On My Knees
Authors: Periel Aschenbrand
I have changed the names of some individuals, and modified identifying features, including physical descriptions and occupations, of other individuals in order to preserve their anonymity. In some cases, composite characters have been created or timelines have been compressed, in order to further preserve privacy and to maintain narrative flow.
For Guy
Contents
I do not regret the things I have done, but those I did not do.
—M
ARK
T
WAIN
Setting the Stage: The Anus Is Back
T
hough I grew up in Queens, I try to avoid going back there at all cost. Every time I go I have a totally irrational meltdown that by just going there to
visit
, my worst nightmare will come true and I will somehow get stuck living there for the rest of my life. I haven’t lived in Queens since I was seventeen, but it still makes me nervous. If my parents didn’t live there, I would have no reason to ever step foot in the largest and most ethnically diverse borough of New York. But alas, my parents do live there and I guess I love my parents more than I hate Queens, so when they call, I come.
I mean, sort of. That’s actually kind of a lie. I live in Manhattan and my mother works in Manhattan and though my father is retired, he often drives my mom to work and so we usually meet in Manhattan. But once every four to six months, my mother becomes irate that I never visit them, so I acquiesce. And also, like most things, the anticipation of the thing is worse than the thing itself—which is to say that although Queens is kind of a shithole, it’s not that bad once you’re there.
Most recently, I was summoned to my parents’ house to bathe my parents’ pug, Señor. Giving Señor a bath is comprised of putting the dog in the sink, turning on the water, rubbing soap on him, and rinsing him off. For the most part he just stands there, looking at you appreciatively. He’s a
pug
not a rottweiler. In other words, a monkey could do this job. But for some reason, my parents think I am the only person who is capable of it, which is typically neurotic of them and totally fucking ridiculous. But my parents are so wonderful and they ask so little of me. So really, what can I do but oblige them?
While washing the dog is easy, the drying part can get tricky. When you try to dry him off, Señor goes totally berserk and tries to steal the towel, and then sometimes he takes off like a bat out of hell and races around the apartment in circles. There is definitely an art to drying him and I’m usually pretty good at it. But this time, he escaped and went completely ballistic. Instead of racing around in circles, he kept making a beeline straight for my behind with such vigor you would have thought he was a bloodhound, hot on the trail of JonBenét Ramsey’s remains in my anal cavity. He kept ramming his flat pug face into my ass and every time I turned my body, he raced back right behind me and did it again. I started screaming, “He’s trying to give me a rim job!”
My mother: “A
ring job
? What is a ring job?”
Me, continuing to scream: “Not a ring job, Mommy, a
rim
job!”
My mother: “What is a
rim job
?”
Me: “Mommy, how long have you lived in this country? You don’t know what a rim job is? How do you not know what a rim job is? A rim job is when you lick someone’s anus.”
My mother: “Oh my God. I can’t believe this. That is
terrible
.”
Me: “Terrible? What’s terrible about it? There’s nothing terrible about a rim job. Don’t you know, the anus is back?”
My mother: “The anus is back.
O-kay.
I didn’t know the anus had ever left, to tell you the truth.”
Right as my mother is saying this, and totally fated, my father walks into the kitchen. My mother goes, “Michael, did you know the anus is back?”
My father looks at my mother and shakes his head.
I go, “Pa, Mommy doesn’t know what a rim job is.”
My father, in his typical deadpan way, without missing a beat goes, “I’ll show her later.”
And then he starts cracking up.
This, in sum, is my relationship with my parents as well as a sample—dare I say taste—of what’s to come.
O
nce upon a time in 1975, in the same hospital where Beyoncé would squeeze Blue Ivy out of her vagina, a small Jewess was born on the Upper East Side of the island of Manhattan. Instead of being born into rap royalty, she was born to Eve and Michael Aschenbrand. Eve was the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Eve’s father had been an important journalist and Zionist who, rumor had it, worked for the Mossad or the CIA. They moved from Israel to America when Eve and her sister, Sara, were preteens. Michael was the eldest of three sons and had grown up in the East Village when it was filled with drug addicts and prostitutes. His father was a traveling salesman and his mother, a teacher. Eve and Michael named their first child Periel, which translates from Hebrew to mean “fruit of God.”
In her own words, for the first time, this is the story of the first three and a half decades of her life.
A
pparently, from the moment I was born three weeks early, I behaved like a small, entitled beast. My mother says that every time she put me down, I started screaming. She says that as I got older I was so mischievous she couldn’t take her eyes off me for even one second. When I was about nine months old and supposed to be asleep in my crib, she heard me giggling. When she walked in and turned on the lights, she discovered me upright and screeching, delighted by my Pollockesque accomplishment of smearing feces all over the wall.
When I was around two and a half, my mother had a horrible toothache and urgently needed to go to the dentist. Because my father was abroad for work and it was so last-minute, she called her younger sister, Sara, who at the time was in her twenties. My aunt, who was single and living the high life in downtown New York City, agreed to watch me but had no idea what to do with a two-year-old.
