The Medicine Burns (3 page)

So by the time of my circumcision, my neighbors were all fully aware of the fact that I was a child awaiting two surgeries, my penis and later my foot, and certainly they knew that I would wear a cast on my foot long before I wore a pair of baby shoes.

Did this gift signify her hope for the future when my feet would no longer turn away from each other? My mother chose not to believe so, and from that point forward, she kept a firm distance from Ruth, and almost all the neighbors, as though they each possessed the same potential for ignorant or intentional malice, which she equated.

Her isolationism might have worked while I was younger, but while my father was unemployed and I was climbing out of my window in the middle of the night, my mother was certain the neighbors were collecting the information, waiting to humiliate her yet again. She suddenly had both of us to attend to, which took some of her attention off me and enabled me to resume a private life which had been prematurely and far too brightly illuminated. After all, I was no more rebellious than my peers, just more committed.

I discovered a drag club on Miami Beach which flaunted its tacky exoticism. The performers were either overweight or anorexic and desperately untalented. But I could watch them for hours, one after the other making a show of their failures, their alcoholism, and their bad attitudes. One could expect the bouncers to have to remove Lola from the stage; her numbers had the tendency to become an assault on the audience, baiting them to get up on stage and do a better job than she if they thought they could. And she would only leave the stage when the bartender or someone in the audience promised to buy her a drink.

I marveled at how they lived. As much as I doubted my parents' values, I assumed that at some point I would be forced to share them. It was these amateur drag shows that made me realize just how vast the world was. The drag queens challenged everything. Not simply gender, but propriety as well. If they sensed they were being laughed at, they laughed along before the joke got too old.

I planned a party for a weekend when my parents were leaving town. It was my mother's prescription of a “rest cure” for my father. Though many of the guests had attended my birthday party at the cottage, the spirit of this party was radically different. I chose my parents' bedroom to act as an orgy room, replacing their reading lights with red bulbs. I moved the stereo from my bedroom into the living room and cleared the shelves of my mother's kewpie collection and my father's Norman Rockwell ingots. I invited the guests to come in drag, to bring drugs and alcohol, and to bring pajamas if they wanted to sleep over.

I remember being tentative about the music and the noise, but my friends' assurances overrode my concerns, at least temporarily. A once smoke-free environment had my eyes watering in just a few hours. Before I knew it, friends had invaded my parents' bar and medicine cabinet, traipsing around drunk and on Valiums, dressing each other up and undressing each other in every corner of every room. I wandered around like a good hostess in one of my mother's aprons, offering cocktails to the guests and urging couples in various states of undress to use my parents' bedroom for the unholy acts.

Things died down by the early morning. Many of the guests had gone home, but some were sleeping on the couches and floor. I found myself cleaning up bottles and overturned ashtrays, stray articles of clothing, and even some of my mother's makeup that someone had drawn from her bag in the bathroom. I was suddenly engulfed with anxiety, with fantasies of them arriving home early, and with the facts of the bottles missing from their bar, their bedding wet with semen and spilled champagne, and the smoke which seemed to linger even with the windows and doors open.

A friend of mine, Armando, held the trash bag open as we moved among the bodies. For each of my worries he offered tender assurances, and when the last bottle had been picked up, he led me toward my bedroom and urged me to sleep with him. When we turned on the bedroom light, some moans issued up from beneath the blankets.

“Let's try your parents' bed,” he suggested. He took off his clothes and crawled over the filthy sheets. I joined him, naked, on their bed. There was a tremendous erotic charge in my final act of defilement. Our mouths and our chests came together, and I felt my feet digging into the velour spread piled at the foot of their bed. I looked into the eyes of the framed photograph of my mother. At the bottom of it she inscribed her dedication to my father and I whispered it in Armando's ear, “‘All my love to you, Baby.'”

I'd never walked in on my parents having sex, nor had I heard them. Sometimes I would find them in the morning asleep with the television still on and a pizza box with some leftover slices between them. My father expressed his affection through telling dirty jokes which my mother would respond to with feigned shock even though she would often have to remind him of the punch line. Having sex in their bed was not exciting because of any of their activity. If anything, I felt I was originating the primal scene, and my excitement was generated by the idea of them walking in on me.

It is assuredly this erotic fixation with being discovered that prevented my housecleaning of the following day from perfectly masking the events of the night before. Certainly, I'd come close. I mopped and dusted, put everything back where it belonged, washed sheets and towels, and even went so far as to replace some of the bottles of alcohol in the bar. The rest, I had hoped, would go unnoticed.

What I'd neglected, of course, was the makeup. Nothing was mentioned, however, until my father returned from his interview with Epstein, visibly distraught as though he himself had been caught in some perverse act. He stood for a moment unsure in the doorway. If my mother hadn't been so quick to greet him, I suspect he would have quietly turned and fled.

“How did it go?” she demanded, her hands on her waist, as though she was defending something behind her.

“They've asked me not to come back,” he said quietly. Then, in a moment I wish I hadn't observed, he looked at her tearfully and asked her, “Do you want me to leave?”

Even my mother looked awkward, her mouth searching out an expression comforting but firm.

“Come in,” she said.

I snuck back into my bedroom while they talked in the kitchen. Though I didn't want to hear them, I couldn't bring myself to drown them out completely with my records. I cannot claim surprise at hearing my name spoken in the exasperated and angry tone that by now seemed inherent in the name itself. It had been two weeks since the party and I had, to some extent, been waiting to be invoked. The fact that it was an unrelated matter, my father's unaccountable theft and its repercussions, did not surprise me either. By that time, it was impossible to localize a problem or blame. Nothing any of us did was discrete anymore.

