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  My days of traumatizing Miss Rivlin came to an end soon after, when my sisters announced that they no longer wanted to take piano lessons. Given my natural affinity, my parents decided that I should continue on, but with a new piano teacher. Alan Small was a middle-aged man with a good sense of humor who wore short-sleeved cotton-blend plaid shirts and smelled of pencil shavings and cigarettes. He had big, sensitive ears and a disproportionately large, round, bald head. We got along much better than I ever did with Miss Rivlin, and he taught me piano more in accordance with how I was naturally inclined to learn it. In addition to the classical pieces we studied together, each week on staff paper he would handwrite tunes—Gershwin, Burt Bacharach, anything he knew I liked—and leave the bass clef on the page empty so I could fill in the accompanying chords and create the arrangements myself. The drudgery of routine piano lessons became more like a happy musical collaboration, and I practiced constantly and looked forward to our weekly meetings.

  My piano playing became a source of pride for my parents, who would encourage me to play for company. Most dinner parties or holiday gatherings culminated in me dazzling the group with an excerpt of Mozart or my schmaltzy new arrangement of the Gershwins’ “The Man I Love” or a rendition of Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind.” Sometimes I felt a bit like a performing monkey, trotted out so my parents could seem like sophisticated culture mavens. Occasionally I resented this, but for the most part I was hammy enough to love the attention and would be slightly pissed off if the subject of playing for the assembled company didn’t arise.

  Other than my parents’ insistence on piano lessons and showing me off at dinner parties, there wasn’t much music in the house. When my father left music behind as a profession, he seemed to drop it altogether as a part of his life. We had one portable hi-fi stereo, a blue Naugahyde thing that looked like a suitcase, with speakers that flipped out on each side of the turntable. It was a family possession, but it was usually in my room. Streisand was always playing. And Judy. And Liza. And Dusty Springfield and Dionne Warwick. I saved whatever money I could from my allowance to buy more records. There was a record store on Avenue J and East Sixteenth Street called Harnik’s Happy House that I could walk to, and there I bought all my records. But Barbra was my favorite. I collected her records in whatever technology was prevalent. I began with the full collection on vinyl, then I moved through eight-track tape, cassette, CD, and digital. Sometime in the early 1970s I succumbed to a magazine circular I found: Columbia House Record and Tape Club, which offered fifteen cassette tapes for a dollar. I got so many of my favorite tapes from that club: Sergio Mendez & Brasil ’66, the West Side Story movie soundtrack, a compilation of Stravinsky ballets, and most beloved, Liza with a “Z.” My parents’ bedroom was next door to mine, and my mother used to complain about the noise, often barging in and turning the volume down herself.

  Ironically, the female impersonations that eventually became a source of shame and awkwardness for my parents originated with a gift from my mother. It was the Funny Girl soundtrack, which became my prized possession and which I listened to obsessively. An unselfconscious transformation occurred in me as I sang along: I started impersonating Streisand. And the more I sang along, the more I could reproduce those sounds. As I added to my record collection, I also added to my repertoire of impersonations, which soon included Judy Garland, Dionne Warwick, Petula Clark, and Shirley Bassey. At that point I had no inclination toward drag; I was more interested in creating a vocal illusion. Before puberty I really could make my voice sound exactly like these women. I secretly bought a special lock for my bedroom door, a sort of stainless-steel plate that fit between the door and the jamb with a brass fob that slid into place and insured privacy. I spotted it in the window of a big hardware store called Doody (no kidding) a few doors down from Midwood Trimmings. I knew if I could have total privacy I’d feel more comfortable developing my abilities as a performer. And once I was alone, I started using my room to practice not only the vocals but the mannerisms of the singers, whom I’d seen in movies and on TV. I tried to bring whatever physicality I could to the performances—which was often crude. I never used clothes or makeup, just voice and mannerisms. Even at that age I knew I was copying these women not necessarily to become better as a female impersonator, but more to find my own voice, to find my own personal ideas and the ability to put a song across as myself.

  When I was doing these impersonations I could fly up to the ceiling and observe myself. I looked like, sounded like—became—these women. I got lost in the volume of sound, some coming from the record, some from my body. I got lost in the lush arrangements, and in the passion of the singing. I felt gorgeous. I knew the impressions were good, and once I grew brazen (or foolhardy) enough to perform them outside my bedroom, I got the attention I needed—even if it was the wrong kind of attention. The impersonations were okay if I chose my audience wisely.

  There were some strange mixed signals from my parents. When my mother’s family visited, my female impersonations were okay, even encouraged. Aunt Adele—my mother’s favorite and closest sister—seemed really entertained. But when my father’s less broad-minded family was around, my whole personality had to be shut down. And though my mother and father never ridiculed me, they were terribly uncomfortable around certain aspects of my personality, and probably fearful of what was to come. They weren’t wrong to be concerned. Not to apologize for their actions but, really, how do you tell a twelve-year-old boy in 1973 that it’s okay to impersonate Streisand in public?