My aunt didn’t have kids, didn’t want kids, and quite frankly didn’t like them very much. Sara had left home at seventeen and by the time this request came in, she was twenty-six years old and had already been married and divorced twice. She spent her time partying and fornicating—not taking care of toddlers.
My mother told her to put me in my stroller and take me for a walk and I would probably fall asleep. So my aunt, having no clue what to do with me, pushed me all the way from her apartment on Ninth Street to Thirty-Fourth Street. She said that I did indeed fall asleep on the walk, but that by the time we got to Thirty-Fourth Street, I was wide awake. Panicked I would start screaming if I was left unstimulated, she took me inside a grocery store just to keep me entertained. She wheeled me around the aisles and started to notice that people were staring at us. She couldn’t figure out why until she finally looked down at me and saw that I had removed my diaper, had both of my legs up in the air, and was masturbating wildly.
My aunt: “I never wanted to have kids to begin with, but if there was ever any doubt, that cemented it. And to make matters worse, when we got home, I realized that not only had you taken the liberty to pleasure yourself in the supermarket, but you had also stolen a bottle of shampoo!”
My aunt, who is never embarrassed by anything, wanted to die of humiliation. My mother, who is the most prim and proper person on the planet, was totally nonplussed. According to her, this behavior was typical. And it got worse.
By three years of age, as long as I was indoors, I refused to wear clothing, with the exception of my mother’s red rubber kitchen gloves, which I would put on my feet and run around the house in, pretending to be a chicken. At four years old, on a class trip to the zoo, I tried to climb into the penguin cage. At six, pretending to be Mary Lou Retton, I turned my parents’ bedroom into a gymnastics studio and my mother found me swinging from the canopy above their bed. She walked in right as I pulled the entire canopy out of the wall. When I was seven, I found a cockroach in the bathroom, and I quickly transformed into an exterminator, complete with ski goggles. I emptied an entire can of Lysol in the bathroom and then sealed the door with duct tape and left the roach to die. When Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” came out, I was ten years old and all bets were off. I would only wear lace and lingerie and thousands of necklaces and black rubber bracelets and would not leave the house without drawing a mole on my face. Whenever we had company, I insisted on performing my Madonna routine and even took to drawing hair under my arms with my mother’s eyeliner.
There was, apparently, no controlling me. My mother once told me, “I was petrified something terrible was going to happen to you because you had absolutely no fear. And you would never take no for an answer. If I said no to something, you would look up at me with your fuzzy head and your big green eyes and say, ‘You doubt it, Mommy?’ and I would finally just say, ‘Yes, Peri, yes, I doubt it.’ ”
She says that she never had a second child because she was afraid to have another one “like me.”
Looking back, I was extremely lucky. If I had a kid like that, I would probably have given her up for adoption, but my parents were wonderful and they adored me. We weren’t rich, but we certainly were well off. My father is a native New Yorker and my mother grew up in Europe and Israel and she has very European sensibilities and it was very important to her to infiltrate my brain with culture. She started taking me to Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art before I could talk.
By the time I was sixteen, I had inherited my street smarts from my father and a sense of worldliness from my mother. We had traveled widely, but beyond that, because I grew up in New York, I had been exposed to all walks of life at a very early age.
This is only to say that I figured out pretty early on that the world was a fascinating place and I wanted to see it all. I didn’t think anyone owed me anything, but I knew it was my life and it would be what I made of it.
Most important, I was comfortable in my own skin. I actually
liked
myself. At sixteen, I had my first really serious boyfriend. He was great but I eventually outgrew him. Then at nineteen, I had my heart broken. And shortly thereafter, I had my first one-night stand. I quickly learned the difference between sex and love. I also learned that a guy will never like you more because you had sex with him. More important, I learned that he will never like you less, so you should pretty much do whatever the fuck you want and be yourself. And that, ladies and gentlemen, was exactly what I did.
I
was twenty-two years old, living in Arizona, and finishing up my last year of college when I met Noam. Like most kids that age, I thought I knew everything. I may have been a little wise beyond my years, but not by much. But I was kind of an old soul and I did realize that life was precious and I was fascinated by the world and I knew how to enjoy myself. Noam used to say I was a good-time girl.
Noam was thirty-one when we met, which seemed old as hell back then but is five years younger than I am now. I had taken longer than usual to graduate. While everyone else was “planning for their future” I was gallivanting around the world and smoking enough pot to kill a horse. I had spent nine months in Europe and when I met Noam, I was working as a cocktail waitress in a strip club to pay it off. Noam, for his part, was getting his PhD in English literature, and while he was totally smitten with me, he found my job distasteful, to say the least.
I understood and agreed that from a feminist perspective working in a strip club was extremely problematic, but I was saving money to travel and making more in one night than most of my friends made in a week. Plus, it was interesting. The strip club was frequented by Mexican kingpin drug lords. Guys with teardrop tattoos under their eyes, with names like El Chapon used to sit around drinking Tequila Rose and call me La Flaca.
I tried to explain to Noam that the way I saw it, I was being given hundred-dollar bills to bring people napkins and that was far better than working in a smoothie bar, mashing wheatgrass for seven dollars an hour. Noam, who was far more of an intellect than I, saw little humor in all this.
