David Rakoff - Shrimp

About David Rakoff

David Rakoff, author of "Fraud" and "Don't Get Too Comfortable," is one of today's funniest, most insightful writers. He is a regular contributor to Public Radio International's "This American Life," as well as The New York Times Magazine, Outside and GQ. He has worked in theater with David and Amy Sedaris and can be seen most recently in the films "Strangers With Candy," starring Amy Sedaris, and "Capote," starring Philip Seymour Hoffman.

David wrote the following piece for "Telling Childhood" at Richard Hugo House on Oct. 14, 2006.

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Shrimp
By David Rakoff

Is it bad faith to accept an invitation to read at an evening titled "Telling Childhood," when the thing one would most like to tell childhood is to get lost? Given the choice, I'd sooner do most anything short of putting needles in my eyes than willingly remember what it was like to have been a child. It's not that things were so terrible. They were not. I was not beaten or abused. No dank cellars or chilly garrets for me. Neither my trust nor my body were violated by a clergyman or a beloved family friend. I was safe and sound. A happy fact reflected sadly in my book sales.

No, indeed, I freely admit to having had a lovely childhood. One replete with the perquisites of great creature comfort, in a bustling and cultured metropolis, in a lovely home decorated in typical late 20th-century secular humanist Jewish psychiatrist: African masks, paintings both abstract and figurative, framed museum posters, Marimekko bedspreads. And listen, on the hi-fi, why, it's "Pete Seeger and the Weavers Live at Carnegie Hall" or "Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris." Or is that Miriam Makeba, clicking her way through a Xhosa lullaby? And on the bookshelf, among the art monographs, the Saul Bellow and Philip Roth novels, the Günter Grass first editions, collected New Yorkers, National Geographics and Horizon magazines; there, tucked in behind the "Encyclopedia Judaica," you might just find that old illustrated copy of "The Joy of Oral Sex," a gag gift never thrown out.

Mealtimes were filled with sprightly talk, with each member of the family given their conversational due. Weekends involved regular outings to museums to look at Henry Moore sculptures, or dinosaur bones, then off to the gift shop to buy a dried seahorse for one thin dime. There were trips to the theater and the ballet, and excursions even farther afield, to Spain or London or New York or back to the old country where we, the children of the new world, could be shown off to the relations left behind. Yes, I can say with no fear of contradiction that, as the indulged youngest of three, mine was a golden upbringing, under the loving guidance and tutelage of two caring and adoring parents whose own path was illuminated by the sunlight they were convinced shone straight out of my ass.

And still, I loathed being a child. Plainly stated, being a child was not-as used to be said around the time that I was a child-my bag. Childhood was a foreign country to me. Here's the thing: everyone has an internal age. A time in life when one is, if not one's best, then at the very least one's most authentic self. When your outside and inside are in sync, and soma and psyche mesh as perfectly as they're ever going to. I always felt that my internal clock was calibrated somewhere between 44 and 47 years old. I don't want to make it seem like I was so smart or mature or advanced. I was off the charts in only one respect, but remarkably so. I was tiny. I come from a short family, but I was worryingly diminutive. Freakishly small, smaller than Rona Schwartz, even. For those of you who do not know Rona Schwartz, that is pretty small. I knew some others who were below average in size, but they usually made up for it by being athletic or…straight. I was not one of the shouting, jostling, hockey-loving boys, and I also wasn't a girl.

In E. B. White's 1945 classic, "Stuart Little," the protagonist is the second son of Mrs. Frederick C. Little of New York City. A child who was "not much bigger than a mouse" and who also "looked very much like a mouse in every way." Stuart was articulate beyond his years. Stuart had a flair for costume, dressing up in full regalia of vaguely pornographic sailor whites just to visit the boat pond in Central Park. When my second grade teacher, Mrs. Brailey-perhaps the only woman I have ever truly loved-read "Stuart Little" to us, I remember thinking Yes! This confluence of traits: the unquestioned membership in a family despite one glaring material difference from them all, and his tininess only seeming to accentuate his courtly manners and dandy tendencies…this was me. I was Stuart Little.

Or so I fervently wished. I lacked Stuart's self-possession. His ease in the world. He was only afraid of dogs, whereas I was polymorphously phobic; scared of everything: dogs, heights, subways, crowds, snakes, the dark, elevators, tunnels, bridges, spiders, flying, loud noises, roller coasters, amusement park midways, the ruffians who hung around about same, horror movies, fireworks, rock music that seemed to glorify chemical abandon (which always made me think of that urban legend about the babysitter who dropped acid on the job and when the parents came home she told them, "your chicken's almost ready," because she was so strung out on LSD she had roasted their baby alive), balloons blown up too big, changing light bulbs, athletes, going down into the basement….everything was freighted with terror.

I vibrated with anxiety. I was wound tight as a watch spring, skittish as a Chihuahua. I must have been very unpleasant to be around. I only realized this last part recently, when it dawned on me that even though I have published two books and lived through a bout of cancer, almost no one from my childhood has ever attempted to contact me. And I don't blame them one bit.

