I.M. Page 11
In a corner of our basement in Brooklyn, carefully covered in plastic, were two old industrial sewing machines that belonged to my father. One was a beautiful Singer straight-stitch machine made of polished wrought iron from the turn of the nineteenth century, which he referred to as “the old iron horse that built this country.” The other was a temperamental and dangerous Merrow machine from the late 1920s, which had a heavy thick blade that cut as it overlocked and could easily have cut straight through my thumb. It was common knowledge in the house that a sewing machine made before the 1930s was better in every way than any new machine. These cast-iron machines were more solid, built to last, more reliable than any newer machines could be, and they were sought-after. These two machines were fitted into wooden tables and converted to modern electrical motors with switches underneath that when turned on would make the whole basement vibrate.
Until I was about thirteen, I sewed everything by hand—puppets and whatever backdrops or stage curtains required stitching. After the fringed shirt episode, the idea of sewing with a machine became more appealing to me. I had begun experimenting with the idea of sewing clothes, but doing it by hand was just too slow. To that point I thought of needle and thread as a means to an end. If there was something I envisioned it could be mine with ingenuity and patience. I had plenty of the former, but never much patience. Sewing by machine would be faster; also the quality and look of things might improve, I thought. Still, I was too terrified by the speed of my father’s machines to learn how to use them. The summer before my thirteenth birthday I had my eye on a brand-new home-sewing machine at the Singer Sewing Center, which I’d gone to inspect at least four times. I saved up my money babysitting until I finally had the eighty dollars I needed to buy the machine.
Things between my father and me had always been strained, and as I got older the strain grew worse. Every so often in an effort to bond with me he’d involve me in the repair of something broken around the house, which was a kind of hobby for him. But I always had a hard time with it. Those household fixes felt more like he was lording some kind of fatherly dominance over me. “Hold this level,” he’d say, and I’d hold the level in place for an eternity while he did the rest, my mind elsewhere. Mostly we didn’t get along. A lifetime of being told how lucky I was not to grow up in the poverty he described as his childhood made me feel squeamish about accepting anything more from him than what I absolutely needed. Also it felt like we were always vying for my mother’s affections. And whatever her motivation, she never did anything to diffuse that dynamic. Eventually great animosity grew between my father and me, and I was most comfortable staying out of his way.
I fantasized about buying that machine for the greater part of the summer. I wanted to go into the store, point to the one I’d picked, pay for it, and leave. I knew that if my father came it would turn into a big production. He’d schmooze the salesperson, it would take forever, and I would be mortified. My father dropped hints about being part of the process and I should have been grateful that he took an interest in my sewing, but this purchase was something I wanted to keep to myself. Also, I didn’t want to indicate to him in any way that I was following in his footsteps. I did not want to work in the garment business, which seemed dreary and limiting to me. I knew I wanted to make things. Art. Puppets. The sewing machine was meant to be a tool for that. In fact, sewing clothes felt like a concession to my family history and, though I knew sewing machines were invented for the manufacture of clothes, for a short while I actively resisted doing so.
When the time came to pick up my new machine the only person available to drive me to the Singer store was my father. When we arrived he looked at the slick new machine I wanted to purchase and shook his head. Then he steered me toward an older and much better one. I hesitated—this was exactly what I didn’t want to happen. But after a few minutes I knew he was right. The old machine was at least twice the weight of the new one, certainly more beautiful—it was curvy, polished, black wrought iron, like a small version of the iron horse, with Singer written in gilt, remounted into a new case veneered in grainy black Naugahyde. It was portable, though massively heavy, with a beautiful wooden dome that clamped onto the machine when it wasn’t in use and, again, like the iron horse, it had been adapted from its original foot pedal to an electric motor with a leather strap that propelled the wheel. What I really loved about that machine was that it could backstitch—which the new machine couldn’t do. Even before I knew how to sew, I knew that a machine that could backstitch was far better than one that couldn’t. My father’s choice of the older machine prevailed. And he pitched in the additional twenty dollars.
I knew that I had something really great in that machine. I approached learning to sew with it methodically and respectfully, unlike my manic and risky approach to other tools. I taught myself to sew, but my father stayed involved from a safe distance. He and I reached a kind of détente over that machine. In this one case he could guide me without being overbearing. He taught me how to wind a bobbin, thread the machines, set the tension gauges properly. He’d bring me a new attachment for it every month or so, like a ruffler or a leather foot, or gauges that attached to the side of the needle and helped me stay within my seam allowances. He’d adjust the new piece for me, and off I’d go. All of that now strikes me as very dear.
I always loved sewing. Cutting cloth. Construction. Pins. The forward progression of sewing fast, like flying. But sometimes the plane fell out of the sky. I remember terrible fits of anger when something went wrong. I might destroy my latest project—pull a puppet or a backdrop completely apart. But I’d always get it back together, undo the damage, and finish.
