Tag: India

After Voices of the Valley I briefly met up with my sister and her husband so we could clean out my grandparent’s house in Princeton. This was my mother’s parents and the Ashkenazi Jewish side of my heritage. I’m going to do a bit of a deep dive on them and especially my grandmother. Let’s do my grandfather first to get him out of the way.

He had done a bit of military service when he was younger and then worked as a patent officer. He wore tweed jackets and always smelled of aftershave and basically came off like a counterfeit British person – he may well have gone to Oxford. He was super into Tolkien and from a style perspective looked fairly similar to that author’s photos on his dust jackets.

He was weak in every sense of the word and the very definition of passive aggressive.

My earliest memories of my grandmother are steeped in mothballs. Not only did she smell like them herself she practically used them as packing peanuts in the huge cardboard boxes tied up in twine that my grandparents brought along every time they came to visit. She would excitedly unpack gifts of clothing, toys and packaged foods that felt subtly tainted by the indelible chemical odor of naphthalene. She always made sure to save the twine.

Both sets of my grandparents had lived through the Great Depression and neither of them could bear to throw anything away but the hoarding on the Arkansas side felt comparably warm and wholesome. The worst thing you might come across in their farmhouse was old yellow margarine tubs where the plastic was starting to disintegrate and splinter. Food in that house smelled fresh and healthy or was something like a box of Little Debbie’s – loaded with so many preservatives that it didn’t matter if they were two years expired.

My Princeton grandmother brought disintegrating Twinkies that reeked of mothballs and tubs of Kool-Aid mix that had compacted into unbreakable discolored rocks. My parents never bought us these kinds of processed snack foods but what should have felt like a rare treat took on sinister undertones with the scent of her preferred preservative and the unmistakable decay it had been intended to cover. As I got a little bit older I began to realize that everything she touched was also tainted with venom and bitterness.

My parents were financially dependent on my grandparents, or actually just my grandmother, in ways that were never openly talked about. As an adult I assumed that they had paid for our house but my mother insisted that hadn’t been the case. It also could have been that my mother was just still afraid of the woman in the same way that I was for most of my childhood. Either way she told us that when my grandmother offered us food that was spoiled or reeked of mothballs we were expected to pretend like nothing was wrong and eat it.

Things came to a head when we were visiting Princeton and she cooked beef brisket with rancid mushrooms that caused the meat to smell and taste like literal shit. The smell alone was making us nauseous but my mother hissed through her teeth that we had to choke some down to placate her. Tears were streaming down our faces as we tried to covertly spit into napkins without having to chew but my grandmother was obliviously crowing about what a fine job she’d done with the cooking.

I’d almost think the whole incident was a deliberate power play intended to fuck with us if I wasn’t certain that she’d utterly destroyed her senses of taste and smell with the aforementioned mothballs. I wish I could say things changed after this traumatic experience but realistically nothing did.

Toward the end of High School I heard that my grandfather had an affair with another woman and almost left my grandmother but went back at the last minute. The whole family made a trip to the Northeast for my older brother’s wedding and we spent the last night before flying home in Princeton. My grandfather wandered around the house finding different things to fidget with and my grandmother followed him around while constantly criticizing and berating him.

They were still doing it when we were able to briefly fall asleep around two in the morning. We had to get up at six to go to the airport and both of them were still doing the exact same thing. It was obvious that neither of them had slept and it felt like they repeated the same pattern on a daily basis. Not long after my grandfather developed full blown dementia and came to San Diego to live in an assisted living home.

He lost all inhibitions and flashed the nurses in the home until they removed the buttons from all his pants and sewed them shut. Within a year or two he choked to death on a piece of a pancake. Back in Princeton my grandmother was starting to spiral out of control.

After a minor traffic accident the police discovered she was no longer competent to drive and revoked her license and towed the car. She lay down in the middle of the road to try to obstruct the tow truck and had to be restrained by the police. Now that she couldn’t drive the hoarding in the house got even more intense.

