Note: this is only an opening section or chapter of what has to become a far longer work. I have been ducking it for months because I don’t want to face how I became what I became.
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“Where I Lived and What I Lived For”
I never felt safe. Ever. Despite the barriers I’d placed around me, regardless of how effectively I’d surrounded myself with walls high and thick enough to shut out (so I thought) miseries I could not even name, all the same there was always the one inevitable fissure sufficient to fit the blade of fear and threat that would cut me and school me in how to cut others.
There are reports from witnesses who said that in the Nazi extermination camps, in the gas chambers themselves, doomed Jews would climb over each other, maul and maim their fellow victims, simply to get to where there might be a few seconds more of breathable air before the gas took them, too. Such desperation is a sign to me, at least, of a fierce and twisted life force, a will to live so brutal that it will sacrifice anyone in the name of its own survival, however short-lived and vain.
I suppose that is how my life had evolved by 1999—a world of exploitation, sexual aggression without rape, use, lack of personal control. But it was also a world of uncontrollable joylessness. For if I used people, I was in pain from the shame of knowing that something had gone horribly wrong. Something—I did not know what—had me in its trap and would not release me.
Once Upon a Mattress
I resist repeating this story. I have told it before. I must sound by now like the Ancient Mariner. It is about the birth of a life lived with my gears half-stripped. It is about the birth of an illness, of several nested illnesses. It is about the moment that was as much my birth as the day in February 1944 when my mother sprang me into the waiting hands of someone who became the first to catch me when I fell.
I did not begin to recall this memory until years later, when I was in my middle or late thirties. Like many moments of trauma it had gone underground, because to remember it all at once would be to face a personal Medusa. Instead I saw the first unfolding of the seminal moment that created me and left me sufficiently alive to know that I was not.
My wife and I were visiting with her parents on Eastern Long Island. My mother also had been invited out for the weekend. Because my wife and I had a new baby, while he was napping, we sat in the kitchen and the topic turned to the balancing act between managing the household and taking care of a child.
And then my mother casually said that she’d once left me alone in my crib for a nap while she took the laundry down the street to the laundromat.
At that moment the expression “crash of silence” acquired new meaning.
Sherley Ballen Katz, my dearly remembered mother-in-law, has been dead for 15 years. Yet I will never forget the expression on her face when my mother said this as offhandedly as she might about buying a blouse. Sherley turned slowly and whispered “You did what?” My mother repeated it, clearly confused by this sudden attention.
“You left a baby alone in his crib while you went out?” my mother-in-law whispered, pointing at me. “How could you do that? My God! How long were you gone? What was Kenny like when you came back?” My wife’s mother spoke evenly and quietly but there was fury in her voice. My mother seemed to remember nothing of the time sequence. It was for her an inconsequential moment, one among many.
As for me, I was shocked and confused. I had always sensed that something amiss happened long ago but I did not know what it was. But by 1978 I had worked for the New York City Welfare Department twice, and had heard far worse tales of child abuse. I had read stories about babies who burned to death while their parents were out at a bar. Or doing laundry. Or anything. Suddenly, once my mother’s secret was out, nothing in my life quite made sense anymore or lined up with much else.
My first thought was simply to shrug it off and “get over it.” But get over what? The non-memory rankled. My wife thought my mother was appalling even before this, and the story—for she also was in the kitchen when it was told—did not do much to temper her judgment.
I walked around with this thought for years. I kept trying it on, trying to remember something. Anything.
Could she have been mistaken?
No, she admitted to it without a second thought, and she should have known what she did.
What then had happened that day? How old was I?
And then the memories began to come. They crept in a bit at a time. Human beings are not intended to absorb some shocks all at once. They cannot “process” the implications of such shock in one moment. Thus, the recovered memory did not reveal everything about itself. But it began to expose just enough about that day so I could begin to glimpse how the most destructive mechanism in my life was set in motion.
And this was the memory as I assembled it:
I slept in the one bedroom in the apartment. My parents slept in a bed across the room (this is a well-earned Freudian feast). The crib in which I slept faced the bed. To my right near the bedroom door was my mother’s bureau, with a round bevel-edged mirror on the wall and her perfumes arrayed on a round white lace doily. I even recalled the tiger-stripe cover on one of the perfume bottles, though I don’t remember the brand name.
Suddenly everything began to become clear. No, it did not happen overnight. I walked into an attempt to recapture the memory. All I had at first were outlines without an emotional core. I knew what was supposed to have happened but I was not there.
Until I was.
Of course I remembered the room. Finally the outline of recaptured memory filled in with emotional detail and the most terrifying experience of my life began all over again.