On that beloved machine, I made the first piece of clothing I ever sewed from scratch. It was for my mother, made of double-faced wool, rust heather on one side and an autumnal horse-blanket plaid on the other. I made a straight skirt (rust face-out) and a matching shawl, the edges of which I finished by hand with a kind of naïve whipstitch. I’d thought that a straight skirt would be easy, but they can be quite challenging even for a professional. This was before I understood the concept of darts, so I made the skirt without them. Luckily my mother’s figure, though wonderful in clothes, was never too curvaceous, so darts weren’t as necessary. The end result was a crude piece that she paired shrewdly with a white ribbed wool turtleneck sweater worn untucked, hiding the chewed-up waistband and horribly set-in zipper. She wore it to shul on Rosh Hashanah with the shawl dramatically tossed over her shoulders, and accessorized it with a gold-coin medallion necklace on a thick gold chain, a massive opaque jade cocktail ring, and rust stack-heeled suede boots.
When I think about that machine now, its importance in my life, I’m simultaneously touched and amused. Back then it wouldn’t have occurred to me that my father bringing home a ruffler was a sign of love. But it was. And leave it to my mother to transform my first-ever attempt at making clothing into a fashion event. She knew I’d be crushed if she didn’t wear it—and if she wore it, she was going to make sure it looked good.
* * *
Having lived through the ordeal of my bar mitzvah, I was faced with the much more life-altering choice of where I would go to high school. I’d humored my parents long enough; I was depressed, fatter than ever, and I had to get out. My choices were limited, though. There was the local public high school, and another in Coney Island named after John Dewey that my eldest sister went to. Neither of those appealed to me and Flatbush Yeshiva High School was out of the question. Then I got really lucky in the form of a great teacher who changed my life forever.
My eighth-grade English teacher at Yeshivah of Flatbush, a woman named Sheila Kanowitz, was modern and good-looking. She didn’t wear a wig; instead she wore her own straightened, thick, dark hair knotted on top of her head or in a ponytail. She wore almost no makeup and had dark expressive eyes and, in general, a very expressive face that grimaced with opinions, acknowledgments of humor, exuberance, and sarcasm. She treated me like a peer;
we made each other laugh.
She assigned a book report on the novel To Sir, With Love, and I decided rather than write another boring paper I would do a dramatization using the entire classroom as a set. And instead of having one of my adolescent classmates play the leading role, a black teacher named Mr. Braithwaite, I prerecorded the lines on a Panasonic cassette tape player, leaving his actual physical presence to the imagination. I knew there would be less disbelief to suspend and definitely more tension if the main protagonist was in some way abstracted, and it really paid off. The class loved it, and Ms. Kanowitz was impressed. It didn’t escape her notice how out of place I was in the yeshiva, and sometime early that spring she approached me with the idea of auditioning for the Fiorello LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts, which was the premier public school for the arts in all of New York City. The name alone was thrilling: Performing Arts.
Convincing my parents took a lot of doing. At first it appeared hopeless—my father added the word “unequivocally” to his “no”—a real ten-dollar word he used when he meant business. The fact that I’d have to ride two hours on the subway every day, a solid hour each way, didn’t help my cause. In those days the subway wasn’t nearly as clean and safe as it is now. And Performing Arts was located in the center of New York City, on West Forty-sixth Street between Broadway and Avenue of the Americas, right smack in the center of Times Square, which back then was a really seedy neighborhood. There were porn movie houses and prostitutes on every corner, junkies in plain sight, and streets filthy with uncollected garbage. Danger notwithstanding, my mother was amenable to the idea, and once she was on board I knew she could convince my father. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for either of them, but I think they were so eager for me to find some kind of happiness that they ultimately overlooked all the possible dangers and agreed that I should try. My mother made a prophetic statement: “The day you start that school you’re going to be so happy, you’re going to drop all the extra weight.”
Once my parents accepted the idea, it was decided I should audition for both the music and the drama departments. My piano teacher, Alan Small, was charged with preparing me for the music audition. We picked a Mozart sonata, which seemed to show off my capabilities to their best. One of my greatest assets was my ability to play very fast, and that really shone in that particular piece. I also prepared a schmaltzy arrangement that I wrote of the Gershwin song “’S Wonderful.”
My mother drove me to the audition that Saturday and waited in the lobby. More nervous than I’d ever been in my life, I walked up three or four flights of stairs to where the music department was located. It was a strange building, erected in the nineteenth century as an elementary school, proportioned for little children, not the growing teens who inhabited it during those later years. The water fountains were lower than usual and it had very shallow staircases that produced a trippy Alice in Wonderland effect. I waited in the hall for what seemed like an eternity, listening to snippets of music coming from other auditions. From what I could hear, I felt like I had a strong chance. Finally I was ushered into a small auditorium. I seated myself at the piano and after saying my name and introducing my music, I began the Mozart piece—and stumbled out of the gate. I was trying to show off my fast playing, which seemed easy at home but not so much in front of others. I paused. Breathed. Looked at the teachers who were running the audition, begged their patience, and started again a bit slower. And again I stumbled. And again I started and stumbled again. I held back my tears and finally I got going. At the end I received a round of applause, probably out of sympathy, but the applause made me more confident to play the Gershwin, which I did with a great flourish.
