H
e a r t S o n s & H e a r t D a u g h t e r s of A l l e n G i n s
b e r g
N
a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 1 4 :
A r c h i v e s E d i t i
o n
STEVE SILBERMAN
Orphans
On
the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It
was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her
retracing search after her missing
children, only found another orphan. ––Herman
Melville, Moby-Dick, 1851
On April 1, 1957, my
father took my mother to see a film called The
Barretts of
Wimpole Street at a theater in Ithaca,
New York. My dad, Donald, was a grad
student
studying American literature at Cornell and my mom, Leslie, was an
English major at Hood.
They were still unmarried, and stayed at the Hotel Ithaca
that
night to avoid the prying eyes of roommates and dorm mothers. Before
returning
to the hotel, they visited a drugstore to buy condoms, but it was closed.
My mother assured my
father that it was the wrong time of the month for her to
get
pregnant. They got married in June. I was born in December.
*
I was named after
Stephen Dedalus, the hero of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was in my father's
voice.
He taught me to love the sounds of language before I could speak by
carrying
me on his shoulders while reading Ulysses
aloud.
*
My father became a
political activist in the era of civil rights protests, "Ban the
Bomb," and the blacklisting
of suspected Communists. I have a photograph of my
family
taken at a demonstration in Buffalo, where we moved four years after I was
born.
My parents are wheeling me and my sister in strollers,
looking like the hero
and
heroine of a movie about a young Jewish couple who devote their lives to
saving
the world. I'm holding up a sign that says PEACE.
*
We moved to New York
City in the mid-'60s, settling in a tree-lined middle-class
neighborhood
in Queens called Fresh Meadows. Every few weeks, my classmates
and
I would have to march in single-file down to the basement of our school past
dusty
drums of water marked with Civil Defense symbols. (I remembered a sign at
one
of my parents' demonstrations that said FALLOUT SHELTERS ARE
OVENS.) On Sunday
afternoons, my family would drive into Manhattan, where
we
would stroll through Greenwich Village and then have lunch in Central Park.
When black lights,
incense, and Day-Glo posters began appearing in Bleecker
Street shops, long-haired naked people started swimming in Bethesda
fountain in
Central Park. I decided
I wanted to be a hippie when I grew up.
*
My
parents were not hippies, they were
New Leftists. My dad would put on a
navy
blue blazer and tie to go on a march. He believed that the hippies were
undermining
the serious mission of fomenting a workers' revolution with their free
love,
psychedelics, Eastern religions, and other decadent nonsense. This long-
awaited
uprising of the proletariat was expected to break out any day, spreading
like
prairie fire from radicalized college campuses, to factories, to the streets.
My
father
kept a copy of Mao's little red book on his night table, beside The
Godfather
and Portnoy's Complaint.
At a demonstration against the Vietnam War
in
Washington, I saw my parents get beaten by riot police who charged down the
steps
of the Department of Justice in blue helmets. Back home, FBI agents came
around
to interrogate the superintendent of our apartment building and my
parents'
friends from the PTA. When I was 12, my father was fired from a
teaching
job because of his statements against the war. His students took over the
administration
building for two weeks in protest. I saw my parents led away in handcuffs, and
my father served 11 days in the Queens House of Detention.
*
At the same time, he was
still my dad, the English professor. Whenever I stayed
home
from school with a cold, he would give me the same advice: "Read Moby-
Dick." As I got older, the
title of Melville's 800-page epic became shorthand in my
mind
for everything that was overbearingly pedantic and tedious about my father.
In 7th grade,
I figured out that I was gay, but I couldn't talk about it with him for
years.
He deflected those conversations by saying in his most rabbinical voice,
"When you meet the
right girl…"
*
My family rented a beach
house in Provincetown, a former art colony at the tip of
Cape Cod, every summer
for 40 years. On one of those vacations in the '70s, I
convinced
my dad to smoke a joint. At first, the drug didn't seem to have much of
an
effect on him. But as we were walking down the stairs he blurted out, "My
sneakers
feel like marshmallows." Marijuana did wonders for my father, or rather,
he
had become open to wonder by the time he started smoking it. He seemed to
relax
in general, becoming less uptight and dogmatic. He told me that smoking pot
had
reinvigorated his sex life with my mother, which was a little too much
information.
*
By then, the revolution
that my parents had fought so hard for seemed even
further
away. My father was fired from several jobs because of his politics, ending
up
at a state college in Jersey City where he taught inner-city kids to see their
own
struggles in the travails of Dickens' textile workers. My parents put their
passion
for political organizing into their union, the American Federation of
Teachers, and my father was elected president of the state council. At the same
time
that he seemed to capitulate to the notion of having to work inside the
system,
he secretly joined the Communist Party for the first time, stashing his red
party
card in an edition of King Lear.
*
Every summer, my father
and I would take a walk on the sand bars in
Provincetown
at low tide to take stock of our lives together.