Noam, by all accounts, was a sophisticated New Yorker but he was mixed with cowboy. He chose his words carefully and when he drank whiskey, he had a southern drawl. The juxtaposition of all this was irresistible. Noam was nine in 1975, the year I was born, when his mother decided they were moving from the South to New York City. They were poor hippies and they lived in raw lofts in industrial SoHo, before it was an outdoor mall crawling with tourists. His mother was working and his biological father bailed when he was a baby and Noam was left to his own devices. While I was still in diapers, he was playing his guitar on Prince Street for money. He was shy, but people were drawn to him because he was talented and gentle and beautiful in a very striking way. He was tall and lithe and had a square jaw, a perfect nose, light-brown hair, and green eyes. He eventually graduated from high school and moved to Los Angeles, where he was “discovered.” There he started modeling and acting, and although he hated it and thought it was vapid and insipid, after two years he had saved enough money to transfer from community college to an Ivy League school.
Noam was fascinating and brilliant in a way I had never experienced before. By the time I met him, he was getting his PhD in literature and could quote Melville, Twain, and Shakespeare. He looked like a model (which he had been), but he spoke like a philosopher. He was shy but he drove a motorcycle. He was modest. And humble. And kind. And sensitive. And really funny. He was just as comfortable in a room full of New York Jews as he was at his uncle’s racetrack in Oklahoma.
I’d been eyeing Noam at the gym for a couple of months before he got up the nerve to talk to me. When we finally went out on our first date, he took me to a Mexican restaurant in the heart of Tucson’s barrio. After two drinks, he told me he was married. “That’s really interesting,” I said, as I choked on my margarita. “And your
wife
doesn’t mind that you’re out on a date?”
Noam laughed and explained that he had gotten married only so his “wife” could stay in the country. Anyway, he explained, marriage was nothing more than social and legal construct. My eyes nearly popped out of my head as everything I had been taught about marriage went straight out the window. This was the most reasonable thing I had ever heard and yet, so
shocking.
Meeting Noam made me realize that I had grown up in the most traditional household in the world. I had always thought I was radical. Noam actually
was
radical. It was easy to be exceptionally daring, brimming with self-confidence, and afraid of nothing when you had a safety net.
And it’s not that I was sheltered. I wasn’t. I had the street smarts of a kid who grew up in Queens but I had lofty aspirations. I knew from a very young age that I was in the wrong borough. At seventeen, I moved west to attend university and swore to myself I would make something interesting of my life if it was the last thing I ever did. I did not want to spend my life living on Queens Boulevard. And all it took was one glance around to discern that most of the people there would never get out. Most of the people I grew up with live on the same block they did twenty years ago.
I liked Tucson because although there was no water to speak of, the climate reminded me of Israel, where I had spent a considerable amount of time as a child with my mother’s family. I fantasized that I would eventually move back to New York City to live a glamorous life and do something artsy, and I imagined that at some point I would poison my father’s parents and take over what was rightfully mine—the giant two-bedroom apartment my father grew up in.
Noam, having grown up in a more bohemian time, was less enamored with this lifestyle than I was. He loathed what Manhattan had become. And although he was a gentile, he understood the neuroses of a Jewish girl from New York even if he didn’t share them, which made for a good balance. He was wonderful but he also suffered from depression, the way people who so deeply understand the world can. It was a difficult thing for me to understand at such a young age. Being older and having experienced more than I, Noam was also more hardened. He loved that I was optimistic but he was a pessimist by nature. Early in our relationship, when I told him I’d love him unconditionally, he matter-of-factly said, “P, nothing is unconditional.”
I naïvely thought that if I just loved him enough, everything would be okay. And I did love him. I knew that because of him I was becoming a smarter and more interesting person. He taught me that things were complicated and nuanced. He taught me to be less reactionary. To live a life with Noam meant that there was a way to live that really wasn’t within the cookie-cutter confines of how most people lived. And I valued this.
But I was young. After about six or so months together, I cheated on him. When I finally got up the courage to tell him that I had had sex—and with a girl, no less—he barely flinched. He understood my desire to experience the world. He was a wise, wonderful, understanding person who granted me the freedom and the support to do anything and everything I ever wanted or needed to do. He understood that I was young and needed to experience life and he wasn’t petty or judgmental. Being with him was the best of both worlds.
When I finally graduated from college, I got offered a job that would send me to Thailand for a year. We never discussed sex with other people or the boundaries of our relationship. While I was there, we spoke on the phone and wrote long letters and e-mailed, and halfway through my stay Noam visited. We had missed each other and it was clear that when I came back, we’d be together again.
But when he left, I had a brief affair with a really hot Israeli medic on a weeklong rafting trip in Nepal. I hadn’t had sex with anyone
before
Noam visited, so it was strange that I did after he left but for some reason it seemed okay to me. I traipsed around India for a while and eventually, after about a year away, I made my way back to Arizona for graduate school. I never mentioned my fling, he never asked, and I just pretended nothing ever happened. It was entirely possible that Noam had indiscretions of his own in my absence but it was a subject neither one of us ever broached.