To Be Honest Page 5

  When we’d see other people on our walks, we’d discuss their style choices and guess at their lives. Dad might ask me why I thought someone would want a tattoo of a skull. I’d guess that he wanted to look scary. Then Dad would ask if the skull proved he was scary or only meant that he wanted to appear scary. Each inquiry led to the same conclusion: many tried to appear to be things they weren’t, and many were duped by these performances; being perceived as something had nothing to do with really being that thing.* Any time an expensive car drove by, he’d give the same rant: “You know, almost everyone with an expensive car is leasing it? They borrowed the money to look richer than they really are. And even if that guy can afford that car, he expects us not to notice that he could’ve given that money to charity. He’d rather spend his money on appearing rich than on something meaningful. He’s an embarrassment. He thinks the car makes him look cool, but it should be a badge of shame.”

  For each newspaper Dad read, he also subscribed to three media watchdog pamphlets debunking it. So, Dad made a game of challenging me to identify inaccuracies and biases in news stories. Once Dad asked me, “Why do you think newspapers print corrections?”

  “Because they made a mistake and they want the news to be right?” I answered.

  “That’s what they want you to think,” Dad said. “They print corrections to make the rest of the paper appear accurate.”

  Dad and I would role-play debates on political and philosophical subjects and he’d show me how the script usually went and invite me to dismantle why certain arguments were tricky or misleading. He’d use examples from the news and politics and history, both recent and ancient, explaining that people used the same faulty arguments over and over because they weren’t creative enough to make up new ones. He taught me the ancient Greek logical fallacies to help give names to the different kinds of bad arguments and lies. As we spoke, Dad’s eyes remained ahead, never on me; he had the concentrated gaze of a tightrope walker. Half the time, his voice boomed, low and certain. The other half, he’d sound like a comedian at a roast.

  It made me proud that Dad considered me mature enough to take on these adult subjects. None of the children at school could identify the biases in the news or list the ancient Greek logical fallacies. My teachers at school seemed unaware of the flaws in our country’s versions of capitalism, democracy, and the legal system. School wasn’t honest enough to be taken seriously. Dad was my education.

  Through these games, I learned in specific terms why school was bullshit, the justice system was bullshit, success was bullshit, coolness was bullshit, gender norms were bullshit, authority was bullshit, white supremacy was bullshit, conventional romance and friendship were bullshit. Anything slippery or disingenuous stood out as if highlighted red.

  I remember spacing out in school, trying to understand why someone would lie. It took me a while to come up with a single example of how lying could be useful. I eventually came up with a potential lie: I could hear a funny joke on TV, repeat it, and claim I’d made it up myself. But it was immediately clear to me why this lie was pointless. I didn’t want to be the type of person who took credit for someone else’s jokes. I wanted to be the type of person who wrote my own jokes, even if they weren’t as good, or who told other people’s jokes and admitted I didn’t write them. Knowing I’d stolen a joke didn’t sound fun at all, even if I managed to trick everyone, because I’d know.

  Most dishonesty read as comedy. Liars reminded me of the Wizard of Oz frantically saying, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” Though everyone could see the humor in The Wizard of Oz, they regarded the unraveling of their own lies with dire seriousness.

  The better I became at talking, the more Dad criticized what I said. As I got older, he made a game of interrogating me with classic questions of moral philosophy. “If a hospital has five people who will die without organ transplants and one healthy person walks in with organs that could save them all, do you kill one person to save five? Or let the five die?” If I answered that we should kill him, he’d say, “Seriously? You’d tear the organs out of a random innocent person?” If I changed my answer, he’d say, “You’d really let five people die to save one?” He’d often add new information to make the hypotheticals more difficult. “What if the man with the good organs is a bad person and the five dying are heroes? What if the five who need the organs are teenagers and the one with good organs is seventy-five with a terminal illness?” This variation on “Would You Rather?” with moral questions was thrilling but stressful because Dad would hold me to what I said and demand that I justify my answers. To this day, when I’m asked a hypothetical question, I flood with adrenalin.