Stuart Little, having set out for the open road to seek his fortune, finds himself the substitute teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, a position he manages to secure simply by donning professorial drag of striped trousers, tweed jacket with waistcoat, and a pince-nez. The children are rapt by his cunning size and stern air of authority. In a lesson on ethics, he has one of the boys steal a small sachet from one of the girls. Stuart turns his attention to the purloined pillow, which attracts him; it might make a lovely, fragrant bed.

"That's a very pretty thing," said Stuart, trying to hide his eagerness. "You don't want to sell it, do you?"

"Oh, no," replied Katherine. "It was a present to me."

"I suppose it was given you by some boy you met at Lake Hopatcong last summer and it reminds you of him," he says to her, dreamily.

"Yes, it was," said Katherine, blushing.

"Ah," said Stuart, "summers are wonderful, aren't they, Katherine?"

Stuart Little, at this point in the story, is seven years old. And yet here he is, transformed into Thomas Mann's Aschenbach. The aging roué, his summers of love and beauty all far behind him, now watching the erotic play of the youngsters on the Venice Lido as the plague creeps in.

How I wished that I might be able to skip directly to adulthood in just the same way. Not so much so that I would be big, but so I might be done with all this and enjoy some peace. Grown-ups, it seemed to me, didn't have to play sports. They didn't view it as a point of pride to make each other laugh so hard that milk shot from their nostrils. Grown-ups didn't have farting contests (this was decades before Adam Sandler and Johnny Knoxville with his "Jackass" pranksters redefined and arrested American manhood). Grown-ups, in general, seemed more indulgent of others' problems, each having so many of their own. If I could make it to adulthood, I would be able to join their tolerant ranks and no one would mind my size.

Until such time, I could usually divert people's attention away from my physical lack by trotting out my advanced vocabulary, or displaying some sort of comic timing, or making a Yukio Mishima reference. And then, like the trout tickler who has cooled his hand in the stream for long enough that the fish doesn't even feel itself being picked up out of the water, there would come a moment where I knew I had my listener. There would be a subtle change in their faces, an inclining forward. Their features would assemble themselves, focused upon me in an attitude of almost perplexed amusement.

There is a reason it is called charm. It is a trick, and like all false magic, it never lasts. Eventually even the most gullible rube will begin to examine the rising table, or ferret out the source of the one-for-yes-two-for-no knocking from the spirit world. And then he sees the sham. Just as quickly as people's faces went a little bit dreamy, I could see them blink themselves back to reality. I'm talking to a child, they would suddenly realize. Like in a cartoon, where the halo of revolving stars is dissipated by a vigorous shake of the head, they would look at me with a kind of what was I thinking self-reproach. I had been caught out, once again.

At age 12, I remember being at a family party, talking to a woman I did not know. She taught classics at a high school in Toronto, as I recall. We were having a nice conversation until the moment when I mentioned, yet again, something about seventh grade-or, as we called it in Canada, grade seven. She made an exaggerated gulp, bugged her eyes out a little and, crossing her surprised hands upon her collarbone, said, "I'm sorry, did you say grade seven?"

"Yes," I replied, knowing exactly where this was leading.

"Oh my," she said, smiling. "All this time I thought you were telling me you were seven." She playfully pushed me on the shoulder in an Oh, you gesture, like this was some stunt I had put over on her, which I suppose it was. She smiled companionably. My size was a joke we could share in equally. I thought that was a hideous, horrible mask you were wearing but it's actually your face! Aren't you clever and funny!

I was four foot nine when I entered 10th grade. The local public high school was an institution catering primarily to teen Jewish royalty, as my brother called them. I could not compete in the arms race of wardrobe or popularity and I didn't try. Happily, my size also meant that I didn't have to even feign interest in the erotic play between the boys and the girls. One look at me was all you needed to know that that would be writing checks my ass couldn't cover.

Like generations of other misfits before me, be they morphological, sexual or otherwise, I decided that I would make theater my refuge. I was a pretty good actor as a child, albeit with the budding homosexual's propensity for outsized and noncontextual emotion. I could cry on cue and did so whenever I got the chance; great heaving arias of Susan Heyward hysteria that could burst forth with all the vulgar hoopla of a magician's bouquet.

The nonmusical offering each year was directed by the drama teacher herself. She selected ambitious works such as Brecht's harrowing "Mother Courage and Her Children," which made liberal use of baby powder in the hair and brown makeup smudged onto cheeks to evoke the filth and hardship of the Thirty Years' War. Another time it was "David and Lisa," which was about two adolescent mental patients. David was hyperintellectual and didn't like to be touched, while Lisa was a bubbling free spirit, given to rhyming echolalia. This was one of those plays from the 1960s that equated insanity with deep artistic sensitivity, asking the disingenuous question, Who is to say who is crazy? You? I? Perhaps it is the mad who are truly sane! It was considered bad form at the time to posit that perhaps the muttering fellow in the corner rubbing feces into his clothing seemed a little bit, I don't know, off?