  My flamboyance was always obvious: I was musical, I put on glittering puppet shows, I drew pictures in the pages of the religious books at school, I had a basement atelier. Many of those could be chalked up to being “artistic,” but the impersonations risked exposing me on a whole other level that I didn’t comprehend. It was somehow related to this mass of shame that followed me around like a stray dog. Whatever it was, it was getting closer.

  7

  The basement flooded the same year my father had his first heart attack, and I always thought of that flood as a kind of physical manifestation of our anxiety surrounding his illness. Any moment my mother wasn’t at the hospital tending to him, she was bailing water. We all pitched in. As scared and exhausted as she was, I got the sense that the flood gave her something real to focus on, something to do—water to bail, a tangible physical challenge with an end in sight; the slow, steady progress of one bucket of water following another. A lot of the details about my father’s first heart attack were kept from my sisters and me. I was twelve, and my sisters were fourteen and sixteen. We were old enough to know there was something terribly wrong, but we didn’t know exactly what, which left a huge empty space to fill with conjecture.

  The day it happened we heard the story thirdhand from Aunt Adele, who came over and made us dinner and stayed with us while my mother remained at the hospital. She said my dad and my uncle Sam had just eaten dinner at his favorite restaurant in Midtown, called Bon Vivant, and while my uncle was hailing a taxi, my father fell in the street. An ambulance came and rushed him to the hospital. A day and a half later my mother came home looking like a total wreck, took off her shoes and stockings, and started bailing water. Her story was less complex; “Your father is just fine,” she told us.

  My sisters seemed paralyzed with fear. I remember feeling a certain guilty relief that my father wasn’t in the house. At that point in my life his presence made me feel physically anxious. I was on the brink of realizing that my lifestyle had a name, and my sexual leanings weren’t something I’d be able to hide forever. And if I couldn’t hide them, then I’d be another of those fairies whom my father thought should be lined up and shot. I realize now that he most likely never would have confronted me, but at the time I was always terribly nervous about a confrontation I was not ready for. When he was in the house, I was on tenterhooks.

  When my dad returned from the hospital our lives changed. The food we ate as a result of my mother trying to cook hea
lthier was bland to the point of being funny. She made a ridiculous celery and mushroom casserole that was so terrible, it tasted like a kind of medicine to cure heart disease. All fried and fatty foods were banned. My father was forced to quit smoking. This health regimen was something he did only within my mother’s sight. Outside of it, he ate corned beef sandwiches and smoked, winking at me to not tell his secrets.

  The family schedule was also affected by my father’s new semi-invalid status. He was encouraged to rest and to sleep, and so he was around in the mornings until 11:00 A.M. or even noon. Of all the things my mother had to adjust to, that was the hardest. She wanted to seize her days, but was slowed down considerably by my father’s long morning routine. He woke up around nine and dominated the bathroom for at least an hour with his morning toilette. Then he had special breakfast needs and a whole regimen of pills that needed administering. His work schedule, though shorter, was never less stressful. Business was difficult, and many was the time I witnessed my father in his office, red in the face, screaming at someone over the phone. It was a challenge for him to spend less time at the office. He felt his absence would affect business adversely, and it probably did. The heart disease added a whole layer of stress to his life, which was already stressful. He was the breadwinner for a family of five, with a bar mitzvah around the corner and two daughters who needed marrying off; two very expensive propositions.

  My parents’ lives as a couple changed after the heart attack, too. They didn’t go out as much. And there were the weekly visits to the heart specialist, a man my father swore by (“the number-one heart doctor in the country”), Dr. Robert Dresdale. My mother had less faith in Dr. Dresdale, based on the fact that my father didn’t seem to be getting much better under his care. They went to Dr. Dresdale once a week for a year after his first heart attack, and once a month thereafter. He became my father’s friend and advisor. My mother struggled with my father’s devotion to him, and they quarreled about it. He had two more heart attacks after that first, including one that went undetected for a while, which would make anyone waver in her faith. There was talk of heart surgery, but Dr. Dresdale overruled that in favor of putting a healthier lifestyle in place—a lifestyle that my father really never committed fully to. My mother wanted to get a second opinion, but my father held on to his idol worship of Dresdale.

  * * *

  My bar mitzvah was a confusing distraction from my father’s illness. I recall it as one of the most troublesome times in my life. At the same time that I was excited about the pending festivities I felt an underlying dread, the sense that I was being initiated against my will into the wrong club.

  I had bar mitzvah lessons with a man named Mickey Cairey, who taught all the boys in our community for decades. His presence made me uneasy. He was a gnomish, disheveled figure in suits two sizes too big and orthopedic shoes—rough-edged in general, a guy who according to my father was “the salt of the earth.” He spoke in the same coarse, uneducated manner as my father’s family, with a thick Brooklyn accent and aggressively bad grammar, representing all the things I was trying to escape. He was pitied for his unmarried status and vagabond mien, and he seemingly had no life other than teaching bar mitzvah boys and arranging funerals. The community was grateful to him for doing things they didn’t want to do themselves—such as burying their kin and teaching me the words I needed to know for this meaningless rite that was about to take place.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have taken it all so seriously. Bar mitzvahs in the Syrian community at that time were far less about boys becoming men and far more of an opportunity for families to showboat their wealth. Families prepared for their sons’ bar mitzvahs years in advance. They reserved temple and venue dates, and saved up for the extravagant parties they’d be expected to host. It was a Byzantine undertaking that dominated the family of the bar mitzvah boy for as long as two years. The glamourous excess of the production was not lost on me, and I took a great interest in my mother’s obsession with dresses and flower arrangements and catering. Had it not been for the religious aspect, I might have enjoyed the proceedings.

