Electroboy (3 page)

I was fascinated by Mrs. de Lime, my first-grade teacher, a two-hundred-pound woman who wore a tight houndstooth dress that hugged her stomach and rear end, and she was even more curious about me, her “gifted child.” I was reading at a fifth-grade level, was extremely verbal, and was interested in exploring the world. I needed the answers, was more interested in what lay underneath and behind things. Thoughts raced through my head, which was crammed with wild ideas and colorful images. I was obsessed with keeping it all in order. One afternoon Mrs. de Lime took me to lunch downtown, which was only a block from school. I had a piece of pizza and a Coke (she had two pieces, maybe three), and I remember other kids from my class looking at us and my feeling ashamed to be seen eating with her. After we ate, she took me to the hardware store and bought all kinds of flower seeds for us to plant on the windowsill of the classroom, our own little project. Over the year she devised other special projects; we explored weights and pulleys, we visited a bank, and she bought me an ant farm. She had me read to the kindergartners. As the first male child, I also filled a unique place in my family. Everybody—my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles—made a huge fuss over me. Somehow I completed the family. With all of this attention came the pressure to achieve and succeed.

When I was in second grade, I was standing on line at the bottom of the stairs waiting for the school bell to ring. A girl named Allison stood at the top of the stairs, her skinny legs clad in a pair of wrinkled white tights, her feet stuffed into a pair of black Mary Janes. I was tremendously curious about her. That night I told my father that I had seen a girl’s legs at school that morning. I know now that this was my first certifiable crush, and I held on to this image for quite a while.

My parents met as camp counselors in the Berkshires in 1958. They married soon afterward and had my sister, Nancy, followed by me two years later. My father was a professor of physical education at the City College of New York and later director of athletics.
He became the director of Camp Mah-Kee-Nac, a beautiful boys’ summer camp on Stockbridge Bowl in Lenox, Massachusetts. This is where I spent my summers. His father, who had died of pneumonia when my father was a teenager, had been an attorney who kept odd work hours and was known to have mood swings and quite a temper. My father worked long days, and I always waited up at night for the headlights of his car to project a pattern on my walls and ceiling as he pulled into the driveway. He had an extraordinary sense of humor and was a pro at crossword puzzles (he used a pen), cleaning, folding laundry, paying bills (I used to watch in amazement as he wrote out each check, marked it off as paid in a special notebook, and did the calculations in his checkbook in pen), doing odd jobs around the house, smoking Chesterfields, and drinking Scotch. As I recall, we were the best of friends and did everything together. My mother thought I should have friends my own age, but other kids didn’t interest me. My father played all kinds of games with me—word games, quiz games (I knew the capitals of all fifty states by the time I was six). We went on outings to the hardware store, made repairs around the house together, and invented our own language, which was more of a tonal dialogue, emanating from the throat. My sister spoke it, too. When I was ten he let me drive around parking lots in his VW bug.

My father is also one of the most neurotic and obsessive-compulsive people I’ve ever met. Each night, before bedtime, he would coach me through hundreds of sit-ups and push-ups in a narrow hallway outside my room. He would hold my ankles and count each time I pulled my elbows to my knees, urging me on to do another. I think my record was once in the four hundreds. He was proud of these physical accomplishments. He was, after all, a professor of physical education. He kept the house spotless. Sometimes he’d get particularly revved up, racing around with the vacuum cleaner in one hand and a trash can in the other. “This place is a disaster,” he’d announce, removing vases, ashtrays, and knickknacks from the coffee table so that he could polish it. He’d massage the wood vigorously with Lemon Pledge. When the surface
was shining, he’d replace the items exactly where they’d been—he has a photographic memory. He’d move into the kitchen and load the dishwasher, clean the counters and table, scrub the sink, and polish the hardware. Then he’d clean out the refrigerator. I would watch in amazement and feel helpless, cringing as he put the Sunday
New York Times
back together, section by section, making sharp creases at the folds. He relentlessly organized piles of bills and mail. As soon as something dirtied, he was there to clean it. He taught me the “proper way” to fold clothes, shine shoes, wash a car. Watching him shine a pair of shoes was thrilling. He would brush them off, hold them under the light, spit into the polish and rub the cloth into it in circles until he had the perfect amount on it. Then he’d massage the shoe with the polish until it was perfectly covered and lay it on a piece of newspaper to bake. After twenty minutes he would inspect the shoe and buff it with the brush until it shined perfectly.

