In The Cage
The following is an excerpt from "In the Cage," a novel about a gifted but emotionally troubled (and possibly closeted) youth growing up in Suburban Maryland in the seventies and eighties.
(From a very rough draft)
My new mom did try to fill the void left by death of my old mother. But to me it was simply not enough. It was already clear to my parents that I was not shaping out to be the ideal son that both of them wanted me to be. I did well enough in elementary school to make it to junior high without any F’s or even any Ds—actually, Martha was very strict in this regard and was not above slapping me in the face even if I brought home an assignment that had a C-minus on it. Naturally, she apologized after slapping me, saying it was for my own good, that she did not want me to end up like the rest of those “jigaboos” (her words) that used to hang out on the street, who ruined the old neighborhood we used to live in back in Baltimore, and “they were the real reason why we had to move out, besides those riots. All those goddamn hoods and do-nothings, junkies and shit.”
And so determined was Martha that I not end up another jigaboo that the two of them—both she and dad—wound up as my virtual masters. It wasn’t enough for them just to monitor my every breath; they had to monitor my thoughts, too. When the other children went out to play in the street, for as long as they wished, I was only allotted an hour before being led back in the house by Martha, and often under threat of another beating. I had to be in bed by eight-thirty, no questions asked. That meant I was not permitted to watch anything resembling a late-night show.
Sometimes “Mom” took me out to Korvettes or G. K. Kreseges to buy some things—usually Brach’s, cheap chocolate candies that you used to get in a gaudy-colored paper bag, or sometimes 45s of my favorite singers or bands, or maybe a couple of Clark bars, or maybe some Wacky Packages or something. Even then, she had to look them over carefully to see if they were “right” for me. As usual, most everything was wrong in some way.
“What on earth,” she would bark in this flatly unsympathetic voice that had already begun to grate on me (I was only eight), “do you want with a thing like that?” That merely being a copy of a Temptations’ 45 single—an early one, partly because I preferred their old mid-sixties sound (which was already considered passé) and partly because I preferred the fancy old Gordy design to the newer, flatter one. “Nobody listens to that old junk anymore.”
“But I want it,” I protested.
“Why?” “Mom” snapped.
“Because I like the music, and I like the design,” I said, feeling strangely un-free in her presence. The look of incredulity in her eyes, combined with ridicule, would, admittedly, make anyone feel uneasy. “I don’t want you growing up to be no sissy,” she snapped. I frowned. “I’m not going to be a sissy for listening to the music I like,” I said. “I want it.”
“Alan,” “Mom” then countered, picking another single out of a stack of 45s, the latest vinyls—“here’s something for you. You need to stay up to date. You can’t get yourself hooked on this old stuff. You’re just a boy. Here,” she said, taking the old Gordy record away from me and handing me a copy of some new, ugly-looking record by the Jacksons. It was called “Dancin’ Machine.” Just by glimpsing the label I already knew that I would hate it; I wanted the old Motown records of 10 years ago. “I told you that stuff is out of date,” “Mom” carped. “If you keep listening to that old trash, people are gonna laugh at you and call you names, and you do not want that, Alan.”
“But I like the old stuff,” I pleaded.
“You didn’t hear a word I said, did you?” she snapped, raising her voice.
So Mom bought me the goddamned record. As I remember it was pressed on cheap, fragile plastic. Mom bought three other records for herself. On the way home I tried to sneak a peek at those records by fumbling in the paper bag they were wrapped up in. Mom slapped my hand. “Ah-ah! You got your record, Alan, those are mine. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, barely able to contain my resentment. “Alan,” Mom snapped, “I told you, didn’t I?”
“I said okay,” I repeated.
We drove back to our house. All the while mom talked about these bands I’d never even heard of—these new super-groups that were springing up left and right. Like Parliament-Funkadelic, the Ohio Players, the Commodores and all that crap. I needed to know these things, she told me, if I wanted to be popular and get the girls to like me. But I was only eight and could have cared less about “girls.” I didn’t listen to a thing “mom” was telling me—it was just a big hash of words spoken in her usual coarse manner, and in that moment hearing her I wished I heard my real mother’s gentle, studied lilt again. There was not a shred of crudeness and hostility in my mother’s voice. I realized I would never hear it again, and at that point I wanted to cry.
In fact, I did cry. I remembered listening to her soft, slightly Southern accent as she talked on the phone, the humor and warmth in it, and it was already a voice of ancient times, another era; from now on, with precious few exceptions, I would only hear the harsh, grating accents of murderers.
Martha paid no attention to it all. As she got home she pulled out a little record player, one that looked more like a toy than anything. There was a white handle on it and the outside was covered with peppermint stripes; on the inside it was blue and white or red and white, I don’t exactly remember which color. There were four speeds on the turntable and for a second I got a kick out of playing the damn thing on 78, whereupon Mom slapped me on my arm and said “Alan, Alan! Stop playing with that—it’s not a toy! Look, damn it—it’s 45! Switch it to 45! You have a brain, Alan—use it!”
