221 Lincoln Avenue, Harbor Isle, Island Park, Long Island
I was born on May 15, 1956, after our name was anglicized from Goldenberg to Gordon, and named after Humphrey Bogart’s character in Casablanca, my mother’s favorite movie. I was two weeks late and weighed eight pounds, eleven ounces. My mother says pushing me out fixed her bad back. She was stooped every morning of my life, until the first jolts of coffee bolted her upright; before I was born, she had to be in traction for weeks in the hospital in order to stand straight.
In those early days of childhood, my mother would always say “Go out and play” after breakfast. On the little island where we lived, there was all kinds of trouble you could get into: stealing, vandalizing, throwing firecrackers, especially cherry bombs in mailboxes, egging, toilet papering, or climbing the scaffolding of new houses being built. But mostly, it was just playing, swinging on swings, jumping rope, swimming, the kind of fun you can have when you’re young, brushing your hand along the tops of hedges while you’re skipping and singing some stupid song you made up.
Running, playing “red light, green light, one, two, three,” or tag, or hide-and-seek, saying obnoxiously, “I know you are but what am I,” as a retort to anyone who called you something you didn’t like, which often got me pummeled, or riding your bike up and down the street screaming, “No hands!” as if anyone cared. But for me, there was always an invisible audience. I felt I was always being filmed, because I was, no doubt, captivating.
At lunchtime I’d hear my mother’s voice over everything, and from anywhere, calling my name with its special lilt. “Riiiiick,” she’d call, “Riiiiiiick,” and I’d run home to eat. Sometimes my father was home for lunch eating the things my mother picked up from her Polish and Russian parents, like bananas or blueberries with sour cream and sprinkled sugar, or pickled herring, or sardines in a salad, or blintzes, or stuffed cabbage, always with white bread and unsalted whipped butter. I didn’t care that much about food then, amazing, considering how it lives with authority in my psyche even today.
After lunch, I’d stay out until I heard my mother’s call again, and then I’d run home for dinner. You didn’t hear about kids being kidnapped, abused, raped, or cut up then. The world felt safer. We didn’t have “playdates” or get chauffeured around from here to there. We walked to school, we walked home from the train station, we walked everywhere. My mother always walked to town and back again with at least two full shopping bags over her shoulder. People stopped to offer her a ride, but she wouldn’t take it. Walking helped her back, she said, and she was very proud of her comely legs.
When she was little, a boy in school pulled out my mother’s chair as she was about to sit, making her fall, which damaged her back. She didn’t get a driver’s license until she was in her midforties. Her driving lessons began with my father, a catastrophe, given his patience and diplomacy. To keep a divorce at bay, she went to driving school.
She always looked too short for her light blue Chevy Nova, half her head peering out from behind the wheel like a twitching blackbird. But she was driving, even picking us up sometimes if we were trapped in the snow or something. She always drove too slowly, and people always honked at her or gave her the finger, but she didn’t care. She probably would have been happier having a spinal tap than driving, but she had to do something to ease her sense of entrapment and need for autonomy. She had given up a lot for this life as wife and mother, perhaps too much, and the loss always seemed to encroach on her, like a tsunami that would wash her away. She at least seemed to feel freer once she could drive.
Anyway, you just went out until you came home, and what you did out there was your own business, and no one asked. Still, sometimes what you did had to come out, like when I was muzzled and tied to a tree and couldn’t get loose. My mother heard my muffled screams a few yards over, so I had to tell her “it was a Cowboys and Indians game” gone awry, but usually it wasn’t anything that dire.
Another time, at the Radcliffe Road school, when the gym was open for recreation, the parallel bars weren’t adjusted properly and fell on my thumb, nearly cutting it off. I still have a huge scar straight across it. Even then I knew, on Monday morning, when Mr. Silverstein took my hand, looked into my eyes, and kissed my boo-boo, there was something not right about it.
Back to the subject of safety, someone might have said, “Don’t take candy from strangers,” but there was nothing menacing about it, and besides, I certainly would have taken candy because I really liked candy. But if I had to imagine in my own childhood the things happening to children nowadays, I never would have left my room. Certain “crises,” like stepping on glass in the water at the beach and shrieking when the doctor sewed up my toe or getting my tonsils out at nine and everyone saying it would be fun because I would get to eat all the ice cream I could ever want, didn’t make me feel unsafe in the world. But no one told me how painful something could be, or how you wouldn’t even want one bite of ice cream because swallowing it felt like swallowing frozen razor blades.
