Failure Is an Option Read online

  My family used to go on summer vacations to the beach in Ogunquit, Maine, and this beach was always crammed with people. At high tide, people were penned in between the ocean and the dunes on a narrow strip of beach that spanned a good distance, maybe a mile. A sea of people—families, kids, teenagers, boyfriends and girlfriends, old and young, black (well not really—it’s Maine) and white. So mostly white.

  Gay and straight for sure, though. Ogunquit had an out gay-tourist community. There were tons of Canadian gays. Canadian gays are some of the best gays in the world. So clean. So healthy. So full of hope. So fulsome in their Speedos. They’re not just gay, they’re g-eh. That could be a T-shirt. Seriously.

  Ogunquit Beach was ripe for a boy with dysphoria. I could roam around and get lost in so many other people’s worlds. I recall one family let me stand right next to them and watch them for what seemed like hours. After some time, I think they forgot I was there. It was more than eavesdropping. And more than voyeurism. It was a kind of visual transubstantiation. If I watched them, I became them.

  Back to the sleepover. James’s house was a typical Worcester house, a modest antique wood-shingled house among similarly styled homes, tightly packed onto a side street. My memory of the interior is a little foggy, but I remember that the living room and dining room were connected and there was a couch and a recliner, and if memory serves, many crosses on the wall, like Carrie’s house. James had a brother who was older, maybe fourteen, and he was home upstairs with his friends. I don’t remember the mom even being there, but she must have been. Or maybe not. Like I said before, things were pretty loosey-goosey back in the seventies.

  I think we read magazines and drank soda, then his dad came home. And that’s when things went south really fast. Remember, first sleepover, very nervous, lots of crosses on the wall, and then . . . let me digress again.

  My parents were pretty quiet people. There was a lot of quiet talking. Or no talking, but if we talked it was at a reasonably low volume. Like one would imagine people talking in East Berlin before the wall came down: everything in hushed tones, to avoid the Stasi listening in. The only thing missing was someone putting on an LP really loud, like big band music, to further mute the conversation.

  I don’t recall my parents ever fighting. Overall, it was a home dictated by an unspoken order of cautious and orderly behavior. There was a cloak of courtly servility, like if Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette lived modestly in central Massachusetts surrounded by microwaved tuna casserole. If they did have a fight, my dad would quietly leave and then come home a few hours later. But because it was so unclear as to whether they had a fight, he might have been just going out. Very, very difficult to discern.

  In any case, that lifestyle did not prepare me for James’s dad. I didn’t know it, but I think he was very drunk. Or just having a bad day because someone pushed him into a whiskey barrel. He was very angry at James. Also, very angry at James’s brother. It was an immediate hailstorm of anger. He sat in the recliner and yelled for a long time. I can’t remember what about, but it was loud and it was emotive and I was stunned. I had never seen anything like this. I loved it.

  I now see what I didn’t then, but all I could see then was this crazy emotive chaos. So new and different. James’s mood soured fast. And I just stood there watching this horrible spectacle, completely rapt. Eventually, James took me aside and told me we were going to sleep outside to get away. W-w-what? Allegedly, there was a tent in the backyard that he set up for when his dad was acting the way he was. The tent was essentially fifteen feet from the house, and the backyard was small, with a fence around it. So I brought Blanky and we went to the tent.

  Camping out wasn’t a familiar occurrence in my life. I had certainly never done it. My parents once signed me up for a one-week trip to 4-H camp, which was going to involve a one-night campout, which I dreaded, but that never happened because on the first night at the camp, a girl attempted suicide, fortunately canceling the camp altogether.

  As grim as James’s family situation looked to me—singularly the most poignantly tragic picture of a broken family I could conceive of, replete with a dad so mean the son actually set up a tent on his property to escape him—my focus was still more on how not to sleep outside, now that we were officially outside.