I switched it to 45 and then received another tongue-lashing for not properly fitting in the little plastic center-piece to keep the record from sliding around on the turn-table. Mom was cursing about what an ungrateful bastard I was—just like my father. She said she should have gone to New York like she planned and married a Jew. But when the music finally started she clapped her hands and began dancing. “These boys are something else,” she said, “they’re better than ever! They gonna be real big when they grow up—especially Michael, the youngest boy. He better watch himself ‘cause he’s gonna have half the girls in the world running behind him—“
I made a half-hearted attempt to grind my hips when she bumped me with her left hip, and I almost fell over. “Damn, Alan,” she exclaimed, jocosely, looking at me with studied movements, “you better learn how to do these dances if you want friends!”
“I have plenty of friends, Mom!”
“Alan,” Mom countered, continuing to do the bump.
And so just for the hell of it, I did the Bump with Martha to the cheesy crappy-assed plastic music coming from the crappy-assed plastic cut-rate cellophane 45 played on a crappy-assed cut-rate hand-me-down phonograph. From the Jackson Five we went to the O’Jays, the Three Degrees, the Isley Brothers, James Brown, the Ohio Players and all the rest of them. They all sounded the same. Something was missing. There was this emptiness to their sound; there was no soul, as far as I could feel. It was plastic—it wasn’t like the old stuff of even five years ago. The old stuff had more grit, more feeling to it; I loved the old, sleek churchy sound of 1965. Not this new stuff…
I took one look at the album covers and winced. The album covers showed these groups posing against trees, alongside buildings, on park benches, in restaurants, in cars or in lounges. They looked like clowns to me. It would have been well and good if one could merely laugh at these things and put them down as a joke. But it was no laughing matter—we all dressed like that, young or old, rich or poor, black, white, yellow, brown or red, with those ridiculous fur coats, puffy arms, lapels the size of boat paddles, absurd jackets, bell-bottoms, fat belts with too many holes in them, enormous chunky collars and platform soles higher than the fucking Berlin Wall.
I could not get it into my head that this was actually happening. It marked the moment of my alienation from society. The moment solidified in my mind the notion that everything around me was ugly, shallow, silly and stupid. I felt an instinctive urge to run away from it all. I needed to get the hell out of Wormwood. But there was a problem: there was nowhere to run to. Everywhere it looked to be the same. I would turn on the TV and see people all over the world, of all races, colors and nationalities, all wearing these same horrible clothes and stupid haircuts. Even in the Soviet Union they wore these ugly things.
Saturday morning cartoons ended for me the moment they came on. The candy looked like something from outer space. The food looked and tasted like poison. The toys Mom bought for me looked weirdly artificial. Even the covers of the latest books in the stores looked horrifying—like a massive psychedelic swamp of clashing colors and bloated fonts, as if designers were deliberately insulting everyone’s intelligence. Even Dad had gotten into the lousy act. He stopped wearing fedoras. He had long since gotten rid of his conk; maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing, since it never looked right on him to begin with. But he replaced it with a small, strange Afro which was thinning at the crown. It looked less like a hairdo and more like some malignant black tumor which seemed to be consuming his face, almost, with those massive mutton-chop side-burns. He traded in his narrow-lapelled shark-skins for a bunch of tasteless polyester leisure suits with stupid turtle necks—or otherwise these crazy-looking sport coats that were so loud you needed to put on shades and plug your ears just to look at them. And Mom was not to be outdone in sheer tastelessness, with those enormous fake eyelashes she liked to wear at parties, along with head wraps, curly wigs, plunging necklines and those fat, goofy pendants showing a jade ring, or an elephant, or even a freaking peace sign. I even hated to look at myself in the mirror because I knew what I was going to see. Just the same, I hated dressing up to go out or for these parties, because that meant suffering through the torture of that dreaded afro-pick. No, I didn’t hate the Afro—not really; I hated the time and the agony it took to get the Afro look, the look that was so cool—and I dreaded all the curses and insults and raps on the head I had to take from either mommy or daddy to get it just right. And when it was just right, it felt like I was wearing a crown of thorns. The whole thing was torture. There was no escape from it, unless you shut yourself in the closet or spent your life cowering in bed. Everybody looked, talked, dressed and acted like clowns, and the freaky furniture, the goofy music, the clunky cars and monstrous buildings reinforced the feeling that we were all living in one big non-stop, dystopian freak-show.
In revolt against this insanity, I decamped, taking refuge in a dream world. I dreamed of building an ark—Alan’s Ark, where all the cool, elegant people who were still left on the planet could find sanctuary against the rising flood of cheap polyester kitsch. Let the others drown in that flood—I will create my own world, a world of real elegance, real beauty and real soul. It would be a black world, too—my kind of black. And in that world I would be king, rather than the jester I was at school and the village idiot I was at home. I would decide which music had real “soul,” real “rhythm,” real “funk.” Bad taste would be a capital offense. There would be no wa-wa peddles, Moog synthesizers and plastic drum sets. There would be no platform shoes and ugly fat rings and pendants. There would be no bell bottoms and stupid sunshades that covered your whole face. And above all, no afros, long dirty hair and no goddamned sideburns.