Busted by the Fuzz

Daydreaming about saviors helps me get through the days of confinement, the years with my father and step-mother, of my mother existing only as an unattainable panacea.

Back to the summer when I am nine, when I find that, as I have fantasized, Mom is only mine and not my brothers' (if you joined the blog late in the game, go back to the beginning to learn about it all).

The magic of the Oedipal Revelation is the engine that drives all my dreams, even as I know my father will still make me live with him. But life isn't supposed to happen this way. You aren't meant to wish for something as primal as full ownership of your mother and get it. Even my shrink thinks it's wacky. The knowledge makes me giddy and reckless, giving me an unreasonable feeling of power over my brothers and potentially over my father.

The summer of the Revelation is almost over. I play the moment of Knowledge over and over in my mind at night, unable to sleep, trying to understand how this information that changes everything might affect my actual day-to-day existence. It means everything to me and nothing to my father, who still expects me, us, to return to live with him at the end of August. I decide to force his hand. In my own screwy way I think tactically and figure he must be made to see how serious my unhappiness is.

So I run away and get arrested.

Well, in all fairness to the Travis County Sheriff's Department, my brother Aaron and I are only made to hang around the station for the afternoon. We aren't actually fingerprinted and booked, or put on a chain gang or anything like that, which is surprising, Texas justice being what it is. I want to call Aaron my co-conspirator in running away but I can't since I am the instigator. We ditch Gary, telling him someone has to stay behind and deliver our demands. My now-half-brothers are twelve and thirteen. I am nine. Maybe they let me play fearless leader because they know I'm playing for keeps.

Vegas Savior in a Bikini

I want my mother so badly I save every single scrap of paper or greeting card she sends me, rereading them, holding them, smelling the traces of Givinchy L'Interdit. She is a fetish.

I'm held against my will by the evil man who calls himself Dad, and my only potential Savior is my mother.

Except for occasional Alternate Savior possibilities.

I meet Mrs. Rosen, a curvy forty-ish woman in the pool, during a three-month stay in Vegas when I am eight. She is an excellent Alternate Savior possibility.

This is two years after Cairo. Adam, the Dad, has taken us to Caesar's Palace and is said by his mother, my grandmother, Beelzebubbe, to be losing something in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million dollars. I am told Caesar's mistakenly believes my grandfather, Adam's father, will pay whatever is owed. As my dad sinks deeper into debt they keep moving us to glitzier comped rooms and we have no limit on our free room signing privileges. In the final few weeks we are in a penthouse suite with purple velvet everywhere.

The fact that Adam apparently never pays Caesar's the money he has lost confuses me greatly. Don't they kill people who do that?

There is a whirlpool area of the pool where you put a silver dollar into a slot and the water jets tickle your crotch if you maneuver yourself into the right position. I almost never get to use the whirlpool since getting hold of an actual dollar in cash is always hard, even as signing for a $200 meal is not a problem. One morning I treat six people to breakfast. Reminder: I am eight years old.

When I meet Mrs. Rosen at the pool she wears a blue bikini over her tanned body. Her black hair reminds me of Mom. She is warm and gregarious, an easy talker. If she thinks my paying for lunch is bizarre she doesn't say so. We talk about everything and nothing and bond thoroughly. After I walk her to her suite and say good-be, I spend the rest of the afternoon feverishly envisioning my future. My new life will start with my emotional confession to Mrs. Rosen of my Dickensian circumstances, her loving embrace with promises to adopt me, and a fresh start with her under an assumed name. (I'm uncertain whether I imagine Mr. Rosen liking me or Mrs. Rosen dumping him so she can be with me exclusively.) By the time I work up the courage to go find Mrs. Rosen and throw myself on her mercy I can't remember where her room is. I wander up and down the flocked hallways knocking on doors without success. I feel such shame. I have thrown away my one chance for happiness.

A present day note: For the record, I may have been precocious, but I did not, in fact, know the word "Dickensian" when I was eight. If I had heard the term, I would have assumed it meant Angie Dickensian.