  A few minutes later, James and I were in the tent, and it was kind of cold, and he had a flashlight, and I really didn’t know how to talk to a kid who was clearly having a total shit life. I felt bad, but I was also cold and brimming with anxiety. I couldn’t really go inside, though, because I was with James, and his apparently drunk, angry dad was in there, so I was stuck in this bizarre limbo.

  I waited. He finally fell asleep, and it must have been at least midnight, and I was lying faceup in mortal terror. Frozen and frozen. I was also afraid to go outside the tent, because those fifteen feet between tent and house were, in my estimation, a vast chasm of untold horror.

  Finally, with everything I could gather, I got up and sprinted inside and felt my way around the kitchen like Clarice in the final sequence of Silence of the Lambs till I found the phone and quietly called my parents. I snuck out the front door and stood in the street until my dad came around. I jumped in his car, leaving without waking James in his tent.

  The first sleepover was a clear failure, but in retrospect, the best one I’ve ever had. I mean, there were no bedtime games, homemade cookies, or building a fort, just tension, a family in crisis, and sitting in a cold tent for three hours. That was more my scene. I’m not even sure whether James ever asked me why I wasn’t there in the morning. He just smiled and moved on. Maybe that’s why I wanted to be him.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Robbery (and How I Failed to Stop One)

  My neighborhood growing up was quiet—mundane, even. People kept to themselves. It wasn’t unfriendly, just staid. I didn’t really know most of my neighbors. I heard one neighbor was agoraphobic and another was a judge who allegedly had a gun. Just random bits of information, maybe true, maybe not, about the people on my street.

  In my early life there, two things stood out as unusual. Once, my mother and I came home from shopping and there was a horse in our yard. There were no horse farms anywhere near where we lived, so a horse in our yard was odd, maybe an omen, maybe a ghost horse. After seeing us, it galloped away down our street and out of our lives forever.

  The other was one night, late, say around eleven, a car kept driving up and down our street, with a girl screaming in it. After some time, the neighbors slowly emerged from their homes trying to figure out what was going on. My mom was beside herself. She thought we were under siege. She doesn’t do well in crisis situations, and although this wasn’t a clear-cut crisis, I think just the hint of something awry put her in a state of abject terror.

  The car went away, but a neighbor had passed along a tidbit of information that at the end of the street, in the woods, was a Styrofoam box of dry ice. The police arrived, but there was no explanation—just a girl in a car screaming and a random box of dry ice. It had the trappings of some satanic ritual but was more likely high school kids who stole from their science lab on a joy ride. But the possibility of some satanic ritual in our little neighborhood was definitely alluring. Nice to have a little satanic shake-up once in a while in a sleepy New England town.

  Our house was a third of the way up a side street lined with modest homes. The homes weren’t on top of one another. Each enjoyed a little bit of land, so they were somewhat spread out. Our house was a small A-frame with an orange door with a knob in the middle. A hint of eccentricity. Or was it a satanic symbol?

  My parents had the house built so it was more modern than the other rather traditional ranch homes in the neighborhood. It had a wraparound deck from the front to the side. After school I would climb up on the deck to pretend like I was robbing the place. It was also easy to hoist myself onto the roof, which was another lonely hobby of mine: walking on
a roof. Otherwise, I spent a lot of time bouncing a tennis ball against the front stairs or practicing archery. My dad bought a bale of hay and put it out back and hung a target that I could shoot at with my bow.

  Mainly, I would have to occupy myself for the few hours before my parents would return from work doing any one or all of these things. Our house was on a slope that ran down to a fence, separating our property from the neighbors’, and before the fence there were two giant willow trees, whose branches shielded the view from the neighbors below.

  One afternoon, I decided it would be fun to play catch. But, seeing that I had nobody to do that with, I took my glove and ball and ventured out to play “tragicatch,” a game I had invented that involved my throwing a ball up in the air, then catching it as it dropped. Really uncomplicated, like an outdoorsy, sportier version of solitaire.

