We Are What We Pretend to Be (11 page)

He paused, and then he began the main body of his speech: “I am as celibate as any heterosexual Roman Catholic priest,” and so on.

The shit that came pouring out of young Gil Berman, if you want to call it that, when he himself was a college kid back in 1977, found plenty of laxatives in and around Columbia. Not the least of these was the comedy club only eight blocks away. There was also the miasma from a gruesomely moronic ten-year war, ended at last and lost, which never should have been fought at all:
Vietnam
. Berman and his classmates, God knows, did not regret having been too young to have fought in that war. It was mostly working-class kids who did that. But they were achingly envious of what Berman would come to call “the draft-dodging students who had raised such particular hell at Columbia while trying to get their government to stop the war. Some of them had
sustained bruises, in fact, from the truncheons of anti-intellectual law-enforcement personnel, or from brickbats hurled by members of the lower social orders in the building trades.”

And drugs were everywhere. Berman on this subject: “You didn’t have to leave the campus and go all the way to the nearest bodega or pizzeria for synthetic accomplishments and popularity. Then as now, the motto of every college, jail, prison, and YMCA in the United States should have been: ‘TV is not enough,’ or, ‘Why put up with the pain of being a living thing when you don’t have to?’ Or, ‘Have a snort, and feel bulletproof for fifteen minutes!’”

He was an only child. Who was his mother, now dead? After her one marriage, she kept her maiden name, which was Magda Lanz, and she lived, in Berman’s words, “from breech birth to long-widowed death in the Knightsbridge mansion built by her father.” That she had come into the world butt foremost, almost killing her own mother by doing that, was no family secret. Her mother—Berman’s grandmother, Sarah—found an occasion almost every day to recall for him the agony she had gone through in order that he might have a mother.

And his mother was permanently deranged by the postpartum depression and electroconvulsive therapy she suffered after giving birth to him, not to mention the nonstop dry heaves before that. So one is tempted to suggest that Gil Berman found chastity more reasonable than most people in good health would because his grandmother and then his mother had gone through such hell as a result of copulation. Is it possible that his grandmother’s tales and his mother’s wails made young Gilbert Lanz Berman, for that was his full name, see sex as calamity’s overture?

What scotches this theory, in part, if not entirely, is Berman’s own testimony that he “made the fur and feathers fly, you can bet your ass, split three cherries, two engagements, and a marriage, before I was twenty-four.” Theory number two: VD?

His mother’s father was Gilbert Lanz, briefly America’s ambassador to Israel, who made a great deal of money honorably in Boston real estate and was the most generous individual supporter of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He died while Berman was still a fetus, and so he was spared the unbearable dissonance of his daughter’s insanity. But he sure did hear her dry heaves. His own wife, Sarah—whose major sexual escapade, to hear her tell it, was a breech birth—was dead. He left his unseen and only grandson $10 million in 1958, and ten times that much to his daughter. Another legacy of value to his grandson, as an armature for him to hang jokes on, was the inscription he had requested for his tombstone, which read, in full: “Ambassador Gilbert Lanz (1883–1958): The only proof he needed of the existence of God was music.” The armature: “The only proof so-and-so needed of the existence of God was such-and-such.” Using the late disgraced President Richard Nixon as an example: “The only proof Nixon needed of the existence of God was a pardon.” Berman on himself: “The only proof I need of the existence of God is a third World War.”

The ambassador himself was no musician. By his own admission he “could scarcely whistle ‘Hot Cross Buns,’” although his mother was said to have played a harp when she was young, before he had a chance to hear her pluck those strings. There was no harp in the house when he was born. The ambassador
was
an
avid golfer. Berman again: “The only proof my maternal grandfather needed of the existence of God was a birdie.”

And what a gift from God it seemed, and indeed should have seemed, to Gilbert Lanz when his daughter Magda revealed herself as a piano prodigy at the age of seven. The most famous piano teacher in the Boston area was Frederika Tanzen Schild-knecht, who gladly took little Magda as her pupil, and who said she might indeed be another Mozart. At the age of eight Magda Lanz performed with the Boston Pops Orchestra, sharing the stage and applause with two other prodigies, Akkoda Akiri and Marissa Lotspiech, of whom nothing more would be heard. Berman would say of his mother, there in Northampton: “Like ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of great artists of every sort since the dawn of history, my dear mother, Magda, fell victim to audience shortages and a talent glut.”