  Instead, I felt deep uneasiness, fear, and skepticism about the whole concept of “becoming a man.” I felt wrong about accepting or carrying out any of the things I was committing to. It was one thing to be swaying and mumbling in shul or pretending to daven in school. It was another thing entirely being in the spotlight, leading the ceremony proclaiming my devotion to god. I felt like a terrible liar. And there weren’t only religious repercussions. Passing from boyhood, where whatever sexuality I was inhabiting could be overlooked, into manhood, a time in one’s life when sexuality would become almost the center of one’s identity, was overwhelming and frightening in its implications. At a family gathering I once overheard my father talking to his sisters and a few of my older cousins about the fact that I was obviously still a virgin, a condition that would need to change in the coming years. The consensus among them was that when the time came, I should be indoctrinated into manhood by being taken to a brothel. I didn’t know exactly what they were talking about—and I was too terrified to ask—but I could make a good guess. I remember my older cousins snickering and nudging each other. My father never followed through on this, but the very thought of it caused me panic for days.

  At the time the standard bar mitzvah had many parts to it. There was the weekday event, usually a Tuesday or a Thursday during the morning prayers, when the ark of the Torah was opened and the bar mitzvah boy went up and read the parashah aloud—the paragraph in the Torah that relates to his birthday. That was usually followed by a small breakfast held in the lobby of the shul before everyone went off to work. Then there was the Saturday “Shabbat” service where the whole thing was repeated in front of a much larger congregation and with considerably more ritualistic fanfare. On that same day, the bar mitzvah family was obligated to host something called a sebbet. The home was flung open for the entire community—usually about three hundred people showed up—for a casual, albeit uncomfortably tight, lunch served out of tinfoil bins on long, ungainly folding tables set up all over the house. The guests would stay all afternoon, praying and singing and eating.

  The pièce de résistance of any bar mitzvah was the grand evening celebration, when the family got to really put on a show and spend a fortune. My dad’s heart attack limited the possibilities. Instead of the evening party, which seemed a little too stressful and a bit out of our reach financially, we put the emphasis on an elegant luncheon, to be served at home, on the day of the actual bar mitzvah. Because of so many bar mitzvahs in the community, mine happened on a random Thursday in May, even though my birthday is in the middle of October.

  My mother took the helm early. My parents went on a vacation to St. Thomas a year and a half in advance of the event and came back with a dozen Georg Jensen silver vases for the tables, which they got for a big discount in one of the island outlet stores. My mother started sourcing fabrics for tablecloths at least a year before the event, constantly nudging my father to bring home swatch books of fabrics that might work. Having not exactly finished the décor on the house, she borrowed paintings from Aunt Deanne, colorful abstract paintings done by her mother, which lent a wonderful, modern, finished look to the place. Tons of temporary and last-minute décor was decided on. They found a Lucite trolley with stainless-steel wheels, which they set in the living room as a bar. Also they found a wall-mirror sculpture, popular at the time, consisting of clear, smoked-, and black-mirrored slats that overlapped to form an abstract city skyline.

  My mother was excited by some of the details and overwhelmed by others. In a community where status symbols were everything, she had a big task ahead. There was a story she told about a lunch hosted by her friend, a woman named Adelaide, considered a doyenne of beautiful china and crystal among the ladies of the community. Adelaide was tired of them snooping about her table, so at that lunch she set out her best Baccarat and Limoges, and on the flip side of every dish was a small sticker sh
e’d had printed that said “none of your business.” (I wondered how my mother knew about those stickers!)

  There was definitely a greater need for my mother’s afternoon lie-downs during this period. She would take to the sofa, or on bad days her bed, with reading materials you might expect of the times: novels by Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and nonfiction by Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer. These afternoon “rest periods” were a sign to the family that she was on shaky emotional ground.

  Still, whatever social or financial pressures my mother felt over the bar mitzvah were more than compensated for by her passionate engagement with selecting the wardrobe. She scoured the usual places in order to dress my sisters, and bought and returned so many dresses. She finally settled on a silvery-blue satin flapper dress for Norma, accessorized with silver lamé tights and patent-leather Mary-Janes. Marilyn wore a patchwork-print flounced peasant dress with her hair partially braided. My father was an elegant man despite being portly, and he dressed himself well. He had a weekly standing haircut-and-manicure appointment. He wore custom-made suits and a seasonal turnover of ties and shirts, all of which he had made at a place in New York City called Kohmer Marcus, where he took me on occasion to witness those fittings. He also had a great collection of pocket squares, a few of which I still have and carry.