The Worst Years of Your Life (29 page)

While my mother continued to buzz in her ear, Cynthia picked up the microphone on her CB and radioed headquarters. She spoke in a quick, clipped lingo that I did not understand. Then Mom swiped at the CB, grabbing at the spiral speaker cord. The entire bus and I witnessed their slap fight for control over the CB. Neither Mom nor Cynthia could hold onto the gadget, and the black cord snapped and struck against the dashboard console. Mom leaned in and appeared to snare Cynthia in a headlock. None of my fellow passengers moved. The polite man who had offered Mom his seat looked at me and said, “Can't you calm her down?” Then Mom let go of Cynthia and said in a hoarse voice, “You win.” Cynthia announced that the bus would return to the Visitor Center, immediately. We would not be driving by the Johnson Ranch house today. The German couple spoke German, in quick, violent snatches. The little boy with the cowlick put his hands over his ears and screamed in three sharp blasts before his sister covered his mouth with the back of her hand. I felt my shingles pain run down my neck and arms, felt the ladybug shell on my back harden.

Mom strode down the length of the bus, past identical fierce glares from the twin sisters. She sat beside me. I shook my head and said, “This is not Manhattan. We're in the Republic of Texas. Pushy doesn't work here.”

Mom said, “Don't worry, kid. I got it covered.”

C
YNTHIA SPED
back to the Visitor Center. She tried to calm the agitated passengers by turning on the bus's stereo system and blasting Lyndon Johnson's favorite song, “Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head.” I stared out the window at the terraced farmland and tried to remember why I ever cared about the presidents. I loved them because my father loved them. Since he'd died I'd been trying every day to reclaim his sense of history. All I'd managed to do was recreate his level of stress and discomfort. The red sore on my back proved to me that I was nothing more than the nervous daughter of a panicked man. That was my place in the passage of time, my inheritance. I could never be president. I was the would-be pothead child of a convicted felon and a whore. I tried to picture my father relaxed, stoned, resigned to his shortcomings. His eyes bloodshot, his smile goofy, a halo of ladybugs flying over his blond head: that was the father I loved.

When Cynthia parked the bus, she pointed to Mom and me and said, “You two stay seated. For the rest of you, I'm sorry but this is the last stop,” Mom clutched my arm. As Cynthia ushered our fellow travelers off the bus, I imagined the Secret Service descending upon us. We were a family of felons. I figured the penalty for assaulting a park ranger included a prison sentence. Maybe now, with the threat of incarceration pending, Mom would admit her pregnancy. I was furious with her. She'd ruined our vacation, stained my Victim T-shirt, tarnished my father's reputation.

Through the bus window, Mom watched Cynthia confer with a fellow ranger in the Visitor Center. Mom said, “I told Ranger Cindy to wait ten minutes in case those Germans got curious.”

T
HE
J
OHNSON
R
ANCH
house was smaller than I had imagined. The white paint on the outside of the house needed a touch-up. The large bow windows sagged in their rotting castings. Before Cynthia dropped us off she pointed out the security cameras and told us which ones were working. “I'll give you twenty minutes like we agreed. The house is locked, but you can view the grounds and Lyndon Baines Johnson's antique car collection.”

A massive live oak stood on the front lawn. Lyndon, or some other hunter, had attached two plaques with enormous stuffed deers' heads directly to the tree's trunk. Mom petted a buck's antlers. I'm not sure what Mom promised or paid Cynthia for our private tour of the Johnson Ranch. Mom believed in cash, and always had at least a thousand dollars stashed on or near her person. She also believed in threats and bribes. With a phone call, Mom could place a lien on your ancestral home or buy you the ostrich farm you'd always dreamed of owning. Mom knew how to bargain. How to make a deal. She was fearless. She knew that she couldn't appreciate the presidents the way Dad and I had, but she could give me something Dad never could. Mom could provide access. She could make things happen. She had what it took to be president.

We walked into the open-air front of the airplane hanger that held Lyndon's cars: a red Ford Phaeton, a Fiat 500 Jolly Ghia, a vintage fire truck, and a little green wagon. The sun had tanned Mom's face. She looked beautiful, victorious. I put my arms around her, rubbed her tummy. “What is it?” I asked. She looked down at me and placed my hand flat on the crown of her belly. “It's a boy.”

Inside the hangar, I recognized one of the automobiles, a small blue-and-white convertible. “This is one of those land-and-sea cars. An amphibious car. Johnson used to drive his friends around the ranch, take them down to the river, and scare everyone by plunging them into the water. The car turns into a boat.”

Mom opened the driver's-side door. “Get in,” she said.

