04. The First Eight Days

Day One – Passage into this world turns out to be quite lengthy and strange.  At least for me it was. I remember thinking the pond in which I’d been floating was running dry and that I was at risk. I became quite woozy. My head was squeezed. I felt tremendous pressure as I was expelled into a world I had never before imagined. I was slapped and twisted. I drew something cold inside my form. I hadn’t even known there were outsides and insides. The brightness bothered me.  Everything was blurred and indistinct. My arms were pinned down. It was loud. Very loud and I was cold. I wish I’d stayed inside I thought. I was very frightened.  I wanted things to be as they had been.

Having said that, it was also tremendously interesting and different, enlivening.  I had an awareness of other forms, which I’d never had before, a sense of my separateness, my empty aloneness, and my hungry vulnerability.  All of my movements were jerky and unsmooth.  I hardly knew myself and was in control of nothing.  Trust was a big issue then … and would be ever since.  Life is such an improbable challenge.  I wondered where I was before, before I was inside.  I have absolutely no memory of that time, then or now, other than the blood, which makes me feel kind of lonely.

I felt lost.  Not in pain, but vaguely uncomfortable, physically and emotionally.  There were long periods of unconsciousness that were so familiar.  It was the awareness that startled me.  I waited.  I waited a lot.  There wasn’t much I could do about anything anyway.  I had concerns and gripes, but was clearly where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to be doing.  At least I thought so.

Nov. 13, 1940 – Second Full Day

Nothing much different than yesterday, it seems, the same mix of pleasant and unpleasant sensations.  I like being held and purred to and don’t get enough of it.  There are others like me, crying separate forms.  It’s not like the big forms want to hurt us, but we were left alone and unattended more than I like.

At times I suck on something that releases a warm sweet substance into my mouth.  It is my best experience, absolutely amazing.  I hardly have words to describe it.  I like the sucking.  And the taste is fantastic.  And the sensation of that stuff going down my throat was just so wonderful and sensual, unbelievably sensual.  I loved it.

Nov. 17, 1940

There was a lot of movement yesterday.  Wherever it was I was staying, with the many big forms and the bright lights, is no longer there.  Where I am now is much cooler and much quieter.  There are only two or three of the big forms that move around me and hold me.  I am still unconscious most of the time.  When awake I see things a bit more clearly, but don’t know what any of them are and don’t really care, just as long as I’m comfortable, which I mostly am.  I sense a fear around me that I do not understand, but it quivers in me like the cold when I am taken out of the wrappings and placed on the hard table to lay exposed while they pat and push and turn me over, back and forth.  It makes me dizzy.  I scream a lot then.  I also scream when I feel the hungers, mostly for the sweet stuff.  Also when I’m cold.  I like that the sound comes from me.  I have no idea what it augurs, but its presence is both a relief and a distraction.

Nov. 19, 1940

Now that was something I really didn’t like.  Didn’t understand it at all.  Found it very frightening and quite painful actually.   Huge numbers of large forms, called “people” it turns out, came to our apartment.  The noise and the rumbling were constant.  Most of the people had their faces partially covered with masks.  They looked grotesque.  Scary.  An old smelly guy with a huge beard who wore no mask picked me up and held me in the air, said some words.  Someone took off my swaddling and left me bare on a table under bright lights in the kitchen.  Jokes were made.  People laughed nervously.  I felt fingers grasp and pull me out from under my stomach.  A liquid both sweet and bitter was dribbled into my mouth.  I sucked on a cloth that tasted of this liquid.  There was a sharp sensation down there, like a pinprick when the diaper is changed, only sharper, and far more long lasting.  Intense.  I cried.  I screamed.  I had no idea what was going on, but I assure you I didn’t like it, although I didn’t think there was anything I could do about it, or about anything frankly.  I do wonder how often something like that happens.

Spring, 1941

Life in the crib is a very mixed kind of experience.  On the one hand, I have lots of quiet moments just laying here playing with my toes or watching the light patterns change on the wall.  Occasionally I hear the singing of birds.  I like this and am content.  I also have many uncomfortable moments, mostly because I’m not getting something I want or getting something I don’t want.  I get hungry and cranky sometimes.  Sometimes the diapers stay cold for hours.  Sometimes I am scared to be alone.

I am never spontaneously picked up or comforted.  It doesn’t matter if I cry or scream.  I am picked up, held, changed, and fed only once every four hours, by common parental agreement.  When we have visitors they must wear surgical masks before they come into the room to see the tortured prince.  One of my mother’s uncles came to see me in the crib and peered over in his surgical mask and I screamed and cried and my mother laughed and my father covered his ears, but no one picked me up.  There will not be one time in my childhood when I am succored and comforted when frightened.  My father will adore me, but find me flawed and disappointing from infancy.  My mother finds me too demanding of her time, too repulsive and disgusting, with all that pee and shit to clean up.

When I was less than a year old a cousin was born to my Aunt Martha.  He was named Richard and we shared time together, but he was damaged goods, Mongoloid perhaps.  He was sent away to a school for the unacceptable forever.  We were told he was dead.  I knew the consequences of being unacceptable.

Nov. 11, 1941 – My first birthday party.

I was born on Armistice’s Day, an ironic fate, a full year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, which drew America and my family into War.  My father’s grandmother, his mother, his two sisters, and a guy my father works with at the fire department and his wife all came over to our little apartment.  There was a cake mother made from some stuff in a box with one candle in it.  Everyone squeezed around the kitchen table.  They sang a song and were loud and happy for a while.  My father seemed proud and pleased.  He held me in his arms a lot, as did everyone else.  I remember how distinctly they each smelled, the roughness of my father’s check, the warm musty smell of my grandmother, the cloying powder of my aunt Marsha.  The adults drank coffee and tea.  The cake had chocolate frosting.

Dec. 8, 1941

Some place far away, in a warm salt sea called Pearl Harbor, there is an attack in which many people die and the world is changed.  And, as far away as that harbor was, we are all afraid.  I don’t know what this all means but it is a source of much concern and consternation in this household.  My parents actually listen to the radio together.  My father tells my mother these are dangerous times.  I am not surprised by that news.  Dangerous is everywhere in my world.

My father does not want to go away to war, is frightened of war.  He grew up in the Bronx, Sam Taub’s fourth son and fifth child, one of ultimately seven children born to these poor Jewish immigrants who came to live on the lower east side in poverty, to share beds, and become Americans.  He remains a mystery to me, much as I plumbed those depths for the forty-two years we shared on this planet.  He was so arrogant, so self-righteous, and so simultaneously insecure.  I don’t get it.  Even when I look inside myself and find the raw and familiar. I don’t get it.

And then there is my mother, part of the something uneasy which I carry inside me, part of the great I do not know what it is, the uneasiness, anxiety, and fear.  Or fears.  I seem to have always been afraid.

War raged in my Bronx neighborhood and Bronx home from the moment I was born.  I have known well the meaning of cruelty, stupidity, irony, sarcasm, and deceit ever since.

Christmas, 1941

When I cry I am mocked or scolded or ignored.  My father may even cover his ears.  I am not picked up.  I am not succored.  I am not comforted.  I am often lauded in public for my size and appearance, but outside the public eye I am subject to relentless criticism.  “Stop behaving that way,” I am told.  “What is wrong with you?  Are you crazy?  I’ll give you something to cry about.  Grow up.  Act your age.”  I am all of one year old.  The messages will be repeated for decades, will abide in me forever.