I.M. Read online

  One Saturday afternoon when I was about ten, Uncle Sam—who collected art and dabbled in painting—took me to an art-supply store in Greenwich Village, where he bought me an entire set of oil paints, brushes, turpentine, linseed oil, and an easel, all contained in one of those wonderful wooden art boxes with the compartments and the slide-out palette. I was so proud of that box. He brought me back to his home studio and began teaching me how to use oil paints. We met every Sunday morning for a few months and I learned a great deal quickly and began painting a lot. A few summers later, when I was fourteen, I spent most of my days and nights on the porch of the huge old farmhouse my family rented in Deal, New Jersey, using it like an outdoor studio, painting for hours and days on end. I have memories of being in such a state of deep concentration that summer, I wouldn’t even notice a rainstorm until the water slanted into the porch. By the end of that summer I had produced about twenty pictures that I entered into a local art show in nearby Long Branch. I sold two pictures. One of them, of a ballerina, was purchased by Uncle Sam.

  I always had the powerful sense that my uncle loved me and accepted me not despite who I was, but because of who I was. When I was five or six the family went to a local street fair in Brooklyn, and my parents put me on a ride made up of mini fire trucks that went around in a circle, like a merry-go-round. There’s a picture of me on the ride wearing striped coverall shorts. I thought it would be funny if I pretended I was in a parade, and I started posing and waving in an effeminate way, like a homecoming queen I’d seen on TV. As I was doing it I perceived that familiar hint of dread, I could sense shame lurking. My dad turned away. But Uncle Sam seemed amused. He waved back and smiled at me.

  My parents did their best considering the time and circumstances. They just wanted me to fit in, and they tried not to appear too disappointed that I didn’t. They wanted me to be thin and athletic and manly. They hated that I was mostly at home in the garage playing with puppets, or sewing, or painting. Even practicing the piano too much got on their nerves. They constantly encouraged me to play outside in the sunshine. (I think it’s the reason that to this day I hate summer weather and sunny days.) The way they coped with my specialness was to look away—something I was completely aware of.

  None of this was surprising given that homosexuality was completely out of the question at that time, especially in the Syrian community. Yes, there were people who wandered in such as my aunt Deanne’s friend Michael Sherman, but he was way outside the mainstream and someone who came across even stranger and scarier based on my parents’ dicey reactions to him. The entire subject was denied any space or expression whatsoever. My mother claims she didn’t even know what homosexuality was until she was thirty. And no matter how much bullying I experienced for being a “faggot,” no one could really fathom what it would mean to really be one. I don’t think my detractors had enough understanding of homosexuality to make the physical correlation. The same was true of me. While I fantasized about lying in the arms of a man, I didn’t realize the sexual or political implications of that fantasy. It was before I had any real sexual desire that I understood, so it didn’t quite feel like I was keeping it a secret. These were, for lack of a better descriptive word, romantic feelings I had—I couldn’t imagine acting on them, nor did I have a particular idea of how I would act on them if given the opportunity. And it wasn’t like I had anyone soliciting me about these feelings. Certainly not my parents. None of my relatives. Not Dr. Mossey.

  God was certainly no help. According to what I was taught at yeshiva, god hated everything about me. He hated “graven images,” any kind of art, which is what I spent most of my time creating. And he hated homosexuals—they were supposed to be stoned to death, an idea that got more and more terrifying as I got older and understood the specific reference to me. Art and my natural attraction to men are as much a part of me as my own nose. If god hated those things, I concluded, he surely hated me. On numerous occasions my father backed this up with proclamations like “I think all fairies should be lined up and shot.” And while that threw me into a state of panic, I didn’t think I’d ever have to reveal my feelings to him—or to anyone else for that matter. My modus operandi was a neat combination of hiding and denying.

  But while I could hide my romantic crushes on men, I couldn’t change my effeminate demeanor. The fact that I was utterly different from the other boys at school and shul was obvious to everyone. Bullying was a regular occurrence throughout my childhood. Mockery. Insults. Pranks. And not just from kids my age. From older kids. From rabbis. I was lucky because I was resilient. And most of the time I did a good job of staying away from possible sources. I preferred to be alone with my puppets and my TV set, and when I did interact with other kids, I chose carefully—I knew I was safe enough with my cousins, who had to be civil with me, and with my one close friend Jackie Gindy, whom I idolized.

  Jackie and I are exactly the same age and had been in Yeshivah of Flatbush together for a number of years before we noticed each other and formed an unlikely friendship. Jackie couldn’t have been more different from me. He was thin, good-looking, and beloved in the community, even in the fifth grade. He came from money, and in that community as elsewhere, people acknowledge that as a lovely personality trait. But it would be unfair to suggest that Jackie’s popularity came solely from his looks and money. He was sweet and easy to get along with, and radiated warmth and a kind of happy vitality. Everyone loved him—he was impossible not to love—and the more beloved Jackie was, the more that engendered a lovely life, and on and on went the cycle of positive reinforcement.

