Alligator Candy (2 page)

For Andy, the mid-1960s in Tucson were an idyllic time with Jon, a spry boy with fiery red hair inherited from my mother's father, Sam. Though my dad was hard at work on his doctorate and writing his dissertation, he made a point to take the family out into the desert whenever he could, packing a lunch of fried chicken, made by my mother from a recipe she'd learned in Chapel Hill. Andy would always remember sitting on the rocks among the cacti at the Saguaro National Monument Park, dipping fried chicken in honey with Jon.

On the days that my dad was writing or teaching, my mom relished her life with her two boys. She took them to theme parks and to visit her brother's family nearby. On Mother's Day, Jon and Andy dressed her in a homemade paper crown and handed her a long paper staff with a star on top to hold. She taught Lamaze to local women when she could, and made the local papers when she was among the first in town to pick up what was then heralded as a new form of recreational exercise: jogging.

But, as with any struggling family, there were challenges. Money was tight. The future was unknown. My dad was prone to worrying about finances, and how he'd support his children and send them to college. He was also besieged with a rare form of severe headaches called cluster headaches, which struck at random and left one side of his face temporarily paralyzed as if he had had a stroke. The headaches lasted for around twenty minutes or so and defied medical treatment. He was told to avoid alcohol, though occasionally he downed a shot or two of his favorite mescal. Other than that, he just had to hope the headaches wouldn't debilitate him at inopportune moments, and ride them out when they hit.

The stress would wear him down at times, and he could be strict, snapping with frustration over mounting bills or a messy house. He was never abusive, physically or mentally, but had that New Yorker trait of being able to scream at someone and then, minutes later, scream that he wasn't screaming. My mother worried that sometimes my dad was too hard on the boys.

With his PhD soon complete, my father accepted a position at the State University of New York at Brockport, where I was born in 1968. My mother would never forget bringing me home in the middle of winter to see Jon and Andy's eager faces pressed against the window. In the haste of delivery, they had forgotten to pack me baby clothes, so I arrived in a thin blue hospital gown. Eight years younger than Andy and six years younger than Jon, I became the family plaything. Andy and Jon delighted in toting me around, and scooting down the stairs beside me. My father would play songs on his guitar while my mom accompanied him on piano.

In the summer of 1969, my parents celebrated their fourteenth wedding anniversary. I have a small black-and-white picture of the five of us around the cake. My father, with a trim, dark beard and black-framed glasses, leans against my mother, who is holding me as I laugh while they blow out the candles. Andy and Jon are seated alongside, smiling. Jon's hands are pressed together, midclap. Our family of five is complete.

I
N
1970 my father accepted a job as professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, which had an up-and-coming anthropology department. The prospect of moving to Florida thrilled my parents. We were northern Jews making the pilgrimage south just like so many of our leathery forebearers. But, like many, they equated Florida with South Florida. As a kid, my mother had gone on vacation to Miami Beach with her family, and still cherished the memories of lounging on the white sands. My dad had an uncle Sid, who was a nightclub pianist in Miami Beach, performing under the less Semitic stage name Mickey O'Toole. The prospect of raising their three boys in the warmth—no snow to shovel, no ice to clear—delighted my parents, who hoped this might be the last in what had been a long string of moves.

But it didn't take long after they arrived in Tampa to realize this wasn't a city of liberal New Yorkers. While looking at one home to buy, they noticed a grimy toilet in the garage. The realtor told them it was for the “
shvarzte
” help—a word that had not lost its fashion here despite this being 1970. A popular restaurant chain in town was called Sambo's. The walls inside had paintings of the restaurant's mascot, Sambo, a little black boy in a watermelon field.

