That’s the Fifth Question, my childhood amendment to the long-held set of
four that centerpieced the obligatory family Seder each year.
I really thought it made a perfectly shaped addendum to that philosophical
battery of inquiries regarding something quite so universal, religious and whole.
Certainly as an adult, given the structure of family traditions as we civilized
dwellers have come to adopt them, I think an inclusion would be one whose time is
well overdue.
But to whom do you lobby for something like that…? And if the answer is the
tribunals of the Synagogue, then you might as well forget it. Those people have much larger and more
significant things to contend with, like rates of annual membership and how to
advance them. That, they can come to work each day and deal with; Life, they can’t.
This is why, at age seven, I knew that the only pragmatic approach was to
very candidly adopt my own amendment, and keep it quiet. No one I knew would care to hear it, and it
made more sense than anything I knew back then.
It was also my very first teaching in one of the most profound religious
and philosophical structures I’d ever encounter in my lifetime: Truth is not a
matter of articulation. In fact, it’s
very much the opposite.
To be even more concise, when applicable, it’s a form of outright denial.
And that act of denial serves more to placate and protect the innocent and the
powerless than to liberate them. Even inside
their own minds, over the span of a lifetime.
And it’s this blessed, uncommon gift of awareness, endowed upon me in
early childhood, for which I can thank my greatest and most effective
teacher: My mother. Tonight, we’d all be
treated to one of the greatest ecumenical lessons a religious gathering could
offer. She’d be drunk off her ass.
If there’s a shred of well-cultivated hostility there, so be it. It’s in check, it’s not harming anyone, and
it’s absolutely healthy and cathartic. I don’t think the Almighty Himself would
hesitate to concur on something quite so academic. It’s us disciples that can’t come to terms
with things. Like alcoholic family
members.
For those unschooled in these things, let’s set the stage. For one, you don’t need a holiday to be
piss-drunk in front of your whole family.
Any gathering occasion, secular or otherwise will suffice. In our case, it was kind of inevitable. When my mom became a single divorcee with a stork
surprise in the late 60s, her surrounding family, terse as diplomatic relations
may have been, put their principal differences aside and embraced their Jewish
family values, carved in the stone of their Depression-Era, War-Era upbringings,
to put the blessed new child first and effectively ignore both any intimidations
or evident, uncomfortable realities, like for example, “what the hell does this
train wreck think she’s gonna do, single, drunk and with a child…..and who’s
she gonna prevail upon if she doesn’t marry her ass off to some accountant from
Syosset once and for all…??”
That’s how the shaken mama cat ended up with her brand new kitten, leaving
her Brooklyn flat behind, and moving into her angry older brother’s cottage in
Bayside upon his mandate. Not of course in any articulation of the above. Rather, it costs a fortune to raise a kid,
and why not do it in the house where the two adult kids were finally out of,
and be in the care of his wife, who he never was able to relate to and was scared
to death of living in the house alone with.
And it gave the house a few more years of property value, with an older
playmate for grandchildren that would be rolling off the assembly line soon
enough.
The single kid sister in her late thirties with the new kid was not some
dangerous fuckup, to be clear. She worked
plenty, in more than one administrative office function in her time, when her
literary aspirations weren’t dogging her.
She did not drive or own a vehicle. And in traditional functional
alcoholic fashion, she was extremely cautious regarding her controlled choice
of just when and around whom she’d get fucked up for the evening. Animals are brilliant creatures. Ever been to the Museum of Natural History..?
Most importantly, she’d never, in any drunken state, allow her child into
harm’s way. Allowing herself into the
custody of her brother’s protective home environment was part of that instinct. She’d have plenty of room within to swill
around in her substance, anyway. It was
a very conducive environment. All you had to do was look the other way and say
nothing about it.
Only one thing can make such an environment quite so difficult for a child,
and that’s the conducive, polar-opposite environment that mostly holds forth on
any other regularly scheduled night, when everyone’s well-behaved, in their
right mind for the most part, dry and sober. Sometimes reserved and depressed,
but other times full of words and laughter. There were very many excellent
times in this author’s kittenhood, even if this kitten got dunked by the tail
many times…
That’s the Twilight Zone this toddler grew up in, when on any unannounced
occasion, the brilliant and vivacious woman who decorated the cast headed by
the lower-key, middle-aged, 1950s suburbia-alumni husband and wife, would arrive
home from work smelling like a brewery, ranting passionately, incomprehensively,
emotionally, angrily, and collapsing all over the house. And the outspoken King and Queen of the court
would remain bizarrely silent and unresponsive. In some state of panic, this four,
five, six, or seven-year old couldn’t get a response out of them. Next day, all was quiet on the Western Front.
