some sort of mantra. Indeed, as I would come to learn, John F. Kennedy (for all of the flaws and self-indulgences that would be revealed many years later) was a figure of remarkable promise and possibility.
My mother’s sadness engulfed me as my attention shifted back and forth between the pictures on the TV screen and her responses to them. I don’t know how long the television coverage of the funeral lasted, but it seemed to go on for days. Everything else faded away and I became so present-centered that I entered a state of trance, a state that would later become very familiar to me. If I listen closely, I can still hear the sound of horse hooves on concrete.
The assassination of JFK was a national trauma that became fused into the emotional DNA of America. His death would come to represent, not only a loss of national innocence, but also the death of a collective sense of unlimited potential. Of course I had no real sense of any of this at the time, but somehow, at least as far as the weight of the moment, I got it. Another aspect of my experience of that dreary yet mesmerizing day that would become familiar to me was that, emotionally, I was on my own.
It was late November 1963, and I was four-and-a-half years old. By this time, my younger brother was nearly three, and the older of my two younger sisters was almost eight months old. My youngest sister would be born four months later, just 360 days separating the two of them. Doing the math reveals that I am the oldest of four children born to my parents in less than six years. As my father would delight in saying to anyone who expressed interest in this peculiar form of family planning, “We held at two pair and yielded to a full house!”
My parents didn’t believe in wasting time. When they announced to their own families that they were getting married all of six weeks after they first met, my maternal grandmother asked the obvious question, “Do they have to?” As the family narrative has it, they weren’t pregnant, it was simply a love-at-first-sight whirlwind courtship that enveloped them in its inevitability: they knew. My parents have always insisted that all of their children were fully planned. Every family has its mythology.
The very first indication that I had a potential predisposition to using drugs came when I was two years old. When my father returned home from work each evening, his ritual included a glass of Scotch. As the story goes, according to both my parents, even at this tender age, I displayed an obvious attraction to the alcohol—reaching for his Scotch and wanting to taste it myself.
This occurred on a nightly basis for some time and became increasingly annoying. My father was impressed by my persistence, and ultimately determined that one taste would be aversive enough to cure me of my interest. So, with my mother’s reluctant consent, he allowed me a sip. To their complete astonishment, as they both report it (it has always been a rare occurrence—kind of like a solar eclipse—when the two of them remember the same incident exactly the same way), my verbatim response was as follows: “Hot . . . burn . . . good . . . more!” That might have been a clue.
My father was a workaholic who regularly got home long after the rest of the family had eaten dinner. As a manufacturer’s representative in the furniture industry, he worked on commission and was effectively self-employed. His work days were spent driving throughout the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metropolitan area to see customers, and when he wasn’t on the road, he was often in his office at our home in Oyster Bay on the north shore of Nassau County about thirty miles east of Manhattan. Even in the mid-1960s, we had two phone lines; one was the regular home phone and the other was for my father’s business. When the business phone rang, answering it became the highest priority; everything else took a backseat until whatever business needed to be conducted was complete. Early on, my siblings and I were instructed how to take proper professional business messages in my father’s absence.
Growing up during the Great Depression had left an indelible mark on my father’s persona. He was a successful self-made man who did everything he could to outrun the memories of the relative poverty he experienced in his family of origin, living in an apartment over a movie theatre in Cedarhurst on Long Island’s south shore. His father had died when my father was seventeen and he saw it as his responsibility to drill the importance of personal responsibility into his children.
Materially, we always had what we needed, but anything we wanted beyond my father’s definition of “necessary” involved doing extra chores to make the money to pay for it. When I was eleven and wanted my first pair of high quality leather basketball sneakers, I had to earn the money to pay the difference between the $9.00 cost of canvas Converse and the $16.00 Adidas Superstars that I coveted (at the time, only Adidas and Puma made high-end hoops shoes).
My mother grew up in the itty-bitty town of Oxford in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania, about ninety minutes southwest of Philadelphia and in close proximity to Kennett Square, the self-titled “mushroom capital of the world.” It was the epitome of small town life in Middle America where everyone knew everyone, and the Police Department, as my father described it, was a “hellava nice guy.” My mother’s otherwise typical upbringing contained the bizarre experience of sleeping in a crib from the time she was an infant until the age of seven. As she would joke, who knows how long she might have been stuck in that crib if her younger sister hadn’t come along seven years to the day after my mother was born to supplant her.
Stay-at-home moms were the norm, and with the four of us my mother had a very full-time gig. She was a combination homemaker and chauffeur, shuttling us around to a wide array of activities in the family station wagon. Still, during my childhood it wasn’t unusual for my mother to spend hours at a time in bed grappling with her own chronic pain and/or resting, with the aid of prescription painkillers and tranquillizers.
Ours was a liberal, progressive Jewish family, where great trust was placed in the omniscience of the medical establishment, education was prized, expectations for academic achievement and athletic performance were sky-high and without respite, and guilt was wielded like a weapon. My father routinely drilled me and my brother and sisters in various forms of mental gymnastics. When we were all together, these experiences often resembled group interviews and included all manner of subjects. The ability to respond intelligently and articulately was applauded, with extra credit given for the clever deployment of puns and double entendres. These exercises proved an excellent and occasionally ego-deflating training ground for cognitive quickness and verbal alacrity. Often they contained elements of fun, but they were nonetheless competitions and we all played to win.
Regardless of what’s presented to the outside world, every family has challenges; its own gestalt of craziness and dysfunction on a continuum that can range from the stuff of nightmares and flashbacks to normative hurts that can still cut deeply and leave nasty scars. To paraphrase a comedian I’ve known personally since my adolescence: normal families are families we simply don’t know that well.
Mine was a normal dysfunctional family. The too-close-for-comfort birth sequencing among my siblings and I made for limited psychological space to accommodate competing developmental needs, creating an extremely intense and emotionally crowded environment. There was nothing approximating the sorts of horrific, post-traumatic stress-inducing abuse that children in too many families are subjected to. Just the more usual wounds to the spirit so common in many families where parents are doing the best they can with what they have at any given moment.
Corporal punishment was a primary parenting option when I was growing up, and it was employed intermittently in our family. After getting slapped across the face for one willful indiscretion or another I found it hard to not cry. Sometimes there was a time delay after I got hit, and it was only after I thought about being smacked in the face that tears appeared. From a very young age I had a rudimentary awareness that I wasn’t crying because it hurt physically; it was about the emotional injury. Those slaps to the face somehow represented a diminution of me as a person—it was a serrated affront to my psyche, and that hurt seemed bottomless.
By early elementary school, unconsciously, I had already begun to
