dream.
In 1959, at age sixteen, remarkably, and beyond belief, Mary Keshner allows me (her precious high school graduate son) to drive to Miami and back with three older friends. I’ve got $109, and I will stay as long as the money holds out.
The drive down was fucking torture, and we all learned to sleep upsidedown, our heads down in the leg-well of Kenny Berkowitz’ ancient Ford. It was hard not to notice the “Kollard” and “White” only outhouses behind the gas stations, throughout the South. The white only and colored water fountains in public areas in Florida.
But, best of all was passing the fabled Kennelworth Hotel, that Miami dream, Casa Godfrey. The large, billboard sign facing Al A read, “No dogs, Niggers or Jews allowed.” The unreality of it all short-circuited my brain’s emotional synapses.
All I could think about was how they came up with that particular order?
Were dogs their first hate? Were Jews a bigot’s afterthought? I couldn’t stop wondering about the order of hatred on the sign.
I never told my Mom, or any of her friends in our tenement building. The Florrie Chuzmirs; the Minna Taylors; the Betty Adlers; the Anne Brills; Mrs. Kolk; Lilly Friede… I could not bring myself to break their spell.
Was I afraid nobody would believe me? The love of that Old Redhead, Arthur Godfrey continued through the years, with many Jewish women’s prayers chanted over the Friday night
Even as a kid, I had no problem with a world without God. My little genius mind was unable to discern why so many people were so quick to decide that they had deciphered all the mysteries of life, assigning same to a God. Though I was able to see that people afraid of the “nothingness” of death needed to create some meaning for themselves, to lessen their fears, I could never accept that any God assigned the ‘all good and all powerful’ role, would be sadistic enough to fuck with His little creations, for His own self-amusement.
In other words, at my young age, I was, and knew myself to be fucked. I didn’t fit. I had massive fights with my parents over my reluctance to join the ranks, and was therefore taught to feel guilty for not believing in something that everyone was expected to believe in. I went through the rote expectations of being
By my seventeenth year, my independence of spirit could no longer be suppressed. My father and I were having another of the many arguments we seemed to always have, regarding the “Nature of Man” (read in, versus the nature of me). It boiled over in the kitchen of our apartment, when my father, red-faced with exasperation screamed at me that “the difference between man and animal is religion.” Composing myself, I said, “You’ve known me all my life… have you ever known me to purposely do wrong, to purposely hurt anybody? Am I an animal? Because I don’t believe what you believe, am I an animal?”
My father started crying. I believe I saw in his face, finally, the tyranny he realized that I had been subjected to. I believe he broke through, and heard the words, and the meaning of what I had said. I left the room, the apartment, and his life, for years to come.
Not caring what became of me, wanting only to break free from the weight of the generational layers of expectations I felt suffocated by, I had myself thrown out of college, and I joined the Marine Corps.
I was a strong kid, who had worked hard, summer jobs as a bell hop. We carried massive quantities of suitcases in and out of mountain cabin resorts, over miles of trails. The Waldemere Hotel, on Shandalee Lake checked out 1200 guests every Saturday, and received 1200 new arrivals every Sunday.
There were no carts, there were no elevators. We four bellhops lugged and carted tons of luggage, from sun-up to sun-down every weekend. We could not eat those days, because we would puke it up from exhaustion. We discovered that we could hold down grapefruit juice, so we lived on a few sips of juice those two days a week. On the city streets, we played tackle football with no equipment. When we got hurt, we kept playing ‘for the love of the game.’ For the year and a half of college I had, before being thrown out at age seventeen, I was on the Hunter College wrestling team. Though only 5’7” tall, and 140 pounds, I had the indestructibility of youth.
But Parris Island, South Carolina, in the sixties was not Kansas, Toto. Upon our arrival to boot camp, we were terrified into immediate, silent obedience by the Drill Instructors. We did not talk, we did not sit, we did not ‘eye- fuck’ the area. We were assured that the D.I.’s did not care if we lived or died. We knew that sometimes recruits did die. Standing at attention for hours at a time, we were told that we would leave Parris Island as “Marines,” or we would leave dead. We believed it.
On one of the first few days as a recruit, we were all standing at attention in front of our racks, studying our General Orders. A voice boomed, “Who doesn’t believe in God?” Again, louder… “Who doesn’t believe in God?”
“The Marine Corps believes in God! Your ass belongs to the Marine Corps, but your soul belongs to Jesus. Any maggot who doesn’t believe in God will stay behind with us, by the time you shitbirds get back, he will believe in God!”
“Give me my Protestant Pussies!” some guys fall out. “Give me my Baptist Bastards!” more guys fall out.
“Give me my Catholic Cock-suckers!” I am now the only one left standing at attention in front of my rack.
“You, what the fuck are you?”
“Sir, Private Keshner is a Jew, Sir!”
“A what?”
“Sir, Private Keshner is a Jew, Sir!”
“There are no fucking Jews in the Marine Corps, you go with the Catholic Cocksuckers!”
I fall out with the Catholic Cocksuckers, and attend Catholic services for the next thirteen weeks.
I can honestly say that the Marine Corps discriminated against no one. Only the sick, lame and lazy caught it in the shorts, and only competence impressed the Corps.
As small as I was, I excelled at hand-to-hand combat, academics, and most important for the Marines, I fired highest in the company on the rifle range, scoring 232 out of a possible 250 points. I left Parris Island with a stripe, one of only four promotions given to our out-posting company.
I was now officially a Marine, a Jar-head, a Leatherneck, just like all those heroes I grew up on, from my uncles, to all those wonderful leading-men in the propaganda movies made during World War II.
Getting off the Greyhound at Port Authority Bus Terminal, west of Times Square, I remember thinking, no, actually believing, that I could step off the curb, hit a bus with the side of my hand, and stop it dead in it’s tracks. The mind of the young is fertile ground for battle fodder.
Although the Marine Corps was a vehicle towards legal independence, it didn’t mature me emotionally, cure my spiritual void or make me any wiser (I am, however, the only Marine I know without a single tattoo). The downside of pushing away from my parent’s advise was that I pushed away from all advise, theirs or others, good or bad.
The folly of living exclusively within your own head is that you meet only one person there (if you’re lucky). I greeted my father’s caution against marrying too young, and the benefits of a good education, with the same enthusiasm as I had his earlier, religious counseling.
The next ten years were taken up with a youthful, ill-fated marriage, the birthing of two kids, and the pursuit of endless pussy. My biological maturity coincided perfectly with the advent of the pill, the free-love generation, drug-chic, and a world without permanently damaging sexual diseases.
Although I finally got serious about college, finishing a degree in accounting at Fordham University at night, I blew off parenting my two, beautiful children, for the pursuit of personal happiness.
Caryn and David had made the unfortunate mistake of timing their arrival twenty years too early. These poor kids suffered my desertion of them because I was too stupid and immature to maintain my proper role as their father. I found countless ‘good’ reasons to justify my absence and neglect. In the end, my disappearance from their lives wreaked the havoc on their hearts, minds and souls you would expect. They were left to roam in the rubble of their psyches, obliterated by a missing father, trying to find some peace and meaning for themselves. Over the past fifteen years, I have tried to reenter their lives, with only moderate success. The damage is done, and the road back
