To Be Honest Page 3

  As a teenager in the late ’60s, Dad wrote for his school paper and discovered that he could get free records and concert tickets by writing music reviews. He wrote every music magazine he could find to inquire about writing for them and many said yes, sending him free stuff to review. Dad traded the records he didn’t want for ones he did. Having inherited from his mother and grandmother an enthusiasm for criticism, his teenage reviews were works of merciless ridicule. When Dad told me about his youth as a music critic, he laughed at his young self’s unbridled negativity, “I wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times criticizing their complimentary review of the Exile on Main St. tour in 1972. I described the Rolling Stones as wheezing old men who could barely make it across the stage!” In Dad’s best music-critic stories, he’d ask insulting questions and accidentally offend his favorite artists. Apparently, when he interviewed Black Flag, Henry Rollins threatened to beat the shit out of him.

  In the late ’70s, Dad got to interview Randy Newman, one of his heroes. “I’d listened to his new album,” Dad told me, “and the rhymes were out of a rhyming dictionary, like ‘sad’ and ‘mad,’ you know? I asked him why his rhymes on this album weren’t as unique, if it was a choice to not focus as much on the lyrics.” When Dad recounted this, he shook his head, laughing at himself. “He thought I was the craziest interviewer he’d ever met. He said he liked the rhymes, something like, ‘Sorry if they disappointed you.’ But I didn’t let it go. I listed examples of bad rhymes from the album and he kept insisting that he liked them!” He imagined Newman would think he must really care to pay such close critical attention. Criticism was Dad’s way of showing admiration and respect.

  Dad’s friends also spoke like critics, constantly debating art and politics. Mom’s friends talked about people they knew. Dad didn’t get along with Mom’s friends any more than she got along with his.

  In 1979, a year before I was born, Dad applied for a job at a corporate record label in Los Angeles managing their back catalog of recordings and was invited to interview with a man who had, for years, been a big deal in the music business. He met this executive and his secretary for lunch at a restaurant in Hollywood. Once they were seated, this man turned to Dad and launched into a diatribe about how much he hated the paintings of Pablo Picasso. Then he glared and demanded Dad’s opinion. Dad explained why he liked Picasso and why Cubism was influential regardless of personal taste. The interviewer told Dad he sounded like an idiot and moved on to a speech about something else he hated. The interviewer put Dad through the same cycle over and over, spitting out an opinion, harassing Dad to give his own, then insulting whatever he’d said. The secretary just watched silently. Despite his confusion, Dad continued responding to each question. He went home and told Mom about his weird interview, how he’d certainly not be hired. The next day, Dad received the news that he’d gotten the job. When he arrived at work, his boss’s demeanor was still prickly, but not nearly as angry as he’d been in the interview. Dad made a remark to the secretary about his not expecting to be hired after the strange interview, and she explained that he’d been given a “stress test” that measured his willingness to engage with authority, and his calmness and rationality in the face of conflict. That was a test Dad could pass.

  A Jewish Christmas Miracle

  Though my parents assured me that most people enjoyed lying and being lied to, I didn’t witness it myself until my grandmother brought me to meet Santa. My parents hadn’t told me much about Christmas because we were Jewish.* For months, Grammy had been offering to take me to Vegas with them for a weekend and had been repeatedly offended by Mom turning her down. Being a seasoned grudge-holder and guilt-monger, Grammy persisted, asking, “What kind of mother keeps a four-year-old child from his grandparents!?!”†

  In truth, at four years old, I spent plenty of time with Grammy. I’d stare at her, inspecting the color difference between her powdered face and her neck. Her purple sunglasses matched her long, painted fingernails and coordinated with her bright pink lipstick. She had the uneasy, practiced smile of a beauty pageant contestant sure to lose. I’d never liked her, but she disliked me just as much if not more. I knew a lot about it because every time she visited, Mom would sit me down afterward to relay Grammy’s grievances: I didn’t smile at her enough or tell her how thin she looked, I asked too many questions, I criticized her driving, I embarrassed her by saying she was crushing me in the chair we were sharing, and so on. When Mom finished listing Grammy’s complaints, she told me, “But you were right about everything. Grammy shouldn’t go through her purse while she’s driving, and you should only smile and compliment her when you feel like it. You should ask questions about anything you’d like to know. And you should call for help if someone sits on you!”

