But the “Oak” and a small, pretty Mesopotamian-eyed girl in the seat next to him are already laughing at my terrible affliction. If only they knew what a wide berth I have given to my father’s Tchaikovsky and my mother’s Chopin. How in my father’s car, on the way home from my grandmother’s, I turn on the Duran Duran tape as loudly as he will let me, and, with my face turned to my window, as if I’m watching the fascinating cement scenery of Grand Central Parkway go by, I mouth the British words I cannot even begin to comprehend (“The re-flex, flex-flex”) under my tuna-fish breath. I mouth them with every last little bit of hope inside me.
* From this point the “sic” will be omitted for the sake of brevity.
12. Immortality
The author poses as the popular music singer Billy Idol on the toilet of his family’s upstate bungalow. Puberty is coming, and the author is about to get chubby.
THE SUMMER OF 1985. I am about to become a man according to Jewish tradition. As in the past few summers, my family is staying in a Russian bungalow colony in the Catskill Mountains. The colony consists of a dozen sunburned wooden cottages squeezed in between some unimpressive hills and a daunting forest-and-brook combination that to kids from Queens might as well be the Amazon. During the workweek it is just our grandmas and their charges (a few grandpas have survived World War II to play competitive chess beneath the easygoing American sun), our lives revolving around the intermittent delivery of stale baked goods from the back of a station wagon. “Bread! Cakes!” an unhappy middle-aged local woman yells at us, and the grandmothers and kids jostle for a week-old raspberry Danish on sale for a quarter that tastes as good as anything we have ever known. (I clutch my change so tight it makes treads in my palms.) Otherwise, we children play The Fool, a Russian card game requiring little skill, and launch shuttlecocks into the air with our defective badminton rackets, not really caring whether they come down or not, because we are relaxed and happy and among our own kind.
My grandmother is always in the background, chewing an apricot down to its pit, her eyes firmly affixed on my once-skinny and now-somewhat-flabby body. She is making sure nothing and no one will cause me harm. The other kids have similar minders, women who grew up under Stalin whose entire lives in the USSR were devoted to crisis management, to making sure the arbitrary world around them would treat their children better than it had treated them. These days my grandmother is talking about going to “the next world,” and that Bar Mitzvah summer, having passed a milestone of my own, I begin to see her as an older woman in decline, the shaking hands clutching the apricot pit, the trembling voice as she begs me to swallow another forkful of sausage. She is a figure as anxious and helpless before eternity as any other. Maybe this is what America does to you. With the daily fight for survival abated, one can either reminisce about the past or face the singular destiny of the future. For all her talk of the paradise to come, my grandmother does not want to die.
On weekends our parents come up to visit from the city, and on Friday nights we kids sit at a picnic table by the quiet country road running past our bungalows, alert as terriers for the difficult sounds our fathers’ secondhand cars make. I remember my first love of that year — not a girl, but the gleaming new Mitsubishi Tredia-S sedan that my parents have bought, a boxy little number known mostly for its fuel efficiency. The beige front-wheel-drive Tredia-S is proof positive that we are ascending to the middle class, and whenever my father and I are out on the road I rejoice upon seeing the more basic Tredia model (the one without the S).
My father is at the apex of middle age, a deeply physical man who feasts with great emphasis upon entire garlic cloves on hunks of black bread and, with his small, tough physique, best resembles a cherry tomato. He lives for fishing. Each year he plucks hundreds, if not thousands, of fish out of streams, lakes, and oceans with his fishing stick and a chilling competence. He single-handedly empties out a lake near Middletown, New York, leaving behind just a small school of dazed, orphaned crappies. Compared with my father I am nothing. The Bar Mitzvah may soon make me a man, but when we enter the forbidding grasshopper-ridden forest by the bungalow colony, and he reaches into the ground with his bare hands to sift for the juiciest worms, I feel coursing through me the Russian word for “weak”—slabyi, an adjective that from my father’s mouth reduces me to near zero.
“Akh, ty, slabyi.” Eh, you, weakling.
When we aren’t fishing, we entertain ourselves at humble cinemas in towns with names like Liberty and Ellenville. The movie of the summer is Cocoon. Its premise: Aliens, Antareans to be exact, descend upon southern Florida to offer eternal life to a group of nursing-home residents, played by the likes of Wilford Brimley and Don Ameche. At this point in my life, Hollywood can sell me anything — from Daryl Hannah as a mermaid to Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl and Al Pacino as a rather violent Cuban émigré. Watching movies in the air-conditioned chill I find myself wholly immersed and in love with everything that passes the camera lens. I feel close to my father, removed from the difficulties of worm gathering while being attacked by aggressive grasshoppers, free of my constant fear of getting my thumb impaled by one of the gigantic rusty hooks with which he terrorizes the local trout. At the movie theater my father and I are essentially two immigrant men — one smaller than the other and yet to be swaddled by a thick carpet of body hair — sitting before the canned spectacle of our new homeland, silent, attentive, enthralled.
Cocoon has everything I want from a movie. Here is the geriatric Don Ameche break-dancing after being energized by the aliens’ fountain of youth, while back at our bungalow colony my grandmother and her fellow senior citizens mull over the price of farmer’s cheese. Here are Floridian palm trees, ocean breezes, and Tahnee Welch — daughter of Raquel — taking off her clothes while Steve Guttenberg, playing essentially himself, peeks through a peephole. I have never seen a woman as easily beautiful, as effortlessly tanned and New World lovely, as Ms. Welch the Younger. The fact that my sexual awakening peripherally involves Steve Guttenberg I have gradually accepted.
The theme of the movie is immortality. “We’ll never be sick,” the Wilford Brimley character tells his grandson before the aliens beam him up. “We won’t get any older. And we’ll never die.” As he speaks, Mr. Brimley’s character is casting a fishing line into the Atlantic Ocean while his worried grandson looks on, a sliver of a boy next to a fully formed, famously mustached mastodon of a man. As my father guides the Mitsubishi Tredia-S beneath the bright rural canopy of stars on our way home, our sedan redolent of dead fish, live worms, and male sweat, I wonder why Wilford Brimley doesn’t take his grandson with him to Antarea. Wouldn’t that mean that he would eventually outlive his grandson? Are some of us destined for a flicker of physical existence while others explode like supernovas across the cold mountain sky? If so, where is the American fairness in that? That night, as my father’s healthy snores rumble in the bed next to mine and my grandmother wanders in and out of the bathroom, sighing to the depth of her ample, peasant bosom, I consider in great detail both the nothingness to which we will all eventually succumb and its very opposite, the backside of Tahnee Welch partly shrouded in a pair of white summer shorts. I want Wilford Brimley to be my grandpa, and I want him to die. I keep thinking of what he tells his slabyi obsessive little grandson at the start of the film: “The trouble with you is you think too much and that’s when a guy gets scared.”