My first memory is my mother washing me in a cement sink in the laundry room. The cement is coarse and prickly and harsh against my skin. This bath usually happens right after the beach and I have sand everywhere, including up my butt, and the whole thing feels like an alien invasion. Her bejeweled hands move quickly and have a life of acute nervousness all their own. My father looms a few feet behind her, a shadow of foreboding: the other. And it was that shadow, my father, who awakened an overpowering urge in me when I was allowed to go up to my parents’ room and watch TV next to their bed—Davey and Goliath, Romper Room, Just Around the Corner—even if they were sleeping, which they usually were.
The urge to see, to touch, what was between my father’s legs under the covers took over. I don’t think I was even old enough to have an erection, so I don’t exactly know how arousal played itself out. But that feeling of thousands of small animals running around in every direction in my chest as I stared at his genitals with the fascination an explorer might have had upon first seeing Niagara Falls, my mother’s naked body barely occurring as a gray shape facing east, was impossible not to want to pursue. I don’t know if I thought what I was doing was wrong, yet instinctively I knew I couldn’t risk getting caught. There was immense danger doing this, but I absolutely had to do it.
My Mother
Our house was a panoply of feminine energy with breasts and vaginas abounding. My sisters were strong personalities, well defined, mercurial. And so was my mother, Eve, the former borscht belt singer and comedian, for whom we were now the audience. Her first language was Yiddish. She could be a kibitzer, telling dirty jokes, gossiping, singing, and even dancing. It was like having Fanny Brice for a mother. If there is truth to the idea that inside the clown is crying, it was evidenced, in my mother’s case, because, though she was deeply funny, there was something discomfiting about being witness to her comedy.
The humor could feel like a cover for something tragic in the deepest chamber of her heart. Supposing we are all reincarnated and traveling this long forever through countless lifetimes together, the moment I first heard my mother sing, I recognized her. Wherever she had been, I had been there, too. Her voice was the ancient air on which our destinies floated, the low hum of the mourning dove.
My mother became genuine when she sang. It was in her voice where you heard the truth, the sadness, the anger, the oppression, a kind of old-world Yiddish cry erupting from her singing like the cry of all Jewish people, both startling and disarming. Her singing reflected collective memory. It was the real deal—inviolable; you were in the presence of something holy. It was always a surprise for those who knew her only as someone funny, because singing was, in a way, the antithesis of her external personality. It was not funny; it was truth.
There was nothing in the least bit amateur about my mother’s singing. Her voice was a lovely instrument, beautifully expressive. She had an ability to interpret and extemporize with it—sometimes, all of a sudden, talking a line with a cry in her voice, her unique phrasing, her taking a note up if she felt like it or repeating something for emphasis. She was an artist through and through. Singing was more honest than talking for her. She is the reason so much of the music I write is for the voice. It is also the reason that later on in her life, when reflux ground her singing voice to a halt, it was clear she felt like half a person.
My mother won a singing contest in Central Park singing “Indian Love Call” when she was fifteen. The great doyenne of the Catskill Mountains, Jennie Grossinger, who was in the audience, brought her up to Grossinger’s with every intention of making her a star. Mom, or Eve Saunders, as she called herself, would come out in a tight red dress hugging all the right places of a well-developed, exceedingly attractive, charismatic young woman and sing about how hot she was. Then two comedians would come out from both sides of the stage and spray her with seltzer. “They put out the fire!” she loved to exclaim. She’d stand there all wet, which only accentuated her curves, giving her the va-va-va-voom she was clearly after.
Once she had them howling with laughter, my mother would sing with a blazing force, a turnaround in tone that was almost frightening, songs like “When a Gypsy Makes His Violin Cry” and “Take Me in Your Arms,” and the laughter would give way to sobs. One of my mother’s sheer instincts was knowing how to work a room. She knew she was a star.
My mother was born in Harlem in 1920, the youngest of four siblings, with brothers Sidney, Louis, and Buddy Samberg. Buddy, the one who had dragged her along to Central Park, was my mother’s partner in crime, playing the guitar and crooning alongside her, but he knew he couldn’t compete. Buddy had charm and talent—a poor man’s Bing Crosby—but my mother had the heat and charisma of an acetylene torch. Later, Buddy made a living performing in a supper club in New Jersey, but was never entirely fulfilled or satisfied. Mom’s brother Louis played the spoons fantastically, clickety-clacking them like a veteran vaudevillian. He played them at weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, even funerals. It didn’t matter whether the occasion was solemn or boisterous, Louis played the spoons with an expression on his face that made him look like a more handsome Jimmy Durante.