That year's offering was to be "The Ecstasy of Rita Joe," a work that dealt with the social problems and injustices facing Canada's native population. It was the 1970s, so we were still calling them Indians. A gritty drama, "Rita Joe" was unrelieved by even the faintest glimmer of levity or hope, ending with a spectacularly brutal gang rape and murder of its woe begotten heroine. Precisely the kind of deeply earnest downer that only a bunch of teenagers would dare put on.

I could not wait.

The drama classroom was in a portable, a prefabricated one-room building on cinder blocks in the middle of the schoolyard. It was a shoes-off environment, no desks, just wall-to-wall nylon broadloom in a mottled goldenrod. The carpet was pilled, littered with errant staples and crumbs and waxy with years of adolescent foot sweat. About 15 hopefuls sat on the floor in a circle around the drama teacher, who sat with her legs folded under her, Zen tea master-like. She surveyed us and then her eyes lit upon me. She gave me a small smile, the corners of her mouth turning up slightly while at the same time, from her nose, I could hear a small puff, the softest whisper of breath. The sound a pillow makes when you sink your head into it. The exhalation pushed her head back and up in the opposite direction ever so slightly.

"I'm sorry," she said to me, before she even handed out the saffron yellow script books. "I'm afraid I can't even let you audition. I'm going to need actors who are more physically substantial."

There are some moments in life that are perfect. Not necessarily wonderful, but that hew so closely to some Platonic or ruminated-upon version of themselves that one almost can't believe they are happening. In fact, one doesn't believe they are happening. As a freshman in college, for example, walking along 112th Street of a winter's evening, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine just up ahead, I looked over to my left at the garbage bags in the empty lot at the corner. In the fading, purple gloaming, their surfaces swirled, they seemed to be undulating. I remember thinking to myself, What an amazing trick of the light, because it is almost as if those garbage bags were simply covered with live rats, but of course, they're not, because to see that with my own eyes would be too horrible, too scarring, too much exactly what I fear at this moment on this dark New York side street. Ergo, here be no rats.

On I marched, right up to those self-same Hefty bags which, of course, were covered, teeming with starving rats who squeaked en masse, a horrible, squealing, rodent choir, that scattered upon my approach, some of them almost running over my boots.

So when the drama teacher said, "I'm going to need actors who are more physically substantial," essentially announcing to the room, "this production is only open to people with pubic hair, which you emphatically do not yet seem to have," they were so exactly the words of which I lived in fear, the words I anticipated coming out of everyone's mouth, I didn't get it at first. I thought I was still making it up in my head. She was smiling at me, after all, and I smiled back the entire time.

I once heard about an Austro-Hungarian princess who was assassinated by an anarchist who, pretending to bump into her, actually stabbed her through the heart with a long pin. Nobody even knew she had been mortally wounded, least of all she herself, until hours later when she finally collapsed. But until she dropped dead, she apparently just smiled and smiled.

As did I. Still grinning and hot-faced, I got to my feet and left the circle. I walked to the door and found my shoes among the pile of sneakers. I laced them up. I found my jacket and my knapsack. The drama teacher had moved on at this point and was already asking other students to read from the play as I stepped outside and closed the door behind me.

Years later, in college, I was working as a summer researcher in a psychiatric hospital, when one of the younger patients on the floor-a boy exactly my age who had been sent home from school after a schizophrenic episode-showed up at my office door. Formal patient contact wasn't really part of my job, but I wasn't forbidden from talking to them, either. I had been instructed to treat them all with respect and kindness, but this boy freaked me out. The differences between us seemed insufficiently pronounced, as if there weren't even a line as discernible as a before-and-after split screen separating us. It felt as though I, too, might go crazy at any moment, just from being in close enough contact with him. Second-hand psychosis. He was agitated and holding his notebook in one hand, which he held out to me, open to a page.

"Look at this," he said.

Exhaustive tables of German verb conjugations covered the paper, written in the tiny, meticulous hand that seems to be the sole province of the mentally troubled.

"Those look like German verbs." I said.

"Yes, I know what they are," he said, nodding his head impatiently. "What I want to know is who wrote them."

Without even thinking about it, I gave him a smile accompanied by a small nasal puff of air whose gentle shotgun report pushed my head back in an upward nod.

Here's where things get weird in an almost "Bleak House" coincidence. I saw my high school drama teacher that very same summer, stepping off the elevator in that very same psychiatric hospital. As the child of a shrink, I knew enough to respect her privacy. I would let her initiate the contact if she wanted it. But I wanted to convey to her that I finally understood that smile. It was a smile meant to sweeten a gentle admonition, a friendly entreaty, as if to plead, Please don't make me complicit in your delusion. A smile that says, Can't you see it? You have eyes. Look at yourself.

I watched her as she furtively shifted her eyes away from mine quickly, so as to pretend she hadn't seen me at all. I didn't blame her for not wanting to stop and talk, and I didn't really mind. She was probably having a hard day, and anyway, by that time I had grown.