I.M. Page 10
My mother’s wardrobe was given another level of attention entirely. Months and months in advance were spent studying magazine spreads, tearing out photos, combing the racks at every major store in the tristate area. Dinner table conversation was dominated by what would be most appropriate for her to wear. She would need one outfit for shul and another for hostessing the luncheon at home. She found a tailored off-white silk shantung suit at Loehmann’s and splurged on Gucci accessories. Stacked-heeled sling-backs, a bone-leather clutch with the signature red and green ribbon trim, and a straw fedora. For the luncheon later at home she changed into Geoffrey Beene apple-green-and-white printed chiffon hostess pajamas, self-belted and finished at the waist with an oversized green-and-white silk poppy. There was no fudging this one. It was purchased full price at Saks Fifth Avenue. She paired it with strands of faceted emerald and white crystal beads that made it look even more stylish than the way it was originally shown.
My clothes were also a pressing concern—not out of a desire to outdo anyone’s preconception of chic, but simply to find things that would fit. I guess all the stress I felt around the bar mitzvah caused me to eat my feelings a little more than usual. All the while I appeared to be dieting, I was actually eating in secret, which resulted in my getting even fatter. Evenings, after a miserable day at yeshiva, I broke away from the TV only long enough to raid the stock of Syrian pastries that my mother had labored over and stored between layers of waxed paper in shoe boxes hermetically sealed in plastic and neatly stacked in the basement freezer. Often before dinner I ate two or three portions from the pots containing the meal, and serving bowls at the table were mysteriously less full. Embarrassing, yes, but not enough to stop me from doing it again and again.
It was nearly impossible to find boys’ clothes that fit me, even in the so-called “husky” departments. Shopping for clothes in my preteen years with my mother was hideous! I would look at something, and she would say in a loud voice that everyone could hear, “No, Isaac, no bell-bottoms for you.” She’d continue with a choice piece of fashion advice: “Trendy clothes aren’t for overweight people.” Or: “Clunky shoes make heavy people look heavier.” Or: “Wear neutrals.” She told me flatly that I was too heavy to wear the loudly printed Qiana shirts that I desperately wanted and were so fashionable at the time. Sometimes she would look at something I held up and say only, “It’s a travesty.” She was protecting me, trying to make my clothing choices above reproach—inoculating me from ridicule by harshly criticizing me in advance. Utter disinterest in the subject of men’s clothes only added to the beleaguered attitude she had toward her overweight son and the process of finding clothes that worked.
Dieting was the bane of my existence. I tried for months prior to my bar mitzvah, hoping to shrink myself into a standard size. I even accompanied my aunt Adele to Weigh In, which was the local version of Weight Watchers. That should’ve been mortifying, but I loved Adele. She and my mother were like two peas in a pod, so I actually found this weekly ritual kind of fun. Adele was an energetic blond ten years my mother’s junior who was always dieting. “Adele is the real athlete of the family,” my mother said lovingly about her over and over, and she was. She was always playing tennis or skiing or jogging. We all loved her, even my dad, who nicknamed her “Toots.” Weigh In meant that I got to spend time with my favorite aunt. She and I had a secret society, with special foods such as Sealtest Ice Milk and skim-milk cottage cheese. There was also a sweet, chemical powder called Alba 77 that came in envelopes and that we mixed in a blender with skim milk and ice cubes to produce a questionable, yet sort of satisfying, diet malted.
In the end, Weigh In didn’t work in time, and the hopes of me getting into an off-the-rack suit were nil. My father took it upon himself to have a suit made for me. A team from his factory in Philadelphia came to New York and took my measurements, and a few times that winter I accompanied my dad to Philly for the fittings. I changed into the suit in an empty office and stood on a fitting cube while they pinched and prodded and measured and smiled knowing smiles at me and at each other, which made me even more paranoid. The suit, which fit beautifully, was a two-button job in powder blue wool shantung with a huge notch lapel. Underneath I wore a kind of Liberty-print shirt and, if I remember correctly, a butter-yellow tie. My loafers were white patent leather with squared-off toes and big Pierre Cardin “PC” logo buckles. All the rules my mother had drummed into my head about what overweight people should wear were broken. Her attentions were scattered, and she assumed my father was handling it. By the time she focused on me, the deed was done. Ironically, I didn’t feel particularly fat in that suit, I felt great. It lent me a kind of false confidence. When I look back at the pictures, I know she was right all along. I looked heavier than I would have in a dark grey or navy blue suit, but the powder-blue feeling was worth it.
