.jerrysaltz on endless appetites and coping mechanisms, childhood and control, criticism, love, cancer, and pandemics
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We don’t do takeout either. It just seems like an invitation to overeat, which is something I worry about constantly. I haven’t had a pancake, waffle, or piece of French toast in decades — afraid I’d instantly become addicted the same way I know if I took one puff of a cigarette, I’d start smoking again. I did this once in 1986, a month after Roberta and I met. I wanted to show her how cool I looked with a butt in my mouth.
Except for my closest friends, it will shock most to know that I am unimaginably bashful. Going out in public in anything but a crowd costs me emotionally. Sometimes I get antsy for days before a nothing event. I never pick up the phone when it rings. As soon as quarantine began, I started to dread someday having to go back into the world. This exile has been one of heaven for me — a version of life that I’ve dreamed of many times.
During the day, he and his four brothers owned a woman’s lingerie company in Chicago called American Maid. I loved going to the office with curved desks and wet bars, watching the masterful old Jewish fabric cutters working with big scissors at enormous tables of satin and glimpsing models. It was an American Dream to me. With the money he made from the invention, our family of five moved to a Jewish suburb north of Chicago. There were brand-new homes and construction sites everywhere.
My life had changed in an instant, but I didn’t know how, or why, let alone what happened. In my early 20s, when a friend of the family gravely talked about “the way your mother died,” I said, “What do you mean? How did she die?” All I knew at that point was what I’d been told, accidentally, at a birthday party as a kid. As I was drinking something out of a glass, someone mentioned something about “Jerry’s mother,” and out of nowhere I bit the glass and it broke.
The next morning, my father walked past our room and saw the sign sticking out from Paul’s mattress. He asked, “Where did that come from?” My heart pounded. And then a new paradigm formed. After a silence, Paul said, “I don’t know,” and stared at my father. I stared at Paul staring. My father stood still staring at us both, blinked, then glowered at us with a look I’d never seen before. He turned and left. This wasn’t in the Jewish-suburban playbook, but that’s the way it was from then on.
But I had a secret garden that redeemed me, a place I could always go to, one that in many ways pointed to ideal forms, beauty, narratives — eccentricity and imaginings leading out of the pandemonium I was in. Every morning on the way to high school, I took circuitous shortcuts, crawling through bushes, smelling dirt, and emerging in the backyards of almost a dozen different Frank Lloyd Wright homes.
It struck me as normal that I would go many years without seeing them. I don’t think I ever saw my stepbrothers more than a handful of times after that night. None of that part of my life had happened as far as I was concerned. A couple of years back, I Googled my stepbrothers after not thinking about them for decades. From what I could gather, at least one of them is dead. Paul had become a pothead in high school and never left his bedroom the last two years I lived in my parents’ home.
These attacks made me afraid to be with anyone. Or go into public, or at least too far from home. I became all but cut off. As for eating, I had no kitchen, only a hot plate. I stopped going out to eat with friends. All my meals came from fast-food places and takeout — any place I could get into and out of quickly. It was a battle to get this done. I did it three times a day. All the rest of the time was spent trying to calm myself down. I took my pulse obsessively, counting my heartbeats.
Did I see America? Not really, unless you count either side of all the interstates in the Lower 48. I was pretty switched off. Manic. I had no curiosity. I drove only from point A to point B. I never took side roads, had an afternoon off, did any sightseeing, detoured to see anything or even take in a scenic overlook. It didn’t occur to me. Except once, in Arizona: I drove about an hour north of the highway to the Grand Canyon. I parked the truck and walked to the canyon ledge. I thought, Cool.
Then two beautiful things happened. The first was being ushered into what was then one of the great art salons in the world, the huge loft of curator-seer-gallerist Clarissa Dalrymple, one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. It cast magic that her loft had once been home to 1970s art-world legend Gordon Matta-Clark. Also, the Paula Cooper Gallery was then in the same building. I was in the right place at the right time.
Roberta had been diagnosed with uterine cancer. Everything changed, and nothing changed. Except what changed. She has had three big operations, two recurrences, and one near-cataclysmic extended emergency hospital stay. She is doing well under treatment today. We have gone through cancer without ever looking up or Googling her disease. We never ask questions about “the odds,” “chances,” “prognosis,” or the future. I do not think that this amounts to denial and incuriosity.
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