  At night, I’d lie awake in bed, haunted by recent arguments, reasoning them out in my head. I believed that if I thought enough, my mind could be clear and correct, and I’d be able to express my reasoning unassailably and be convincing. When Dad and I talked, I concentrated on remembering every word we said for later consideration. If Dad claimed he hadn’t said something or that I’d misunderstood him, I needed to be able to depend on my memory.

  Sometimes I’d feel certain Dad was wrong and that I was explaining why perfectly, but he’d still insist I wasn’t making sense. When I’d call out Dad contradicting himself or avoiding a question I’d posed, he’d get accusatory: “That’s nonsense,” he might say. Or, “You don’t even mean what you’re saying.” I particularly hated, “You’re wasting my time.” These lines bothered me, I think, not because they were critical, but because they were the same evasions Dad had taught me to see through. Sometimes I wondered if Dad was testing me to make sure I’d call out vagueness and avoidance and bad arguments, even with him. I hoped he was testing me.

  Once, I noticed Dad stomping through the house. I saw him accidentally slam his shoulder into the side of a doorway and asked him, “Dad, why are you mad?”

  “I’m not mad,” he growled.

  “But you seem mad.”

  Dad glared down at me. “You think you know how I feel better than I do?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Don’t think about how I seem,” he snapped. “Listen to what I say. If you don’t believe me, that’s calling me a liar.” He loomed with his arms at his sides and feet together like a soldier. “No one else knows as much about my feelings as I do. That’s why it’s so presumptuous to try and read someone’s mind. If you want to know what someone is feeling, ask. And when they tell you, believe them.”*

  Everybody’s a Critic

  Because I wasn’t playing with other children, I spent most of my playtime at home reading and writing. I wrote stories constantly, hundreds of them, and I’d show my favorites to my parents. Mom found my stories amusing. She’d be diplomatic without lying, telling me the parts she liked and sometimes telling me if there were previous stories that she liked better and why. But I always got the sense that she meant everything she said, and she was always responding specifically and seriously no matter the nutty eight-year-old subject matter. Dad didn’t share Mom’s diplomacy. I remember most clearly his thoughts on a mystery short story I’d written about a boy who could win every chess game, no matter who he played. In the story, everyone was certain he was cheating, but no one knew how. At the end, a detective-like child revealed that this mysterious sham chess master had been playing with weighted pieces. I knew this ending made no sense; I was good at setups, not payoffs. I figured payoffs were too hard for an eight-year-old but Dad didn’t see my age as an excuse.

  We sat in the record room, Dad waving a marked-up copy of my story. “Why would weighted pieces benefit a chess player?”

  “You caught me!” I answered, laughing. “I couldn’t come up with an answer to the mystery!”

  But Dad wasn’t laughing. His seriousness in these criticism sessions made them even funnier. Dad studied his notes on the manuscript. “Did you think the reader wouldn’t notice that the ending doesn’t make sense?”* Dad asked. “Were you counting on your reader being
an idiot?Ӡ

  “It was a test!” I said, laughing. “You passed!”

  Dad continued without responding to my joke. “Also, chess competitions don’t let players use their own pieces! Didn’t you do any research?” It had never occurred to me to do research. I decided that the next time I wrote a story, I’d ask the school librarian to fact-check.

  “How did he sneak his weighted pieces onto the board anyway?” Dad asked. “Is this kid a sleight-of-hand artist?”

  I took that as an actual suggestion. “Ooh, maybe at the end he should be a magician!”

  “That’s not what I meant—” Dad clarified.

  “Wait, better idea!” I said. “What if it turned out he had magical powers? Maybe he won because he could read their minds!”

  “That could be better,” Dad said. “Depends on your execution.”

  Often these criticism sessions ended with Dad being reminded of a similar story or movie or an episode of the Twilight Zone or Outer Limits that he’d describe to me for inspiration. Sometimes, he’d read me aloud a Ray Bradbury story.