  The classes I shared with Jackie were always brighter and happier places because he was there. He held an enormous amount of power in the social realms at school, and he wielded it benevolently, often putting off my detractors without trying or even saying anything; he only had to enter the scene. People knew we were friends, and they treated me better in his presence. I couldn’t really understand what our bonds were based on, but I knew they were deep and real and that I had his loyalty.

  * * *

  I didn’t always possess good character judgment. One day when I was ten or eleven, outside the synagogue, one of the boys I thought was my friend lured me into performing one of the female impersonations I had begun doing around that age. I must have been delusional not to see this coming, but what ham can resist being asked to perform? At first the small crowd seemed rapt. I was doing Streisand—“Don’t Rain on My Parade,” probably the best number in my repertoire. Then the crowd grew, and by the middle of the number, the taunting started. I tried to ignore it, but after a while I realized the whole thing had been a setup. Finally I stopped. I had the presence of mind to shout, “You don’t appreciate greatness when you see it.” To which the kids responded by making a ring around me; there in the entrance to shul, they danced as if doing the hora, chanting over and over, “We appreciate Ike! We appreciate Ike!” (Ike was a nickname for Isaac that I detested.) As impervious as I tried to be, that was a bad day.

  I was most scared of exposing my family to the ridicule. I would avoid my sisters at school for fear they would get a glimpse of the taunting. Walking to shul on a holiday was an ordeal. Approaching the entrance to Beth Torah meant navigating a gauntlet of insults from the other boys. I’d make any excuse to walk alone so as to more easily dodge the group of mean kids that seemed always to await me there. My mouth would run dry in expectation of some horrible scene and the shameful prospect that someone would tell my parents, or my sisters would see and feel implicated by association. My parents must have been aware of the situation—certainly my sisters were. But they never spoke of it because I think they understood that I preferred it not to be an issue. It helped me persevere to think of it as my own problem that I could keep under control. And on good days I relished defending myself against bullies. It rarely got physical, it was mostly words, and I think learning how to defend myself against those bullies is one reason I have no problems calling on words when I nee
d them.

  I was born with a lot of fight, and with an optimistic streak that I think I got from my mother—no matter how sad or depressed I get, I go on. I was also born with the great knowledge that feelings don’t lie. I don’t know what taught me that lesson; perhaps a lot of artists are born with an innate sense of trust in their feelings, and perhaps the undercurrent of my mother’s support imprinted that message on me, too. I gathered that being different was a good thing. I had no desire to be the same as the boys who played basketball and conformed to what everyone expected of them. I didn’t challenge them—there was no point in that. But I also didn’t try to be anyone other than who I was.

  Sometimes public shaming took me by surprise and there was no escape. The summer I was eleven my parents sent me to Camp Winadu, an all-boys sleepaway camp, which was largely attended by Syrian-Jewish boys. I’ve blotted most of that horrible summer from memory, but I can tell you that I wasn’t the boy with the sun-kissed skin out on the lake water-skiing. I was the fat boy in the arts-and-crafts shed making découpage. On the odd days when I wasn’t hiding in the woods by myself, I was hiding in the woods and doing female impersonations for small groups of kids who would find me there. At the end of that summer, the counselors did a send-up show featuring parodies of some of the campers. One of the counselors dressed up as a girl, with a wig, a dress, and a tulle stole. As I watched the crude performance and listened to the other campers howl and hoot and jeer, it slowly dawned on me that the “girl” in the show was meant to be me. That it has the power to embarrass me even now is a testament to how deeply mortified I was. It was one thing for me to emerge occasionally among all the small-mindedness, racism, sexism, and homophobia, and embrace my oddness publicly doing female impersonations and puppet shows. It was another to be broadly ridiculed so publicly, and by adults who were meant to be looking out for me. It made for a deeply felt, at times very sad, reality.

  For the most part I lived by operating in a state of denial. Not a denial of who I was—rather, a denial of my environment, and that it had any particular power over me. It was a form of self-preservation, but it was also a great test of self-awareness. To put it crudely: How else would I know I was a sissy if it weren’t for bullies?

  4

  If my mother colored my existence, my father outlined it. He stood in contrast to her in almost every way. She had a command of the language; my father expressed himself awkwardly. My mother grasped the modern world while my father’s view of it was narrowed by his past. And yet no one can say they didn’t inspire my sisters and I to live a better life than the ones they had as kids, and to move further forward than they were able to as adults.

  Parents in those days were not the friendly caregivers of today who agree with their child’s every utterance and peccadillo. In the middle sixties and seventies there were still winners and losers at ball games; big, scary accidents on unsafe, concrete jungle-gyms; playing in the street till all hours; and riding bikes to the ends of the Earth. When I was growing up, parents demanded respect, awe; they were people who put conditions in place, who did not stand for deviance from any of the plans they laid out. My mother was the day-to-day disciplinarian, every once in a while threatening to slap us, her hand hovering in the air or reaching for her slipper, which meant something worse. Her threats were more amusing than terrifying. If we expressed our dismay or disagreed with her in any way, she’d shoot us a deadly glance and we’d get the standard “Well, you’re stuck with me!”—which covered a lot of ground those years. My father was the overlord. The unpresent presence. The threat of a formal spanking if we really got out of line—more emotionally terrifying than physically painful. He wasn’t involved in the small business of the household. He’d arrive home from work late in the evenings, pour himself a Dewar’s on the rocks or a Mateus Rosé, although he was not a drinking man. After his first heart attack the doctor told him an occasional cocktail would do him good. So he used the cocktail more as a way to tune out than as something to overindulge in.