I was a year and a half or maybe two. I awakened from my nap and called for my mother. Nobody answered. I called again. Nobody answered. I did not know where my mother was except she was not there. I was afraid. I was in the sudden vastness of a room that kept expanding. I could not get out of the crib. I began to scream. I cannot describe panic. You must complete it for yourself.
I screamed for my mommy, I screamed from terror and rage, I screamed from the first and most hopeless sensation of abandonment I would ever know, I screamed until there was no voice left, and then I screamed some more.
And then she returned. I knew she returned because I saw her die in 1992, when I was 48. I don’t remember what she did. Nor do I remember what I did or how I felt. All I know is that I experienced in that blankness a kind of death and rebirth, jagged and savage. It was, I would learn many years later, the kick-start of a chemical change in me that made me the inheritor of my parents’ mental illness.
In terms of behavior, it began a lifetime of defiance spiced with cowardice, insolence, anger, and deliberate hurting in word if not in deed. It gave me my chief weapon of pain, the “bitter tongue” Edith Wharton assigned to the philandering financier Julius Beaufort in The Age of Innocence. I could use it against anyone I felt had slighted me. I developed a gift for writing that made me dangerous. Secretly (now not so secretly) it is a gift I came to treasure and, far later, to handle with extreme care.
More importantly, or as part of those ages of mania, for years I behaved hideously toward my mother and I never understood why. I never understood that I was remembering something I could not remember and was exacting from her a terrible vengeance.
Twice Upon a Mattress
Years later there are repeated cycles of joy and horror.
In high school, at the insistence of a teacher, I entered psychotherapy because it was supposed to help cure me of my stutter by finding out why I really wanted to screw my mother. At that time I had no idea that it was my mother who had screwed me, and that my screwing in return was to make her pay for everything affecting me. I did not know I was playing to a guilt trip, but I was all the same. I was getting my mother to shell out for me every week. That was the heart and core of my therapy: unwitting vindictiveness.
So I went dutifully once a week, lay on Dr. Hammer’s putrid green cloth couch, and said nothing or couldn’t shut up. There was no middle ground. Even when I talked, none of it had any consequence. By high school I had become a master of evading my own feelings while not giving a shit about anyone else’s.
I remember a particular Friday afternoon, leaving the therapist’s office on West 92nd Street, and standing in spring sunlight and a breeze on the corner of Broadway. I could not explain how good I felt, but for those moments my life was perfect. Whatever happened inside the therapist’s office had nothing to do with the rush of joy I felt, a rush I would later identify (when I got around to it) with a prolonged orgasm. I felt invulnerable. I felt beautiful and strong and all the things I never allowed myself to feel most of the time. I felt perfected.
Later I got off the subway at 180th Street and went to use the bathroom, only to find a man masturbating into the next urinal. Oh well, I thought, I can hold it until I get home. Let him jerk off in peace.
No rage, no resentment, just equanimity. And yet at the same time, I knew it was going to be transitory. I don’t know how I knew that but I knew that this mood would come to an end, and I would never know what triggered the switch. I think of Jane Kenyon’s magnificent meditation on her depression, “Having It Out With Melancholy,” and this simple line: Unholy ghost, / you are certain to come again.
But how did I know? Probably only because it had been happening for years. There were days, especially in Junior High School, when I snuck out of school at lunchtime and went home, my body dragging like someone 90 and in failing health, simply to spare myself an interminable afternoon growing out of a endless morning of mockery, inattentiveness, and a sad boredom so crushing that it made me want to die.
I would get home. My mother was at work on 41st Street so I’d be safe for the afternoon and early evening. I would lay down on my bed with its pale blue chenille cover and be unable to move. I felt utterly paralyzed. Everything hurt. I was not even sad so much as I felt dead. The psychoanalyst Michael Eigen once authored a book called Psychic Deadness. When I found it I identified totally. And I could not get it to stop. I tried everything. I tried to make myself ejaculate. Can you imagine a 12-year-old boy who cannot get himself off because he could care less? That was me. Or if I got momentary relief, I would gaze down at the clots of semen in the toilet and feel disgust and no relief.
The next day I would have to go back to the 8th or 9th grade and it would start over again. My mother would write transparently stupid excuse notes because I said I felt sick. More of the endless guilt trip, for sure. And nobody questioned them. In my mind I figured they were relieved to be rid of me. Maybe I nailed that one despite myself.
The pattern repeated itself for years. Even as late as high school I would sick out or come home and lay on that same bed. In high school I could fantasize like mad, I was editor of both the yearbook and literary magazine, but I was unspeakably miserable. The Unholy Ghost would take over for a few days and leave me drained and exhausted. My only job was getting over on other people.
The rest is not perfected but it will be because it must be.
