Jewish White Trash
Outside a snow-covered duplex in Worcester, Massachusetts, I witnessed my father do a backflip on a sled in the winter of 1997. Shawn Michaels held the WWF championship belt at the time, but for a brief moment, Dad was the real champion in my eyes. I, along with my cousins Joshua and Victor, had built up a natural bump in the landscape with snow and created a launch pad at the bottom of a small bunny hill in their backyard. The three of us were reunited once again, as we were every Christmas since I could remember.
Although Dad was usually pretty composed on his normal regimen of heroin and cocaine, the Christmas spirit had encouraged him to drink a bit more than usual, which inspired this act of bravery. He stumbled over to us kids, snatched my disc-shaped sled, and positioned himself at the starting line. Sitting cross-legged, he began his descent towards the jump and rapidly gained speed. Somehow, possibly due to his limber intoxication, he managed to complete a full backwards revolution in the air before crashing and eating shit into the landing patch.
I’m almost certain this happened. The memory is extremely vivid, however, it doesn’t seem plausible. And although Dad can halfway corroborate it, I also question it because this period of my life is bowed with confusion. Joshua and Victor were Puerto Rican and looked quite different than me, but we were blood-related cousins. Their grandmother Helen was also my grandmother, although I already had two other grandmothers so I didn’t understand how this could be. Lastly, we were Jewish, so why were we celebrating Christmas with a seemingly Christian branch of relatives? The answer was that this was my secret family that couldn’t be acknowledged all year, until Christmas time approached, and we took our annual trip to Worcester.
I’d eventually learn that my mother was adopted, and a few years before I was born, she had reunited with her birth family. They were all located in Worcester, so every year, unbeknownst to my Boston family, we’d take the fifty-mile trip out west and celebrate Christmas. Under no circumstances could this ever be discussed with the Boston family, who were under the impression that every Christmas we took a vacation somewhere else.
Although I looked forward to our Christmas trip every year, it aroused an identity crisis within me at a young age. Who was I? I felt out of place in Worcester - not completely a part of, given that I didn’t see or speak to them fifty-one weeks out of the year. They were a unit plagued with alcoholism, addiction, and poverty, but they were wholly connected. Christmas dinner was complete with inside jokes, stories about people I’d never met, and a warmth that I wasn’t completely attached to.
On the other hand, I couldn’t feel comfortable around my Boston family either, seeing that I was in on my mother’s dark secret. Was I even Jewish anymore? Did it matter? Getting bullied at school by the other Jewish kids for being “poor white trash” only added to my disorientation. I was forever an outsider, at least in my own head, and used whatever evidence I could tack together to support this notion. I utilized it as an excuse until I was nearly thirty to wreak absolute havoc.
Mom, who suffered from the same affliction ten-fold, didn’t survive it. She died with a needle in her arm about six years after my dad’s infamous backflip. I tried to let it kill me for about a decade, and despite welcoming death at every moment, I seemingly emerged the victor. I’m no stronger or better than her, I was just lucky enough to hit the zenith of my savagery before a flatline. Many thousands won’t be so lucky if our attitudes and actions as a society don’t shift.
The complexity of addiction is that the more experience you have with it, the more baffling it becomes. While still in chains, an indentured mind alone cannot outmaneuver it’s master, so once you surrender to the fact that you’ve lost all sovereignty, you finally have a chance in hell of overcoming it. The coin toss for most of us, especially heroin addicts, is between reaching this conclusion and an untimely death. With the rise of fentanyl, this window has shrunken dramatically. Humility seems to be the key in conquering the many troubles we manufacture for ourselves, and this notion stretches far beyond addiction. But what do I know? I’ve been wrong about nearly everything I’ve ever conned myself into believing, except the one thing that ended up saving my life.
I was different in that my parents were heroin addicts. Although us kids didn’t completely understand this detail, it was obvious to me that my home life was atypical. My clothes were dirtier, my social skills were less refined, and I needed a way to relieve stress from day one of kindergarten.
Pretending to get caught in between a set of French doors and screaming comically, I managed to get a rise out of a few kids at school that, prior to this event, regularly ignored me. I felt high from their approval. From an early age I learned that making people laugh, especially at the cost of my own dignity, could provide a rush of endorphins and numb the pain for a brief moment. It would remain my greatest tool until I discovered alcohol at age fourteen, and then heroin five years after that. Alcohol made me feel like I fit in, while heroin made me feel like I didn’t exist. This cured everything. A solution to all my problems short of erasing my social security number. For without an identity, there was nowhere for the shame to roost.
I used heroin, along with a variety of other drugs, for a decade. Its drop in effectiveness correlated with an increase in consequences. Chronic homelessness, violence, lengthy jail sentences, and ultimately acts of irredeemable self-mutilation became unavoidable, all the while heroin’s ability to placate lost all potency. I still couldn’t stop. Not until I woke up in that bloody bathtub did I understand that there would never be a compromise. Horrific repercussions, shame, and the blessing of having nothing left to enable my brutality led to my complete submission. I then became honest, open-minded, and willing to reboot my psyche, defragment my mind, and reinstall the software. Given the extremity of my strife, one would probably imagine that this should have come quicker, but like others that come from morbid roots, I was willing to fight (myself) to the death for far too long.
***
When I was maybe eight or nine years old, I asked my dad about my great-grandfather’s family in Ukraine. Were they farmers? Blacksmiths? I was curious what they did for work before my ancestors came to America. Dad told me that they owned a mill that processed flour to make bread. I thought that was pretty neat. I always pictured this huge barn with nineteenth century machinery in it, and dozens of employees scampering around and doing all kinds of odd jobs around the mill. I imagined a giant silo to the left of the barn, where my family would store the already-processed flour to make room on the production floor for more wheat. Maybe my distant relatives still owned the mill presently, I always thought, and that one day I would venture out to meet them.
When I was nineteen years old, I saved up a few grand from selling Oxycontin and bought a plane ticket to Europe. I figured while I was over on that side of the planet, I might as well make a quick pit stop in Ukraine and see the Klickstein flour mill.
Excited, I called Dad and asked him if he could give me any information on how to get the address. He couldn’t compute my question. I said that I wanted to go to Ukraine and find the Klickstein mill, meet our family, and see how the business was holding up. After having a good laugh, he responded by telling me there was a misunderstanding in regard to my lineage. In actuality, my great-great grandfather had two flat rocks that he’d grind wheat into flour with. When he was killed in the pogroms at the turn of the century, his son (my great-grandfather) escaped and left behind the two rocks. That was the fucking mill.
This distorted my perception of familial identity, a shallow concept to begin with. But having been raised in a quintessentially broken home, it provided me with some amount of inherited self-worth. My particular offshoot of the Klickstein clan was clearly a human dumpster fire, but with inspiration of one day seeing the family mill in all its glory, I thought maybe my junkie parents were just a deviation from an otherwise reputable gene pool.
I’m older now, and not so black and white in my thinking, but when Dad told me about those two rocks, I couldn’t help but lose a little bit of hope. Having drug-addicted parents was a never-ending source of shame and self-hatred, so getting this ancestral clarification instilled in me the belief that I was inherently destined to fail. Impending alcoholism, drug addiction, mental instability, trouble with the law, suicidal thoughts, and an early grave were simply expected. To put it more lightly, the practice of positive thinking was completely foreign to me from birth.
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