I WAS BORN Neil Downs. Thankfully, my mother didn’t listen to the wishes of her mother, the last observant person in our family, and name me Chaim. My mother said I never acted or looked like a Chaim, or either one of them for that matter.
My father’s eyes were hazel, his hair dark, curly brown, which he slicked back in a nineteen forties, Sinatra-style pompadour. My mother’s eyes were blue-green, her hair straight and light brown. They both had tawny skin. I am a genetic freak, reaching back to the muck of my recessive gene pool, against all odds, that found their European ancestors in a pair of Cossack and Aryan interlopers, for I have wavy blond hair, blue eyes, and fair skin. And I married a blond-haired, green-eyed, alabaster-skinned WASP with the three names of Sarah Brockton Roberts. And, we had a blond-haired and blue-eyed son: Barry Castor Downs. We named him Barry, as is the Jewish tradition, for my father Ben, who died from a combination of life-exhaustion and cancer a year before his grandson’s birth. From the beginning, my son was no Barry, always Castor.
The day he was born was the happiest day of my life. Better than becoming a doctor, losing my virginity, smoking pot or doing downs, meeting Sarah, making love to Sarah, falling in love with Sarah.
To us, Castor, a breech baby, was special and grew more special with each passing day. To him, and only him, I gave my unconditional love. Only Castor—amidst the smells of pain and death squashed under the odors of toxic cleansers; the pillars of lies that the diseased must tell themselves and that we pretenders to knowledge of sickness and death reinforce; the blasphemy of blackened eyes and broken hearts of beat-up wives; the sadomasochistic bruises of abusive lovers; the shriveled arms and deteriorating insides of streetwalking junkies; the wealthy cokeheads with paranoid delusions of sudden heart attacks; the foolhardy twenty-somethings who tested their mortality by rollerblading at break-bone speeds; the uninsured poor who came in for a cold and left with the surety they had TB; the loneliness addicts who came to me as a last resort to cure the incurable ills of life—among the simple sadnesses of everyday existence in the emergency room where I worked at St. Vincent’s Hospital in downtown Manhattan—only my son gave me faith in the future of humanity. In god.