My mother was the epitome of the suburban housewife, but with a touch of the obsessiveness that marked all in my family. I used to watch her kneeling on the kitchen linoleum, happily scraping out the wax between the tiles. This comforted me because it relaxed her. So did watching her smoke her Winston cigarettes and drinking her coffee-flavored No-Cal soda. She always made certain that my sister and I had everything that we wanted—pulling things off even when times were lean. The product of a broken marriage, she grew up with a single mother whose parents helped support the family. Her father was a liquor salesman who passed on his competitive qualities to her. She went back to complete her college degree in her thirties, as she had dropped out early to marry my father. She passed on her sense of competition to both my sister and me and taught us both to “be tough.” It wasn’t until she was in her forties that she had the chance to apply her natural skills in business, becoming extremely successful in the field of executive recruitment. My mother didn’t give me much space for being different from other kids. I just wanted the freedom to do whatever crazy things I felt like doing—taking apart a telephone and trying to put it back together, connecting
a Matchbox car to a wire and plugging it in and getting shocked, baking a frog in the kitchen oven. She was always encouraging me to do what the other kids were doing. One spring night after dinner, when I was about twelve, my father and I were in the backyard throwing a baseball around. It was an instructional session as opposed to a recreational one. “Don’t throw it like that,” my mother’s voice barked. I looked up and saw her head sticking out her bedroom window. Now I had the additional pressure of having two coaches. I held in my rage and kept throwing the ball back to my father as he threw it to me, but not as she wanted me to. She wanted her son to be like everybody else; she wanted him to be a baseball player, not a mad scientist.

But even with their shortcomings, I thought my mother and father were the ideal parents, full of life, witty, attractive, and stylish, and I wanted to be just like them. I didn’t envy any of my other friends’ parents like I did my own parents. We were a close-knit and a relatively happy family. Nancy and I watched television together at the foot of my parents’ bed, and we had spirited political debates at dinnertime. Of course, there was some screaming, fighting, and hair pulling in our house, too, but no more, I imagined, than in the average American home. I often ended up serving as the mediator, the buffer, and the referee. My sister was often the target of my parents’ outbursts. My father even kicked her bedroom door in once, which was rather out of character for him. She was dating a boy from “the other side of the tracks,” a punk who had no plans to go on to college, and getting C’s in all her classes. The more my parents tried to control her, the more she resisted. One evening at dinner she told my parents that she was going to see her boyfriend that night. My mother forbade her to leave the house, and a huge fight ensued. My mother began screaming about what a “lowlife” the boyfriend was as my sister tried to escape the kitchen and climb the stairs to her room. I tried to keep the two apart, but my mother’s hostility was so intense, she looked like a heavyweight fighter getting ready to take a swing. Luckily, Nancy escaped to her bedroom. In general, Nancy seemed to run into more of the normal adolescent problems than
I did and screwed up quite a bit. I was the one who followed the rules by the book and entertained and made jokes for my parents and their friends. I developed these defense mechanisms against conflict and gradually took on more responsibility in order to keep things running smoothly within the family.

Growing up in the Jersey suburbs was like playing Color-forms. We all had the requisite vinyl pieces—the house, the yard, the trees, the fence, the lawnmower, the patio, the picnic table, the grill, the mother, the father, the son, the daughter, the golden retriever, the martinis, the hamburgers—you could put them together any way you wanted and make a suburban dream life or fuck everything up by putting the mother on the grill and the golden retriever underneath the lawnmower.

New Jersey is a strange place. It never seemed like we were near the center of anything or were extraordinary in any way, and I longed to be extraordinary. I wanted to do things differently from everybody else, better than anyone else. And I wanted to be famous. Even though we lived eleven miles from the city, it might as well have been Omaha. I longed for the big city, more opportunity and excitement and adventure. Sometimes I’d wonder what it would be like to have to live on the opposite side of my map, in a mud hut in some Third World African nation, and eat grain that had been drop-shipped on the village by the Red Cross. Maybe I was spending too much time reading back issues of
National Geographic
at 4:00
A.M.
when I couldn’t sleep. Visions of women nursing starving babies, men with bones through their noses, and children with distended bellies filled my mind and kept me up devising plans to save the world. I imagined rescuing all of the starving and homeless people, building enormous feeding centers and shelters for multitudes.

