Back home, I take my clothes off down to my underwear and turn on the television for 240 hours. Mama, what have I done to you? I cry as the morning news turns into the nightly news and a comic show about an inventive orphaned child named Punky Brewster takes up some of the time in between. How could I have run away from you like that? Am I really any better now than this motherless Punky?
My father calls from Cape Cod to check up on me.
“Could you put Mama on?” I ask.
“She doesn’t want to speak to you.”
And I know what will happen when she returns, at least a month of silence, of doing a little whinny with her head whenever I so much as come into her line of vision, and sometimes even pushing away the air in front of her with her palm as if to signify that I am no longer welcome to share the earth’s atmosphere with her.
But one day, deep within my ten-day escape, all alone with my science fiction and my forbidden Doritos, my ass sore from sitting on the scruffy couch for so long, my eyes television red, my mind television numb, my fifty-three-dollar capitalization reduced to a pocketful of quarters, I think to myself: This is not so bad.
It’s actually kind of good.
It’s actually kind of perfect.
Maybe this is who I really am.
Not a loner, exactly.
But someone who can be alone.
14. Jonathan
Prisoners of Zion: Gary and Jonathan face another day of Hebrew school.
BACK AT SSSQ, the bodies have been piling up for years. Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka. We have special presentations in the gym, a protective fortress of prayer books around us, the American flag on one side of the stage, the Israeli flag on the other, and between them the slaughter of our innocents. As I watch the ovens open and the skeletons crumble, I become angry at the Germans and also at the Arabs, who are the same thing as the Nazis, Jew-killers, fucking murderers, they took our land or something, I hate them.
Then the other images that disturb us: Kids, white kids like us, are putting marijuana needles into their arms. They are smoking the heroin cigarettes. First Lady Nancy Reagan, standing next to the actor Clint Eastwood, a somber black background behind them, tells us, “The thrill can kill. Drug dealers need to know that we want them out of our schools, neighborhoods and our lives. Say no to drugs. And say yes to life.”
The children of the Solomon Schechter School of Queens are scared of Nazis and we are scared of drugs. If the Jewish Week had published an article revealing that Goebbels had been dealing dope to Hitler up at the Eagle’s Nest the world would finally click into place. But for now, the sad fact is that some of us will not go on to Jewish educations. We will go to public high schools where there will be gentiles, and gentiles love to “do” drugs. And how will we be able to resist the peer pressure when those thrilling drugs come our way? Clint Eastwood, sneering: “What would I do if someone offered me these drugs? I’d tell them to take a hike.”
I picture myself walking past the lockers of Cardozo High School in Bayside, Queens, the mild-mannered public school I’m zoned for. A kid walks up to me. He seems all-American, but there’s something not quite right in his eyes. “Hey, Gnu,” he says, “you want these drugs?”
And then I punch him in his face and scream, “Take a hike! Take a hike, you Nazi PLO scum!” And there’s a Jewish girl they’re trying to stick with their needles, and I run over to her, fists swinging, and scream, “Take a hike! Take a hike from her!” And she falls into my arms and I kiss her needle marks, and I say, “It’s going to be okay, Rivka. I love you. Maybe they didn’t give you the AIDS.”
The other holocaust we’re scared of is the nuclear one. The 1983 ABC-TV movie The Day After showed us what could happen to the good people of Kansas City, MO, and Lawrence, KS, if the Soviets were to vaporize them with thermonuclear devices. Then there is the BBC version, Threads, shown on PBS, which is widely acknowledged to be more realistic: babies and milk bottles are instantly turned to cinders, cats asphyxiate, survivors are left to eat raw radioactive sheep. (“Is it safe to eat?” “It’s got a thick coat, that should have protected it.”) I memorize the final moments before the bomb hits Yorkshire, an exchange between two ill-prepared bureaucrats, and I chant it to myself in the middle of the sclerotic hum that is Talmud class:
“Attack warning red!”
“Attack warning? Is it for real?”
“Attack warning is for bloody real!”
And then in the matter-of-fact tones of a BBC announcer: “The first dust settles on Sheffield. It’s an hour and twenty-five minutes after the attack. This level of attack has broken most of the windows in Britain. Many roofs are open to the sky. Some of the lethal dust gets in. In these early stages the symptoms of radiation sickness and the symptoms of panic are identical.”
Yes, they are quite identical. I am nearly shitting my pants. The problem with Threads, shot in the washed-out industrialized colors of its locale, is that it’s often hard to distinguish the city of Sheffield before the bomb hits from Sheffield after the devastation. The raw radioactive sheep actually looks like a step up from the shelled peas they’re serving at a family dinner in the opening shots; at least the mutton hasn’t been boiled to death.
The Day After, on the other hand, soft-pedals the devastation. The world falls apart far more brightly; how could it not with Steve Guttenberg (God, there he is again) playing one of the irradiated leads? But what I love about The Day After are the scenes of hardworking Missourians and Kansans reveling in their station-wagon lifestyles before the attack. Kids are riding their bikes through many-acred lawns, adults play horseshoes without worrying about mortgage payments, at the Kansas City Board of Trade soybean prices are up, and at Memorial General Hospital Dr. Jason Robards arranges for a patient to get his favorite flavor of ice cream. Vanilla. Whatever we’ve heard about the cost of living in Atlanta, Georgia, seems doubly true of this place. Here, my parents’ income if they don’t get a razvod—roughly $42,459.34 in 1983 dollars, give or take a cent — would make our family upper middle class. And then, fifty minutes into the film, when the enormous pines are uprooted by the nuclear blast, and the atomic flash reduces a wedding ceremony to so many skeletons, you really feel that these people have lost something special.
For its faults, The Day After is growing up in the early 1980s. This is our vocabulary. Pershing II. SAC Airborne Command. Launch on warning. “This is the Emergency Broadcast System.” “Sir, we need access to the keys and authentication documents.” “Confidence is high. I repeat, confidence is high.” “I want to confirm, is this an exercise? Roger. Copy. This is not an exercise.” “We have a massive attack against the U.S. at this time. Multiple ICBMs. Over three hundred missiles inbound now.” “Message follows. Alpha. Seven. Eight. November. Foxtrot. One. Five. Two. Two.” “We have execution from the President.” “Stand by. Unlock code inserted.” “Honey, we’re going to have to get used to things being a lot different. What matters is, we’re alive. And we’re together.” “The catastrophic events you have just witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in the event of a full nuclear strike against the United States.” When I close my eyes I can almost feel the eerie still as Steve Guttenberg walks down a Kansas country road minutes before the Soviet missiles reach their targets. The children’s swings are empty. A crow buzzes over the state’s ample wheat.