Magic Bullets and a Fairy Princess

Through the strangeness, the violence, the sex, I retain a weirdly positive attitude most of the time, undoubtedly rooted in fierce, if rather demented, denial. This is disastrously exacerbated by the whole Oedipal-Inner-Wacko experience of learning Mom is mine alone. Never mind the kidnapping Dad who keeps me from her most of the time. In my longing for her I concoct a fantasy that she has no connection with my brothers or my father. She is mine alone. I go back to these two words, mine alone, like a mantra as I rock back and forth. My expectations of the world are forever warped during the summer I am nine, in Texas, when I find out she is, as a matter of literal fact, mine, alone, when I learn of the other mother, the one in the loony bin that my brothers must now call their own. It's mind blowing and dangerous. It is, after all, the event that starts this saga… The event that leads inevitably to the bumping off of my Inner Child.

The power of this Revelation isn’t just about showing me that my deepest desires can actually come true, that Mom can be mine as I wish. No, this breathtaking fulfillment of my unspoken dreams infuses me with expectations of other miracles. Maybe I can escape my father too.

After discovering my personal connection to the magical side of the universe I begin to hope my father Adam will just go away.

Before Cairo, when I am about four, someone in New Mexico anonymously tries to shoot him through the sliding glass door leading to the backyard, leaving a bullet hole in a painting. The bullet misses his head, but just by inches. Magic. He might even be taken away. We never know who shoots at him. I have a vague memory of being told it has something to do with the C.I.A. but I don't think he is important enough for that. Not everything is a cloak and dagger story. Not everything is epic. I would love it if it is just that Adam is sleeping with someone else's wife and the guy gets drunk and comes after him, but that isn't the kind of life we live. Motives are never that clear.

He is a near-victim of a bullet in New Mexico several years before the universe drops the ownership of my mother into my lap. I vow the magic will work again. Once I am free of him I will work on my next secret wish - to become a fairy princess. But that's another story.

The Naked Dad Problem

Part of my father Adam's superhuman shock value and power comes from the fact that we believe he can do anything. Later, after Egypt, after a million other places, a friend of his in South Africa calls, crying, saying her ex has taken their child. All she knows is that they are supposedly somewhere in the Alps. She doesn't know what country. My father gets on a plane to Europe and finds that kid in two days. The irony of his returning a child taken from its mother does not occur to him. There is no superhuman to rescue me, to return me to my mother when Adam takes me at the age of five. I don't want anything the next six years with him brings - not the world travels, not the upheaval, not the violence. A razor blade goes missing once. My brothers and I are lined up as one-by-one we are asked whether we are responsible. Dad slugs us in the face, going down the row, until one of us confesses. I forget which it is, but I don't think I'm the one.

The sexual experiences start early. Five. It feels incredibly good. Is the idea of kid-sex rooted directly in the whole hot-naked-dad-problem? Or is the adult prism, the looking back, is that unduly influenced by the satisfying gasps and horror-filled eyes of adults I now tell? When I am five and the little girl next door is six we don't play doctor, we don't play post office - we have oral sex. The only surprise to me now is that it's a girl the first time. Maybe there are others earlier. Now that I think of it, there is, a boy with an overly sandy crotch. The grains of sand taste too gritty and I don't like it. We're four. Also no pretense of playing a child's game here.

Is this a direct path from Dad? Does violence lead to tasting a sandy crotch? Aside from fear tactics, empathy is my father's greatest weapon. If you talk to him for any length of time he walks away knowing everything in your heart, especially your weaknesses. While oozing genuine understanding and charm he ferrets out what he can use against you. Half the time he probably isn’t even aware he's doing it. Sometimes it can be something small - guessing he can tease you to tears about your looks, for instance, or knowing you're a kid who's embarrassed about the child-like size of your penis in relation to his. It could also be something that affects you for the rest of your life, like using your mother's deep sense of shame and uncertainty about her background to convince her she's unfit to care for a child. You know. Something like that.

Many years later my father accidentally admits something to my cousin Edy. It happens in such a trite, "Law & Order" way that even now it makes me giggle. Whatever else I think of him never imagine Dad capable of reducing himself to making an easy slip on the witness stand. Edy is on the phone with him and asks how things are, and he tells her how aggravated he is with Aaron, who is in his mid-20s at the moment, and on the outs with him. He tells how Aaron has crazy ideas that as a child he is beaten and abused, allegations Adam heatedly denies. My cousin asks him, "Well, what if Sam has the same memories?" That's when Adam loses the plot, telling her, "Not Sam, maybe Gary and Aaron, but I never hit Sam." After thinking of him as a superhuman genius, the fact that he implicates himself, admits to hitting Aaron and Gary so easily and stupidly, is thrilling. You can see the late Jerry Orbach turning to Sam Waterston: "We got our guy."

