Dead Languages Read online

  SOMETIMES my childhood seems to me nothing more than an endless series of obsessions, overwrought attempts to get beyond a voice that bothered me and, like any saint in the grip of a metaphor, I desired either to vanish forever or to emerge triumphant. I never emerged triumphant. The nearest I got to vanishing forever was watching Robert Shields perform mime on Montgomery Street the day after I’d asked Z, at the Currier graduation dance, to let me have the last slow one for old times’ sake. Not meaning to be nasty or vindictive but only mocking my speech in the way I’d always mocked hers, she answered affirmatively in such absurd, abrupt, repetitive, broken rhythms that I told her she could go find someone else to dance with and ducked back into the dark crowd. This concomitance—falling in love with significant gestures twelve hours after listening to an immigrant make fun of my disfluency—bred my newest devotion. I decided to become mute. That was all there was to it. I would end the exchange. All summer I practiced sign language and, although no one in my family knew the first letter of the manual alphabet, I thought a perfect time to cease oral communication would be when we went on our annual hike in the High Sierras the first two weeks of August.

  The High Sierras: mountains of such magic importance to my childhood as to be commensurate with aboriginal promises of beauty and peace; jagged pinnacles far, far away, but oh so close, so omnipresently in the mind; background to a poster of Beth’s that said IN WILDERNESS IS THE PRESERVATION OF THE WORLD, which is not exactly a novel idea but which in its balanced incantation had a certain charm for me; subject of innumerable slide shows when Beth and I were too young to hike, and Mother and Father would return with color pictures of melting snow, rushing water, tents, cabins, silver drinking cups; site of Mother and Father’s tenth anniversary, on the last day of which Mother threw out her shoulder and pleaded with Father to pop it back in place for her, but he could not—he was simply incapable, he said, of causing her pain—so they had to walk all the way back to the ranger station, where a very nice and quite good-looking young forester was eager to oblige.

  The summer I turned twelve, while they were shutting their suitcases and locking the windows of the house, I handed the members of my family three-by-five typewritten notes that said:

  Dear——: Hi! I just wanted to tell you I’ll be conducting a little experiment during our stay in the Sierras. For the next two weeks—beginning right now—I’m not going to talk. I have, as you know, been studying sign language. I’ll bring along the manual alphabet guide, so you can ask me a question, then follow my answer in the guide book. If that’s too much trouble, I’m going to tie a notepad and pencil to my wrist, so I can write down and hand to you my opinion on important matters of discussion. You can talk to me. I just won’t be able to talk to you. Thanks for your cooperation. Here’s (nevertheless?) to a happy vacation.

  Jeremy

  Beth thought I was kidding, Father said let’s get on the road before nightfall, and Mother asked whose permission I’d obtained to use her typewriter. On the drive north I was unable to entertain my family in the way I usually did, conflating billboard phrases into a mad rush of meaningless sound, and was forced to forfeit my turn when Beth decided all the punch of Twenty Questions was lost when it was played in pen. Other than that, though, I didn’t have any special problems during the journey. In restaurants I’d tap Beth on the shoulder, point to what I wanted, and she’d tell the waitress. At gas stations I let Father ask the attendant where the men’s room was, then followed him. In the car I stayed silent, concentrating on pastoral scenery.

  Once we got on the trails, I just watched white water without identifying my feelings. I didn’t have to say the waterfall was strong or loud or blue or beautiful, the deer was fast or afraid or dangerous or female. I didn’t have to say the sun was hot, the trail was steep, the mountains were gorgeous, my backpack was heavy. In wilderness was the preservation of the word. When we stopped and spoke to other people on the trail, Mother would explain that I had a very hoarse voice from singing for six hours around a camp fire. At night I’d lie awake in my sleeping bag, look up at the moon and stars—enormous white ink blot on black paper, hundreds of sparkling asterisks—and think I’d at last arrived at the proper relation of man to his environment, probably solving my speaking problem as well.

