Black Dog of Fate

IN THE YEARS AFTER MY GRANDMOTHER’S DEATH, I CAME TO discover there were two kinds of memory. One was a personal web of sensations. That was suburbia: good times, romance, sex, friendship, and the body in motion. That kind of memory—that sense of limitless potential—was inseparable from the rock ’n’ roll that poured out from the large turquoise and gray Zenith transistor radio my grandmother gave me when I was eight or the smaller RCAs and Sonys I later carried in my hand.

To be thirteen and dreaming. Sleepless between the cold water of the morning faucet and the light between curtains. Between dream and homeroom. Believing in “Somewhere beyond the sea.” A bra strap graceful beneath the transparency of a white blouse. And when the blue sky over the shoreline and the coconut smell of Coppertone faded and the pubic curls from bathing suits and breasts half visible were gone, the sweet voice of * * * * and the saxophones blared.

Eros dueling with death. Paul Anka’s agony. Elvis’s shaking. Little Richard’s St. Vitus’s dance at the piano. Aretha opening the campaniles of the jukebox. Martha Reeves’s great belts. Roy Orbison’s lamentations. Jackie Wilson’s tremolos. Billy Stewart’s blackscats. Garnet Mims’s gospel highs. And Bob Dylan’s voice, which hit me like broken glass under a tire, like metal scratching concrete. It wasn’t sweet, it was penetrating, hitting nerve and skin, slightly liturgical: something minor key, the way the ghost notes wavered as they rose and fell. There was something ancient and primal in the voice, something raw and naked and intuitive, undefinably new. In that voice I heard an estuary of traditions—bluesy, post-Guthrie-dust-bowl, folk, country and rock, Jewish cantoring and political edginess, social aberrance and poetic opacity. It was a transformative voice that carried with it some of the sediment of American culture and a sense of the new.

Rock defined my sense of time because it embodied events in memory. Just a chord, a piece of melody, the pitch of a voice, the anticipation of a bar could trigger a moment past that was now present. The body was a labyrinth in which sound stayed like a disc forever spinning. And when the song returned on the radio or the phonograph, there was a flaring up in the senses, feeling jolting the mind, the past spilling into myth and nostalgia, the private storehouse of memory grew and then grew into itself.

“It’s the same old song with a different meaning since you’ve been gone,” that’s how the Four Tops song of 1966 goes. It was a song that mourned the loss of love, but celebrated the song as embodiment of experience. The song as monument. The song as emotion relived. “The Same Old Song” was the first 45 I can recall that was self-reflexive about memory. The passionate tenor voice of Levi Stubbs celebrated memory and the act of memory indelibly imprinted in the experience of a song in the grooves of the disc.

The one we danced to all night long
All you’ve left is my favorite song
It used to bring sweet memories
of a tender love that used to be
Now it’s the same old song
but with a different meaning
since you’ve been gone.

Yet it was never just the same old song. Holland, Dozier, and Holland spun their meaning well; it’s both a new and an old song, a reminder of a past that’s now fused with a present, which is an ongoing present that stays alive as long as the song is heard on the disc of the imagination.

And when the music was spinning, I spun in it, and the mysterious figure that was my father and the veil of high culture that was the Balakians of the Upper West Side and the Aroosians with their aesthetic fetishes and doting affection—all disappeared. The world inside 57 Crabtree Lane faded and I was free in the open spaces.

To be seventeen in Linda Bloom’s basement, smell of warm malt from cans of Colt 45 and smoke hanging from Salems, Luckies, Marlboros, the couches pushed back against paneled walls baby I need your lovin’, got to have all your lovin’ Arlene’s black pumps kicked off. Heaven Scent. Old Spice. Dampness. So take a good look at my face, you’ll see my smile, it’s way out of place, if you look closer it’s easy to trace Someone says Jerry and the Pacemakers for President.