After feeling that he
was
my nemesis for years, I began to appreciate how similar we were in many
ways.
He became much more affectionate and emotionally expressive. By the late
'80s, his own mother and
father were dead, and sometimes he would burst into
tears,
crying that he had become an orphan. He began talking about mortality, and
predicted
that he would die at the same age as his father, 69. But his worst fear
was
becoming an invalid. If I'm ever a vegetable, he would say over and over, just
pull the plug.
He told me that he didn't believe in an afterlife and would be
"annihilated"
after his death, which seemed like an oddly vivid choice of words, as
if
he was describing the obliteration of atomic particles or an entire city.
*
In August of 2001, I
proposed to my boyfriend, a soft-spoken science teacher
from
the Midwest named Keith, on the breakwater in front of the house we rented
in
Provincetown. Gay marriage was not yet legal, but we decided we would
celebrate
our love and commitment in the company of our friends and families
anyway.
My parents loved Keith, who I'd lived with in San Francisco for seven
years.
My father had become a vocal critic of discrimination against gay people in
his
union. He resigned from the Communist Party because his comrades refused to
support
gay rights.
*
My dad made the only
political speech at our wedding, a rousing toast to marriage
equality
that made even Keith's church-going Republican relatives from Illinois
cheer.
I felt like by my finding a life-partner and getting married, my father and I
had
finally become peers.
*
A few months later,
three weeks before my father's 70th birthday, my parents
attended
a union meeting. My mother poured them both glasses of apple juice.
My dad took a sip and
said to one of his colleagues, "I think I drank that too fast."
Suddenly he jerked back
and slumped toward the floor. The EMTs arrived 20
minutes
later and restarted his heart with a defibrillator. With shouts and sirens
wailing
in the background, my mother called me on her cell phone and told me to
get
on a plane to New Jersey.
*
My sister Hillary and
brother-in-law Andrew flew in from Los Angeles, and we
all
met up in Newark Airport like a fated rendezvous in a dream. My father had
been
taken to Greenville Hospital, a dreary three-story facility with just one
working
elevator and a sign on the wall that said RESPECT THE PRIVACY OF
THE PATIENTS. THIS IS NO
PLACE FOR A CONVERSATION. We rode up
to
the intensive-care unit beside trays of green and orange mush and cups of Jell-
O. My father was in a
private room, hooked up to a rack of bleeping and
squawking
machines, because his situation was more precarious than patients in
merely
critical condition. He looked like he was sleeping, but didn't react to our
presence
even when my mother suddenly cried out "Please don't leave me!" It
was
as
if he had been turned to stone.
*
We visited him a couple
of times a day, groping our way through an underground
cavern
that only people whose loved ones are dying know about. We would eat
our
meals in a diner nearby feeling like aliens who had been abruptly transported
to
a planet with an atmosphere barely capable of sustaining life. I marveled at
all
the
people still moving around purposefully in the Day World, lining up for the
salad
bar, oblivious to what is never far away. My sister was five months
pregnant,
so at night, she and my brother-in-law shared the only guest bed in my
parents'
apartment, while I slept in my mother's bed. Taking my father's place like
that
was so psychologically fraught that I couldn't even begin to feel my own
feelings,
but my mother's need to talk into the night trumped my need for
boundaries.
After playing Catherine to my father's Heathcliff for
51 years, she
looked
like she had been struck by lightning. She could barely navigate across the
room.
*
Waves of shit smell
would periodically wash over the ICU, as if the ward was
barely
keeping itself afloat in a sea of decay. One day a nurse handed me a plastic
baggie
containing my father's wedding ring. "Your father's finger was so swollen,
we
almost had to call in a plumber to cut it off," she explained. I quickly
slipped
the
ring out of the bag, which was marked with BIOHAZARD warnings, and
warmed
it in my palm before giving it to my mother, who was sitting desolate in
the
hallway.
*
In the valley of the
shadow of death, I decided to meditate at my father's bedside
as
I'd been trained to do as a young Zen student. I sat down in a chair and started
counting
my breaths: one, two, three… Right at
that moment, my father's arms
shot
out to the sides of his bed, his lower lip curled up in an uncharacteristic
sneer,
and his feet began thrashing under the sheets. The rawest
expression of fear
and
terror I have ever seen in any creature, human or animal, took possession of
his
face. He arched his back and rose from the mattress, shaking and convulsing, as
if
he was trying to climb out of his
body. I ran to the nurses' station and called
out,
"My father is having a seizure!" After poking her head in, one of the
nurses
said
"Yes, he does that sometimes," as if she was discussing his bowel
habits or
meal
preferences.
*
I stroked my father's
forehead and tried to soothe him. His eyes were open, but
when
I put my face inches from his and called his name, there was no flicker of
recognition.