Until the next time. There was usually a
good one-month grace period, before she’d show up at home in that condition again.
If that wasn’t soon enough, sometimes she’d spend the night with friends in
the next borough, like her still-beloved ex, and the friends they still knew
from eras past. She’d be on the phone
with my patient aunt that evening, asking to talk with me, and my aunt would put
her reluctant boy on the phone. I’d have
to sit through some drunken Judy Garland monologue. The best part was knowing I’d be off the
phone in about sixty seconds.
But not on Seder night. That was a
live in-concert show.
My aunt and uncle were the convention center for the family Seder. The young, affluent son and daughter, their
spouses and respective litters, my common playmates would all make their way
in. Under lesser circumstances, I looked
forward to these summits. Even if I
could only really take their company in shorter form, an evening all together,
with all the grownups offered the best set-up. My younger cousin and I could
lumber off with our make-believe theatrics, the bedrooms our exploration caves,
grownups laughing and serving out front, and by night, the place is empty and I’m
in my bedroom with my stereo and Bob Dylan 8-track tapes.
On nights such as this, there’d be none of that. I’d be shuttled home from
school by my uncommonly quiet aunt, a normally outward spirit. We’d roll into the place scored not by the
usual Zenith full of General Hospital, but rather the serenade of my bedroom
stereo, a Vivaldi Symphony purring out of the 8-track player. I knew trouble when I heard it. My mother would be swilling about the house,
as detainable as ever, a structure about to fall any moment, while my aunt
dashed off into the kitchen to whip up her classic cinnamon Bundt cake for the
evening’s proceedings. As the drunk stumbled
about, hurling insults at her brother, he’d scream her down while he set things
up in the dining room for the annual commemoration of Elijah’s Arrival. I’d try and find a good, safe corner to hide
out and beat this whole scene.
You won’t get anything too deliciously sensational or scandalous from this
story, I’m afraid. Even on the
non-secular occasions did anyone use weapons beyond their raised voices, or
even threaten to. Ours was an
intellectual household. The outright
denial spoke to that. It was mostly a
non-violent scene.
There were a few spectacle occasions, to be sure. One of them went down in a hallway bedroom,
with an entire family of child cousins in tow outside the door, when the drunk
raged against my aunt, and dived under the bed for her bottle of J&B, My outraged aunt lost her cool and blocked
her, leading to the kind of staged altercation seen only in preview clips that
opened things like The Streets Of San Francisco. Two ordinarily civilized older
women suddenly in fisticuffs, one sending the other slamming backward to the floor. I wasn’t shocked, and I don’t think any of
the spectators were either. If anything,
I despaired over the certification of my life as a cliché, a carbon copy of
those archaic, antiseptic little Centers for Disease Control public-service
announcements for family alcoholism I’d see on Sunday mornings before 8AM, in
that local-TV public-affairs desert, before anyone else was awake, and before
Wonderama came on.
Those enlightening, disgusting little filmed messages also set me straight
on just what my family situation was. I don’t
know why people were so down on television as some poison in a kid’s life. If
it wasn’t for those educational little ads, I’d have really been convinced I
was out of my mind, and likely in therapy or on drugs for the rest of my
life. Here was TV reminding me that I really
was normal, and the house was crazy. In
too many ways, I owe my life’s salvation to the FCC.
I’m not sure just where things went play-by-play-wise on that Seder evening
fifty years ago, after the hallway bedroom fight scene, but it wasn’t anything
beyond tears drying and everyone back in the dining room for cake, coffee and
Louis Sherry ice cream afterward, my mother unconscious in her small bed
chamber. It was on that evening that I’d
make my premiere as the presenter of the “Fair Koshes” or Four Questions of the
Passover Seder, the old “Why is This Night Different Than…” line of
inquiry. I’d been put to some
ineffective Hebrew School lessons, and had just managed to master the execution
of the sung Four. There was still a great
deal I did not understand at age seven.
I didn’t realize that when my inebriate mother howled at the table about
her child’s impending recital of the “Fair Koshes”, that the term was actually
a Hebrew reference, and not some drunken incoherence. I also didn’t understand why no one in a room
of twelve or more adults didn’t open their mouth and say, “She’s Drunk”, nor
did I understand why no one had the where-with-all to try and politely usher the
creature out of there, in the effort to maintain a unified dignity. But the absence of any of that kind of effort
or the capacity for it educated me more than enough. The sanctity of the Seder was a mere
backdrop, some Beckett-like pre-text in some experimental theater production,
that transcends the words and scenery to present an experience much more lasting
and unforgettable.
Dyaneu.
-Noah F.