On the day of the luncheon, we were awakened by the arrival of the caterers and waiters with crates and urns and rentals of all kinds. The house was unrecognizable. The furniture had been emptied out a day earlier and replaced with round tables covered in canary-yellow-and-white plaid organza tablecloths. Placed on each table were white lilies in the silver vases that my parents had purchased on vacation. It was an unusually beautiful cool and sunny spring day. The tulips on the front lawn were peaking. The original lead-crystal-paned doors in the front of the house were temperamental and attached to an equally temperamental alarm system. They mostly remained shut, but that day they were flung open, adding to the excitement and the feeling of vulnerability in having all these people come into our home to celebrate an event about which I had such ambivalence. This was supposed to be the social pinnacle, but I felt disdain for these people who made my life so difficult and were now entering my house under the false pretense of celebrating me.
Once the party was fully under way, my nervousness and a lot of my loathing for the whole elaborate charade flowed out of the house on the cool cross-breeze. Everyone seemed happy. Even the ritual of the bar mitzvah earlier that morning seemed light and airy compared to the nervousness I felt in advance. I was more hysterical about reading that parashah than anything I had ever done. I found my way to the podium on shaky legs, but a few seconds into it my inner ham emerged and my nerves disappeared. By the end I discovered I was as good at singing my parashah as I was at doing Streisand in the alley, and there wasn’t much of a difference between the two. The only thing missing was applause at the end, which doesn’t happen in shul.
The food and the clothes all made their impact, most of the guests were duly impressed, and my parents shone as hosts. But by the end of the day, the great irony revealed itself: What was supposed to be about me was much more about my parents and the obligation they felt to acknowledge their son becoming a man. I’ve always been good at gritting my teeth and making it through tense times with a smile. That day those skills were tested—I was seething on the inside, while on the outside grinning and bearing, aided by the aura of the custom-made powder-blue suit. Even now, people who know me well are astounded by my ability to appear content, even jolly, when in reality I’m spitting nails. Mostly it has to do with my fear of upsetting others, and my distaste for confrontation.
At the end of the day, when most of the crowd had gone and only a few stragglers remained, I channeled my feelings into my puppet show. I flung open the garage door and put on a rousing performance of my puppet Follies. The show that evening had an ominous, manic quality to it. The Gypsy overture played extra loud on the cassette player, and my Rockettes danced with a little too much enthusiasm.
8
The year I was born my family spent the summer in a charming cottage in Bradley Beach, New Jersey, which is a tiny town near Asbury Park that the Syrian Jews descended upon every year when the weather turned warm. The cottage was in a perfect spot, across the street from a lake and close to the beach. In old pictures and home movies it looks idyllic, with a small front porch and red-and-white striped awnings. There’s footage of me i
n my playpen bouncing up and down. There’s a happy photo of Maureen smiling broadly and holding me on her hip. There’s a red convertible Thunderbird in slightly later pictures, too, which was my father’s pride and joy. “If you close your eyes I can make the car fly,” my dad would say to my sisters and me, seated in the back. We would close our eyes and he’d speed up, which really felt like taking off. “If you open your eyes the car can’t fly anymore,” he’d say, so we’d keep our eyes shut and swear we were really flying.
A few years later my father lost everything in the failed attempt to take his company public, and we spent summers in Brooklyn for a while. By the time we were ready to reenter the summer social fray, the Syrian Jews had shifted the scene up the Jersey Shore from the charming cottages of Bradley Beach to the oversized, ostentatious houses a few miles north in a town called Deal. There, starting at age eleven and lasting until my early adulthood, I spent summers in an ever-changing series of odd rentals.