  With each of Mom’s refusals, Grammy’s nagging and accusations escalated until Mom could no longer stand to say no. On the night-drive to Vegas, I slept the whole way. In the morning, Grammy shepherded me back into her car and peeled off. I’d never been in a car without being told our destination. I asked Grammy where we were going and, with her hands on the steering wheel and her face turned fully toward me, she said, “Guess!” I gripped my seat belt, terrified that Grammy would crash the car while her eyes were on me instead of the road. My parents had warned me about the commonness of car accidents. “We’re going to meet Santa!” Grammy said, eyes still on my face, excited to watch me light up.

  Focused on Grammy’s terrifying driving, I absently muttered, “Santa?”

  Grammy sighed. “Your mommy never told you about Santa?” She turned back to the windshield in disappointment. Then it dawned on her that she’d get to be the first person to tell me about Christmas, and her hands hopped from the steering wheel to my shoulders. “Santa brings everyone their Christmas presents!”

  “Grammy!” I shrieked. “Put your hands on the wheel!” She kept her palms on my shoulders for a couple seconds before begrudgingly taking the wheel again.

  “Without Santa, there wouldn’t be any Christmas,” Grammy said.

  “But,” I replied, “we’re Jewish.”

  “Christmas is for everyone,” Grammy said. “On Christmas Eve, Santa flies in his magical sleigh to every house in the whole world and climbs down the chimneys to put presents beneath your Christmas tree.”

  I concentrated my hardest to understand what was going on. I imagined the inside of my head, pictured a throbbing brain pulsing in a jar. Now I was motion sick with an accompanying headache.

  “We don’t have a chimney or a Christmas tree,” I told her.

  Mom always praised me for being perceptive, but Grammy did not. We drove in bitter silence until we reached the mall’s little Christmas scene and joined the line of parents and grandparents with their hopping children.

  Grammy pointed to a display of plastic trees with white foam. “See the snow!”

  I’d heard Las Vegas was a desert and that it didn’t snow in deserts. I dashed under the velvet rope to feel the snow. It felt like fabric and wasn’t even cold.

  Grammy called after me, her voice muffled through her clenched teeth, avoiding a scene. “Michael! Don’t touch the snow!” She pulled my hand away from the fake snow and led me back to the line.

  I couldn’t imagine why Grammy would lie about foam being snow and, even stranger, why she’d expect me to believe her over what I could observe myself.

  Grammy interrupted my furious thinking. “Look!” she said, her mouth open with a playful exaggerated awe that I found condescending. “That’s Santa!”

  At the end of the line, Santa sat in a throne, posing for photos. As the line moved, Grammy explained, “When you meet him, you tell him what present you want for Christmas.” All I wanted for Christmas was proof that Grammy was lying.

  As we got closer, I heard Santa’s voice. “Why does he say ‘Ho Ho Ho’ all the time?”

  “That’s how Santa laughs,” Grammy muttered, dismissively flashing her purple fingernails.

  Eventually, frazzl
ed Grammy lifted me onto Santa’s lap and watched from the side of the stage. I inspected him for evidence of magic. Santa said, “Ho ho ho, hello Michael!” I gasped, unable to solve how this man could know my name. I concluded that magic was the best explanation and opened my mind at least a little to the possibility that this strange person possessed supernatural powers. But I had to attempt more tests.

  “Ho ho ho, Michael,” Santa said, milking my shock at his use of my name. “What do you want for Christmas?”

  I trained my eyes on him to scrutinize his reaction and said, “I’m Jewish.”

  Santa’s head fell back with a human-sounding laugh. Then, he leaned in close and whispered, “Me too, kid. Me too!”

  Santa and I cracked up together. There was nothing more fun than the airing of a forbidden truth. This mall-Santa’s frankness was my personal Christmas miracle.