  “Oh wow, that’s way better!” I’d chirp and rush off to try a new ending or write something else entirely.

  I showed Dad every story I wrote that I liked, maybe one out of ten. He’d read anything I showed him and give me written notes. Over the course of my childhood, Dad must’ve read and commented on a hundred of my stories, maybe even more. He didn’t have anything positive to say about any of them. I didn’t mind because I liked the stories and that was all that mattered. There was no reason my stories had to be good. I understood that it was rare to be a great artist. Dad told me openly that he himself had never written a good story. “I always liked fiction and poetry but I had no talent,” Dad said. So, I was off the hook. I could write stories for enjoyment. Criticism was part of the fun.

  Eventually, an adult told me I had “thick skin” and explained to me what the phrase meant. It didn’t sound like me. Other people armored themselves; I wanted to be like the ancient Greek Stoics Dad had told me about who were as sensitive as anyone but strong enough to bear the full weight of their feelings. That sometimes meant crying but more often meant laughing at myself.

  Mrs. Racine, my fourth-grade teacher, had a stiff ’80s perm and smelled like hair spray. She gave me a B- on a story I wrote for class, a noir caper about rats who robbed a cheese store.

  I raised my hand and asked Mrs. Racine, in front of the class, why she’d given me a B-. I agreed that the story deserved a B-; I hadn’t liked it enough to show it to Dad. But I was testing my hypothesis that Mrs. Racine had no reasoning behind the grade, that she wasn’t a good enough teacher to know how to criticize. To me, this situation was win-win. If Mrs. Racine proved herself a better teacher than I expected, good for her! If she failed to justify the grade, she’d have confirmed my hunch that she gave out grades based on personal feelings about the students or on whims that we had no reason to entertain. If Mrs. Racine were publicly discredited, other kids in class who might have felt bad about their grades could be freed from her baseless judgments.

  Mrs. Racine replied, “Michael, you need to learn to take criticism.” I laughed out loud at how little she knew about me.

  “I like criticism,” I told her. “The problem is you didn’t give me criticism. You wrote the grade without an explanation.”

  Mrs. Racine called me out into the hall as if I was in big trouble. I started crying, as always. Once outside in the echoey school hallway, she repeated that I needed to learn to take criticism. I told her, through tears, “But when you’re not specific, no one can decide if your opinion is worth listening to.”

  I didn’t anticipate that she’d be insulted by this remark. I assumed teachers knew they had to earn their authority. But Mrs. Racine reddened; her hands flew to her hips. “I’m the teacher!”

  Luckily, my eyes could cry and roll at the same time. “Think of it this way,” I said. “If I was grading you on how good you are at giving criticism, what grade do you think I’d give you?” Mrs. Racine’s mouth fell open. And I wasn’t even finished. “Actually, the question that really matters is: what grade would you give yourself?” At this, she flinched and took a step back.

  I braced myself for her to punish me or send me to the principal, but instead Mrs. Racine muttered an excuse about having to get back to class and dashed away, leaving me in the hallway. I chased her through the classroom door and called out, “Mrs. Racine, you’re the one who needs to learn to take criticism!” This retort would have landed better if I weren’t still crying.*

  When I told Dad about this confrontation, he tilted his head against the cushion of the record room couch and stared at the ceiling. “If she can’t handle criticism from a child, how does she expect to make it through life?”

  It seemed true that if Mrs. Racine got this sore over questions from me, under the smallest fraction of what I received from Dad, she’d shatter.

  Ask the Rabbi

  There were shockingly few conversational lulls on our walks to and from synagogue, but whenever a silence struck, I’d tell Dad about any theories or questions that had been recently on my mind. I’d never found a question that Dad wouldn’t answer; I doubted that such a question existed. That’s why one Saturday morning, hurrying after Dad in my little suit and yarmulke, I considered it perfectly appropriate to ask, “Dad, what does the Torah say about fetishes?”