I dreaded our summers there. During the winter months I had an easier time staving off depression—lost in my garage with my puppets, and sketching in my basement atelier. The summer was supposed to be a break, a vacation, but for me it meant being forced to confront all my worst fears. It’s not that I avoided them entirely during the winter months, but they intensified and came to visible life during the long summers spent in that provincial beach town. To this day I experience my peccadillos, insecurities, and intense nervousness tenfold in the summertime. June and July get progressively worse and every year, for a few days in August, the world comes to an end.
A very big part of my summer anxiety came from the necessity of appearing in a swimsuit. As early as I can remember I hated taking my shirt off at the beach, feeling too fat to be so undressed in public. All the bullying in the world about being effeminate doesn’t hurt me nearly as much as one sly remark about being fat.
The town of Deal, New Jersey, like so many beach towns, had a lot going for it before it became overbuilt. There were about fifteen blocks of gorgeous old houses, mansions really, built at the turn of the century and occupied by people like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norma Shearer. By 1972 those houses were almost exclusively owned by Syrian Jews, and early McMansions were being built on any available vacant lot. The community was growing, its affluence was growing, and so was the exclusivity of its borders. To this day the richest families still live within the original fifteen-block radius, with descending castes of other families living farther and farther from the middle.
Dead center of the daytime social scene was the beach club, which was called the Deal Casino. (Nothing to do with gambling.) It was located smack in the middle of the town, on the oceanfront. It sets me on edge to even write about it all these years later. As you walked into the Deal Casino you were confronted with a huge pool, like a vast kidney-shaped water-village. Around the pool were cabanas and lounges with the same kind of social significance as the layout of the town itself. Those blue-chip families that had been members of the casino for longer had cabanas closer to the pool. The girls sitting on the lounges in front of those cabanas were given special consideration by the eligible boys. The rest of us inhabited cabanas that were rows and rows back, which felt like a whole other town. Eligible girls were expected to remain pristine on their lounges, in big hair, full makeup, high heels that never came off, and the skimpiest bathing suits decency would allow. The thought of ever going near the water and ruining the effect was out of the question.
From the time I was eleven, my mother and sisters and I stayed put in Deal from July Fourth until Labor Day, while my father stayed in Brooklyn three nights a week and commuted the rest of the time. There wasn’t much of anything for me to do in Deal. There was just me and my adolescent insecurities, with no change of subject. I tried day camp one year but discovered that was worse than being on my own. So I created diversions. One year I took it upon myself to organize a production of Bye Bye Birdie at the local Y. Another year I hand-painted T-shirts and sold them. And one year, encouraged by Uncle Sam, I made twenty paintings and took a booth at the local art fair at the end of that summer. Since I couldn’t haul the garage or the basement atelier to Deal, these were the projects I clung to. While around me people were luxuriating in sun, ocean, and grand parties of all kinds, I was hiding in a dark location, away from the crowd, working.
Any fear disappeared along with good sense when my inner ham emerged. Two or three times each summer, an audience would assemble at the Deal Casino to watch me do my female impersonations like they would a kind of sideshow freak. It started one random Saturday, when someone—I was easily swayed—convinced me to do Barbra Streisand. I got up the nerve and belted out “My Man,” which drew a huge crowd. At the end they cheered. And hearing that applause made me feel so great. It’s an instinct, perhaps a warped one; even the people who hate me love me when they applaud. You can feel it. Like a big collective caress. No matter what they say about you in real life, or do to hurt you, you’re being rewarded at that moment. They love you, and they’re telling you so.
I did another number, and before I knew it I finished a full “set.” Judy, Dionne, Liza, all the favorites. One day, at the climax of one of my shows, I noticed my father watching from the back of the crowd, a deeply puzzled look on his face. I didn’t stop singing, but I kept one eye on him and watched him peel away. I ended the show abruptly and was afraid to go home. But my father never mentioned it. That kind of denial was how he dealt with a lot of things about me he didn’t understand.