Sid, the brother who was most sincere and most like my mother, died young. He was working on the subway tracks for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority when he started complaining that he was seeing double but put off getting his eyes checked. When a train came rushing toward him one day, he thought he was getting out of the way, but he actually moved straight into it.
Sid was my favorite uncle, because, as with my mother, I recognized him from a previous life. I saw love flying from his eyes at me like starlings. I laughed like a baby, only wanted to be around him when he visited. He was soulful, always seeming to get me. One of the greatest and most influential gifts of my life was the Porgy and Bess score Sid gave me. He found it on the subway. It was an unreturned library book. I learned every note of it.
In my twenties, I went to see Barbara Stabiner, a clairvoyant on Long Island. She told me that my mother had been a star in many lifetimes, and the reason it was relatively easy for her to give it up was that she knew she had done it before and it was time to master another scenario: a domestic one, being a mother and a wife. At one point (this is where you might throw this book across the room), the room got cold, and Barbara said, “Ohhh, we have a visitor.” She said it was Mozart, and he had a message for me.
He said, “You can want to be a genius in this life, but you have to want to be a human being as well. You cannot forgo life in the pursuit of your work; it will come back to you.” He continued, “Strive to be as good at being human as you are at being an artist.” I will admit I rolled my eyes, but he made enormous sense. He said he was working on the human part where he was, growing in all directions, ignoring his “Mozart” incarnation.
Around this time, I had discovered numerology, and Barbara said I was surrounded by numbers. I said, “That’s funny, I was just thinking of studying numerology because of a book I picked up last night,” but she shook her head and said, “No, honey, you don’t need to study it; you already know it.” We are all intuitive, right? Sometimes we find vehicles for our intuitiveness. When I look at people’s numbers, I see and feel things that together create a map or a graph of that person for me, and I trust it all the more because of what Barbara said.
Barbara told me my father could have killed someone and, if not for my mother, would have. And finally, she said Uncle Sid was my guardian angel.
My mother and I were extremely close. No matter what I did, she thought I was a genius. Her relationships with my sisters were more complicated because, like her, they were women, and all the competitiveness that comes with that caused enormous friction in my family. My sisters solidly rejected my mother’s acceptance of what they perceived as cowardice, powerlessness, and victimhood in her marriage.
One of my favorite things was watching the Academy Awards with my mother. She always remarked on who was up in weight that year, or down, Liz being the most frequent recipient. “She looks good,” she’d say, nodding her head in approval, with the solemnity and pride one might affect at an inauguration. “Good for her. She lost weight.”
Or she would say, “She looks heavy,” the worst indictment you could utter, shaking her head, privately contemplating the difficulties Liz faced—the ins and outs about which she knew so much from movie magazines like Photoplay and Modern Screen. She always seemed to know when Liz and Dick were together or separated, speaking about their relationship as if they were dear friends she was always in a state of perpetual empathy for.
She loved the clothes, and she would always remark on the deformities whispered about in Hollywood. One such chestnut concerned the unfortunate Myrna Loy. “Bad legs,” she’d say pityingly. “Thick ankles, that’s why she always wears pants. You never see her legs in a movie, do you?” I didn’t really know who Myrna Loy was, though I’d shake my head no, because I wanted to be in on it. But my mother could also explode like the top off a pressure cooker. Then she was the furthest thing from funny you could possibly imagine. These episodes involved smashing plates, running away from home, or sobbing hysterically, and they were almost always about having given up her singing career, or having four children with no help, or her marriage to a maniac.
My Father
My father was the second child of four, born in 1919. There was Aunt Sylvia, the imperious oldest, who liked to say things like “Rrricky, I wouldn’t get into bed with him if he were the last white man alive”; my father; Aunt Blanche, the gym teacher; and Uncle Freddie, the jeweler. Freddie, born blond-haired and blue-eyed, which, in a Jewish family, is like being born with a crown, a scepter, and gold running through your veins, was very handsome and consequently treated like a prince. My grandmother was hard on my father, overwhelming him with expectations. During the Depression, he sold apples on the street to help her.
He had enormous native intelligence and discipline combined with an obsessive curiosity, but because of the exigencies of the times he missed education altogether. After the Depression there was the war, robbing six years from his youth.
Soon after my parents were married, before he went overseas, my mother went down to visit my father at Fort Benning, in Georgia. Because of his voracious appetite, they had sex so many times that she was sore and tired. He wanted to go at it again, but my mother tearfully told him, “I can’t, Sam, I’m exhausted.” He threw a tantrum so fierce she realized she would have to either leave him or never say no to him again. Because she chose the latter, my sisters and I grew up in a climate of intense sexuality—an atmosphere of forced complicity.
