My mother too had been intrepid in her fashion. When she was young she worked in public health with drug addicts and subsistence farmers in Africa. After I was born she narrowed her horizons and became first an expert in early childhood education and eventually a psychology professor. Our house on Sullivan Street, at the far end of the Gardens from the Golden mansion, was filled with the pleasing accumulated clutter of their lives, threadbare Persian rugs, carved wooden African statuary, photographs, maps and etchings of the early “New” cities on Manhattan Island, both Amsterdam and York. There was a corner dedicated to famous Belgians, an original Tintin drawing hanging next to a Warhol screen print of Diane von Furstenberg and the famous Hollywood production still of the beautiful star of Breakfast at Tiffany’s with her long cigarette holder, once known as Miss Edda van Heemstra, afterwards much beloved as Audrey Hepburn; and below these, a first edition of Mémoires d’Hadrien by Marguerite Yourcenar on a small table next to photographs of my namesake Magritte in his studio, the cyclist Eddy Merckx, and the Singing Nun. (Jean-Claude Van Damme didn’t make the cut.)
In spite of this little nook of Belgiana they did not hesitate to criticize their country of origin when asked. “King Leopold II and the Congo Free State,” my mother said. “Worst colonialist ever, most rapacious setup in colonial history.” “And nowadays,” my father added, “Molenbeek. European center of fanatical Islam.”
In pride of place on the living room mantelpiece sat a decades-old, never-used block of hashish still wrapped in its original cheap cellophane packaging and stamped with an official Afghan government seal of quality bearing the likeness of the moon. In Afghanistan in the time of the king the hashish was legal and came in three price- and quality-controlled packages, Afghan Gold, Silver and Bronze. But what my father, who never indulged in the weed, kept in pride of place on the mantel was something rarer, something legendary, almost occult. “Afghan Moon,” my father said. “If you use that it opens de third eye in your pineal gland in de center of your forehead and you become clairvoyant and few secrets can be kept from you.”
“Then why have you never used it,” I asked.
“Because a world vissout mystery iss like a picture vith no shadows,” he said. “By seeing too much it shows you nossing.”
“What he means is,” my mother added, “that, (a), we believe in using our minds and not blowing them, and, (b), it’s probably adulterated, or cut, as the hippies used to say, with some dreadful hallucinogen, and (c), it’s possible that I would object strongly. I don’t know. He has never put me to the test.” The hippies, as if she had no memory of the 1970s, as if she had never worn a sheepskin jacket or a bandanna or dreamed of being Grace Slick.
There was no Afghan Sun, FYI. The sun of Afghanistan was the king, Zahir Shah. And then the Russians came, and then the fanatics, and the world changed.
But Afghan Moon…that helped me in the darkest moment of my life, and my mother was no longer able to object.
And there were books, inevitably, books like a disease, infesting every corner of our shabby, happy home. I became a writer because of course I did with those forebears, and maybe I chose movies instead of novels or biographies because I knew I couldn’t compete with the old folks. But until the Goldens moved into the big house on Macdougal, diagonally across the Gardens from ours, my post-graduation creativity had been stalled. With the boundless egotism of youth I had begun to imagine a mighty film, or a Dekalog-style sequence of films, dealing with migration, transformation, fear, danger, rationalism, romanticism, sexual change, the city, cowardice, and courage; nothing less than a panoramic portrait of my times. My preferred manner would be something I privately called Operatic Realism, my subject the conflict between the Self and the Other. I was trying to make a fictional portrait of my neighborhood but it was a story without a driving force. My parents didn’t have the doomed heroism of properly Operatic-Realist leads; nor did our other neighbors. (Bob Dylan was long gone.) My celebrated superstar-African-American-movie-director-in-a-red-baseball-cap film studies professor haughtily said after reading my early screenplays, “Very prettily done, kid, but where’s the blood? It’s too quiet. Where’s the engine? Maybe you should allow a flying saucer to land in the goddamn Gardens. Maybe you should blow up a building. Just make something happen. Make some noise.”
I didn’t know how. And then the Goldens arrived and they were my flying saucer, my engine, my bomb. I felt the excitement of the young artist whose subject has arrived like a gift in the holiday mail. I felt grateful.
It was the age of nonfiction, my father told me. “Maybe stop trying to make sings up. Ask in any bookstore,” he said, “iss de books on de nonfiction tables dat move while de made-up stories languish.” But that was the world of books. In the movies it was the age of superheroes. For nonfiction we had Michael Moore’s polemics, Werner Herzog’s Woodcarver Steiner, Wim Wenders’s Pina, some others. But the big bucks were in fantasy. My father admired and commended to me the work and ideas of Dziga Vertov, the Soviet documentarist who detested drama and literature. His film style, Kino-Eye or Ciné-Eye, aimed at nothing less than the evolution of mankind into a higher, fiction-free form of life, “from a bumbling citizen through the poetry of the machine to the perfect electric man.” Whitman would have liked him. Maybe I-am-a-camera Isherwood too. I, however, resisted. I left the higher forms to my parents and Michael Moore. I wanted to make the world up.
A bubble is a fragile thing, and often in the evening the professors talked worriedly about its bursting. They worried about political correctness, about their colleague on TV with a twenty-year-old female student screaming abuse into her face from a distance of three inches because of a disagreement over campus journalism, their colleague in another TV news story abused for not wanting to ban Pocahontas costumes on Halloween, their colleague forced to take at least one seminar’s sabbatical because he had not sufficiently defended a student’s “safe space” from the intrusion of ideas that student deemed too “unsafe” for her young mind to encounter, their colleague defying a student petition to remove a statue of President Jefferson from his college campus in spite of the repressible fact that Jefferson had owned slaves, their colleague excoriated by students with evangelical Christian family histories for asking them to read a graphic novel by a lesbian cartoonist, their colleague forced to cancel a production of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues because by defining women as persons with vaginas it discriminated against persons identifying as female who did not possess vaginas, their colleagues resisting student efforts to “de-platform” apostate Muslims because their views were offensive to non-apostate Muslims. They worried that young people were becoming pro-censorship, pro-banning-things, pro-restrictions, how did that happen, they asked me, the narrowing of the youthful American mind, we’re beginning to fear the young. “Not you, of course, darling, who could be scared of you,” my mother reassured me, to which my father countered, “Scared for you, yes. Vith this Trotskyist beard you insist on wearing you look like an ice-pick target to me. Avoid Mexico City, especially de Coyoacán neighborhood. This iss my advice.”