  Dad laughed, charmed. “That’s a great question!” he said, his voice rising in pitch.

  I’d learned the word “fetish” earlier that week from Mom, even though I’d been saying fetishistic things since I started talking. In one section of the first Michael Talking Tape, Mom asked me what TV shows I liked and I answered, “Inspector Gadget because Penny gets tied up.” When she asked what other shows I liked, I said, “He-Man, because sometimes Teela gets tied up. And Betty Boop because sometimes she gets tied up.”

  On the tape, you can hear Mom laugh knowingly. She says, “Well, Michael, it’s good to know you’re a feminist.”

  I’d often brought up these things in school, thinking it was a matter of taste; some kids liked cartoons about soldiers or unicorns, and I liked cartoons about girls tied up. In earlier childhood, teachers had shrugged off my remarks, but by age nine, I’d noticed that the subject made adults mysteriously uncomfortable. So, one afternoon with Mom, I asked her why it bothered them.

  Mom didn’t need to pause to decide how to discuss this. With the unvarnished truth, answers required no hesitation. “You like girls tied up because you have a ‘fetish.’ That’s what it’s called when you really like a special thing that other people don’t even think about.” She said it matter-of-factly, the way my teachers spoke about photosynthesis or the gold rush. “Lots of people have fetishes,” Mom said. “Liking girls tied up is one of the most common ones. And lots of girls like being tied up too.”

  I stopped drawing. “They do? Why?”

  “Why do you like what you like?” Mom asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “That’s because no one knows why they like what they like. But some people get upset when they’re reminded that not everyone likes the same things.”

  I could tell this answer wasn’t the whole story, but it was satisfying because she made it sound like anyone thrown off by my fetish was unreasonable.

  When I brought up fetishes on this sweltering walk to synagogue, Dad told me, “The Talmud is supposed to discuss everything. That should include fetishes.” Then he laughed. “But I have a feeling you’ve found something they missed.” I blushed with pride. “Do you have a specific question?”

  “My question is … does the Torah say it’s okay to imagine girls from your school tied up?”

  Dad answered casually, “In Judaism, you’re allowed to think anything you want. It’s Catholics that believe thoughts can be sinful.”

  I considered this some more. “Also,” I said, “I’ve imagined girls tied up since I was born …”r />
  “Since you can remember,” Dad corrected. “Memory develops at three or four.”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “So if there’s a God, he gave me a fetish.”

  “That’s an interesting argument,” Dad said.

  “Why does God give kids fetishes? Does God like fetishes?”

  “Hmmm,” Dad said. His brow folded, and I wondered if his head hurt as much as mine when he thought. “I don’t know,” he said. “You should ask the rabbi.”*

  The next morning, at the big wooden table in the synagogue where I had my one-on-one Hebrew School lessons, I opened with the question: “What does the Talmud say about fetishes?”

  Rabbi Minsky was in his sixties, with a wizard-like red beard and nicotine-stained yellow teeth. He always reeked of cigarette smoke.

  The rabbi’s light green eyes trained on me and I watched his wild red eyebrows rise. “Fetishes?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Like if someone imagines girls tied up, but doesn’t tie up girls in real life.”

  “Tied up?” he repeated, wagging his head and waving his hands in a cartoonish caricature of confusion that might very well have been bad acting. Mom had presented fetishism as commonly understood. This scholarly rabbi was either unaware of fetishism or pretending to be.

  I told him, “I imagine tying up girls all the time. God must want me to think about that, right?”

  Rabbi Minsky said, “Why are you thinking of this? This tying up?”

  “No one knows why they like what they like,” I said, surprised that a nine-year-old would know more about life than an allegedly wise old rabbi. “If the Talmud doesn’t mention fetishes, why not? Isn’t it an important subject? Are there some things God doesn’t want us to talk about?” Rabbi Minsky hesitated, so I spelled it out for him. “If God wants us to talk about everything, we have to talk about this,” I said. “Either God isn’t honest or you’re not honest.”