He said of talent in general: “Beware of gods bearing gifts.”

So, although Magda Lanz continued to practice piano for three hours every day, until botched shock treatments following the birth of a comedian zapped her memory and aplomb to flinders, she set out to become a physician. She attended Knightsbridge’s superb public schools and then drove daily in her own Mercedes convertible to and from Boston University, where she studied premedicine. A plain woman, and somewhat dumpy, albeit coming and going in a $60,000 form of transportation, she fell in love with a pretty-faced, redheaded, baritone, predental student: Bob “Paddy” Berman. As luck would have it, this “paragon of manly schmaltz,” as his own son would come to call him, was also a former Junior Golf Champion of Barnstable
County, Cape Cod, where his folks lived. His dad owned a shoe store in Hyannis. It isn’t there anymore. And did Magda’s duffer father and her sandtrap Romeo ever hit it off!

Bob and Magda were given a $45,000 wedding at the Knightsbridge Golf and Country Club, and then the shit hit the fan big time! Magda found herself pregnant, and the rest is history. Berman: “Imagine how my father felt, only twenty-two, in his first year of dental school. How would
you
feel if you stuck your dingdong into a woman, with the best of intentions, and she exploded?” Or, conversely, one might wish to ask: “How would you like it if, through no fault of your own, you were booby-trapped protoplasm? Or her son?”

Gil Berman on the subject of his birth, which ruined the lives of both his parents: “When the doctor dangled me upside down and spanked my butt to start my breathing, I didn’t cry. I said, ‘A funny thing happened on the way down the birth canal. A bum came up to me and said he hadn’t had a bite for two days. So I bit him.’”

After the booby trap went off, Magda and Bob Berman, one has to say, both behaved honorably and resourcefully within the strict existential limits Fate had set for them. As luck would have it, those limits, according to Berman, were “more like inner tubes stretched between fence posts than like barbed-wire such as once ringed Auschwitz and Alcatraz, because they had plenty of money. Money is dehydrated mercy. If you have plenty of it, you just add tears, and people come out of the woodwork to comfort you.”

Yes, and each of his parents made the most of such momentum
as he or she had been maintaining before, and again, shit hit the fan. His mother continued to play the piano for hours every day, and she took up making artistic scrapbooks of current events, and she was a queen bee in a hive of doctor and lawyer bees, and nurse and hairdresser bees, and a nanny bee and then a tutor-and-companion bee for her child, and on and on. And there was already a gymnasium in the basement, and an aerobics instructor bee to make her and her child stay in shape. One odd rule she made—and she got a lot of what she asked for—was that although her son could sit next to her on the piano bench while she played—she liked that—he was never ever to touch the keys. If he reached for the keyboard when he was very little, she would grab his wrist and say, “No, no, no, Gilly-willy. Gilly-willy be very unhappy if he touch the keys. Gilly-willy-woo cry and cry all night like Mama.” That sort of thing, as though the Steinway grand were, in Berman’s words, “a red-hot, potbellied, cast-iron stove in a hick-town hardware store.”

Also, if he made any friends in the outside world, he wasn’t to bring them home with him. A former kindergarten teacher would recall him as having been “a rather unusual child.” She was unable to be more specific than that. She was eighty years old.

It is Gil Berman who is responsible for the analogy above: a childhood home like a beehive. It must have surely occurred to his dad as well. “Anyone preparing for a career in the healing arts,” he said, “is bound to have heard about the lives of social insects at some point in his or her education, as the case may be. I don’t see how Dad could not have thought of Mother as a queen bee surrounded by workers. So fucking obvious! That
would make him a drone. As a drone he had done all a drone was supposed to do, which was knock up the queen. But he was not a bee, and so he stayed in dental school at Boston University, to which he had just been admitted. What else was he supposed to do?

“He asked his gaga wife if he could borrow her Mercedes to drive to and from BU, since she was never going to drive again, and there were four other cars. She said, ‘You’ll have to ask my lawyer.’ So he did. The lawyer said he could. That was the last time he asked his wife for anything. If there was something he really needed, like money for gas or lunch, he asked her lawyer.”