I went to the record player and shut it off. I'd come to the last disc of Berg's
Lulu
and worried that its cacophonous climax might fuel their accusations of me. My mother had come a long way in her assessment of my antisocial behavior: where I'd once been the flawed product of their conscientious upbringing, I now had taken on the dramatic proportions of a stranger, a boarder at whose mercy they found themselves.

I overheard her assurances to my father that he was not to blame, he was not mad. I needed help. If they continued to allow me to go on the way that I was going, the family (and this she pronounced like a curse) would rot from within. Perhaps my new position as a sort of stranger within the family made my parents naturally superstitious of me. It was this superstition that had suddenly driven my mother to believe in something she had never had faith in before: psychiatry.

True, she had gone along with my father's recommended therapy but the fact that it had failed to produce results for him supports my opinion that it was a leap of faith, the calling in of the witch doctor or exorcist, that my mother resorted to while scheduling an appointment for me. I was summoned to the kitchen where she offered me the time and date from a Post-It stuck to the tip of her finger. In another clinical gesture, she dangled her makeup bag before me and asked, “Do you want to tell me about this?”

“No,” I answered, as there really was nothing to tell. Had she taken the jockstraps from my drawer, I might have blushed. She had, in this case, allowed her imagination to fill in the gaps. The missing makeup and apparent return of some gouged and mutilated lipsticks and eyeshadows were the basis for her assumption that I had gone on to the next step of homosexual development: the inevitable renunciation of my gender. This theory went along with another of her theories, that using her makeup was an attempt on my part to mimic a heterosexual lifestyle. I'm still unsure as to whether she considered that hopeful.

As ludicrous as the accusations were, any attempt at refuting them on my part were viewed as understandable lies in the face of such shameful behavior. And so I tempered my responses, which were initially quite negative, and consented to their suggestion that I see the psychiatrist. After all, what could it hurt? I reminded myself that it was my mother, and not I, who had such doubts about them.

One thing I was certain of was that my mother and I had gone as far as we could talking with each other. Everything we said seemed to have some other meaning beneath it, and in the same way that my mother walks with that stiffness from so many years in casts, I seem to maintain an inhibition in my language, finding in it an inherent, or possibly inherited, quality of concealment.

I didn't believe that it was communication we were both attempting. It has taken this much time to recognize that we did not so much want to discover each other's secrets, but to find a way to reveal ourselves. I am sure now that we were both trapped in one of the great and painful deceits of language: the promise of its transparency. It was this dream of nakedness that drove my mother to the most drastic, literal acts.

I began seeing the psychiatrist, a middle-aged Jewish woman with whom I felt immediately at home. And it was in her office, with its dark wood and draperies, its shelf of leather-bound books including the complete standard edition of Freud's works, that I began to understand the significance of our club feet.

I was withdrawn from therapy at the crucial junction when the conflict with my mother seemed best handled with her at one of the sessions. The therapist had asked both my parents to come to the session so as not to put my mother on the defensive. But from the moment I broached the news to them that Miriam and I felt we could accomplish a great deal if they would join me for just one session, my mother began to fear a setup.

“Why should I go?” she asked. “It's your problem.”

Well, at one point it was my problem, then it was my father's problem, and now it's the witch doctor's problem, I thought. Anyway, with much resistance, she and my father drove me to her office and decided they would come in for a short while.

Before my mother sat down, she asked, “Have you made any progress with him?”

It was the first time that I saw my therapist caught off guard, but I had warned her. She urged them to sit down, and took a seat herself. She regained her composure then, asking my mother, in a volley, what kind of progress she had expected.

While my mother turned uncomfortably in her chair, Miriam began speaking verbatim, as though a copy of Freud's famous letter to the mother of a homosexual son had been freshly drawn from its envelope. All the great lines were there, “‘It cannot be classified as an illness…a variation of the sexual function…many highly respected individuals of ancient and modern times…'” But her most impressive performance came when, quoting Freud, she directed his appeal to my mother as though they were her words. “‘By asking me if I can help you, you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place…'” She shook her head, sadly explaining that my sexual preference was not the source of my conflicts. “It is the family—” she began to assert.

My mother was enraged. “You want to tell me what's normal?” she asked, her voice painfully restrained. “I suppose you regard it as normal the fact that he dresses like a woman? That he steals his father's underwear?”

I turned to watch my father as he drew a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes under his glasses. He reached out and took my mother's arm. “Let's go, honey,” he said sniffling.

She pulled away from him as though she was disgusted with everyone in the room.

“And what kind of role model do you think you are?” she asked my father scornfully. “Sitting there crying. You've never had a moment of strength in your life.”

“That's not fair,” I interjected.

She gathered her purse and coat and stood up.

“What's not fair?” she asked. “All I wanted was for you to have a chance at a normal life. They'll never accept you. It's like you've chosen to be deformed. Why would anyone choose that for themselves?” I wanted to answer her, but she and my father were already at the door. “We won't be needing your services anymore,” she informed Miriam before slamming the door behind them. My heart was pounding with anger.

“She can't get over that foot of hers,” I managed. I then told Miriam about her cast and how she'd never been able to admit how it had humiliated her and set her apart.

Miriam made the generous offer of seeing me again, free of charge. I told her I appreciated the offer, but didn't feel right about it, and when I left her office a half hour later I was surprised by the feeling of friendship that gripped my throat and made it hard to say good-bye.

I expected tension when I arrived home, but was surprised to find my parents dressing to go out for dinner. They urged me to dress quickly and join them. I thought, maybe Miriam had made an impression, maybe my mother was sorry for what she'd said, or just felt better for saying it. But I thought, in the spirit of coexistence, it was best to accept and make concessions, or at least not disturb the respite.