You love the way the cigarette juts out from between her long fingers and how her red painted nails set off the white cigarette paper. You’re breaking training and her parents are in Puerto Rico for the week baby you’re so smart you know you could’ve been a school-book, the way you stole my heart you know you could’ve been a cool crook no matter what car you can get, some MG midget or a Spitfire or a bug or a GTO, the top will be down and the warm midnight air of the Garden State Parkway will pour in. The smell of the deep fry wafting over the boardwalk, the surf surging over your throat, and the transistors blaring tinny and static—

But I learned that there was another kind of memory, too. A kind of memory that was connected to something larger than my life. After my grandmother died, Armenia seemed more and more remote, and I lost my direct and visceral sense of the ancient Near Eastern world that she embodied. Yet, no matter how deeply I sank into suburban life and the happy society of teenage Tenafly, my memory of my grandmother was a strange shadow appearing now and then to remind me that there was something else I needed to know. She imploded my present at the strangest moments, without conscious provocation. She had become my pakht—the force of fate that called on me, whether I was ready or not, and who, like Lady Fate, was indifferent to my present moment, my station in life, or my need for security and comfort. She was history knocking on the door of the heart, and when she came knocking, her message often was opaque, symbolic, evocative. I was left to make of it what I could, but I could not escape the intrusion.

I’m remembering a clear, cold evening, a few inches of hard-crusted snow on the roadside. It’s February 1968, and my girlfriend Rose Germain and I are sitting, arms around each other, in the third-row seats of a Ford Country Squire station wagon on a triple date. We’re returning north up the Garden State Parkway from the Milburn Theater, where we have just seen The Graduate. I walk out of the theater thrilled in part because the hero was played by Dustin Hoffman. Not a John Wayne or a Steve McQueen or a Paul New-man, but this short, dark guy with a nose that would have been at home on any Greek bas-relief.

Earnest, alienated, and rebellious, Benjamin Braddock was more real to me than Holden Caulfield or James Dean, and until Camus’s Meursault replaced him, he was my antihero. His destined love, Elaine, was played by Katharine Ross. A touch of adolescence about her cheeks, blue eyes, long auburn hair, and tentative smile. She was chic as she walked the Berkeley campus in suede boots and blue jeans and an array of Abercrombie & Fitch jackets. I loved the way she popped a few french fries into her sensual mouth from a white paper bag she and Benjamin had taken out from the drive-in, and then smiled as she said goodnight and disappeared into her white house. Against the swarthy Hoffman, she was the ultimate shiksa.

Everything was white in southern California. The white walls of Mrs. Robinson’s hallway against which she shrinks when her affair with Benjamin is revealed to her daughter. The white paneling of the Braddock kitchen; the white empire dresses at Benjamin’s college graduation party; white walls of the Taft Hotel’s famous room number 528 (the place of assignation). And finally, the white 1960s First Presbyterian Church of Santa Barbara, where Benjamin rescues Elaine from the white interior of her almost-marriage to the blond medical student. It was more than sixties minimalism; it was the white nothingness of the American dream.

And Benjamin, depressed and alone, staring into the fish tanks in his bedroom. Benjamin driving forlornly around the posh streets in his new Alfa Romeo after Elaine has banished him from her life. Benjamin in shades drifting on a raft in his backyard swimming pool, a beer sweating in his hand, orange trees above him. The lyrical and melancholy songs of Simon and Garfunkel: Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again / because a vision softly creeping / left my dreams while I was sleeping.

I sat with my arm around Rose in the third seat of the car, elated by the film and feeling the good feeling of being with her on a Saturday night. Then, like sudden cold water, a memory overwhelmed me. I found myself back in the summer of 1962, reliving a scene that no doubt I had repressed from the time it happened. Perhaps my flashback was triggered by Dustin Hoffman, whose Jewish looks were somehow a bridge for me back to my Armenianness, which lived submerged in me. My arm went limp around Rose’s shoulder and I stared through the back window of the station wagon into the sky where the red lights of the radio towers were blinking.

I am lying in my bed running a fever that in a few days will lead to the measles. My nose is bleeding periodically onto my T-shirt and I’m rereading a book called Roger Maris at Bat, in which I can relive all sixty-one of the home runs Maris hit the previous summer to break the Babe’s record. As the fever rises, I’m trying to hold on to the image of Maris’s elegant left-handed swing and the white bullet rising into the right-field bleachers of Yankee Stadium.

My grandmother comes into the room, hot late July, the air conditioning on the blink, the windows open, and the sounds of cicadas shrill in the trees. “The soul,” my grandmother says, “leaves the body. Sounch [breath]. Ott [air]. Hokee [soul]. The soul leaves through the mouth when you die and finds a place to live. Souls are either good or evil. Good souls are connected with angels and saints. Evil souls with suicides or criminals or Turks.”

