born to do—be a big brother, to be somebody who, through love, understanding, and patience, was able to redirect misguided energies. I’m pretty sure there’s no higher calling than that!
Irving, Dad’s older brother, like everybody from my father’s side, had all tried to be musicians. He had worked hard to be a professional violinist; my dad’s sister, Aunt Mildred, a professional singer, and another uncle played the accordion, until the hard knocks of the creative life made all eventually throw in their towels. Nevertheless, at every dinner party at my house or at another relative’s place, after we ate, boom: all these fucking instruments would come out of the woodwork, and the whole night would be a fantastic escape from the ordinary. I loved those times. People were singing; people were playing. People were telling jokes; people were getting drunk. The booze was flowing, and I began to become addicted to ways of removing myself from the mundane, which I found to be really deadly. I dreaded routine, the sameness of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Every day was deadening to me, and there was nothing to aspire to; nothing about it had any kind of color to it—it was just drab, drab gray.
“The Perlman curse,” I said. Those were words my father used. My father was citing the fact that very few in the male Perlman line ever lived past fifty—Uncle Irving and I are the only exceptions. Everybody on my father’s side tended to die young. My dad’s dad didn’t make it past fifty. My dad didn’t make it past fifty. It was kind of a curse on allthe Perlman men. Hell, my brother didn’t even make thirty-nine. I mean, fuck, this shit was so palpable, I remember when I was in my forty-ninth year I got so nuts that every month I was buying another quarter-million dollars’ worth of life insurance. Even my wife started lookin’ at me like maybe I was worth more dead than alive. But Irving’s story inspired me deeply about how life sometimes makes you throw the dice, whether you want to or not, and in the most dramatic way. He was supposed to be dead when he was twenty-one because he had an inoperable tumor where his spine met his brain, and nobody wanted to touch it. The last doctor he went to said, “So what’s everybody telling you?”
“Everybody is telling me I got three to six months to live.”
The doc said, “If you do nothing, that’s right. So then, why don’t I try to take it off, and if you die on the operating table, well, then, you lost three to six months of your life. This is the only chance you got, and by the way, I’m not guaranteeing you anything, but who knows.” So Irving got the operation and lived until his eighties, thus being the first to break the deadly Perlman curse.
During Shiva I talked with my uncle about when Dad got sick a couple of years ago. I remember it was a scene right out of Spencer Tracey in Boy’s Town . Dad was in this big ward in Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and I went to visit him at around 5:45 in the afternoon. So you know how the light is at that time of the day. (In cinema I later learned that little sliver of time was called “magic hour” and one every cameraman wants to capture because . . . well, it’s magical!) So he’s in this huge ward, the size of a half a football field, and his bed was all the way on the other end, right by the window. There’s this streaming sunlight, late afternoon sunlight, coming in, and it’s backlighting this sort of tableau, and I know I’m kind of walking toward the bed, but all I see are shapes. I see about thirty figures all sitting around someone propped up in a bed. As I get closer and closer to this beautiful image I notice that this crowd is all young Puerto Rican and tough Irish kids sitting around my dad. His class had come to visit him, you know, in the hospital, and that was the moment when I realized I wasn’t theonly one who thought of my dad as angelic. The look on every one of those kid’s
Irving, Dad’s older brother, like everybody from my father’s side, had all tried to be musicians. He had worked hard to be a professional violinist; my dad’s sister, Aunt Mildred, a professional singer, and another uncle played the accordion, until the hard knocks of the creative life made all eventually throw in their towels. Nevertheless, at every dinner party at my house or at another relative’s place, after we ate, boom: all these fucking instruments would come out of the woodwork, and the whole night would be a fantastic escape from the ordinary. I loved those times. People were singing; people were playing. People were telling jokes; people were getting drunk. The booze was flowing, and I began to become addicted to ways of removing myself from the mundane, which I found to be really deadly. I dreaded routine, the sameness of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Every day was deadening to me, and there was nothing to aspire to; nothing about it had any kind of color to it—it was just drab, drab gray.
“The Perlman curse,” I said. Those were words my father used. My father was citing the fact that very few in the male Perlman line ever lived past fifty—Uncle Irving and I are the only exceptions. Everybody on my father’s side tended to die young. My dad’s dad didn’t make it past fifty. My dad didn’t make it past fifty. It was kind of a curse on allthe Perlman men. Hell, my brother didn’t even make thirty-nine. I mean, fuck, this shit was so palpable, I remember when I was in my forty-ninth year I got so nuts that every month I was buying another quarter-million dollars’ worth of life insurance. Even my wife started lookin’ at me like maybe I was worth more dead than alive. But Irving’s story inspired me deeply about how life sometimes makes you throw the dice, whether you want to or not, and in the most dramatic way. He was supposed to be dead when he was twenty-one because he had an inoperable tumor where his spine met his brain, and nobody wanted to touch it. The last doctor he went to said, “So what’s everybody telling you?”
“Everybody is telling me I got three to six months to live.”
The doc said, “If you do nothing, that’s right. So then, why don’t I try to take it off, and if you die on the operating table, well, then, you lost three to six months of your life. This is the only chance you got, and by the way, I’m not guaranteeing you anything, but who knows.” So Irving got the operation and lived until his eighties, thus being the first to break the deadly Perlman curse.
During Shiva I talked with my uncle about when Dad got sick a couple of years ago. I remember it was a scene right out of Spencer Tracey in Boy’s Town . Dad was in this big ward in Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and I went to visit him at around 5:45 in the afternoon. So you know how the light is at that time of the day. (In cinema I later learned that little sliver of time was called “magic hour” and one every cameraman wants to capture because . . . well, it’s magical!) So he’s in this huge ward, the size of a half a football field, and his bed was all the way on the other end, right by the window. There’s this streaming sunlight, late afternoon sunlight, coming in, and it’s backlighting this sort of tableau, and I know I’m kind of walking toward the bed, but all I see are shapes. I see about thirty figures all sitting around someone propped up in a bed. As I get closer and closer to this beautiful image I notice that this crowd is all young Puerto Rican and tough Irish kids sitting around my dad. His class had come to visit him, you know, in the hospital, and that was the moment when I realized I wasn’t theonly one who thought of my dad as angelic. The look on every one of those kid’s
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