After that the pipes burst and she was afraid to call in a plumber out of paranoia that any workman would discover the jewelry and other valuables she had hidden around the house. Without a working toilet she took to urinating and defecating in buckets that she layered with cat litter. A concerned neighbor called Adult Protective Services and when investigators saw the living conditions in the house they came in wearing Hazmat Suits and forcibly removed her.

Now that she was living in a nursing home herself her health took a major turn for the worse. A doctor tried to put her on a low sodium diet but she made a point of going out of her way to eat extra salt to prove how above his advice she was. Her legs ballooned up to the size and shape of elephant’s legs from retained water and took on an infected bright red color. This put her in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

A tree had fallen onto and destroyed a section of the roof of the house on Terhune Road and we knew that it would have to be dealt with eventually. My sister and her husband booked a trip to New Jersey and because it coincided with my festival season travels in the area I decided to come and help. I’d been hanging out in Philadelphia just before and Bridget and Alyssa dropped me off at some kind of train that went on to New Jersey.

No one in my immediate family had been inside for many years and the moment we opened the front door we were hit by the smell. Rat droppings covered every visible surface and the rodent’s urine had started to eat away at the hardwood floors. The closest room to the entrance had formerly been filled with canned food but the labels had all rotted away and the rats had managed to chew through the bottom of the cans draining all of the contents into a gigantic scab of dried out food and feces on the floor.

The smell of mothballs was undetectable – the decay had won.

Tom and Jenny were renting an Air BnB nearby and they offered to get me a room as well out of the budget that had been put aside for the project but it was the height of Summer and I decided to sleep in the yard. The smell of pests, mildew and black mold was too intense to sleep anywhere inside the actual house but I’d been getting into the habit of outdoor sleeping anyway. I still had an old German military sniper bag, basically a green quilted sleeping bag with sleeves and a hood, that I’d been traveling with ever since my days on the Rockaway.

The vegetation in the yard had become so overgrown that none of the neighbors were able to see me and at night I could watch opossums and raccoons as they wandered into the house and onto the roof. I had noticed a large forested park down the street when we went to eat at a nearby pizza restaurant and I started taking nighttime walks to explore it.

After a couple of nights of wandering the forest trails I discovered the path to a reservoir called Lake Carnegie. After that I prepared for bed each night with a walk and a moonlit swim – first in the shallow water above the spillway and then across the deeper sections used by the Princeton Rowing Team. Eventually I started to see coyotes coming to the water’s edge each night to drink as repetition allowed me to blend in imperceptibly with the landscape.

On one of the last nights the quiet park was transformed by a loud and well lit wedding. I thought about trying to pass myself off as one of the guests and taking advantage of the open bar. I realized almost immediately that I didn’t actually even want to – I already had a bottle of Benedictine I’d found in my grandparents’ attic and opted to continue sipping from it and to take my usual swim hidden in the shadows as if the wedding wasn’t even there.

I had stopped drinking alcohol when I first discovered I had Hepatitis C in 2011 but more recently I’d realized my liver was in top condition and a little bit of drinking in moderation wouldn’t hurt me. The attic was filled with ancient syrupy liqueurs in ornate bottles. I’d sampled a few but the only one I really liked was the Benedictine – it’s basically like a thick golden absinthe flavored with a blend of oriental spices.

When I went to hang out in New York City immediately afterward I brought along a goody bag of vintage vices from around the house and attic – old Playboys and cherry brandy and firecrackers and weird pills that had barbiturates in them that I distributed among the daring across a couple of nights in Central Park. None of it was particularly good and the only real intoxication came from the anachronism of it all.

One of our goals in clearing the house was to find whatever jewelry might be hidden and everything in the attic was obscured under a layer of pink insulation that the rats had torn apart and strewn around. I spent part of each night going over it all with a flash light so I could concentrate on the bigger task of dragging downstairs hoarded junk into the dumpster during the daytime. Eventually I started finding a sequence of artifacts that told me more about my grandfather.