My father was stationed in Greenland during World War II. He said it was so boring that every night someone would have to be on twenty-four-hour patrol to prevent men from going out into the snow and freezing themselves to death, which, he said, was just like going to sleep. He made it sound so easy, even pleasant; I always keep freezing to death as my back pocket plan should things not work out. After Greenland, my father was sent to Europe.
After the war, because of all the nights in France his unit had to sleep outside on frozen ground, my father had to have surgery to remove a cyst at the base of his spine that had grown large and excruciatingly painful.
He did not leave the army honorably. He witnessed a superior officer making a virulent anti-Semitic remark to a private and, losing his temper, punched the officer in the face, doing considerable damage. He was dishonorably discharged. So, by the time my father came back from Europe to start a life and a family, he was a rage-filled mass of disappointments and a walking powder keg.
When he was stationed in France, my father was Staff Sergeant Samuel Goldenberg. He changed our name after the war to make it sound less Jewish because given the anti-Semitism at that time it was almost impossible to start a business that wasn’t in the garment industry. My father’s father, Papa Joe, for instance, was a furrier, making jackets, stoles, muffs, and hats for all the women in the family. But my father wasn’t interested in fur. He wanted to be an electrician. Electrical work was considered extremely dangerous, and few wanted to take the risks, so you were almost guaranteed to make a living.
My father’s pugnaciousness, combined with his strength and zero impulse control, was lethal. Outside the family, when others would find him fascinating and charming, or sexy and appealing, we crouched in horror over the part of the story they were missing. I think my father felt we were lucky enough just to be born. He was barely clothed and fed as a boy, so if we wanted more, we didn’t deserve it. Why should we have what he didn’t have? We should just shut the fuck up.
He was the antithesis of what a Jewish father was supposed to be—fostering the education of his children, proud of their learning and accomplishments, protective and paternal. He never even looked at a report card, didn’t know our birthdays, never defended us, ignoring the neighborhood bullies, and basically left the parenting to our mother.
My father was easily threatened, so when it was obvious that one of his children might be advancing beyond him intellectually, he became jealous and enraged. My sister Susan seems to have been born brilliant, which made her electrifying in my eyes. But she lorded her intelligence over my father like a cudgel as revenge against his tyranny.
The tension of their not meeting until she was two, because he left my mother pregnant to go to war, and his being nothing but an intruder upon her happiness, meant they were always a land mine waiting to be detonated. The first thing she ever said to him was, “Don’t you touch my mommy’s pajamas.”
Lorraine, a breech baby whose eyes were badly damaged, making her half-blind from a careless forceps birth, came into the world volatile and combative. She would say anything to anyone, and her relationship with my father was like setting off a hydrogen bomb.
Sheila, catching wind early that arguing and having a strong personality in our family brought you no good, shut up like a clam, suffering in silence with a never-ending array of stomach troubles that brought her in and out of hospitals and a lifetime supply of some horrible-tasting emerald-green medicine.
My mother’s way of calming my father down was to have sex with him. They had sex day and night. You could always hear them: the breathing, the kissing. I walked in on them because there was no door to their bedroom. I don’t know exactly what I saw, but I think it was a blow job, and that was enough to make me bolt from the room.
When I was born, my parents, after three daughters, had a son, momentous in a Jewish family. My father finally had a mirror. But being claimed and raised by all the females, I might as well have been a daughter as far as he was concerned, only more disappointing for dousing his fantasy about having a friend, an assistant, and even a confidant in the harem-like world he created.
When my father came home from work, I would run down the stairs, jumping into his arms and kissing him. He seemed happy to be greeted this way, until the day he recoiled, saying, “We don’t do that anymore.” His sudden inquiries into why I didn’t have more friends who were boys precipitated his making me join Little League, where I was hit in the eye and practically blinded by a line drive during the first game. In an effort to turn me into a man, he took me fishing, but the loudness of the motor made me cry, and the smell of the fish and the motion of the water made me throw up, so that was a failed mission.
He would also bring me to work with him as soon as I was old enough to work. It might mean brushing rust off a huge shed with a metal brush, painting it first with a coat of Rust-Oleum and then with a coat of semigloss protective paint. He’d leave you to it, occasionally coming out to scream at you and tell you how badly you were doing it. He’d have me organize thousands of oily metal things, things he had pilfered from various demolition jobs—screws, nuts, bolts, sockets, switches—into a million metal compartments, which I found as interesting as Bartleby the Scrivener found the Dead Letter Office.
Copyright © 2024 by Ricky Ian Gordon
