Bound For Distant Shores

Tomorrow morning, at this time, I will be in Istanbul, Turkey—which, as near as I can estimate, is around 8000 miles from here. It boggles the mind. The mind can’t process it. Like in the Summer of my seventh grade year, when I went out West on a trip with some classmates and Mr. Dyroff, the geology teacher, and remarked that the mountains in the distance looked like a painted backdrop. They still looked that way to me in 2003, when D—and I circled the country on our honeymoon.

Last night friends and I saw “The War Tapes”—an Iraq documentary pieced together from footage shot by soldiers during a yearlong tour of duty. Looking at the dead, dismembered bodies of “insurgents,” I was struck not by the intense, visceral reality of it all, but by the sense that, somehow, I was still disconnected from the experience. Watching the twin towers fall on CNN had a similar effect. Even going to Ground Zero, looking at the twisted, smoking metal felt somehow like being on a movie set. Strangely, what hit me most intensely was the sight of a shoe display in a store window near the site, all of the shoes covered in a thick layer of white dust. I thought all at once about the fact that some of that dust was once people—people who might have passed this display on their way home from work and stopped in to try on a pair of shoes.

The Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC is a brilliant exercise in trying to make people really experience an event that is removed from them in time and space. When you go in, as I remember, they give you a card to wear, which bears the photo and vital information of an actual person who died in a concentration camp. In a sense, you become that person for the duration of your visit.

You start at the top floor of the museum and gradually descend, stepping at one point through a boxcar that carried people off to Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen. Piled next to the car are the real suitcases of deportees, who marked them with their names in hopes of claiming them again at journey’s end. In one empty, white room you sit on a wooden bench and listen to recordings of camp survivors telling their stories. There are piles of shoes, children’s drawings done in the camps, and an airshaft running from the top of the museum to the bottom, its walls filled with thousands of family photographs of victims.
Nobody talks. I was there with four other people and yet I remember it as an intensely solitary experience. Mostly I remember the kids’ drawings: Hanukkah candles, hopeful, happy stuff. Typical kids drawings that could have been done anywhere in the world, at any time, but happened to have been done inside a concentration camp, by kids who would not live to see their next birthdays.

So what controls how fully we experience things? Even things that are really happening to us, in present time, sometimes feel unreal and cinematic. And even those things that feel most real to us in the moment fade quickly into a kind of unreality in our memory—so that, when we try to recall them, we remember at most a flash of emotion, or a couple of isolated, seemingly random snapshots of related scenes. You try in vain to summon up the time, the place, the people, as a complete, organic reality. Complicating this even further is the almost unconscious way in which we reshape our memories into a sensible, more aesthetically pleasing narrative. I do this, I think, to an unusual extent: I don’t trust my own memory of events at all—of when, why, or how they happened, because in rethinking and retelling them I am always trying to make a better story. I’ll give you an example:

I remember the first time I got drunk. I was 13 years old and my parents had gone out for the evening, leaving me alone in the house for the first time. For some reason, they did not have their keys with them, so I was going to let them in when they got home.

I sat down in the family room to watch a rerun of “16 Candles” on tv (already, as I write this, I’m thinking that the release date of “16 Candles” may prove that I was older than 13 when this happened). I liked anything with Molly Ringwald in it. I thought she was cute. Suddenly the idea occurred to me to go get a full glass of Maneschewitz (sp?) Passover wine (the only alcohol I had ever been given before) and see what getting drunk felt like. I watched “16 Candles” and drank maybe 16 ounces of Maneschewitz. Then I got another glass and drank it, immersed in Molly Ringwald’s freckly cuteness. Then I started tasting other things—vodka, whiskey.

I passed out on the white couch. I woke up. I threw up purple wine all over the white couch. Drunkenly, I staggered to the kitchen, where I procured Glass Plus and a paper towel. Back in the family room I swabbed in vain at the spreading purple stain. Then I overturned the pillow, not noticing that the zipper side was now facing out. I passed out again. I awoke to the banging of my father’s fists on the glass family-room windows over my head. Remember, they didn’t have their keys with them. I let them in. Drunkenly, I muttered something about being very tired, excused myself and went to bed. The next morning I awoke at dawn, filled with terror, and ran into my parents’ room. Eavesdropping, I heard them discussing me, and drunkenness. I burst in: “I could not help overhearing,” I said, my voice dripping with righteous indignation, “the accusations you were making against me. I was not drunk last night. I was tired. I am shocked, amazed and disappointed that you would accuse me of such a thing!”

The matter was temporarily dropped. That day, I had a play rehearsal at school. My dad drove me there in silence, and afterwards he drove me home in silence. Entering the family room from the garage I saw my mother, my grandmother (what she was doing there I don’t know), and my sister standing around the overturned, deeply-stained couch-pillow. “It smells like wine,” said my mom. “Can I talk to you guys alone?” I said to my parents. My sister and my grandmother left the room. “Mom, dad,” I said, “I have been feeling depressed. Last night, I ate a bottle of aspirin. It made me throw up. I was drinking cranberry juice before, so that’s why it’s red. I didn’t want to tell you.” Their anger melted into compassion. Therapist visits were arranged. I went, every Wednesday night for the rest of that year, to an office in a man’s house, sat on his leather couch and talked about feeling depressed.

I have no idea which parts of this story are true and which I have made up completely or stitched together from other, unrelated events. Actually, I do know that I got drunk on Maneschiewitz, and that I passed out and threw up, and that my parents couldn’t get into the house. And that I did go, at one point, to a therapist with a leather couch and an office in his house. Beyond that…? I’m going to ask my parents for their version of the story, and publish it here in a later post.

9:40 pm, Newark Airport…D and I will be in Turkey for the next two months, but I’ll have Internet, so more thoughts, memories, and impressions are definitely forthcoming. Please stay tuned…