The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead Read online

  “For weeks,” my father told me, “I regaled my friends and anybody who would listen that my father and I had visited the great star of the Austrian, German, and Yiddish theater in America—Rudolph Schildkraut. What’s more, I said, he was probably our cousin. Nothing in the conversation between my father and Rudolph Schildkraut would lead me or anybody else to come to that conclusion for a certainty, but I wanted to impress friends and neighbors and quickly added Rudolph and Joseph Schildkraut to our family. I said, ‘They’re probably second cousins.’ Some days I made them ‘first cousins.’ Rudolph Schildkraut—as you know, Dave—went on to Hollywood and had a brief but successful motion picture career. I told everybody he was a much better actor than his countryman Emil Jannings.”

  Adolescence

  Rattlesnake Lake

  Testosterone initiates the growth spurt; increases larynx size, deepening the voice; increases red blood cell mass, muscle mass, libido; stimulates development of the penis, scrotum, and prostate; stimulates growth of pubic, facial, leg, and armpit hair; stimulates sebaceous gland secretions of oil. Throughout high school, my acne was so severe as to constitute a second skin. Oil leaked from my pores. I kissed no one until I was 17.

  Acne flourished on my chin, forehead, cheeks, temples, and scalp, and behind my ears. It burned my neck, appeared sporadically on my penis, visited my stomach, and wrapped around my back and buttocks. It was like an unwilling, monotonous tattoo. There were whiteheads on the nose, blackheads on toes, dense purple collections that finally burst with blood, white circles that vanished in a squeeze, dilating welts that never went away, infected wounds that cut to the bone, surface scars that looked hideous, wart-like protuberances at the side of the head. I endured collagen injections, punch grafts, and chemical peels.

  I washed with oval brown bars and transparent green squares, soft baby soaps that sudsed, and rough soaps that burned. I applied special gels, clear white liquids, mud creams. I took tablets once, twice, thrice a day; before, after, and during meals. I went on milk diets and no-milk diets, absorbed no sun and too much sun. I took erythromycin, tretinoin, Cleocin, PanOxyl, Benoxyl, isopropyl myristate, polyoxyl 40 stearate, butylated hydroxytoluene, hydroxypropyl methylcellulose. I saw doctors and doctors and doctors.

  My father would ask me, please, to stop picking at myself. Sometimes he’d get impatient and slap my face (as if he were both reprimanding me for squeezing scabs at the dinner table and expressing compassion by striking the source of all the distress), but he was certainly justified in whatever frustration he felt. My hands were incessantly crawling across my skin, always probing and plucking, then flicking away the root canker. The inflammatory disease bred a weird narcissism in which I craved the mirror but averted any accurate reflection. I became expert at predicting which kinds of mirrors would soften the effect, and which—it hardly seemed possible—would make things worse.

  My mother still had pockmarks on her cheeks as evidence of a diseased childhood, with patches of pink skin on her nose acquired in more than one surgery to remove the skin cancer that was her reward for believing, as a teenager, too many doctors’ X-ray radiation cures. (The enormous amount of radiation she received was thought to be the likely cause of her breast cancer and death at 51.) In a faded photograph of her brother wearing khaki in Okinawa, his face appeared to be on fire. A doctor at Stanford Hospital told my sister that he was the most decorated dermatologist in the Bay Area and there wasn’t a thing he could do to improve the quality of her skin until she was at least 21. Only my father’s face was impressively blemish-free, although whenever he cut himself shaving or the impress of his glasses left a red mark at the eyebrows, my mother would claim that he, too, had had problems. They used to have perfectly absurd arguments over who was responsible for the cluster forming on my chin.