The few times Adam hits me, with his fist, in my face, make a big impression on me. But the barrage of sound, the screaming, the constant everyday vitriol make me think it can happen again at any moment. That's worse. That's what can still wake me up at night, Dad's voice in a bad dream, all these years later. No words, really. Just a roar. My brother Aaron feels it the same way. Plus he wakes up thinking that a million pound weight is bearing down on his chest, forcing the life out of him, all the while the roar screaming away, surrounding him, penetrating every part, until he dies.

Thalidomide Boy

Our first few months in Egypt we stay at the Cairo Hilton, where the scrambled eggs are always watery and gooey, no matter how many times you beg or send them back. And then we live in a rented flat for a month or two. My six year-old Self as well as my ancient, already aged Inner Child is most impressed by a cripple on the street nearby, rolling along on a board with wheels. He must be a Thalidomide baby. He has no limbs at all, just one flipper that he uses to propel himself. A cigarette hangs almost sexily from his mouth. I love that. He is a poor, deformed mess, but he still has the insouciance to smoke.

I suffer through watery eggs every day. I want my mother. I imagine what it is like to have flippers instead of arms and legs. Powerless. Cursed. At least, I think, the Thalidomide Man is free. He is able to wear his True Self on his outsides. (I am probably very wrong about that. Now I think his True Self, the one in his heart, probably has legs, arms, hands...) But as repelled and scared as I am by him, I am also enthralled. And at least he can smoke in peace.

This is our first overseas trip with our new step-mother, Laura. Her pigtails, braces, and peasant blouses make her seem prepubescent. The hair under her arms does not. She is barely of legal age. I don't know why I'm being so snide about her since she is kind and deeply concerned about the three boys that have been dumped in her lap, me and my brothers Aaron and Gary. Laura later tells me about ongoing incidents where I disappear for hours at a time, rocking, eyes blank, like an autistic person, an idiot if not a savant. She says she takes me in her arms and holds me tight, desperately trying to will me into coming back, but that I am always reluctant to return. She worries one day I will disappear forever. I like that idea.

Naked in Cairo

Mom is a glimmer during most of this time. Between visits I don't remember much about actually being with her, maybe a smile, a card, the way her laugh stays with me. I think of her when I fall asleep in some foreign city or when we live in the middle of nowhere on ranches, and I hold her close, trying to remember her smell, how her hair feels, how she paints her nails.

My brother Aaron and I try to fit the puzzle pieces together of where we live and where we travel as children. We almost always get the order wrong but can recall all of the luxury. We are never rich. Sometimes in the years that follow there is barely enough cash in our step-mother's purse for my brothers and I to steal, leaving us chronically short of cigarette money. I am told that flying first class throughout my time with Adam and Laura is possible because our dad has a judge let him take control of some money our grandfather puts aside for us. That's what our grandmother says. It feels true whether or not it is. Plus Adam supposedly stiffs American Express for something like a hundred grand. That must have helped keep us in four-star hotels. But the money always runs out since it seems he never has a real job and rarely earns any kind of living. There are businesses sometimes, and ranches, but no jobs, and no steady money. We don't usually do much as a family on our travels.

I am taken out of the first grade in Blanco, Texas and we move to Cairo, Egypt. We are fairly atypical Jewish visitors since we are there before peace is declared and Adam may or may not be selling arms and ammunition to the Palestinians. There are propaganda films in the theaters that show Israelis using napalm to burn innocent Egyptian children to death, and I watch in rapt wonder as skin peels off the victims, bloody, scabbed, on fire. There are blackouts. It is not for a decade that I think to note that I am quivering in the dark, frightened, numb from the terror of being bombed by My Own People.

Lots of times upon hearing how much we move around people ask if my father is in the military. I tell them he is a pirate. Bluebeard in blue jeans. Propelling me down the plank with words that tear me apart at a volume that shatters glass. He is brutishly attractive in a skinny, Alec Baldwin-punching-photographers way. I watch him as he stalks around in the nude, wondering what it would feel like to touch his dick. Instead of doing that I wait until I am spending the night with an Egyptian man and his family, a guy my Dad has befriended. I am six. The man sleeps alone, without his wife, and asks me if I want to sleep in his bed with him. I reach into his pants and hold his penis, its warmth sending a strange sort of shock into my fingertips. It is all my idea. He is going along with it but clearly confused. I start to cry and ask to go home.