We sat in the white-leather seats, proud of our hard-earned view of the Texas hills. Mom took out a linen handkerchief from her purse and handed it to me. “Your father told me this thing helped you guys relax.”

I knew by the weight and size of the gift that it was Buchanan. I unwrapped the pipe. The bowl was still packed with a small amount of pot. I'd never smoked Buchanan before.

“Your father died too young to have a will,” Mom said. “Just think of this as your inheritance.”

“I don't suppose you have a lighter.” Mom handed me a silver Zippo with Dad's initials. She watched me light the pipe. I coughed. The smoke burned my throat. I offered Mom Buchanan, but she shook her head no and pointed to her belly.

“When the baby's older,” she said, “I want you to tell him about his dad. I want him to know where he came from.”

His dad.

We sat together in this magic convertible, me smoking, Mom breathing in the air at my side. We needed a new getaway car. One that could take us back home and beyond. Up the Hudson and along the Garden State Parkway. I gazed down the hill to the Pedernales. Mom pointed out a zebra. I laughed. It was just a gray spotted pony. Everything was clear. I would skip Nixon. Dad would understand. Instead, I'd take my little brother to Omaha, Nebraska, then to Michigan. Gerald Ford, 1974–77, born Leslie Lynch King. He was renamed after his adopted father. Ford didn't know who his real father was until he was practically an adult. I'd tell my brother about Ford and all the men fate brought to power, the chief executives, all the fearless men in charge. He'd know that Andrew Jackson was thirteen when he fought the British in the Battle of Hanging Rock. I'd explain the difference between John Adams and John Quincy Adams. I'd give him reasons to like Ike, to be grateful for the Monroe Doctrine, to appreciate the irony of William Henry Harrison dying of pneumonia one month into his term after staying out in the cold to deliver his endless inauguration address.

Mom said, “Now smoke in moderation. Don't get caught. Don't let your grades slip. Promise me.”

I could hear the walkie-talkie static and chatter coming from the Secret Service agents. We'd been caught. Mom would certainly be arrested. Cynthia would lose her job. I'd be left to raise Lyndon alone. Dad's pot was strong, but mellow. For the first time in our relationship Mom and I had a deal, an understanding. I began to hum “Hail to the Chief.” As the agents approached in their dark, shiny suits, I promised Mom I would tell Lyndon, my running mate and my half brother, all the things I knew about my father, his father.

I
F YOU HEAD OUT TO
G
REENHEATH,
L
ONG
I
SLAND, TODAY,
you'll find that the schoolyard where Zvi Blum was attacked is more or less as it was. The bell at the public school still rings through the weekend, and the bushes behind the lot where we played hockey still stand. The only difference is that the sharp screws and jagged edges of the jungle gym are gone, the playground stripped of all adventure, sissified and padded and covered with a snow of shredded tires.

It was onto this lot that Zvi Blum, the littlest of the three Blum boys, stepped. During the week we played in the parking lot of our yeshiva, where slap shots sent gravel flying, but on Shabbos afternoons we ventured onto the fine, uncracked asphalt at the public school. The first to arrive for our game, Zvi wore his helmet with the metal face protector snapped in place. He had on his gloves and held a stick in his hand.

Zvi worked up a sweat playing a fantasy game while he waited for the rest of us to arrive. After a fake around an imagined opponent, he found himself at a real and sudden halt. The boy we feared most stood before him. It was Greenheath's local Anti-Semite, with a row of friends beyond. The Anti-Semite had until then abided by a certain understanding. We stepped gingerly in his presence, looking beaten, which seemed to satisfy his need to beat us for real.

The Anti-Semite took hold of Zvi's face mask as if little Blum were a six-pack of beer.

Zvi looked past the bully and the jungle gym, through the chain-link fence and up Crocus Avenue, hoping we'd appear, a dozen or more boys, wearing helmets, wielding sticks. How nice if, like an army, we'd arrived.

The Anti-Semite let go of Zvi's mask.

“You Jewish?” he asked.

“I don't know,” Zvi said.

“You don't know if you're Jewish?”

“No,” Zvi said. He scratched at the asphalt with his stick.

The bully turned to his friends, taking a poll of suspicious glances.

“Your mother never told you?” the Anti-Semite asked.

Zvi shifted his weight and kept on with his scratching. “It never came up,” he said.

Zvi remembered a distinct extended pause while the Anti-Semite considered. Zvi thought—he may have been wishing—that he saw the first of us coming down the road.

He was out cold when we got there, beaten unconscious with his helmet on, his stick and gloves missing. We were no experts at forensics, but we knew immediately that he'd been worsted. And because he was suspended by his underwear from one of the bolts on the swing set, we also knew that a wedgie had been administered along the way.