  But on the last day of this high-camp paradise—why is there always a but and why is it always on the last day?—I got it into my mind that I had to run the entire distance to the way station where our car was parked. I ran uphill, downhill, through streams, over rocks, faster than deer. I’d run until I was out of earshot, then jog in place until my family caught up, and listen to Mother say: “Don’t run, Jeremy. If you run, you won’t notice the trees or the animals or the falls. That’s what we’re here for: to feel one with the beauty of nature, not to set sprinting records.” I already felt one with the beauty of nature. I wanted to set sprinting records. I’d hold up a sign—See you at the next bend—then turn my back and be off.

  Father finally had enough of this silence game and, in a cool glade right at the timberline, caught up with me. Bounding over the rocks, snorting and puffing, he looked like nothing so much as a mad goat. I sat in the dirt, carving JJZ into a boulder with my pocket knife. What a wordsmith. He took off his pack, sat down next to me, and patted my leg.

  “Don’t you think you’ve done quite enough to make your mother and me miserable without running away from us on the last afternoon of our vacation?” Father asked.

  I nodded.

  “We’ve let you hand us notes for two weeks. Won’t you walk these last few miles with us?”

  I shook my head.

  “Won’t you please, Jeremy? It would make your mother so happy.”

  I shook my head.

  “Please walk with us the rest of the way.”

  I stood, picked up my pack, and started to run back onto the trail, but Father caught my foot and gave a little flip, which he really shouldn’t have done because I had an open knife in my hand. The knife, the pack fell out of my grasp. I landed in the dirt, Father pounced on me, and then—in a clearing at the timberline of the most beautiful mountains I know—we commenced to wrestle. It was the worst melodrama, the most absurd tableau: clutching each other’s clothes and rolling around on a bed of pine needles. He kept shouting, “Why won’t you walk with us? Why won’t you talk to us?”

  Perfectly legitimate questions, but I didn’t have the answers and, besides, I was more interested in what had happened to the knife. Though it may have been only the sun setting his fingers on fire, I thought I saw the red handle of my pocket knife sticking out of his hand. I didn’t stop to contemplate whether I was encountering pure hallucination or potential homicide; I pushed him off me, grabbed my pack, and didn’t stop running until I was at the bottom of the mountain, a hundred yards from our car, sitting on a rock and skipping stones across a placid lake.

  It seemed like it took forever, but they finally came trudging down the trail. Mother shook her hat at me. It was an extremely ugly hat. It had purple polka dots scattered across the brim like a disease. I’ve never seen her quite so angry as she was the moment she saw me sitting on a rock, skipping stones. She said she’d thought I was lost and now here I was, skipping stones. She said I had no right to run ahead of the pack, no right to make her worry like that, no right to ruin everyone’s vacation by playing dumb. I nodded, and in sign language said I was sorry. She thought I’d made an obscene gesture and, explaining that twelve years old wasn’t too old to be spanked, struck me across the back and legs with her steel-tipped walking stick until words came out of my mouth: not very pretty words: rather ugly words, in fact: so ugly as to be dishonest: but words, nonetheless: “I hate you. I hate all of you.”

  10

  DID YOU KNOW that corporal punishment is often used for petty and trivial offenses such as throwing gum or not stripping for gym? Did you know that it is sometimes administered with split baseball bats and with slotted paddles? Did you know that it has been do
ne in front of other children, as well as by students? Did you know that it has been done to disturbed children who need to be helped rather than hurt, that in the name of discipline grown men will hold a resisting child down on the floor and hit him many times?

  Did you know that, when Mother got worked up about an issue, she could crank out a purple pamphlet with the best of them? Well, I suppose you did…. It wasn’t so much that I hated the members of my family as that I couldn’t communicate my love. That is always a problem, I’ve found, being unable to communicate one’s love. It gets one into the least attractive type of trouble. And I did love them. I loved them as ferociously as it’s possible to love one’s field artillery when one’s field artillery is committed to the ideal of social justice but prone toward intramural warfare. It seemed to me Mother thought the only reason to exist was to perform an endless number of good works. Where in the world would she get such an idea? No wonder Beth’s doctoral defense was going to be a revisionist view of the Levellers.