Kill Your Dad For Lent

We are culturally Jewish if religious unbelievers. Lent is not our thing. But the idea of killing for spiritual sacrifice has such emotional resonance.

On the day that changes my life forever with the magical, Oedipal gift of Mom being mine alone, our dad Adam arrives breathless after his drive from the Hill Country ranch he is building. Adam always drives like a bat out of hell. He says he once comes in third in the Mexican Grand Prix. He tells us seat belts are dangerous. He is a car screamer. I forget which half brother utters his first words, moyah hoyah, an attempt at mother fucker, the words we all hear most often in the car from our father.

Adam does not have to be in the car to scream. When we live on one of his ranches I get up to catch the school bus very early, so I usually cook my own breakfast. Often he will be up early as well, on the phone with some of his mysterious (Palestinian?) business associates. One morning he is screaming on the phone in the kitchen. I creep in to fry up some eggs. I must stop to think before acting: If I crack the eggs against the side of the pan it could make the pan clatter loudly on the burner. But if I crack them on the counter I might drip some of the egg whites. I choose the latter plan, resigned to my fate as he takes time away from screaming on the phone to scream at me that I am a fucking, cocksucking idiot, why is it I cannot see I am dripping fucking egg all over the goddamned kitchen, and what the fuck do I think I am doing. He does not hit me. He rarely does, maybe only three or four major times in my life, but I always think he will.

On the night of the Demented Inner Child Oedipal wish coming true Mom and Dad say they need to talk to us because Aaron, the middle brother, met a woman on a Greyhound bus while traveling from Austin to see our grandmother in San Antonio. He returns to Austin that afternoon, telling Mom about the woman he meets, and in turn, Mom calls her ex, my father, the one who will die for Lent. The stupid, unbelievably coincidental way it happens is that Aaron and the woman on the bus are chattering away when she apparently realizes she knows him, met him as a baby, because she is a former friend of his mother, Helen. My mother is named Sally, Aaron says. Not Sally, says the woman, You know, your real mother, Helen. You cannot make this shit up. The meeting is totally by chance. Adam is in his best, most genuine, most concerned mode, explaining how their mother, the other mother, the mother who makes my mother mine alone, is sick, and that he and my mother spent two and a half years in Mexico so my (half) brothers will be safe. Huh? I knew there is more to this story. But Adam just assures my brothers (again: half brothers!) over and over that they are loved, and that my mother is still their mother, while inside I scream with glee: No she is not! No she is not!

Finding out she is mine gives me hope. Adam will not let me live with her but since she now belongs only to me it seems destined that we will one day be reunited. The fact that I often see her on weekends and summers makes no impression on the drama of my longing for her. It is always as if I have not seen her in years. When Adam first moves us to Texas from New Mexico I am only six and I do not know where my mother is for a whole year. That is exactly how I remember it and how it feels. It has been pointed out to me many times that this is patently untrue. I only go a few months without seeing her. I am told all the time when I ask that she will be moving to Texas and I will see her soon. I do not remember that. She is missing. Stolen. I am kidnapped.

I never will know exactly how Adam got me away from Mom. The law is not a consideration in our numerous households. Ever. He just does what he wants, teaching us a deep disrespect for any form of authority and encouraging a disorienting kind of lawlessness that makes no sense, since when we live with him it is like being in the military. His rules are seemingly ironclad but they change according to his mood. In the guise of celebrating the last dregs of some variant of Flower Power we live under a reign as paranoid as anything Nixon or Bush II could think up. I am a political prisoner without a political cause. Occasionally, like when I am eight and our dad inexplicably keeps us cooped up at the Palace of Caesar in Las Vegas for three whole months, I up my classification to concentration camp victim. Nazi Germany and three months in Vegas. Before they died Susan Sontag or Hannah Arendt should have written about how similar the two experiences can be.

Bernstein Hot In Fem Bowling

There is much backstory to how my mother is secretly mine alone and not mother to either of my older brothers. Another blog will tell of Dad abducting the boys and heading for Mexico with my mother to take care of them, to keep them away from their "real" mother. Of how they are raised by MY mother without ever knowing the truth. Until five years after the divorce. Until the night in the bedroom. The night my Inner Child greedily gets exactly what he always wanted. Her.