Though steeped in Cuban history and billed as the “cigar capitol of the world,” Tampa was still rural, and felt more like Georgia than Florida. It represented the paradox of the Sunshine State: the farther north you go, the more southern it gets. People drove pickup trucks in Tampa, spoke with southern accents, chewed tobacco, and bought rusty tools at flea markets. The Florida State Fair, held in nearby Plant City since 1904, wasn't just an annual diversion, it represented a way of life. The Tampa Bay area was America's capital of carnies and circus performers. Sarasota had the headquarters for the famous Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus, and Gibsonton was the year-round home for the largest concentration of self-described sideshow “freaks” on the planet, such as Monkey Girl and Lobster Boy—the latter of whom, a man born with clawlike hands and feet, later became notorious for murdering his daughter's fiancé.

As my parents were finding their way in this new city, they soon faced a new challenge of their own. Something seemed off with Jon. Though playful, bright, and affectionate, he seemed to have trouble processing information. He found it difficult to understand basic instructions and sometimes jumbled words. One time at synagogue, the rabbi posed a question to the children, and Jon gave a nonsensical response that left others feeling uncomfortable.

My brother's struggles created tension between my parents. My dad put a high value on intellectual prowess. As someone who had used his brain to pull himself out of the Bronx, he feared what might be in store for Jon—especially when Andy and I were doing fine. What Jon needed, they agreed, was the right school. But after looking around town at different prospects, my parents grew discouraged when they went to one place where the students were in uniforms and being ordered to sit up straight. They thought this would be too much for Jon, who they felt needed more nurturing and support. And that's just what they found when they drove up to Independent Day School, a small private school on the north side of town.

IDS, as it was nicknamed, seemed hatched from a hippie dream. There were long-haired kids sitting in trees, and teachers wearing faded jeans and beards that rivaled my dad's—which now hung down low on his chest alongside his long dark hair. The entire school, which ran from kindergarten through seventh grade, had fewer than a hundred students. The campus spread over eight leafy acres of ponds, creeks, and cypress and citrus trees. A former orange grove, IDS teemed with wild peacocks—an especially surreal sight in the suburbs. The birds had been brought to the area by a farmer in the 1920s to ward off trespassers. In a promotional brochure, IDS cheekily referred to the birds as the school's “watchdogs.”

Instead of the usual square brick buildings, classes at IDS took place in a half dozen circular brown pods and, for the sixth- and seventh-graders, a giant yellow geodesic dome in the fashion of Buckminster Fuller. The Dome, as it was nicknamed, and the “Domies” inside, represented the pantheon of IDS-ness. Students aspired to the Dome and the day that they would become Domies. Walking inside the three-story-high building felt like entering a moon colony of Deadheads. Everyone seemed to have long, straight hair—the men and women, boys and girls—and some shade of bell-bottoms with patches of peace signs and rainbows. Instead of orderly desks and chairs, the room was a jumble of metal folding chairs and wood-paneled tables.

Inside the Dome, a colorful banner read “Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it eludes you,” with the word
butterfly
represented by an illustration. The twenty-five-foot-high ceiling consisted of white insulation foam, porous but firm enough to catch the pointy end of a pencil chucked by some slack-jawed middle schooler and leave the pencil hanging there. Before long, all kinds of pointy supplies—protractors, rulers, and, most treacherously, sharp-tipped metal compasses—protruded from the entire ceiling. Kids would be sitting cross-legged in a circle discussing Frank Lloyd Wright with an earnest hippie instructor when a compass or pencil would loosen and plummet stealthily to the floor—or upon a head, arm, or lap.

The school was as groovy as white suburban 1970s groove could be. Its mission statement declared that “a happy child who is given respect as a unique human allowed to fulfill his needs to play, to investigate, and to be himself, is more open to learning than a child who is unhappy, tense, and fearful.” This philosophy had come from the founders, two grad students at USF trained in gifted education. Classes were designed around the British Infant Model, blending two grades as one and allowing these students to progress at their own pace.

In a symbolic gesture, someone removed the ringer of an old bell left on the property from its days as a farm because, as a caption beneath a picture of it in the yearbook noted, “traditional school bells never ring at un-traditional IDS.” This sort of holistic consciousness, or conscientiousness, extended to the weekly field trips, called “community classes.” As well as going to the local library, IDS students visited the local slaughterhouse to learn how meat was produced.