Large black and white photos from his military days – exotic animals in India, candid snapshots of nude soldiers goofing off in the showers and fields of exploding mortar shells. Filipino Pesos especially printed by the Japanese Occupation during World War Two. A square shaped metal phonograph record that I can’t remember whether or not I ever got around to playing.

I knew that he had been an avid collector of the early sci-fi magazines and I found a pile of comic book sized Weird Tales with exciting colorful covers. Nearby was a copy of a Tolkien fanzine from the mid 60s – printed on thin typing paper with the telltale purple marks of the mimeograph machine. I wish I still had this stuff but it all eventually got lost either in the RV or somewhere before that.

The big surprise was an angry letter from my deceased uncle written after my grandfather had rudely turned away a Black girlfriend my uncle had brought around to meet him. I knew my grandparents were bigots – my grandfather directly called my older brother a bastard for being born out of wedlock in his will and my grandmother constantly thought our Black neighbors and best friends were trying to steal from us even though their family was clearly much wealthier than ours.

What I hadn’t known was next to anything about my uncle Stephen. He had died of cancer when I was very young and my mother scarcely talked about him while my grandmother only ever alluded to his success as a physicist. Reading this letter written in his own words finally made him feel like a real person to me and invoked a hitherto missing sense of kinship.

Many of the Jewish people I know are constantly arguing over whether or not they should be considered white but whiteness has always felt like an indisputable part of modern American Jewish identity to me. I started to see this house on Terhune Road in Princeton, a previously white enclave, as a vital part of my grandparents struggle to achieve this white identity. Similarly to how my grandfather changed his last name for Schmuckler to Sherman – selected for a Civil War general but has gone full circle to becoming a visibly Jewish name again.

I can’t remember how long the entire process took but it was at least a week and three loads of the construction dumpster. My brother-in-law eventually discovered the pouch of jewelry hidden inside the stuffing of the couch – I don’t think my grandmother even remembered where it was anymore. One of the relatives wanted a set of lamps that she had made from antique Chinese vases so we packed those up for whoever was getting them.

I was the only one of my siblings that never opted to take a trip to visit the Princeton grandparents alone but spending so much time in the house reminded me of a family trip we took when I was about twelve. I’d found a free copy of Stephen King’s It at the local library and I could only read it at night with a blanket stuffed in the bottom of the door to hide the light or my grandmother would take it away from me.

I went to one Catholic Mass while staying in Princeton but recently church had stopped providing the feelings that kept me dedicated for my first year of Catholicism and it felt like I was just going through the motions. My initial pledge to spend a year completely abstinent from opiates had began on the Summer Solstice of 2011. I returned to the Griffith Park observatory on the Solstice of 2012 and repeated the pledge but it felt like a pale imitation of the first one with none of the fire or urgency.

That first year I was offered heroin multiple times and never felt even slightly tempted. While cleaning out the medicine cabinet in the bathroom I found a bottle of Tylenol with codeine from the 1970’s – it had been prescribed to my uncle who died young of cancer. I thought of throwing it away but realized I didn’t have any good reasons not to take it.

The pills had long since dissolved into a clumpy white powder that sparkled in the sunlight as if it was riddled with tiny reflective crystals. I swallowed it all while preparing to lay down in the yard on one of the final nights. Despite the printed expiration dates opiates don’t really lose their potency over time.

About an hour later I suddenly had to throw up and then that old familiar feeling began to settle over me. Besides the warmth, itch and euphoria I’d say it felt most like being completely certain I was in the right place at the right time and all was well with the world. Now that I think about it’s almost identical to the feeling I’d get from taking communion that first year but had become conspicuously absent in my more recent Church adventures.

When I got back to Los Angeles I would return to Fifth and Spring to start finding pain pills again. Eventually this would lead to using heroin in Tijuana and New Orleans and from there a few years of homelessness and active addiction around California. You could say it all began with that tiny little bottle of codeine and things might have turned out quite differently if I’d decided to just throw it away but I don’t regret any of it.

It was what it was.