  The primary beneficiary of Mother’s largesse was the Negro People. There were far fewer honeymoon pictures of Mother and Father kissing each other than of both of them kissing some black-faced, white-robed statues in Palm Springs. And that seemed to set the tone for the remainder of the millennium. Father rooted for the Dodgers because they were originally from Brooklyn, but we as a clan stayed loyal to them because they hired the first black baseball player (Jackie Robinson), retained the first crippled black baseball player (Roy Campanella), and started the highest number of black players with Stepin Fetchit faces (Johnny Roseboro, Jim Gilliam, Tommy Davis, et al.). There was something slumming in all this, something that was wrong, and I knew what it was when I was nine years old: we would love someone only when he was helpless. Gretchen thinks most of my problems pretty much stop and start on that sentence. One Easter weekend at Watts Towers Mother looked smogward through some latticed wine bottles with a positively religious sparkle in her dark eyes. When cousin Sarah married a black man from Philadelphia, Sarah’s mother couldn’t come, so Mother substituted and brought the temple down with an a cappella finale of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Never in my life have I met anyone who meant so well.

  She began working full-time as the public information officer for the first integrated junior high school district in California and proceeded to make the Levellers look like a gang of Georgia Democrats. Mother sat on the side at the Tuesday night school board sessions, attacking her antique typewriter as if she were H. L. Mencken in Inherit the Wind. Whenever she grouped school children for posed pictures she insisted there be black faces in the crowd, but she was such a poor photographer that the black kids always came out as smudgy studies in ebony. She wrote the bimonthly newsletter that was distributed to the teachers, my teachers, and nearly every issue offered a signed editorial polemically in support of desegregation of the schools.

  “We were all babies,” she wrote, explaining the origins of human sympathy. “We all have parents who love us. We all live in some kind of house. We all have families. We all have friends. We all need food. We all have feelings.” She got giddy about people she’d never met in a way she never could about people with whom she lived in some kind of house. Mother needed a scrim between herself and love, in the same way Father has relied upon the periodic cancellation of his memory; Beth, the space of time; and me—at twenty-one I already seem to suspect I’ll never marry.

  One day Mother came home and stood on our tiny plot of front lawn, pounding a for sale sign into the grass, shouting at us to come outside.

  We followed orders.

  “What’s for sale?” Beth said, wise guy, as she was deep in some homework assignment. “The lawn?”

  “The whole blessed house,” Mother said. She pirouetted ecstatically in the windy twilight.

  “The whole house?” I said.

  “We’re moving,” she explained, waving her hammer at me.

  “Back to L.A.?” Father hoped. It was the only true paradise he ever experienced, way in the past.

  “No, into the Fillmore district.”

  “She’s lost it,” Beth whispered to me. “She’s finally joined Daddums in the burn ward.”

  “Honey?” Father said. “The Fillmore?”

  “At today’s Human Relations meeting, Ike said, ‘Revolution comes the day white families give up their houses in Pacific Heights to move into the ghetto.’” It was 1968. Mother took what Ike said as a personal challenge. Ike pronounced the word, “ghetto,” with exaggerated emphasis on the first syllable to make it sound like he still lived somewhere near there.

  “Honey?” Father tried again. “Don’t you think Ike meant it just sort of rhetorically?”

  Mother refused to entertain the notion that words were ever meant as anything less than a direct call to arms and, while we paraded up and down the sidewalk with flashlights, accosting inquisitive pedestrians, Mother got on the horn with a hundred realtors, trying to get one, just one, to have enough imagination to foresee what a publicity coup it would be for them to work out a swap with a black family from the Fillmore. It’s a pity Father hadn’t earned his real estate license yet. Maybe he could have figured out a way to get us waking up every morning in the projects.