IDS attracted children of professors like my dad, as well as lawyers and artists around town. One kid came to school every day by paddling his canoe across the lake. Another had parents who let her choose her own name. She chose “Blackbird,” for the Beatles song; before that she was just called Girl. Students not only climbed the many trees, but also they spent classes there perched on branches. To earn money, kids would get paid to clean lettuce.

For my parents, the school felt like a progressive oasis, and they eagerly signed up Andy and Jon to attend. They bought a small ranch house with a red-tile roof close enough by that the boys could walk to school. A creek separated our backyard from the campus. When people would say how annoying it must be to hear the screaming kids all day back there, my mother told them that she loved hearing the children's voices.

Jon and Andy were happy to join the chorus of these free-range kids. They ran around barefoot, built wigwams from fallen palm fronds, and gathered tadpoles at the lake during recess. The citrus groves became a steady part of the diet, and entertainment regimen. During softball games, the pitcher might clandestinely slip a grapefruit into her glove, lobbing it to the unsuspecting hitter, who, to his surprise, would smack it into a pulpy blast. To crack down on orange fights, teachers made a rule that any fruit thrown, even the rotten ones, had to be eaten.

Andy had taken up photography, and would shoot pictures of the kids forming a human pyramid up the Dome. Jon and his friends spent recess playing soccer or shoving one another into the pond—a convenient excuse for Jon to run home for a change of clothes. He might come back over the newly constructed bridge on the main road or, if he was feeling more like Huck Finn, balance-beam across the creek on one of the few wooden planks positioned there by adolescent explorers. After school, Jon and Andy would head up to the other nearby school to play H-O-R-S-E on the basketball court.

Jon became known as a quiet but thoughtful boy with a compassionate streak. One time, one of my brother's friends fell from a tree, and Jon came to his aid. “You're okay,” he told him, “just breathe deep. You got the wind knocked out of you.” Another time, Andy fell into a pond while looking for turtles and Jon readily helped fish him out.

But while Jon seemed to be finding his place among the kids and the teachers, he still struggled to get by in class. When the teacher dictated simple sentences for the class to write down, Jon's paper would often be missing words. If the teacher said, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” he might just write “the quick fox dog.” Jon's grades began to plummet, along with his self-esteem. At home, there were more frequent conflicts with Andy—like fighting over who got to sit in the front seat of the car. My parents sought the help of a psychologist, who established behavior modification plans, keeping tabs on the refrigerator as each boy completed chores so that he could earn the front seat.

The psychologist determined that Jon was suffering from an auditory memory deficit disorder—a sort of aural dyslexia that jumbled the words he heard. Seeking help, my parents sent him to a speech therapist for weekly sessions. Jon, like many ten-year-olds, put up a fight about going to see her after school but stuck it out. The speech therapist would read sentences to Jon and tell him to draw a blank line when he came to word that he couldn't remember. They would then go back over the sentences until the blanks were filled. Before long, Jon began to improve. His scores jumped a full two or three grades in the span of eight months. My parents felt relieved as he brightened and gained confidence. Jon relaxed more during his visits with his speech therapist and began joking around with her. One afternoon, he brought her a gift: a small jar of dyed sand he'd layered like a rainbow.

T
HE HELICOPTER
circled faster and faster, cutting the air with whirring blades. Down below, the astronaut drifted alone in a bright orange raft on a deep blue sea. His orange capsule bobbed nearby. The whirlybird lowered down, angling to pick up the astronaut and bring him to safety.

It was not long after we had moved to our new house in Tampa, and Jon and I were playing with our favorite toy, the VertiBird. Created by Mattel, the battery-powered toy promised “safe flying fun,” as the box read, by letting us “pilot real copter missions!” The small orange plastic copter with black blades was attached to a square white and yellow base by a long white spindle. To control the whirlybird, we pulled back or forth on two levers: a throttle and pitch control. The harder we pressed, the faster the bird went, occasionally careening into the blue shag carpet below.