Politically, my family always seemed to be on the wrong side of popular opinion. My parents were liberals who took my sister and me to protests against the Vietnam War and to a McGovern rally in 1972. Toward the end of the war, on a cold and snowy night in December 1974, my mother took my uncle and me to huddle around a bonfire on the lawn of the Episcopal church in
town. We held candles and sang Christmas carols with the minister, his wife, and some other people from the church. I was holding my mother’s hand, and I remember her tears and the warmth of the fire.

Although my parents encouraged me to get involved in all kinds of after-school activities, school was the main focus of our lives, and in the truest sense of the Jewish tradition, a tremendous emphasis was placed on our academic achievement. In addition to being “the smart one,” I felt even more important because I had a slight speech impediment, difficulty with my S’s, that got me separated from the rest of the class for one-on-one instruction. I had very little self-control and was loud and liked to incite trouble. My competitive drive forced me into the limelight by the time I reached junior high school, when I became both student council president and yearbook editor, a rare feat for a thirteen-year-old. I worked compulsively and around the clock, a perfectionist who was very accomplished academically and extremely popular. I walked around the halls of River Dell Junior High School with meticulous notebooks and clean book covers. My locker was orderly, supplied with extra notebooks, pencils, and pens. I was the master of rewriting notes into new notebooks and retyping term papers when I found the slightest error. My student council campaign posters featured my superb graphics, painstakingly executed in my basement headquarters. I spent hours drawing my simple election message, “Elect Andy Behrman President,” making sure each letter was the same size and perfectly aligned with the next. I went through sheets of colored oak tag and numerous Magic Markers, and ended up with magnificent-looking posters that put my opponent—who had just scrawled her name on some white cardboard—to shame. But inside I was suffering from a combination of anxiety and depression, dogged by uncontrolled obsessive behavior, relentlessly, repetitively cleaning, organizing and aligning objects so that they were symmetrical, constantly washing my hands, counting and checking. Filled with doubt, I needed to touch things repeatedly to count them or check them—pennies in a coin wrapper, a light switch, or the knob on my
door. Nobody noticed. It was my secret. When I was sixteen I started pulling out my hair. I have always had a very full head of hair, and one day I noticed, as I was twirling it with my fingers and around a pencil, that I was actually yanking it out by the root, one strand at a time. Sitting in my classroom, listening to my sophomore English teacher lecture, I would pull hairs off the side of my head, over my right ear; then I’d examine the root and scrape it onto a piece of white paper to study the stain it left. Each time I plucked a hair from my scalp, I would put myself into a deep trance; the excitement was intense, like an orgasm. I often looked around to see if anybody noticed what I was doing. Over a period of a couple of months, during school and late at night when I couldn’t sleep, I pulled hair until a four-inch patch of my scalp was bald. Unlike a girl in my class with the same condition, who had to wear a bandanna to cover her baldness, I had enough hair on top to cover the bald patch. The smooth, hairless spot felt pleasurable to touch. My parents thought the bald spot was a dermatological problem, and so did the doctor they took me to see, a top-notch dermatologist at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, a man nearly in his eighties. I remember driving across the George Washington Bridge thinking how silly this whole thing was because I knew why I was losing hair. The elderly doctor in his white lab coat and white hair examined the naked skin on my head and stared blankly at me. “Son, I don’t know what this is,” he said. “But I’ll give this a try.” He swabbed the patch with a solution that burned for hours. It was supposed to promote regrowth. It felt like I was being punished for ever pulling a single hair from my head. I was so frightened by the severity of the treatment that I never touched my hair again and probably replaced this habit with squeezing blackheads. Fifteen years later I learned that I had trichotillomania, a disorder in which one pulls hair from the scalp, eyelashes, or eyebrows and often plays with the root, to relieve tension. The act results in tremendous gratification and humiliation.