  When I got off his lap and returned to Grammy, she was ecstatic. “You were laughing so much with Santa!” she said.

  My fervor to debunk Grammy congealed into nervousness. I knew telling her the story would hurt her feelings, but it seemed a shame to keep quiet about the wild thing I’d just experienced.

  I told her what Santa had said. Grammy doubled over in hysterics. “Oh, Michael!” she said. “That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard!”

  “It is?” I asked. “I thought you’d be embarrassed because you lied.”

  Grammy stopped laughing. “I didn’t lie,” she said. Then she went back to laughing. “I can’t wait to tell your mommy about what you said to Santa.”

  Once home, Grammy perched on the brown couch in our little living room and told Mom the story. I looked back and forth, contrasting them: Grammy’s peacock colors against Mom’s muted earth tones. It was hard to believe these two were related.

  When Grammy mentioned that she’d taken me to see Santa, Mom’s usually warm demeanor chilled. She interrupted, “You took Michael to meet Santa even though you knew I wouldn’t want you to?”

  Grammy ignored this question and continued the story. The way she told it, I’d been excited to meet Santa. She edited out my skeptical questions. Then she described the dialogue with Santa as if she had been right next to us to witness it herself. I watched Mom’s face to see if she spotted Grammy’s lies. When Grammy reached the part when I told Santa I was Jewish, Mom burst out laughing. Grammy ended the story there, omitting the part when I called her a liar. It shocked me that she thought she could get away with these distortions when I was right there to correct her.

  When Grammy finished, Mom was still in a laughing fit. I interrupted, “Mom, she told it wrong.”

  Grammy ignored me but I knew she’d whine to Mom privately later about me embarrassing her. Mom’s closed-mouth smile meant she knew who to believe, that she trusted me more than her own mother. I knew she was right to trust me. I marveled at how easy it was to be trustworthy, even for a four-year-old, and how bizarre it was that Grammy and other adults couldn’t manage it.*

  When Grammy finally left, Mom sighed and braced herself to explain to me why the parents at the mall lied to their children and why the children were so overjoyed to be lied to. Mom told me that when she was my age, she had similar suspicions about Santa. She asked Grammy about it and Grammy replied, “Santa brings you your presents! You’re so ungrateful! You think your own mother would lie to you? And all your friends’ parents would lie? What kind of a child thinks such nasty things?” Years later, when Mom learned conclusively that Santa wasn’t real, she asked Grammy why she hadn’t just admitted the truth when asked the first time. “Because believing in Santa is so fun,” she replied. “I wanted you to have fun.”

  Mom did her best to explain why kids believed in Santa despite the story being so obviously false. She said that most people prioritized fun and fitting in over truthfulness.

  I replied, “But we make up stories and see movies and we know it’s not real and it’s still fun!”

  Mom laughed. “That’s true, Michael! I don’t know why they don’t just say it’s a fun story. They don’t want to do it that way, I guess.” Then, in an uncharacteristic move, Mom suspended her principles and advised me to hold myself back from correcting other kids about Santa. “Next year, in kindergarten, if they ask you about Santa, tell them you’re Jewish so you only talk about Hanukkah. Maybe tell them the story of the menorah instead.”

  I was shocked. “Isn’t that lying!?!”

  Mom hesitated a moment, conflicted, but stuck with her position. “Yes,” Mom said. “But just this once, it’ll be better if you don’t tell them the truth.”

  Dad would never have given that advice.

  The Hypocrites of Kindergarten

  In kindergarten, the roving mobs of cavorting children either barely spoke or spoke inarticulately, as if they’d never spent an hour alone talking into a tape recorder. I invited them to make up songs and jokes and stories but received mostly nervous squints. The boys couldn’t sit still or pay attention for the games I knew, like asking each other questions or making up captions for each other’s drawings. They’d leap up in the middle of my explanation to run around and scream. The girls were better with language and more attentive but wouldn’t play with or talk to me. I wanted friends, but only under conditions that disqualified the whole school.