Ms. Kanowitz helped me prepare for the drama audition. We chose two monologues from a list of suggestions supplied by the school; one from a play by William Inge called The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, and another from a play about a morphine-addicted vet and his family called A Hatful of Rain. I navigated my way to the Drama Book Shop on the subway. It was located in the West Forties, up two flights of stairs. It’s a place I got to know very well. Those rooms lined with shelves and all those thousands of plays became a kind of mecca for me and my classmates those years in Performing Arts. Ms. Kanowitz helped me plumb some of the more mysterious depths of the characters, staying late and meeting me one weekend. I felt apprehensive about memorizing all the words, but once I was able to concentrate on the character and think his thoughts, I found that remembering wasn’t the issue. It was about making it real, and convincing myself it was real.
I never thought I would come close to getting into the drama department—my talent, I’d always told myself, was for music, and so I wasn’t nearly as nervous. A senior student volunteer who was enlisted to read with the auditionees met me and brought me to a smaller room than the one used for the music audition. She had long dirty-blond hair that she switched dramatically from side to side. This was a girl who already, as a senior in high school, understood something about sex and being sexy. This sense of style extended to the drama teachers who judged me that day, all of whom seemed more attractive than the ones from the music department. Their hair and clothes made sense, even if it wasn’t, in all cases, chic. The attractiveness of everyone else in that room further convinced me that I didn’t belong among them, and I was resigned to the inevitability of being rejected.
First, I performed the Inge monologue, which was sad without being self-pitying. Then I began the second monologue, and I was able to lose myself in it. A hush lingered in the room after I finished. (Actors do that for one another in class—they fall silent and speechless, as a way of overstating how good you were, also to make their reaction as or more important than your performance). I entertained guilty fantasies of leaving my torturous career as a pianist aside for what seemed like a more fun career as an actor but, as it turned out, the choice was not mine to make. About two months after those fateful auditions, two letters came in the mail from Fiorello LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts; one letter telling me that I was not accepted into the music department, and one saying I was accepted into the drama department. I suppose the music faculty who auditioned me thought the stumbling and performance anxiety bode poorly for my chances to succeed as a professional musician—and they were right. Whatever the cause, the outcome worked in my favor. I didn’t realize it, but fate was smiling.
10
Things went topsy-turvy those first few months at Performing Arts high school. Being sequestered at yeshiva for the first eight years of my school life then rushing head-on into this exposed, modern, libertine environment was like eating a main course of culture shock with a large side order of guilt. The main objective of the rabbis in my life was to prove what a fuckup I was. Meanwhile they drummed it into my head not to trust anyone but other Jews. So no matter how difficult life among the religion was, they made it impossible to accept any other, happier life among people I could relate to. The mostly sad, repressed world around me had suddenly transformed into a wonderful, vibrant one, and it was only with a good deal of fear and anxiety that I was able to start letting go of the past. The object now was to assimilate to a place where I actually belonged—despite the fact that I’d been brainwashed to believe that assimilation was the root of all evil. For at least the first year I felt like an impostor. I was convinced I had entered a dream and would wake and be deported back to the horrible world I had come from. Everyone at my new school seemed so glamourous and worldly, and there I was, this fat, overly sheltered yeshiva boy. During my first year at Performing Arts, while all this joy and excitement was going on in the foreground, there was a background hum of fear and skepticism.
Still, I realized that this new world set before me could be my salvation. There were people of color, whom I was drawn to as a reaction to my father’s racism. I was eager to have diverse friends just to prove him wrong. There was a transgender person named Ro with whom I spent hours in the library. There were homosexuals—mostly closeted—but also
out ones like Wallace Jenkins, a classmate who would become a great role model. And Alan Reiff, also in my class, who seemed so much like me: chubby and effeminate and from a Jewish home. He wasn’t out yet either, but that wasn’t the point. It was good to know I wasn’t the only one with that exact set of attributes.
For a long time the other kids seemed to be having a lot more fun than I was. For that first year I only let myself put a toe in the waters of this new society. These other kids fit in so much better and they looked better, too. I was fat and pimply and had a Jew-fro while they were (for the most part) thin and good-looking, and their ethnicity always seemed to add cachet while mine seemed like a draggy old thing that needed to be shed. Being black or Hispanic was so much sexier. For the first few months, whenever I made inroads with a friendship, something always reeled me back in. For a while kashruth—Jewish dietary laws—was an issue. I was afraid to eat things that weren’t kosher for fear of being found out. Also, most of the cool parties took place on Friday nights, which were out of the question for me because of my obligation to be home for Shabbat. And when boys and girls paired off I was completely stumped. I never lied, but I was also too scared to claim my sexuality just yet. Eventually I figured out how to put the subject off with self-deprecating fat jokes, and I functioned as a kind of asexual jester.