Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2002-05-27- 4:55 a.m.

If You Don't Cry...

”Now is not the time for verbal swordplay, for unlikely flights of imagination and wildly shifting perspectives, for metaphysical conceit, for wit. And nothing would be worse than a detailed scholarly analysis. Erudition. Interpretation. Complication. Now is a time for simplicity. Now is a time for, dare I say it, kindness.”
-Margaret Edson
I would never tell you the truth. Not all of it. Ever.
You wouldn't understand. And I wouldn't want you to.
You should know that before proceeding any further.
I haven’t cried since the spring of 1997, and then it was only in pain. I had a pinched nerve in the region of my right deltoid muscle. It had started as merely a twinge, a feeling of soreness as if I had been spending time at the gym. I ignored it for days. Until the first night of spring break. Lynn and I were planning to drive to New Orleans for the break in the morning; I was very excited about this, seeing as I had not been to Louisiana since I was twelve, much less been to New Orleans since I had become old enough to enjoy its more nefarious attractions.
The night before, I was in my room, lying on my bed when the pain got really bad. I was watching Risky Business with Lynn and SHG; I had told them earlier that I had never actually seen it, and they had been appalled and insisted on renting it. Turnabout was fair play; when I first began dating Lynn, I was appalled that she had never seen The Godfather, Goodfellas, and most of the other classics I loved. We actually had made a list of films she hadn’t seen, and we’d leave it in the car so that on our trips to the video store, if we didn’t see anything appealing in the new releases we’d pick a movie off the list.
Shortly after Tom Cruise’s parents left him alone and he danced about in his tightie-whities, the twinge became a stabbing, and from there it moved on to something I can’t describe. I curled up into a ball. I screamed. I cried. Lynn and SHG picked me up and carried me to the car, and drove me to the emergency room. I was no longer coherent. I don’t remember much more, beyond feeling myself deposited onto a gurney, and then seeing a needle go into my arm. When I awoke, I was fed painkillers and muscle relaxers and x-rayed and scanned until I could go home. I never made it to New Orleans that spring break; instead I sat on my couch and held an ice pack to my shoulder and swallowed muscle relaxers. But I didn’t cry anymore, not that spring break, nor anytime since.
Before that, I hadn't cried since I was twelve years old. It was the last time my mother hit me. I'm not sure what it is that I had done that merited punishment anymore, if I ever did remember. What I do remember is that she reached out and slapped my face, and that I instantly reciprocated and slapped my mother across her cheek. My mom just stared, and then walked out of the room. And then I cried and cried, and then my face got all hot and I swore to myself that I would never let them make me cry again. And my mother never slapped me again either.
The first time that I can remember being hit was the day I turned seven years old. My seventh birthday party had a Ghostbusters theme. My parents went all out, getting a leftover cardboard cutout from some movie theater and wrapping old shoeboxes in aluminum foil and filling them with dry ice to resemble the traps. At my party, we were playing hot potato, with my dad as the judge. I thought my dad was cheating, making my friends lose to ensure that the son of his best friend didn't lose, and stubborn then as I am now, I refused to let it go. My dad took me upstairs and whipped me with his belt in the living room while my party continued downstairs. When he was done, he sat there with me on the couch while I cried and screamed, as seven year olds are wont to do. My dad sat there with infinite understanding, and when I had calmed myself, he told me to go to the bathroom and wash my face. He knew I wouldn’t want my friends to see me like this. He went to the bathroom with me, and soaked a washcloth in hot water for me, and he and I went back down to my party.

I don’t tell people about this stuff. I had to avoid the entire topic of my childhood with my therapist to avoid talking about it. These days, all this stuff has a greater meaning. People want to discuss it, find out what issues you have due to your abuse, and I simply don’t see it quite that way. Abuse is a word that gets bandied about these days, like racism or anti-Semitism, until I don’t really know what it means any more, and I’m forced to use a definition like what the Supreme Court uses for obscenity: I know it when I see it. Nobody ever fiddled with me in a sex-type way. No one ever came home after a bad day and whaled on me for no reason. No one got drunk and tried to hurt me. My parents were simply from a different school. My parents raised me like they were raised. And truth be told, when I got older and smarter, when I was fighting with my dad I used to provoke him into hitting me deliberately, because I knew when he had gotten over it, when his temper was down, he’d feel worse about that than anything else.
I understand my father now. Part of it has to do with a secret: after his father died, my dad briefly kept a diary on the family computer, and I found it and read some of it. I never knew my Grandfather, my father’s father very well. He died when I was in the fourth grade, and rather suddenly, less than two weeks after he first fell ill. And he lived far away, in Louisiana, so I didn’t see him very often. Mostly what I can remember is a tanned face, and a bald pate surrounded by an unruly shock of white hair. I can remember a lovely pecan tree in the backyard of his house, that grew heavy in the fall, the melodic sing-song of the bayou accents in the living room, and a gorgeous chess set I wish I had now with pieces designed as chevaliers and footmen-at-arms. I can remember the smell of the Mississippi River in his backyard. Beyond that, the man himself is lost to me.
But I learned my dad remembered different. My dad’s memories were of a Rabbi’s son who ran a pawnshop in a riverboat town. My dad’s memories were of what it meant to grow up Jewish and poor in small town Louisiana in the forties and fifties. My dad’s memories were of growing up the son of a strange man in a stranger place who had a quick hand with a belt, and of being his eldest son with a younger brother and sister who he wanted to protect. My dad’s memories of this, colored by his own realization that he himself had a short temper. My dad grieved the loss of his father, and feared he was too much like him to be different. And reading this, my father’s secret words meant only for himself, I realized for the first time that I was truly my father’s son.
Like me, my father had gone to Israel after graduating from high school. That was in 1961. When I was living there, I begged him to come during his vacation from work at Christmas. When he came, I took him to the places I had been that were closed to him when he had been there. I took him to the vineyards of the Golan Heights. I took him to the beaches of Eilat on the Red Sea. And finally, I took him through the Beggar’s Gate into the old city of Jerusalem, and to the Western Wall, where I stood, and I watched him write down his prayer and tuck it into the crevice of the stones of Herod. I have never felt so close to him; not before, not since.

(Continue to Part Two)

previous |next |archives

If you want to make me
famous or just complain: Jay Elias -
jelias@diaryland.com

Older

Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
Jesus On The Dashboard - 2003-08-13
An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
Don't Worry, It's Coming - 2003-08-02

Diaryland

join my Notify List and get email when I update
my
site:

email: