The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

Undeniably, I inherited my athletic genes from him. When Natalie assisted on the goal that won her soccer team the city championship, he crowed, “The Shields bloodline!”

Bloodline to Star Power (i)

My father’s birth certificate reads “Milton Shildcrout.” His military record says “Milton P. Schildcrout” (he had no middle name; he made it up). When he changed his name in 1946 to “Shields,” the petition listed both “Shildkrout” and “Shildkraut.” His brother Abe used “Shildkrout” his sister Fay’s maiden name was “Schildkraut.” Who cares? I do. I want to know whether I’m related to Joseph Schildkraut, who played Otto Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank and won an Academy Award in 1938 for his portrayal of Alfred Dreyfus in The Life of Emile Zola.

I grew up under the distinct impression that it was simply true—the actor was my father’s cousin—but now my father is considerably more equivocal: “There is the possibility that we’re related,” he’ll say, “but I wouldn’t know how to establish it.” Or: “Do I have definite proof that he was a cousin of ours? No.” Or: “My brother Jack bore a strong resemblance to him; he really did.” From a letter: “Are we really related, the two families? Can’t say for certain. What’s the legend I’ve fashioned over the years and what’s solid, indisputable fact? I don’t know.” “We could be related to the Rudolph/Joseph Schildkraut family—I honestly believe that.”

In 1923, when my father was 13, his father, Samuel, took him to a Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side to see Rudolph Schildkraut substitute for the legendary Jacob Adler in the lead role of a play called Der Vilder Mensch (The Wild Man). Rudolph was such a wild man: he hurtled himself, gripping a rope, from one side of the stage to the other. After the play, which was a benefit performance for my grandfather’s union—the International Ladies Garment Workers—my grandfather convinced the guard that he was related to Rudolph Schildkraut, and he and my father went backstage.

In a tiny dressing room, Rudolph removed his makeup and stage costume, and he and Samuel talked. According to my father, Rudolph said he was born in Romania, and later in his acting career he went to Vienna and Berlin. (“Schildkraut” is of German-Russian derivation. “Schild” means “shield” “kraut” means “cabbage.” We’re protectors and defenders of cabbage.) He and his wife and son, Joseph, came to New York around 1910, went back to Berlin a few years later, and then returned to the United States permanently in 1920. (Joseph Schildkraut’s 1959 memoir, My Father and I, confirms that these dates are correct, which only proves that my father probably consulted the book before telling me the story.) Samuel asked Rudolph whether he knew anything about his family’s antecedents—how and when they came to Austria. Rudolph said he knew little or nothing. His life as an actor took him to many places, and his life and interest were the theater and its people. The two men spoke in Yiddish for about 10 minutes; my father and grandfather left. What little my father couldn’t understand, my grandfather explained to him later.

“For weeks,” my father told me, “I regaled my friends and anybody who would listen that my father and I had visited the great star of the Austrian, German, and Yiddish theater in America—Rudolph Schildkraut. What’s more, I said, he was probably our cousin. Nothing in the conversation between my father and Rudolph Schildkraut would lead me or anybody else to come to that conclusion for a certainty, but I wanted to impress friends and neighbors and quickly added Rudolph and Joseph Schildkraut to our family. I said, ‘They’re probably second cousins.’ Some days I made them ‘first cousins.’ Rudolph Schildkraut—as you know, Dave—went on to Hollywood and had a brief but successful motion picture career. I told everybody he was a much better actor than his countryman Emil Jannings.”

ADOLESCENCE

Rattlesnake Lake

Testosterone initiates the growth spurt; increases larynx size, deepening the voice; increases red blood cell mass, muscle mass, libido; stimulates development of the penis, scrotum, and prostate; stimulates growth of pubic, facial, leg, and armpit hair; stimulates sebaceous gland secretions of oil. Throughout high school, my acne was so severe as to constitute a second skin. Oil leaked from my pores. I kissed no one until I was 17.

Acne flourished on my chin, forehead, cheeks, temples, and scalp, and behind my ears. It burned my neck, appeared sporadically on my penis, visited my stomach, and wrapped around my back and buttocks. It was like an unwilling, monotonous tattoo. There were whiteheads on the nose, blackheads on toes, dense purple collections that finally burst with blood, white circles that vanished in a squeeze, dilating welts that never went away, infected wounds that cut to the bone, surface scars that looked hideous, wart-like protuberances at the side of the head. I endured collagen injections, punch grafts, and chemical peels.

I washed with oval brown bars and transparent green squares, soft baby soaps that sudsed, and rough soaps that burned. I applied special gels, clear white liquids, mud creams. I took tablets once, twice, thrice a day; before, after, and during meals. I went on milk diets and no-milk diets, absorbed no sun and too much sun. I took erythromycin, tretinoin, Cleocin, PanOxyl, Benoxyl, isopropyl myristate, polyoxyl 40 stearate, butylated hydroxytoluene, hydroxypropyl methylcellulose. I saw doctors and doctors and doctors.

My father would ask me, please, to stop picking at myself. Sometimes he’d get impatient and slap my face (as if he were both reprimanding me for squeezing scabs at the dinner table and expressing compassion by striking the source of all the distress), but he was certainly justified in whatever frustration he felt. My hands were incessantly crawling across my skin, always probing and plucking, then flicking away the root canker. The inflammatory disease bred a weird narcissism in which I craved the mirror but averted any accurate reflection. I became expert at predicting which kinds of mirrors would soften the effect, and which—it hardly seemed possible —would make things worse.

My mother still had pockmarks on her cheeks as evidence of a diseased childhood, with patches of pink skin on her nose acquired in more than one surgery to remove the skin cancer that was her reward for believing, as a teenager, too many doctors’ X-ray radiation cures. (The enormous amount of radiation she received was thought to be the likely cause of her breast cancer and death at 51.) In a faded photograph of her brother wearing khaki in Okinawa, his face appeared to be on fire. A doctor at Stanford Hospital told my sister that he was the most decorated dermatologist in the Bay Area and there wasn’t a thing he could do to improve the quality of her skin until she was at least 21. Only my father’s face was impressively blemish-free, although whenever he cut himself shaving or the impress of his glasses left a red mark at the eyebrows, my mother would claim that he, too, had had problems. They used to have perfectly absurd arguments over who was responsible for the cluster forming on my chin.

My sophomore year of high school my zit trouble reached such catastrophic proportions that twice a month I drove an hour each way to receive liquid nitrogen treatments from a dermatologist in South San Francisco. His office was cattycorner to a shopping center that housed a Longs drugstore, where I would always first give my prescription for that month’s miracle drug to the pharmacist. Then, while I was waiting for the prescription to be filled, I’d go buy a giant bag of Switzer’s red licorice. I’d tear open the bag, and even if (especially if) my face was still bleeding slightly from all the violence that had just been done to it, I’d start gobbling the licorice while standing in line for the cashier. I’m hard-pressed now to see the licorice as anything other than some sort of Communion wafer, as if by swallowing the licorice, my juicy red pimples might become sweet and tasty. I’d absorb them; I’d be absolved. The purity of the contradiction I remember as a kind of ecstasy. My senior yearbook photo was so airbrushed that people asked me, literally, who it was.

In “Is Acne Really a Disease?” Dale F. Bloom argues that, “far from being a disease, adolescent acne is a normal physiological process that functions to ward off potential mates until the afflicted individual is some years past the age of reproductive maturity, and thus emotionally, intellectually, and physically fit to be a parent.” Dale F.