  My sophomore year of high school my zit trouble reached such catastrophic proportions that twice a month I drove an hour each way to receive liquid nitrogen treatments from a dermatologist in South San Francisco. His office was cattycorner to a shopping center that housed a Longs drugstore, where I would always first give my prescription for that month’s miracle drug to the pharmacist. Then, while I was waiting for the prescription to be filled, I’d go buy a giant bag of Switzer’s red licorice. I’d tear open the bag, and even if (especially if) my face was still bleeding slightly from all the violence that had just been done to it, I’d start gobbling the licorice while standing in line for the cashier. I’m hard-pressed now to see the licorice as anything other than some sort of Communion wafer, as if by swallowing the licorice, my juicy red pimples might become sweet and tasty. I’d absorb them; I’d be absolved. The purity of the contradiction I remember as a kind of ecstasy. My senior yearbook photo was so airbrushed that people asked me, literally, who it was.

  In “Is Acne Really a Disease?” Dale F. Bloom argues that, “far from being a disease, adolescent acne is a normal physiological process that functions to ward off potential mates until the afflicted individual is some years past the age of reproductive maturity, and thus emotionally, intellectually, and physically fit to be a parent.” Dale F. Bloom’s thesis seems to me unassailable.

  In one study, of teenage boys with the highest testosterone levels, 69 percent said they’d had intercourse; of boys with the lowest levels, 16 percent said they’d had intercourse. The testosterone level in boys is eight times that of girls. Testosterone is responsible for increasing boys’ muscle mass and initiating the growth spurt, which peaks at age 14. From ages 11 to 16, boys’ testosterone levels increase 20-fold. By age 16, the cardiovascular system has established its adult size and rhythm.

  Hair grows about half an inch a month; it grows fastest in young adults, and fastest of all in girls between ages 16 and 24. Brain scans of people processing a romantic gaze, new mothers listening to infant cries, and subjects under the influence of cocaine bear a striking resemblance to one another. According to Daniel McNeill, “Our pupils reach peak size in adolescence, almost certainly as a lure in love, then slowly contract till age sixty.” As Natalie would say—as she actually did say—“That’s awesome.”

  When she asked me why people write graffiti, I tried to explain how teenage boys need to ruin what’s there in order to become who they are. I talked about boys at the swimming pool who simply wouldn’t obey the pleasant female lifeguard asking them to leave the pool at closing time; they left only when asked gruffly by the male African-American lifeguard, and then they left immediately.

  “One Sunday morning,” my father reminisced to me over the phone, “my father announced that he was going out to watch me play punchball. That was the first time in all the years I’d been playing that he expressed a desire to see me play. We played in the street in front of my house. The only interruptions came when a horse and buggy came through. My father found a place to watch at the left-field foul line. I saw him standing there and waved as I took my turn to hit. This time, I hit the ‘Spaldeen’—that’s what we called the Spalding high bouncer—with all my might and it shot like an arrow for the very spot where my father was standing, going probably sixty miles an hour. My father stood there, waving at the ball futilely. It struck him on his left cheek, missed his eye by inches.”

  According to Boyd McCandless, “A youngster is his body and his body is he.”

  Tolstoy said, “I have read somewhere that children from twelve to fourteen years of age—that is, in the transition stage from childhood to adolescence—are singularly inclined to arson and even murder. As I look back upon my boyhood, I can quite appreciate the possibility of the most frightful crime being committed without object or intent to injure but just because—out of curiosity, or to satisfy an unconscious craving for action.”

  A dozen or so teenage boys stood atop a jagged rock in the middle of Rattlesnake Lake, four miles southeast of North Bend, an hour out of Seattle. Several teenage girls did the same. I lazed about on a raft, watching from afar. The boys wore cutoffs and, nearly without exception, boasted c
hiseled chests. The girls, wearing cutoffs and bikini tops, seemed considerably less toned. (During the pubescent growth spurt, girls’ hips widen in relation to shoulder girth. Boys’ shoulders widen in relation to hip width. Eighteen-year-old girls have 20 percent less bone mass in relation to body weight than boys of the same age.)

  The rock was perhaps one story high. The boys chose to dive from the higher parts of the rock into the lake; most of the girls dove, too, but less spectacularly, less dangerously. One girl who didn’t dive kept being pestered by her friend: “I can’t believe you’re seventeen and you won’t dive. If you don’t, I’m never going to speak to you again.”