  That wouldn’t have been his style, though. He was more circumspect about his role in the revolution. That fall, Father was fired from his post at the Jewish Welfare Fund—he wasn’t getting enough one-liners about last night’s charity dance into Herb Caen’s gossip column—and accepted a much lower-paying job as director of the poverty program in the Mission. He sat in a one-room office without central heating and called grocery stores, wanting to know why they didn’t honor food stamps; called restaurants, asking if, as the sign in the window proclaimed, they were indeed equal opportunity employers. Sometimes, on weekends, he flew to Sacramento or Washington to request more money for his program. In the Mission district, they worshipped him. They called him the Great White Hope. Watts rioted, Detroit burned. Father said, “Please, I’m just doing my job.” They invited him to barbecues, weddings, softball games. At the softball games he outplayed everybody. The salary was seventy-five hundred dollars a year, but he was happy. The ghetto was his.

  Father called a landlord to ask whether the apartment listed was still available and received assurances there was a vacancy, but when he returned that evening with a skinny black man who’d just arrived from West Texas the landlord said the room had been rented. The poverty program filed a complaint with the city housing department; when weeks passed and Nicky was still without a place to live, Mother told Father to move Nicky’s luggage into the guest room.

  Nicky didn’t have any luggage but he stayed until spring. He showed me how to shake hands, how to play pool, play cards, how to dance, how to dress. He bought me liquor and dirty magazines. He played basketball, baseball, football, tennis, and track with me and let me win. He didn’t leave until he met and married a pretty white girl, but what I remember is this: the morning after he moved in I walked into the bathroom while he was showering, smelled his body as burnt butter, hot heated jelly, damp sweet sweat, and vomited into the sink.

  With Father working to improve the ghetto and Mother working to get children sent out of the ghetto, they couldn’t very well, in all good conscience, keep me going to a lily-white private school. Besides, neither of them was making anywhere near as much money as before and they couldn’t afford such exclusive education for me any longer, especially since Beth still had another year to go at Jack London Preparatory Academy. Also, Mother thought it would be good for me to mingle with unpampered people; I might get off my high horse and loosen up a little. Instead of going, as most Currier graduates did, to Borough Hills Middle School, which was neither in a borough nor on a hill but in the middle in the sense that it was an intermediate step between private grammar school and prep school, I went to Bayshore Junior High in the heart of the city.

  BAYSHORE was different from Currier. No grass fields, no left field walls,
no right field fences, no tower with hour bells. But no speech therapist, either, no farcical student elections, no red-robed Christmas chorus catering to tourists and appearing on the eleven o’clock news, no all-night Open Houses. Just gunmetal gray lockers, gunmetal gray corridors, gunmetal gray classrooms, and little black boys carrying gray metal guns. They left me alone; they knew who my parents were. My reputation as a runner had also preceded me, and they weren’t going to harm someone who, come track season, promised to be so valuable.

  After school I’d walk into the Mission, leave my books in Father’s office, then go to the court in the ghetto, which, after the murder in Memphis later that year, was renamed King Memorial Recreation Center. A hoop, a swing, a clay tortoise. At first I just watched. Black basketball is to white basketball as hockey is to, say, hopscotch: they’re not the same sport. I’d played white basketball in well-lit gymnasia, on glassy surfaces, against glass backboards, dribbled a leather basketball, passed it politely to my teammates, allowed my opponent to score a reasonable number of points, acknowledged the fact when I committed a foul. I’d played that game. Even when I played with Nicky, we’d play with people from the Heights and, if he had any jazzier gestures, he never revealed them. Maybe he just wasn’t a very talented athlete. The Mission version—wearing purple socks and black boots with a steel comb in your hair, never passing the ball to your teammates or shooting from beyond five feet, refusing to confess your most flagrant infractions, and kicking your heels and leaping off cement into rarefied ether—I’d never encountered before and was awed.

  From the library I checked out Rattling the Rim, which concerned the heroes of street basketball in New York City. I’d memorize the myths, then appear at the Mission playground and, during water breaks, in halting tones, tell sad stories about Bedford-Stuyvesant drug addicts who could jump through the moon. The San Francisco stars didn’t want to hear about the New York stars. They didn’t care if Earl Manigault could touch the top of the backboard with his elbows, if Connie Hawkins could spin the ball on his nose while coming down off cocaine. They didn’t care. They weren’t interested. They wanted to be left alone and not be compared to anyone else and dunk until dark.