  Anyway, as I was in the middle of my game, I could hear my neighbor playing catch with his dad. My neighbors were a family of five—one kid was a little younger than me and two a bit older, say around thirteen or so. The mother had remarried and her new husband cut a rather handsome figure. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with an athletic build and a welcoming smile. He looked like a professional baseball player, or an ex-model or an ex–pro baseball player/model. On the surface, he was the dad any kid would want. Shit, he was even playing catch with his stepson and I was playing “tragicatch.”

  And, look, I liked my dad, it’s just that this guy seemed pretty perfect. My dad liked tennis and racquetball. Not that that’s bad, but when you’re a kid and someone asks you what your favorite sport is and you say racquetball, they likely pull down your pants and punch you in the dick. I really like baseball. I collected baseball cards. I played in Little League. My neighbor’s dad seemed very into baseball. The thing was, I didn’t really know them that well, and I wasn’t the type to walk down and introduce myself.

  So I hatched a plan to throw my baseball down into their yard, and when I ran down to retrieve it, I would pretend that my dad had thrown it. I rallied the courage and whipped the ball down and ran into their yard, yelling, “Jesus, Dad, terrible throw.” I stumbled through the awkward lie about how I was playing up in my yard with my dad, too. Just another kid playing catch with his dad. Yeah, playing catch with the old man.

  I’m fairly sure they knew I was lying, so after a few more bumbling attempts at conversation, they invited me to play. Right away, the dad began to teach me how to throw a curveball. I was in love. I’m a huge curveball fan. The curveball is the oral sex of baseball. It’s delicate and precarious. Maybe a bad analogy, but maybe not. They never asked why my imaginary dad never came down, considering I purportedly left him there in the middle of a catch, over an hour and a half earlier.

  Anyway, it was the beginning of a wonderful friendship. I quickly became close with them and they treated me like family. I soon got in the habit of going to their house after school instead of mine, because they would leave their sliding door in the back of the house open so I just could go in and wait for the kids to come home.

  Also, as I recall, they had milk, and for some reason our house never had milk. Milk was really good. But I repeat, our house never had milk. I think it was a holdover from the Jewish kosher laws (called kashruth), which dictate a separation of dairy and meat. This derived from a passage in the Bible, which states that no goat should be cooked in its own mother’s milk.

  Now, you could take this literally, because milk-soaked goat made the goat taste better, but it could be perceived (from the perspective of the human) as unusually cruel to the goat itself, its being cooked in its own mother’s milk. Or, perhaps, if one could assign advanced goat cognition, then maybe it is aware enough to realize that it is being cooked in the very sustaining liquid from its loving mama. Or the Bible might have just been having a bit of fun with words, as in, figuratively, don’t cook a goat in its own mother’s milk, as in “don’t be an asshole.” Either way, this rule stuck, and even in the modern world, conservative Jewish homes sometimes have two kitchens, to enforce the law, separating the preparing and consuming of dairy products and meat products.

  I’m not saying it was just the milk that attracted me to the neighbors, but that was a big part of it. They were decidedly not Jewish, and that had its allure. They were messy. Not overly messy, just not afraid to let things go. They had a dog. That was fun. The closest thing we had in our house to pets were plants.

  Actually, once, for a very short time, we had a cat, but it was banished to the basement because it tracked dirt and ate from the floor. That soured our (the cat and my family’s) relationship. I mean, I think our cat could tell that the home itself was against her being there. I would go down to feed her and she would either defiantly walk away or violently scratch me. It was like a kidnapper bringing food to his or her abductee. There was no love there.

  The energy at the neighbors’ house was decidedly different. There was this air of casualness and controlled disorder. I think it was just that they were “normal.” Also, they lacked cynicism—an attribute I admired. I mean, it was their country after all. The natural feeling of “I belong” does wonders for people’s moods, and they seemed to exude that. For cynical Jews, a defining characteristic can be “I’ll never belong, so I’ll settle on showing those ‘belongers’ a thing or two.” Maybe I was a little like our cat, but I found a home that didn’t mind as much having me around.

