Don't Go Crazy Without Me. Deborah A. Lott
He turned to me, and I scrambled across the bed to escape him. He pushed his gorilla face next to mine and whimpered. We both froze for a moment, and then he began to bounce up and down and shake the bed. I scampered away to the wall, cornered. Enraptured. Afraid. One minute he was just my father wearing a mask, and the next, he’d turned into a gorilla.
That was the shape-shifting father I had at age four—would-be actor, teller of dark truths, funhouse amusement, sexy gorilla, and his favorite role: lay rabbi of the La Crescenta Valley Community Jewish Center.
In our overwhelmingly Christian, far-right Republican community, a motley assortment of families with varying degrees of Jewish identity built a modest cinderblock synagogue. Its walls became a target for swastikas; vagrants broke in and spilled the sacramental wine. Itinerant clergy performed brises, bar mitzvahs, funerals, and weddings. My father led Sabbath services, taught Sunday school, and officiated at Shivas, leading week-long nightly prayers at the homes of the bereaved. He’d learned the Jewish liturgy from his maternal grandfather, Abraham. When Abraham was struck and killed by a train shortly before Ira’s bar mitzvah, Ira declared himself an atheist. Thirty years later, he got on the bimah each week and dared God to make an appearance. The pulpit offered a stage; a good enough performance might even restore his faith.
Friday night Sabbath services. I perched on the edge of my metal folding chair and looked up at the carved wooden Jewish stars, the only adornment on the plain concrete walls, and at the gold embroidered Jewish stars on the satin cloths that covered the three podiums, and then at my father who presided behind the center podium, his unruly curls slicked back under a yarmulke. Behind him twin lions on the doors of the ark protected the sacred Torah scrolls inside.
Ira looked over the top of his reading glasses and scanned the room. He cleared his throat and began, “The Lord reigneth; may the earth be glad; let the multitude of islands rejoice. Clouds and darkness surround Him; righteousness and justice are the foundation of His throne.” This was his rabbinic voice, fervent and rousing. The room stilled. Under his mother’s direction, five-year-old Freddie Hindberg lay down across two folding chairs and shut his eyes. All the energy in the atmosphere converged in the lush cadences of my father’s voice. He made love to each word, intoning, gesticulating, swaying forward and back. I slipped under its sweet seductive trance. By the time I heard him pronounce, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God,” any distinction between him and the God he spoke for was lost.
For the Purim carnival that spring, my father exchanged his rabbi costume for drag. He wore a wig of platinum blonde banana curls, crimson lipstick, a demure white blouse, and a chambray floral printed skirt constructed from a tablecloth. His bra, of faded tan industrial strength cotton, looked like surplus from a World War II WAC. My mother wadded up old nylons that smelled of the floral sachet that lined her lingerie drawer and stuffed the cups. He stuffed more till his breasts could compete with the girth of his belly. If he was going to be a woman, he would be the über version.
The skirt’s four rows of deep pockets extended around his middle. The night before the carnival, he filled those pockets with prizes. For one ticket, I could reach into the capacious pockets of my father’s skirt and get a rubber airplane, a paper fan, a miniature man with a nylon parachute, or a little wooden dog who danced. I reached into my father’s pockets again and again, until I got what I wanted most, a ring with a glittering ruby red rhinestone.
Surrounded by screaming children, my father became Mae West. Hands on his hips, he proposed to one of the temple’s teenagers, “Hey, big boy, why don’t you come up and see me sometime?” He threw a kiss. The teenager blushed and looked away. With a shift of his hips and a glance over his shoulder, he became Marilyn Monroe, winking and preening and throwing kisses to her adoring fans. “Well, hello,” he said in her baby soft voice, “Wouldn’t you like to get to know me better?”
Sashaying around the Jewish Center auditorium, he became an all-forgiving, all-accepting Mother of Infinite Bounty. Unlike my mother who doled out her affection as if always in danger of running out, Ira in drag had an unlimited store.
For the talent show that day I performed too. My father put me in one of his white shirts that reached down to my ankles, and my mother held me as I stepped into his black wingtip shoes. As Ira hovered in the wings, I stood in front of the small crowd who began to titter. I looked down and recognized the temple’s youth, dressed up as Queen Esther, Mordecai, and Haman, their mothers in a row, with their stiffly sprayed hair.
I channeled Ira’s stage persona and in a booming voice recited the poem he had written: “I want to be my daddy / a big old fatso man / I want to be my daddy / ‘cause I’m his Number One fan. Yay!”
I had rehearsed the poem so many times that I almost felt as if I had written it, and for a time afterward—too long a time—I remained confused: whose poem was it, and whose desire?
Present, Bedroom, Midnight
I’m in bed with my husband, Gary, in a nest of books and papers of my own making. He’s reading a book about politics on his iPad. I’m writing notes on my Antioch students’ essays for a course on childhood trauma memoirs. They’re writing about before and after, how traumatic events can divide one’s perception of the world into life before and life after.
“Hey, be careful with that red marker,” Gary says. I have a tendency to inadvertently brand everything around me, pajamas, pillows, sheets, my arms, as if I’m trying to mark myself, create some outward sign to correspond to my inward defects.
“Tell me a joke,” Gary says.
Jokes are Gary’s version of a bedtime story. He has an encyclopedic recall and could tell himself a million of them. What he wants is to hear one in my voice.
“I don’t know any jokes,” I say.
“Unless they feature cute little animals,” he says.
“You mean, the one with the bunny or the one with the penguin?”
“Cute little animals pooping. Or humping. Those are the only jokes you can remember.”
“We all have our obsessions,” I say.
Gary is fond of the jokes his grandfather used to tell, with their old men new to this country eating smoked fish on park benches. To tell them well requires a Yiddish accent. My Yiddish accent is decidedly lacking, even though I heard my father tell the bawdiest possible versions of these jokes, reverting to Yiddish for the punch lines. Everyone who knew my father remembers his jokes, and his Har Har laugh that sounded like a comic strip rendition of a laugh. In a movie theatre, it could evoke a startle reflex in the surrounding patrons. I can still hear his voice as he told those jokes, the accelerating intensity, his trouble containing his own laughter along the way, his glee at the punch lines, the distinctive jarring cadence of his laugh. But I can’t remember a single joke. The accent and the jokes were something of my father’s I never picked up, and try as I might, I just can’t remember what was so funny.
CHAPTER TWO
Flipped
My brother, Paul, pressed his binoculars to the front window of our living room so he could stare into the Finches’ living room across the street. “Mrs. Finch is putting on her jacket,” Paul narrated. “You know, the one she only wears when she leaves the house.” My ten-year-old brother was coaching me in the art of spying—marking ourselves once again as observers, rather than members of the community around us. Paul was fascinated not so much by exactly what we could see in the Finches’ living room, as by the fact that we could see without being watched ourselves. Being watched by our neighbors, or rather, being seen by them for who we were, constituted my mother’s worst dread.
Paul handed the binoculars to me. They felt heavy in my five-year-old hands. Though I tried to brace them against the window, my wrists collapsed and they slipped, resting on the