He asked the lawyer, “How about tuition? Should my parents keep paying that? They will if they have to.” Berman: “He was just a kid, you realize, only twenty-three years old when the excrement hit the air-conditioning. He felt he had done terrible damage with his dingdong, and he had had zero opportunity to establish himself as head or even co-head of a biological family. At least Bob Berman could become an orthodontist instead of sitting around the beehive with his thumb up his ass. Could he actually ask for money?”

Bob Berman’s strikingly specific boyhood dream of becoming an orthodontist formed on a golf course when he was only a caddy, had been about money, and lots of time for golf, and being a doctor, but a kind of doctor whose patients weren’t sick, who could never up and croak on him. But in defending his career choice against funsters since the eighth grade, Gil Berman’s dad had become, in Gil Berman’s words, “operatically arioso on the subject of how important smiles were, and what meticulous
planning and patience and surgical skills it took to fix one.” A professor of his at BU Dental likened orthodontics to “civil engineering in a teacup.” Gil Berman’s dad loved hearing that. It was the truth.

Gill Berman: “The only proof my dad needed of the existence of God was a birdie or an overbite. And after he bought another man’s practice in Boston with Mom’s money, he started chasing women with his own money. Why not? He was warm and beautiful. He came back to the Knightsbridge apiary maybe once a month. I’d sit next to Mom on the piano bench while she hammered out a thunderstorm. Or I’d watch TV. I didn’t have a clue as to who or what he was. Neither did Mom.”

Dr. Robert Berman, DDS, did in fact attempt to relate to his biological son when the son was a sophomore at Knightsbridge High. He took him for a ride in what had been the boy’s mother’s convertible Mercedes, “so they could talk.” That’s right! You got it! Dr. Berman was still driving what had become a priceless antique, not because he was cheap but because the car was glamorous. Gil Berman would say of that trip that he himself might as well have been the machine, and the Mercedes the fascinating personality, since his father talked to the car all the time. “The car had lost a lot of its pickup,” said the comedian. “So when we were stopped at a stoplight with other cars around, Dr. Berman would say to the old Mercedes something like, ‘Listen, old girl, in a moment that light is going to turn green, and nice people on important errands behind us will expect us as good citizens to jump ahead with all possible alacrity. Can you possibly do it this one last time? That’s my baby.’”

When in Barnstable High School on the Cape, Dr. Berman had had what almost none of his classmates had, unless they had some kind of business to inherit: a blueprint for a future he could surely build—orthodontics. Others who played golf as well as he did, or could sing as well, might easily ruin their lives in sports or entertainment, where even more gifted people would surely cut them new assholes, would make them feel like something the cat drug in. That wasn’t going to happen to young Bob Berman, and it didn’t.

Gil Berman on his dad: “He was staunch! He held his course through all kinds of weather until he could at last drop anchor in the tranquil marina of orthodontics, where every patient has deep pockets, and no one dies.” There in the Calvin Theater on December 11, 2000, Gil Berman might have been his father when his father was a teenager: “Let us pray: Our Father, which art in Heaven: Lead us not into the temptation of outsize expectations.”

Magda Lanz Berman, Gil Berman’s mother, died of cancer on April 9, 2000, having been a widow for twenty-three years. She had been a wife for only about half that long. She had been smoking two packs of unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes since she was twenty, but she didn’t die of cancer of the lung. She died of the quickie: pancreas. She died three months before her son the comedian entered the Caldwell Institute for the second time. That’s right! You got it! Gil Berman had committed himself to Caldwell once before.

He committed himself the first time “when,” in his own words, “I was a preemie, a neonate.” He was also a newlywed,
twenty-four years old. While in Las Vegas, Nevada, for the first time in his life, as a warm-up act for Marie Osmond, he had married a topless dancer named “Wanda Lightfoot,” if you can believe it, when they were both tiddley-poo on LSD. During the wedding ceremony, during which they had promised to have and to hold and so on, he at least had the presence of mind to whisper hoarsely to his bride, who had a terrific set of knockers, “No kids, no kids.”