He ground his teeth like a barnyard animal as his beautiful brown eyes
rolled
in divergent directions. I was terrified of the possibility that he was fighting
to
reconstitute his soul in a broken vessel so he wouldn't leave his beloved
Leslie
alone
on Earth. I pledged that I would take care of her, and told him that it would
be
all right to leave his body if it was time. It's
OK Dad. Let go. I promise to take
care of mom. Thank you for
everything. We love you. You lived a beautiful life. Let
go. I
felt that if my mother saw him in this condition she might drop dead of grief
on
the spot. But I needed someone else in my family to know what was going on,
so
we could make informed decisions. I asked my sister to go into our father's
room
and tell me what she saw. After a few minutes she came out pale and
shaking
and said, "Dad is in agony. We're betraying him. If I could have killed
him
right
then, I would have. We've got to get him out of there."
*
The head of my father's
medical team was Dr. Faltes and the neurologist was
Dr.
Ahad.
When I told Dr. Faltes that I was certain that my
father didn't want any
heroic
measures to save his life that would leave him significantly impaired, he
snapped
back, "Do you have power of attorney? How do I know you don't have
some
axe to grind against your father? This happens." We renamed the doctors
Faustus and Ahab ––
after the alchemist in a German tale who sells his soul to the
devil
and the captain of the Pequod in Moby-Dick –– to weave the ragged thread of
my
father's fate back into the narrative of his life as a teacher. My sister and I
begged
Dr. Faustus to give him morphine, and he assured us that he would. But
the
next morning, our dad was in the same tormented state. A nurse told us that
the
staff would not give him drugs because "he does not have enough brain
tissue
to
feel pain." I felt like we were fighting a revolution in Greenville
Hospital to free
my
father from the ultimate oppression –– the tyranny of being trapped in his
body.
*
Then we found out that
my father's kidneys, deprived of oxygen during his heart
attack,
were failing. When Dr. Faustus asked me to sign a paper authorizing
dialysis,
I declined, effectively sentencing my father to death. The
next day, Dr.
Ahab's EEG confirmed
that he had no hope of recovery. The two halves of what
was
left of the brilliant brain of Donald Silberman were
firing asynchronously,
with
only minimal and sporadic activity. After I conveyed this news to my mom,
a
young doctor burst out of the ICU and ran over to a family praying on the other
side
of the hallway. "I have great news!" he said. "Your grandmother
is going to be
absolutely
fine. It's like a miracle." I asked Dr. Faustus to take my dad off his
respirator.
*
He survived for four
more days. Though it seems terrible to say so, this was
awkward,
because we had already scheduled a celebration of my father's life at his
college
for the following Monday. But my dad was also a punctual man. On
Sunday night, I was
falling asleep beside my mother when I had a strange dream: a
crystal
lattice, glittering in the dark, geometrical and inhuman. Then the phone rang
on
my mother's night table. A nurse's voice said, "Mr. Silberman
has expired."
*
My father's body was
still warm when we got to the hospital at 1:30 am, but he
looked
utterly dead, with a slack expression that he never wore in life. My mother
said
goodbye to her prince and protector for the last time. When we got back to
the
apartment, she gave letters to me and my sister that he'd written and sealed
years
earlier, before an operation, to be opened by us in case he didn't survive.
"I
lived
the life I chose. (Sometimes, these days I think that it might have chosen
me.) I have been very happy," he wrote
to me. "I did the right thing. I dedicated
my
life to human progress –– to bringing about changes that would improve the
conditions
of life and the quality of life of the common people. My belief as I
depart
this world is that I have been an instrument of historical change -- that the
forces
of change worked through me. For this reason, I led a life of meaning and
purpose."
*
I expected a small group
of tweed-jacketed socialist professors to attend the
tribute
to my father, but instead, the auditorium was packed with his colleagues
and
former students, standing room only. Hearing them praise his work in the
classroom
and on the front lines of his union was like discovering that my dad had
lived
a double life as a superhero. The man I talked about, on the other hand, was a
guy
who adored salt bagels, Casablanca,
college football and basketball games, and
the
poems of Walt Whitman; insisted on not being disturbed as he read the Times;
and
enjoyed nothing more than drifting in an inflatable raft with my mother every
August, reading a novel
while curling his hair with his index finger. When the
speeches
were over, a student in a wheelchair told me that while he never really
knew
my father, he had been crossing the campus a few weeks earlier when he
dropped
all his books on the sidewalk. My dad, who happened to be passing by,
got
down on his hands and knees to pick them up.
*
A year later, my mother,
my husband, and I returned to Provincetown while my
sister
stayed home in California with Andrew to raise their son, Christopher. In an
uncanny
symmetry of loss, our beloved house had been torn down the previous
winter
by the guys who owned it. With my mother leaning on Keith's arm, I read
aloud
from Moby-Dick before scattering my
father's ashes in the water.
[Originally
published in NHS 2009, http://www.poetspath.com/napalm/nhs09/Steve_Silberman.htm]