I cannot see my mother as a person. Yet I will kill for her, kill for the glamorous, all knowing, all loving force who will give me the perfect life if only I can escape. From him. Dad. The badman. I love everything about her. Sexy. Even I can see that. And funny. I have a picture of her where her hair is frosted and teased within an inch of its life, and she wears a silk stole over her bare shoulders. She turns to me with a grin and says the photographer is very good looking, that she is naked under the stole, and that my father will throw a fit if he knows. This is before they mercifully split up, before he steals me away from her.

I am unreasonably proud of her bowling skills. She is a champion. A gigantic trophy she wins by scoring 279 in her final game of a tournament is a treasured possession. Her bowling skirts are always short and her legs are always good. During one championship tournament a newspaper runs a picture of her from behind with her leg kicked high in the air, the unmistakable bowling stance while throwing the ball. You cannot see her underpants or anything, but the headline says it all: Bernstein Hot in Fem Bowling. I am the kind of child who gets the double entendre. Years later I tell my mother that the picture with the article framed is hanging on the wall of my kitchen. She gets upset which mystifies me. For some reason she thinks I must be sitting around with my friends laughing at it, laughing at her. She has no clue. Make fun of her to my friends? I invite them to worship her with me. I bathe in the fact that Mom is Hot in Fem Bowling. I am so in love with her. My attachment is beyond obsessive. Language has not evolved far enough to completely encompass the depth of my madness…

Inner Child/Inner Oedipus

She belongs to me alone.
My Inner Child, Inner Oedipus, Inner Freak sees her as a sexual being, if not a sexual object. Her long legs and ample breasts, her classically beautiful face, frosted hair… Do I want to be with her or just BE her? With age and dates I jump around a lot. The Palestinian Egypt connection happens at six. At the moment I am nine. I sit quietly with Mom and my two brothers in her bedroom as the epic unfolds. She is mine now, mine forever. I would thank God but we are a family of atheists so my sense of Him is murky. This particular night of my deep joy that should never have happened starts out normally. Our father, Adam, is allowing us to spend the summer with our Mom, Sally, in Austin, Texas. My two brothers, Gary, thirteen, and Aaron, twelve, are gathered in her room, which is typical. We all often lie in her bed watching television, our dinner plates flat on our chests, a practice I follow still, though back then bits of spaghetti rarely got tangled in my chest hair since I had none.

That is how it is. We are pigging out on tacos.

Then suddenly Dad arrives and it all starts tumbling out of them, of Dad really, with Mom putting her arms around Aaron, who has no clue what might be going on, while she throws Gary supportive glances. I am virtually ignored, an incredibly rare thing that makes me so indignant I almost miss the real news. Our father gives us a few careful facts. He was married to someone before our mom Sally, to a local girl in San Antonio named Helen, and she was the one who gave birth to Gary and Aaron. A woman who is now, I kid you not, in a mental hospital. The parental units focus entirely on my two brothers, imagining, I guess, that they are the ones whose lives are about to change. They have no idea. My head wants to explode. The rush of joy is suffused with pain and mystery. I want to laugh, sing, and cry all at the same time, but I just sit there as my heart stops, time stops, and I silently let the Revelation flow through me. I have always wished for my mother to belong to me alone. Desperately. Secretly. And now she does.

Sally is my mother. Not their mother. Just mine. My father, the man who keeps me hostage mostly, away from her, traveling, in Egypt, in the Orient, in Hawaii, in California, my father, the bane of my existence has unknowingly given me the greatest gift possible. My sexy mother belongs only to me. My brothers? Let them go fantasize about the crazy woman in the hospital who gave birth to them.

Magical Thinking

There are things that should never come true, Oedipal, irreversible things that warp your expectations. Something desperately wished for is plopped in your lap, like it is the most normal thing in the world, like it could happen again. Just for you. You learn to think magically about the universe. Sometimes it can be harmless, like believing if you win at Spider Solitaire then the person you met last night will call today and be your one true love. At its worst magical thinking leads to Santeria and blood sacrifice. I know. I once saw the chicken die. But I had a good reason. A reason that as I post on this blog in the coming days and months will lead you directly to my central point: Do not reclaim your Inner Child. Kill the little bastard.