  The boys at Rattlesnake Lake kept asking one another about their own dives, “How was that one? How did that look?”

  It looks like this: the average penis of a man is 3" to 4" when flaccid and 5" to 7" when erect. The recorded range for an erect penis is 3.75" to 9.6". In the 1930s, mannequins imported from Europe came in three sizes according to the size of the genitalia: small, medium, and American (compared to other cultures, Americans are obsessed with the size of sexual organs: penises, breasts). Lyndon Johnson frequently urinated in front of his secretary, routinely forced staff members to meet with him in the bathroom while he defecated, and liked to show off his penis, which he nicknamed “Jumbo” in a private conversation, pressed by a couple of reporters to explain why we were in Vietnam, LBJ unzipped his fly, displayed Jumbo, and said, “This is why.” Phallocrypts, sheaths that cover a New Guinean man’s penis, run to two feet in length. The length of my penis when erect is 6" (boringly, frustratingly average); I’ve measured it several times. My father, though much smaller overall than I am, is, I’m pretty sure (glimpsed discreetly), markedly more well-endowed. No wonder he used to be such a sex fiend.

  Boys vs. Girls (ii)

  At birth, body fat is 12 percent of body weight, increases to 25 percent at 6 months, and 30 percent at 1 year. At age 6, it’s back down to 12 percent again, then it rises until the onset of puberty. Postpuberty, the rise continues in girls, while in boys there’s a slight decline.

  During high school, girls’ bone development is 2 years ahead of boys. Young girls surpass boys in height and weight, and they frequently remain taller until boys enter the adolescent growth spurt that accompanies pubescence. Maximum skeletal development occurs at 16 for most girls and 19 for boys; dating between classmates in high school is by definition a hormonal mismatch and a farce.

  “At seventeen, you tend to go in for unhappy love affairs,” said Françoise Sagan, who should know.

  In males, the sexual urge peaks during their late teens or early twenties, but not until a decade later does it peak in females.

  “I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, / or that youth would sleep out the rest; / for there is nothing in the between / but getting wenches / with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting”—so saith the Shepherd in The Winter’s Tale.

  Between ages 15 and 24, men are three times more likely to die than women, mostly by reckless behavior or violence—e.g., murder, suicide, car accidents, war.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter, Scottie, “For premature adventure one pays an atrocious price. As I told you once, every boy who drank at eighteen or nineteen is now safe in his grave.”

  Hoop dream (iii):

  My father was the manager of a semi-pro basketball team called the Brooklyn Eagles, which consisted of Harry Glatzer; his brother, Nat, who played for Thomas Jefferson—where they both went to high school—“but,” according to my father, “went nowhere following graduation” Max “Puzzy” Posnack, at the time the captain of St. John’s; Allie Schuckman, also a star at St. John’s; Max “Kappy” Kaplan, from St. John’s as well; Artie Jackson, a black player who displayed “dazzling accuracy from all over the floor” and Isador “Midge” Serota, who “filled his days playing pickup basketball.” The Eagles were to be paid $100 under the table (since many of the players were college athletes) to provide the opposition for a Christmas Day game at Yale.

  There is, I’m sure, much mythmaking in my father’s version of the story (and all his stories); the last time he told me this story, he told it with the same, implausibly perfect details he always does: as he and the seven players drove from Brooklyn to New Haven, “a slight snowfall came down at about four or five o’clock P.M., making driving a little tricky, but Kappy was a good driver. Somewhere, about twenty-five or thirty miles from New Haven, the light snowfall turned heavier, making driving a little dangerous. We were making slow but steady progress toward our goal, the Yale basketball court.

  “All of a sudden, we felt a bump against the front fender. A body rolled up over the fender and off the car onto the roadway. We’d hit a man. We stopped the car, raced to a nearby farmhouse, and called the local sheriff, who showed up in about fifteen minutes and started asking Kappy if he’d been drinking or driving too fast, especially under these hazardous conditions. One look at the body by the sheriff and he said, ‘It’s that old Polack, the town drunk. He probably never saw you.’

