an array of specialists: orthopedists, masseuses, physical therapists, and speech pathologists. Each specialist claimed that my father’s particular problem was slightly peripheral to his field of expertise, and referred him to another specialist, someone more capable of diagnosing and absolving, someone who would return my father to the normal, lithe boy he was before this urgent dance overtook him. A nutritionist suggested more iron in his diet, and so my grandmother snuck spinach and brussel sprouts into his lunchbox in various guises, chopped up in tunafish sandwiches, layered with potato salad. The rabbi who lived down the block stopped by the house one evening to wonder aloud if my father’s episodes were not a cry for spiritual guidance, a vigorous plea for increased moral structure. My father’s teachers wished that something could be done; they admired my father’s diligence and consented that his schoolwork was always neat and timely, but his constant thrashing was disruptive to the class. The other kids had begun to curse and shout and bounce up and down at their desks, paying more attention to my father as they tried to anticipate his next outburst than to the subject matter at hand. Finally, my father’s Aunt Jean, a boisterous woman who would often stand up from the table in the middle of dinner to publicly adjust her girdle, slipped them Dr. Berger’s telephone number. “He’s an Upper East Side mensch,” she said. “An Austrian Jew, an
intellectual.”
She lowered her voice to a stage-whisper, “He helped Harry with his premature whatsis.” Everyone in Hackensack, New Jersey, right down to the mailman, who was far more startled by a barking boy than he’d ever been by any savage dog, wanted my father to act right, to be restored perfect and whole and still as a turtle, as still as his brother, as still as any boy could be expected to be.