My grandmother is talking in a loud voice and the sun pouring through the window is so bright that she is almost lost in the glare. She keeps speaking. “The unclean souls pursue the living and appear in the bodies of animals. The souls of evil people roam the world; the souls of the good find homes. Souls can hide in anything, a jerboa or a grape leaf; they can fold into coils on a mulberry leaf. Souls are like flowers, so pay attention to them and don’t be fooled by nature, don’t be fooled by beauty.”

She steps out of the light, in front of the big mirror on my wall, and I can see that she has let her hair down. “Everywhere there are omens. When an omen appears near you and you miss it, you have missed your fate. A red rose turns white in April; broom on the hillside goes black in August; sheep change color overnight; mulberries on lower branches are soft and inviting. When bread is dear, death is near. Sleep with one eye open; be a half inch off the sheet. Know the evil eye.”

“I’m not going to die,” I say to my father. I watch him by the window as he punctures the pink rubber circle of a bottle of serum with the long needle. The glass syringe has a long purple line going up the side. I watch the serum fill the void of the tube made by the slow release of the glass push-stop. From the nozzle the silver needle seems to float in the light.

The pain is like a knife in my ear. The needle is long and when I smell the alcohol on the cotton swab, my muscles tighten, then it’s cool on the back of my arm, and I clench my jaw and the blue sky in the window disappears as if someone pulled the shade.

When I wake my grandmother is standing over me. My skin is burning, and I am too groggy to talk. I just watch her pull a glass jar off my chest, and I smell the kerosene. My eyes follow a thin swirl of smoke as it evaporates toward the ceiling. There is gauze in the jar and my grandmother stares into it, and I stare at her and then at the college pennants on my wall like flags in the wind making me dizzy. I see the red ring on my chest where my grandmother has just pulled the jar.

“Syringe can only do so much,” she says, “now fever will lift soon. Hokeet seerem, ano-tee-es?” (Beloved soul, are you hungry?) I nod yes and feel the sweat cooling on my body and my T-shirt damp and cool. Her hand brushes my hair. Her wrist is cool on my forehead.

I think it is morning, because the light seems red against the wall, but the room is dark, and my grandmother is standing by the old black Windsor rocker. When she smiles, she is all gums just like a baby because she has taken her teeth out. Her thick, dark brown hair flares out over her shoulders and spreads like a cape down her back, and as she grins the space of her mouth seems to float in the air, making her look like a hag. In a white slip, her breasts are half visible.

“There were maggots on the slits of their backs. We lay on the ground. Four of us. Something ran through the brush. The night sky was perfect. I saw a star shoot south to Nineveh, and lightning came and the brush was silver and then it was black again.

“The Turk had an ax and a short knife with a mother-of-pearl handle. The blood was warm, then cold. I recognized him from the souk in Diarbekir. He was like a dead animal on me. I watched the dead feathers fly up into a blue sky where my box kite flew at Easter. I fell like a lap of blue beads on the marble floor in the Turkish bath.

When the light comes through the window there is a bowl of soup on a mother-of-pearl tray, strands of egg flying through the broth. Arkayutiun soup (soup of heaven), my grandmother calls it. Some bones float and the allspice in the rice-stuffed meatballs is sweet in the lemony chicken broth. My grandmother’s hands smell of fresh lemon rind as she feels my forehead again.

Sweaty and uncomfortable, I sat like a paralytic and looked blankly into the night as the cars blurred by. I was thinking to myself, Gran, what the hell are you doing here? I’m on a date, and I know you’ll understand if I say I was hoping to have a good time at Rose’s after the movie. But I was emotionally wiped out by this reverie. Although Rose and I prided ourselves on being able to talk about ideas and feelings, I would have felt absurd trying to tell her of the memory I had just relived. How could I explain my Armenian grandmother to her, when I didn’t understand Armenia myself? So when I stood on Rose’s front porch back in Tenafly and she asked me to come in, which meant that we would go down three steps to the TV room of her split-level house and roll around on the couch doing everything we could with her parents sleeping upstairs, I said I didn’t feel well and went home.

At home I sat and stared at the dark TV screen beneath the bookshelves. The house was silent, everyone sleeping upstairs, and the air of the room floated with dim molecules of light from the lamp, and I kept hearing my grandmother’s voice. Souk, Diarbekir, Turkish bath, Der Vorghormya. Words of Armenia, names of places whooshing around in my head. Had I been a witness to a memory of hers so terrible that it could only be said to me, an eleven-year-old, half delirious with fever, lying in bed between darkness and light? My grandmother had spoken so emphatically that day, in clipped, deliberate speech, as if to say, This is a moment to listen.