We thought he was dead.

We had no dimes even to make a telephone call, money being forbidden on the Sabbath. We did nothing for way too long. Then Beryl started crying, and Harry ran to the Vilmsteins, who debated, while they fetched the
mukzeh
keys, which of them should drive in an emergency.

S
OME WHISPERED
that our nemesis was half-Jewish. His house was nestled in the dead end behind our school. And the ire of the Anti-Semite and his family was said to have been awakened when, after he had attended kindergarten with us at our yeshiva for some months, and had been welcomed as a little son of Israel, the rabbis discovered that only his father was Jewish. The boy, deemed gentile, was ejected from the class and led home by his shamefaced mother. Rabbi Federbush latched the back gate behind them as the boy licked at the finger paint, nontoxic and still wet on his hands.

We all knew the story, and I wondered what it was like for that boy, growing up—growing large—on the other side of the fence. His mother sometimes looked our way as she came and went from the house. She didn't reveal anything that we were mature enough to read—only kept on, often with a hand pressed to the small of her back.

A
FTER
Z
VI'S BEATING
, the police were called.

My parents wouldn't have done it, and let that fact be known.

“What good will come?” my father said. Zvi's parents had already determined that their son had suffered nothing beyond bruising: his bones were unbroken and his brain unconcussed.

“Call the police on every anti-Semite,” my mother said, “and they'll need a separate force.” The Blums thought differently. Mrs. Blum's parents had been born in America. She had grown up in Connecticut and attended public school. She felt no distrust for the uniform, believed the authorities were there to protect her.

The police cruiser rolled slowly down the hill with the Blums in procession behind it. They marched, the parents and three sons, little Zvi with his gauze-wrapped head held high.

The police spoke to the Anti-Semite's mother, who propped the screen door open with a foot. After her son had been called to the door for questioning, Mrs. Blum and Zvi were waved up. They approached, but did not touch, the three brick steps.

It was word against word. An accusing mother and son, a pair disputing, and no witnesses to be had. The police didn't make an arrest, and the Blums did not press charges. The retribution exacted from the Anti-Semite that day came in the form of a motherly chiding.

The boy's mother looked at the police, at the Blums, and at the three steps between them. She took her boy by the collar and, pulling him down to a manageable height, slapped him across the face.

“Whether it's niggers or kids with horns,” she said, “I don't want you beating on those that are small.”

W
E'D LONG IMAGINED
that Greenheath was like any other town, except for its concentration of girls in ankle-length denim skirts and white-canvas Keds, and boys in sloppy oxford shirts, with their yarmulkes hanging down as if sewn to the side of their heads. There was the fathers' weekday ritual. When they disembarked from the cars of the Long Island Railroad in the evenings, hands reached into pockets and yarmulkes were slipped back in place. The beating reminded us that these differences were not so small.

Our parents were born and raised in Brooklyn. In Greenheath, they built us a Jewish Shangri-la, providing us with everything but the one crucial thing Brooklyn had offered. It wasn't stickball or kick-the-can—acceptable losses, though nostalgia ran high. No, it was a
quality
that we were missing, a toughness. As a group of boys thirteen and fourteen, we grew healthy, we grew polite, but our parents thought us soft.

Frightened as we were, we thought so too, which is why we turned to Ace Cohen. He was the biggest Jew in town, and our senior by half a dozen years. He was the toughest Jew we knew, the only one who smoked pot, who had ever been arrested, and who owned both a broken motorcycle and an arcade version of Asteroids. He left the coin panel open and would play endlessly on a single quarter, fishing it out when he was finished. In our admiration we never considered that at nineteen or twenty we might want to move out of our parents' basements, or go to college. We thought only that he lived the good life—no cares, no job, his own Asteroids, and a mini-fridge by his bed where he kept his Ring Dings ice-cold.

“Not my beef, little Jewboys,” is what he told us, when we begged him to beat up the Anti-Semite on our behalf. “Violence breeds violence,” he said, slapping at buttons. “Older and wiser—trust me when I tell you to let it go.”

“We called the police,” Zvi said. “We went to his house with my parents and them.”

“Unfortunate,” Ace said, looking down at little Zvi. “Unfortunate, my buddy, for you.

“It's a delicate thing being Jewish,” Ace said. “It's a condition that aggravates the more mind you pay it. Let it go, I tell you. If you insist on fighting, then at least fight him yourselves.”

“It would be easier if you did,” we told him.

“And I bet, big as your Anti-Semite is, that he, too, in direct proportion, also has bigger friends. Escalation,” Ace said. “Escalation built in. You don't want this to get so bad that you really need me.”

