BORN FREE

“You’re writing a book? You can barely even read a book and you think you can write one? You think you are so important people will want to read all about you?” Ahh, nothing more inspiring than a mother’s words of encouragement. You have a mother, right? You know how when you ask your mom about the day you were born and you expect to hear a nice story about the joy of seeing you for the first time and the instant connection she felt with you? When my mother tells the story about that day, August 28, 1957, she tells of one of the worst days of her life. Mom recalls that in the state of Connecticut, they put women under full anesthesia, Lord knows why. Mom evidently didn’t react well to the drug and so when she finally came to, her first reaction upon seeing me was to throw up—a lot, according to her. She felt so sick that she didn’t want to hold me for a while. And just as she was feeling a little better, she got the terrible news that her beloved doctor, who had just delivered me, went home afterwards and died of a heart attack. Yeah, not a great entrance on my part.

My parents’ goal was to make me a fully independent person, as quickly as possible. By the age of four, my best friend and I walked through the streets of Philadelphia, on our own, the two-mile trip to my grandparents’ house. I have Google mapped both of the addresses—our house and my grandparents’ house—to see if my memories match in any way to what the reality is and, shockingly, I remember it pretty well. We had to cross Cheltenham Avenue, a six-lane thoroughfare with an intersection that brings together three different main roads, and I remember us being stranded on the center island, cars whizzing by on all sides. I have asked my mother repeatedly throughout the years, “What the fuck were you thinking!?”

“I knew you could handle it,” is what she says to me. It was crazy to let such young children take off on their own that way, but on the other hand, I still remember it sixty-one years later, and it never fails to make me smile and feel proud.

John F. Kennedy took office in 1961 and my dad, being an inspired social worker called to serve by a great leader, took a job in the Kennedy administration, working at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare on issues dealing with juvenile delinquency. He got a GI loan and bought a small house in Bethesda, Maryland, on Fairfield Drive, a tiny street with no sidewalks, and a stone’s throw from the Bethesda Naval Medical Hospital, now known as Walter Reed Hospital, the Navy base where all American presidents receive their medical treatments. I went to Lynnbrook Elementary School, which was about a half a mile walk from our house. I was two years behind my sister and the teachers were already making it clear that I was not nearly as bright as she was, which was true. I had to go to the little building behind the playground for remedial reading and speech therapy. As far as I know they did not have a diagnosis of dyslexia at that time or place, but that is what I was suffering from. Once we got past “See Spot Run,” I couldn’t keep up at all. I loved when teachers read us stories but was humiliated when we went around the room and had to read out loud. But I also had a lot of successes. I was very good and quick at math. That made sense to me. I took up the trumpet in the band, and really excelled at that, getting the first trumpet seat even though I was only in fourth grade. We played kickball and football with the competitive ferocity of little gladiators, and I was good at sports, so that helped me have an identity as well. I was a very happy kid, and my thoughts were consumed by the same thing a dog might be focused on—playing with a ball of any kind and eating anything that was put in front of me. Our little brother was born and moved into my room. I loved having a brother, but I was six years older than him, and he was not as good at kickball as I had hoped he would be. At six, I took the train to Philadelphia by myself to visit my grandparents. At age eight, I got my first job, delivering one hundred newspapers for a dollar. I added a second paper route the next year, firmly indoctrinated into that atrocious child-labor racket of paperboys, where I would stay until I graduated high school.

Culturally, the world was going mad and sending my little brain all kinds of messages about love, peace, freedom, and equality. I didn’t fully understand it, but I was obsessed with it all, especially the music and the comedy that was happening. My parents were into the folk music of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Simon and Garfunkel. The famed folk singer, Pete Seeger, even came to our house a couple of times with friends of my dad’s. We got our own little record player for the basement, and I spent my paper route money on 45s of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Supremes, etc. We would memorize the words to the songs and then put on shows for each other in the basement, acting them out. In retrospect, I realize how seriously I took those shows, an indicator that I wanted to be part of telling stories, but I had no concept of anything called show business at the time. I just loved watching and listening to it all—Get Smart, The Mod Squad, The Smothers Brothers, Tom Lehrer, Bill Cosby, The Three Stooges, and Dick Van Dyke. Jerry Lewis actually made me throw up from laughing too hard at Who’s Minding the Store?

I had a very typical American childhood in a typical American town, including some of the uglier sides of growing up in America. My parents had come to Washington to join a movement for equality and justice in America. Mom was teaching at a nursery school and Dad was dealing with changing the juvenile justice system, working with a racially and ethnically diverse group of exciting men and women on the same mission. We all went to the civil rights marches and anti-war protests, marching through the streets of Washington and into a few scary situations. My poor parents had to miss Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech because it took place on my birthday, but I’ll never forget my dad stopping the birthday party and blaring the speech from the radio in our backyard. My parents had parties with their friends, and this kind of racial commingling didn’t sit too well with our neighbors. Bethesda, Maryland, is located right on the Mason-Dixon line, and where we lived still had a very Dixie feel to it. No Blacks. No Jews. Segregated swimming pools and country clubs, and white supremacy and racism displayed everywhere with no shame or consequences. My sister and I were the only Jewish kids at Lynnbrook. For as much as we fit in, we were also freaks. We got our “Christmas presents” at Hanukah, we skipped school on the High Holy Days, and no one knew what the fuck was going on when we brought in our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on matzoh at Passover. When I was about nine or ten, I had to start going to Hebrew school on Wednesdays after school and on Saturday mornings. (Just what I needed, more fucking school. And trying to learn to read another language, which is read backwards, when I couldn’t even read English? Not going to happen.) We were The Jews. We were The Christ-Killers. We were The N-word Lovers. The kids really didn’t know what half of it even meant and were only parroting their parents’ fuckedup beliefs. Sometimes my friends would call me “a dirty Jew” and an “n-word lover” and, being a little kid who wanted to fit in, I dealt with that by calling other kids dirty Jews and n-word lovers. How fucked up is that? But I guess it was what I felt I needed to do to survive. Lines were being drawn, even among ten-year-olds. If your hair was long enough to touch your ear, you were a Hippie/ Fag. If you went to a peace march, you were a Hippie/Fag. Puberty was coming. Kids were starting to smoke cigarettes and make out with girls, and I just wanted to play the next game and eat the next popsicle. The redneck culture of my friends in Bethesda was crashing into all of the lessons of equality, justice, multiculturalism, and peace that my parents were teaching me, and that the amazing pop cultural landscape was embracing. By the time I got to the end of elementary school, my survival instincts knew something was going to have to change. Luckily, it did.

Chevy Chase, Maryland, is where the Jews lived. That was the word on the street when I told my friends we were moving there the summer after finishing elementary school. It was only about a mile away and we were all still going to be going to the same junior high school and seeing each other every day in the fall, but I might as well have been moving to another country. I loved my friends there, but it was clear to me that I wasn’t really going to end up on the same path as them. Besides, I was ready to let my freak flag fly a bit. I wouldn’t get another haircut for the next four years.