  I settled into a new routine: I took the bus home from my school, dropped my bag at my house, and then walked down to their house through their sliding door, grabbed a glass of milk, and turned on their TV, waiting for them to come home. It was like a rented family. From our first introduction, this would continue for weeks upon bliss-filled weeks. It was a new milk-fed world, and I relished it. Often, I would eat dinner there and wander home afterward to my house, happy in the knowledge that I had a new family.

  One day, I dropped my bag and walked down to their house, grabbed my glass of milk, and turned on the TV as usual. After about twenty minutes, their front door opened. Typically, it would be the younger daughter, or the son (the one I played catch with), but this time it was two men. They rushed in and ran immediately down the hallway that led to the bedrooms. They didn’t see me, as I was in the recliner in the living room holding a glass of milk.

  I wasn’t sure exactly who they were, but it wasn’t my house, so I figured it was better not to ask. After a few minutes, I saw them run out back through the narrow opening that separated the living room from the front hallway. One carried a small television, and the other followed shortly behind. I took a sip of milk.

  After a moment, they ran back in to the other side of the house. Again, I sipped my milk. I was confused, but not really rankled yet. A minute passed and they rushed by again. This time one was holding a ceramic box. The other stopped. Our eyes met. I smiled. He called to his companion.

  I began to sense a whiff of “I’m going to die.” A real primordial intuition. A tangible air of a predator/prey scenario. The first guy rushed back in and stood next to the guy who was glaring at me. Then they both glared. It felt like a long time—us three in a tense stare-down.

  Finally, the first guy broke the ice. “Who are you?”

  “Jon,” I said.

  “Stay in the fucking chair,” he said.

  I nodded. I felt a whit of piss expel into my undies.

  “Where are your parents?” he said.

  “They’re at work,” I replied. They looked at each other. “But I don’t live here,” I said.

  “What do you mean, you don’t live here?”

  “I’m the n-neighbor,” I stammered.

  “What?” the second guy said.

  “I live next door.”

  “You said your parents were at work.”

  “They are,” I said. “My mom’s a dancer.” Just a quick plug for the arts. “It’s not my house, I swear.”


  “Where do you live?” he barked.

  “That one,” I mumbled, pointing through the glass door behind me, at my house.

  They looked at each other, flummoxed. It was confusing, but we were working at cross-purposes. It was the first time I realized that sometimes the truth doesn’t matter. The first guy walked up to me and stuck his face close to mine.

  “Don’t move. Don’t call the cops. Don’t call your parents. If you get up from that chair, we’ll kill you.” Then he took the TV I was watching and they left.

  So I sat there, for about forty minutes, completely still. The daughter came home and found me sitting straight up, holding my half glass of milk like I was displaying it in a milk commercial. I signaled for her to sit. The mother and dog quickly followed. It didn’t take long before she saw what had happened. I told her what happened, and then the police came and I gave my statement.

  The police asked why I didn’t call sooner, and why I didn’t get the license number or look for what kind of car they left in. I explained that they threatened to kill me, so I didn’t want to die. Look, it was a failure on my part not to act, but I was a kid and I was scared and it would have been extraordinary to have been able to do more.

  A week or so later, my house was robbed. As my parents called the police, a flash of the moment when I pointed and said, “That one,” crossed my mind.

  CHAPTER 5

  How I Failed to Do Anything Significant with My Disease

  I’ve always been a rather sick person, in that I get sick a lot. Or I think I do. I’m a bit of a hypochondriac, but not to an extreme. I would classify myself as comfortably hypochondriacal. I once went to the emergency room because I thought a pimple was a spider bite, and that spider eggs were inside my temple, and that when they hatched I would die. Also, maybe I was high on psychedelic mushrooms.