“But what if we did?” we said.

Ace didn't answer. Frustrated and defeated, we left him—Ace Cohen, blowing the outlines of asteroids apart.

T
HEY WERE ALL
heroes to us, every single one of Russia's oppressed. We'd seen
Gulag
on cable television, and learned that for escapes across vast snowy tundras, two prisoners would invite a third to join, so that they could eat him along the way. We were moved by this as boys, and fantasized about sacrifice, wondering which of our classmates we'd devour.

Our parents were active in the fight for the refuseniks' freedom in the 1980s, and every Russian Jew was a refusenik whether he wanted to be or not. We children donated our reversible-vested three-piece suits to help clothe Jewish unfortunates of all nations. And when occasion demanded, we were taken from our classes and put on buses to march for the release of our Soviet brethren.

We got our own refusenik in Greenheath right after Zvi's assault. Boris was the janitor at a Royal Hills yeshiva. He was refilling the towel dispenser in the faculty lounge when he heard of our troubles. Boris was Russian and Jewish, and he'd served in Brezhnev's army and the Israeli one to boot. He made his sympathies known to the teachers from Greenheath, voicing his outrage over our plight. That very Friday a space was made in the Chevy Nova in which they carpooled while listening to
mishna
on tape.

Boris came to town for a Shabbos, and then another, and had he slept twenty-four hours a day and eaten while he slept, he still couldn't have managed to be hosted by a fraction of the families that wanted to house and feed him and then feed him more.

The parents were thrilled to have their own refusenik—a menial laborer yet, a young man who for a living pushed a broom. They hadn't been so excited since the mothers went on an AMIT tour of the Holy Land and saw Jews driving buses and a man wearing
tzitzit
delivering mail. Boris was Greenheath's own Sharansky, and our parents gave great weight to his dire take on our situation. His sometimes fractured English added its own gravity to the proceedings. “When hooligan gets angry,” he would say, “when drinking too much, the Anti-Semite will charge.”

The first, informal self-defense class was given the day Boris was at Larry Lipshitz's playing Intellivision Hockey and teaching Larry to smoke. It ended with Larry on the basement floor, the wind knocked out of him and a sort of wheeze coming from his throat. “How much?” he said to Boris. “How much what?” was Boris's answer. He displayed a rare tentativeness that Larry might have noticed if he hadn't been trying to breathe. “For the lesson,” Larry said. And here was the wonder of America, the land of opportunity. In Russia if you punched someone in the stomach, you did it for free. A monthly rate was set, and Larry spread the word.

That was also the day that Barry Pearlman was descended upon by our nemesis as he left Vardit's Pizza and Falafel. His food was taken. The vegetarian egg rolls (a staple of all places kosher, no matter the cuisine) were bitten into. A large pizza and a tahini platter were spread over the street. Barry was beaten, and then, as soon as he was able, he raced back into the store. Vardit, the owner, wiped the sauce from little Pearlman. She remade his order in full, charging only the pizza to his account. The Pearl-mans didn't want trouble. The police were not called.

B
ARRY
P
EARLMAN
was the second to sign up. Then came the Kleins and cockeyed Shlomo, whose mother sent him because of the current climate, though really she wanted him to learn to defend himself from us.

Our rabbis at school needed to approve of the militant group we were forming. They remembered how Israel was founded with the aid of NILI and the Haganah and the undergrounds of yore. They didn't much approve of a Jewish state without a messiah, but they gave us permission to present our proposal to Rabbi Federbush, the founder of our community and the dean of our yeshiva.

His approval was granted, but only grudgingly. The old man is not to be blamed. Karate he knew nothing of; the closest sport he was familiar with was wrestling, and this from rabbinic lore—a Greco-Roman version. His main point of protest, therefore, was that we'd be wrestling the uncircumcised publicly and in the nude. When the proposal was rephrased, and he was told that we were being trained to battle the descendants of Amalek, who attacked the Israelites in the desert; that we were gearing up to face the modern-day spawn of Haman (cursed be his name); when told it was to fight the Anti-Semite, he nodded his head, understanding. “Cossacks,” he said, and agreed.

I
T WASN'T
exactly a pure martial art but an amalgam of Israeli Krav Maga, Russian hand-to-hand combat, and Boris's own messy form of endless attack. He showed us how to fold a piece of paper so it could be used to take out an eye or open a throat, and he told us always to travel with a circuit tester clipped to our breast pocket like a pen. When possible, Boris advised us, have a new gun waiting at each destination. He claimed to have learned this during a stint in the Finger of God, searching out Nazis in Argentina and then—acting as a military tribunal of one—finding them guilty and putting a bullet between their eyes.