  “We were watching the time. We had to be in New Haven by six-thirty. The sheriff told us about a farmer who lived nearby and did commercial driving. By this time—five-thirty or so—we had to skip dinner, hire the farmer-driver for twenty dollars, and get to the game. Kappy’s car was impounded as evidence and would have to be kept in the town of Wilton, where we hit the man. We piled into the big limousine and got to the gym about seven, cold and hungry. The Yale people, who thought they’d been stood up, were furious with us.

  “We changed into our uniforms, had a brief warm-up, and the first quarter ended with the Yalies leading by twenty points; the half ended with Yale up about thirty. At halftime, Allie and the team gulped down sandwiches and sodas. Hardly the recommended diet for players engaged in a clash with finely trained athletes—rested and ready for the game against those ‘tough guys’ from Brooklyn. Puzzy gave the team a pep talk at halftime and the second half was a different story.

  “Puzzy, Allie, and Artie began hitting their shots. The game ended in a tie. We played two overtimes and lost by a basket. The Yale captain thanked us and paid me the hundred dollars, twenty of which immediately went to the farmer-driver to drive us back to the bus station in Wilton. We got on board the bus around midnight and arrived back in New York at about six A.M. The players made a dash for the Automat (now defunct; you placed nickels in food slots, and out came the food, from main dishes to dessert). I distributed what was left: each player got a few bucks. I took nothing. We had enough for subway fare—five cents back to Brooklyn—and the game was history. It soon became a neighborhood legend.

  “A month later, Kappy went back to Wilton for the inquest. He was declared innocent. We never played another game.”

  Why Lionesses Prefer Dark Brunettes, or Why Both Men and Women Are Attracted to Deep Voices

  The olfactory system—the sense of smell—bypasses all the brain’s thinking processes and directs its information exclusively toward the regions that control sex and aggression. In order to mate with a female hamster, male hamsters must have this system functioning. Male mice need it in order to respond to female fertility signals, and female pigs need it to be aroused by boars. In humans, scent no longer dominates sexual response; scent is nowhere near as significant for us as it is for the rest of the animal kingdom.

  Sight is much the most important human sense; appearance is what attracts us. “Gentlemen prefer blondes,” but lionesses prefer dark brunettes, which are believed to have higher testosterone levels and potentially better genes.

  Humans and many other species find voices attractive. In humans, deep, husky voices—considered sexually attractive by both sexes—are also correlated with high testosterone levels and therefore potentially high sex drive and good genes.

  Fear and terror, not shared pleasant experiences, are more likely to result in mutual attraction. The release of stress hormones activates the brain’s neurochemic
al systems that promote attachment bonds. In a famous experiment, an attractive woman interviewed young men on a swaying rope bridge 200 feet above a river, and also on the ground. Midway through the interview, she gave them her phone number. Over 60 percent of the men she interviewed on the rope bridge called her back; only 30 percent of the men on the ground did so.

  I was 17, as was my girlfriend, Carla, and neither of us was sexually experienced. Rain fell like needles, but Carla’s parents’ cabin’s back porch, sheltered by a lean-to roof and enclosed by a tight green net, kept us dry. I wanted to sleep outside, catch cold. I wanted to share disease and shudder. Carla wanted to brush her teeth. She liked the smell of bathrooms, mirrors, warm toilet seats. Toothbrush and towel in hand, she pushed open the screen door and sought linoleum.

  I unfolded the sleeping bags and unrolled them on the wooden floor, fluffing up our backpacks, tucking them into the mouths of the sleeping bags. I pushed the bench out of the way into the corner of the porch. I rearranged things and waited.

  “Everything’s wet out here,” Carla said when she emerged. “Let’s sleep inside.”

  “No,” I said. “The rain’ll stop soon.”

  I shut the door to the house, jiggled the doorknob, and pronounced the door locked. The only way to get in was to find the key somewhere on the porch come morning.