Like the time when I was nine and locked myself in the bathroom with my mother’s makeup. For all the times I watched obsessively as she applied it, this one time I wanted to know what it would feel like on my skin. To me it was no different from painting the faces of my puppets. Still, I was sure this wouldn’t go down well, so when I was called to dinner I panicked and quickly washed my face with soap and water, leaving behind smears of makeup on my face that wouldn’t have been noticed by a child my age. I still remember the expression on my parents’ faces—simultaneously noticing and refusing to notice. Dinner went on as usual; no one said a word. It was the same that day when my father watched me perform at the Deal Casino. He saw and refused to see. But from that point forward I think he couldn’t deny the reality of who I was and why I was jeered at and bullied all the time. It had to be difficult for him having a son who did things like female impersonations in public, and I felt certain that he was ashamed of me. At shul or family functions, I found it harder and harder to be with him.
* * *
Behind the scenes, invisible to all but me and one other person, a true milestone occurred in Deal the summer right before my bar mitzvah: I not only became a man, but I lost my virginity. I had a friend who was almost exactly my age, with whom I had sleepovers. We got along on so many levels, something I’d never really experienced before with anyone. This boy and I spent days and days together, constantly in each other’s company. We played all kinds of games, and rode our bikes, and had a really easy rapport. One weekend we were at the Deal Casino alone in my family’s cabana, which was far away from the center of the beach club. We couldn’t be heard, and the cabana door was locked with a hook-and-eye latch. Narrow stripes of bright sunlight slipped through the slatted doors, but otherwise the cabana was dark and cool, and the scents of salt and chlorine were edged out by the stronger scent of Bain de Soleil. We were undressing, changing into our swimsuits, and while I hadn’t gone through puberty yet, I noticed that he had. He had a man’s body. One thing led to another, and before I could even think about the significance of what was happening, we were fumbling through youthful sex. He instructed me on how to please him and he administered my first orgasm, which was like being let in on a great secret.
We went on having innocent sex for a few years, and I wasn’t plagued by guilt or confusion. The sex had no political or social ramifications for me. It didn’t feel dirty or have perverse connotations. It was beautiful. And purely physical. I never felt self-
conscious, and he seemed as gratified by it as me. Our friendship was not altered in any way; the sex was merely something else we did together when we were completely alone. It didn’t seem unnatural or wrong, yet it was something I knew we had to hide from everyone else.
When I look back on it now I’m grateful that I was able to have something so sweet and uncomplicated. And illuminating. It ended when we were fourteen or fifteen and we both went our separate ways. When it was over we never referred to it again. There were certainly no expectations of becoming a legitimate couple—I was still so young I didn’t really understand what this sort of thing even meant beyond feeling good.
Sex with him didn’t feel like anything as serious as a lifestyle-defining choice, nor did I pine for him when it was over. I wasn’t in denial about my preferential love for men, but I was still piecing together what it all meant. Now I knew, though, that there was an action I could associate with my longings. The taunting and bullying took on a new meaning, too. I started to understand the connections between my sexuality and the thing I was being ostracized for. All those years of being the outsider were tied to this one trait, which was as natural to me as my hair and eye color, and which was just starting to make itself felt for real.
9
A few months before my bar mitzvah, my dad bought me two pairs of professional scissors: one for fabric—a heavy, classic pair, about a foot in length—and another, equally long, for cutting paper patterns, although I didn’t yet know what paper patterns were. The scissors looked crazily phallic—long blades and big round handles. In silhouette, basically male genitals. My father had my name, which was also my grandfather’s name, etched into the enamel of both pairs. When he presented them he warned me to “never, ever use fabric shears for paper, or paper shears for fabric.” He also gave me another gift, which I thought was a joke at first: the family’s ubiquitous utility scissors. He said, “These were my father’s”—something I never knew till that moment—“and now they’re yours. Take very good care of them. You were named after my father, and you’re like him. He had a lot of talent. He could make anything he wanted.”