  My father, Zeke Isadore Mizrahi, was born into the garment trade. His father was a tailor in Syria who worked as a ladies’ clothing cutter in a sweatshop in SoHo after he emigrated to the United States shortly before 1920. I don’t know if it was due to some failing on his part, or if it was a result of the hardships of the Depression, but my grandfather had a tough time holding down a job, and my father described his upbringing as “dirt poor.” Both my parents were born the same year, 1927, two years before the great crash of the stock market. There were nine children in my father’s family—two girls and the rest boys, and all seven of the boys shared a single bedroom. He and his brothers would go with their father to wholesale food markets where they would buy huge sacks of rice and lentils and other cheap provisions that they’d survive on for weeks. My father was forced to drop out of school before the seventh grade and find odd jobs in sweatshops to help support the family. Eventually he learned his father’s trade as a cutter, his gateway into the garment industry.

  In 1957 my eldest sister, Norma, was born, and my father had made a name for himself in the community as the owner of one of its most successful childrenswear businesses, making mass-market coats and suits for little boys. Two years later, when my sister Marilyn was born, the company was so successful there were plans to take it public. Two years after that, when my mother was pregnant with me, the public offering failed, and my father lost everything. But he was resilient. He reestablished himself by frequenting a coffee shop in the garment center that in those days was a kind of industry meeting place. He sat there morning after morning and finally met his next partners, with whom he would from a manufacturing concern. Together they founded a company called Rydal Mfg., makers of little boys’ coats and suits, with headquarters at 112 West Thirty-fourth Street, in what was regarded as the premier childrenswear showroom facility. My father not only overcame the blow of losing his business while having to support a young family, he started a new business in the ashes of the old one. That was a great lesson to me and my sisters. When I went out of business in 1998, I thought back to this history and puzzled a lot about the idea of reliving one’s parent’s mistakes before embarking on one’s true purpose.

  While my father was bred for the garment business, I always thought of his trade as a sort of fallback for him. As a young man he’d been a drummer for a big band—his professional name was Zeke Manners (not to be confused with the country-western star)—and became well-known on the local circuit. He had a fantastic sense of rhythm, and years after he gave it up he used to play the drums with his hands on any surface available; accompanying the radio or just eating up nervous energy in the car while waiting for a light to change, he played the dashboard as though it were a conga drum.

  The stories he told of his days as a drummer, which he meant as a cautionary tale about the debauchery of misspent youth, brought out the opposite reaction from me. I was fascinated and couldn’t understand why he’d left it all behind. He drank a little. He even smoked reefer. He fell madly in love with a non-Jewish woman, and they moved in together. Their romance ended when two of his older brothers hunted him down in his “love nest” and “beat sense into him.” Sense meant finding the right Syrian-Jewish girl and settling down in a reliable business and having kids. Although I was one of the kids that resulted, I was never convinced it was a good thing he turned his back on his musical career, not to mention this woman he seemed to love. I often thought that the years he spent as a drummer were his happiest.

  He and my mother started dating in 1956, after they met at a community dance. They were the same age—thirty—and for her it was a crisis, since she was considered way past the marriageable age in the community. They had actually met once before ten years earlier at another community party when he’d asked her to dance and my mother said she “turned him down flat.” When they met the second time, however, my mother was more amenable. She didn’t want to be an old maid and still held on to her hopes of starting a family. For
ever after, my mother maintained the upper hand in the relationship and never tired of telling the story of their first meeting.

  * * *

  My mother, Sarah Esses, did not lack for a healthy self-image. She was born in Brooklyn, the oldest of eight. She ruled the house even then. Her immigrant Syrian parents didn’t speak great English, so from the time my mother learned to read, they relied on her to translate from English into the broken Arabic she spoke.

  Here’s a bit of questionable family lore—a story my mother loves to tell: Sometime in the early 1930s, when she was six or seven years old, a couple of Hollywood scouts came to her neighborhood in Brooklyn looking for talent. They noticed the beautiful Sarah Esses and knew immediately that they had a star on their hands. They took her to a local portrait photographer to take her picture. The picture is evidence that the story has some basis in truth. She is hauntingly beautiful. Draped like a cherub, perfect ringlets, searing, deep-set eyes staring directly at the lens. Apparently the minute the powers-that-be saw that photograph, they pressed the talent scouts to sign my mother to a contract. But it was not to be. Her parents were quick to refuse. No daughter of theirs was going to ruin her life and become a child star, and no one was moving to Hollywood. I often wondered why my grandparents took Baby Sarah for the portrait sitting in the first place. Was it to taunt the scouts? Was it to prove to themselves that they indeed had a beautiful daughter with star quality? My mother insists that those very same talent scouts discovered Shirley Temple a few months later. I have a framed print of that photograph—it lives on a shelf in my den as a symbol of my mother’s great missed opportunity.