  My teacher, Mrs. Smith, wore metal-rimmed glasses and her white hair in a messy bun with clumps and strands poking out all over. She appeared to me older than my grandparents, with a quiet strictness and devotion to propriety.

  Once, I was sitting alone at a desk drawing while the other kindergarten boys nearby shouted impressions of machine-gun fire. Mrs. Smith came up behind me and rested her hand on my shoulder. I shrugged away from her hand, which I could tell she found rude, but I considered perfectly justified. After all, Mom had told me people should ask permission before touching me and that I could always say no if I wanted.

  “Michael, why don’t you go play?” Mrs. Smith said.

  “I am playing,” I told her. “I’m playing ‘drawing.’” This line was intended to satirize her suggestion that the games I liked weren’t considered games, but Mrs. Smith assumed I’d misunderstood her.

  She clarified, “Why don’t you go play with the other boys?”*

  “We don’t like the same games,” I said.

  She knelt down to my level. “What if we go together and ask if you can play too?”

  The way I saw it, I’d told her clearly that I didn’t like their games and she’d responded by suggesting that I ask permission to play them? I felt certain something was wrong with her. I rolled my eyes at the exhausting prospect of having to explain something so simple to an adult. But then, before I spoke, another possibility occurred to me: she thought I did want to play but that I was saying I didn’t because I was shy. Mrs. Smith had accused me of lying.

  I corrected her in the slow, condescending tone that she and other adults used when correcting kids. “I’m not shy. I don’t like their games because the screaming hurts my ears and the running makes me tired.”

  Mrs. Smith grabbed my arm and lifted me from the seat. “I’m sure you’d rather play with the other kids than sit here all alone.”

  I tried to pull away from her. “Being alone is fun,” I said. She ignored me and tugged me toward the boys. I said, “This is ridiculous.”

  Mrs. Smith stopped pulling and frowned. “Excuse me?”

  “I told you I don’t want to play. You don’t believe me.”

  Mrs. Smith’s lips curled.* She gasped as if I’d cursed and sentenced me to a time-out. This was my first time ever getting into trouble. Even my parents had never punished me. I started sobbing. “Why?” I asked.

  “You’re being mean,” she said, pulling me across the room again.

  I gave her a variation of Dad’s chocolate defense. “It’s not mean to like a different game. You probably like different games than me, don’t you? You don’t play my games. Does that make you mean?” Mrs. Smith ignored this argument
. Grammy was the only one I’d seen go silent like that instead of defending herself. To me, it meant Mrs. Smith knew I was right and was too embarrassed to admit it. She left me in the corner in the time-out chair. I faced the wall, crying. Then I thought about the absurdity of receiving a time-out as punishment for wanting to be alone. I laughed. I considered this the cleverest thought I’d ever had.

  The next time I played chess with Dad, I bragged about this observation. Dad laughed and said, “That’s called irony.” I loved that there was already a word for it, because that meant others noticed what I noticed and laughed at; more like me were out there somewhere, even when everyone at school acted like I was crazy.

  “Can you believe these people?” Dad said, laughing with me at Mrs. Smith. “There’s no rule in school that you have to play games you don’t like with people you don’t like. She made it up! What were you supposed to do? Play games that you don’t find fun?”*

  “The other kids should play better games,” I added excitedly.

  Dad scoffed, and I felt his criticism switch its aim to me. “They should play whatever games they want. Why should they have to play your games if you don’t have to play theirs?” I started crying, but Dad continued. “You can’t go around criticizing other people for doing the same thing you do. You’re being a hypocrite.” I immediately knew this new word would be helpful.

  Mom told the story of the Jewish Santa to anyone who would listen. Once, she told it to Bubbe and Zayde while we all sat around the glass coffee table in their frozen-in-the-1950s suburban house. Zayde was drifting in and out of sleep, like usual. Even when awake, he appeared distracted by nothing in particular. On the other hand, Bubbe reminded me of an alligator I’d seen on TV, eyes judging everything through an uncertain number of transparent, layered eyelids. When Mom had finished the story, I remembered my new favorite word and asked, “Mom! Is Grammy a hypocrite?”