the finished machine appeared wrapped in ribbons under our tree.
When I was nineteen, another girlfriend invited me to join her enormous Irish Catholic family for Christmas dinner. I was working as a newsman at a small radio station in Berkeley, California. Like many Jews in round-the-clock occupations, I had volunteered for the Christmas shift so the Christian workers could stay home. It was a miserable way to spend the day. All alone in the studio. No news to report. The only sound bite I could get was from some guy who’d had himself baptized in the campus fountain at the university: “It was cold!” I replayed those three words in every newscast until my boss called me from home and told me to knock it off. But what I remember most is the blast of warmth and good cheer that greeted me when I finally stumbled into my girlfriend’s house. The company, the tree, the music, the food. What a relief. What a pleasure.
Later, when I moved in with the girl who would become my wife, and later still, when I married her, we’d spend Christmas at her parents’ house. They always made a huge occasion of it, the presents spilling from beneath the tree almost to the opposite wall. I would sit up late with my wife’s father, a brilliant professor and author. We would drink whiskey together and talk books and ideas until we could no longer keep our eyes open.
But he was an atheist. So was his wife, my wife’s mother. My wife was, too, for that matter. We all were atheists or agnostics, the lot of us. It was Christmas we loved, the bright tradition, not Christ, never Christ. The holiday had simply become my deracinated version of my father’s Passover: a celebration emptied of its meaning.
In the end, as I considered my conversion, I thought: No. It wasn’t that night at Mina’s house that made Jesus Christ central to my thinking. It wasn’t that picture on the wall that made his presence pervasive in my imagination. It wasn’t even the Christmases through the following years that made him matter to me so much.
It was stories. It was literature. He came to me that way.
CHAPTER 5
T OUGH G UYS
I ’ve always loved tales of adventure. Stories of suspense, action, danger, fear. Superheroes against arch-villains. Cops against killers. Men against monsters. As a boy, I couldn’t get enough of monsters. Creatures limping through misty graveyards in the dead of night—they were some of my favorite things. When I was seven, the Aurora company started bringing out plastic monster models from the old Universal movies I loved to watch on TV. They were thirteen-inch-tall figurines that came in pieces that you assembled and glued together, painting them if you liked. Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and so on. I got them all, every one. My mother worried I was growing morbid. When I was ten, I had to beg her to let me buy the new Creepy magazine. But oh man, I had to have it. A monthly collection of black-and-white comic strip spook stories with macabre twist endings. The vampire turned out to be the heroine’s suitor. The werewolf turned out to be the hero’s wife. The last line of dialogue was almost always the same wordless shriek of terror: “Aiiiyeeeeee!”
Alfred Hitchcock, though, he was my Homer. He was a movie director first, of course, but as the “master of suspense,” he also became a brand. That was my brand. I never missed his weekly TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents . A new tale of murder and mayhem every week. More macabre twist endings. The killer wife feeds her husband’s body to the police disguised as a leg of lamb. A wife identifies her rapist and her husband kills him, but the wife has gone mad and is pointing at every man she sees.
Sometimes when the show was on, my best friend and I would build a tent of blankets and chairs in my bedroom to create a spooky inner chamber. We’d roll the wheeled television stand under the canopy and sit on the floor
When I was nineteen, another girlfriend invited me to join her enormous Irish Catholic family for Christmas dinner. I was working as a newsman at a small radio station in Berkeley, California. Like many Jews in round-the-clock occupations, I had volunteered for the Christmas shift so the Christian workers could stay home. It was a miserable way to spend the day. All alone in the studio. No news to report. The only sound bite I could get was from some guy who’d had himself baptized in the campus fountain at the university: “It was cold!” I replayed those three words in every newscast until my boss called me from home and told me to knock it off. But what I remember most is the blast of warmth and good cheer that greeted me when I finally stumbled into my girlfriend’s house. The company, the tree, the music, the food. What a relief. What a pleasure.
Later, when I moved in with the girl who would become my wife, and later still, when I married her, we’d spend Christmas at her parents’ house. They always made a huge occasion of it, the presents spilling from beneath the tree almost to the opposite wall. I would sit up late with my wife’s father, a brilliant professor and author. We would drink whiskey together and talk books and ideas until we could no longer keep our eyes open.
But he was an atheist. So was his wife, my wife’s mother. My wife was, too, for that matter. We all were atheists or agnostics, the lot of us. It was Christmas we loved, the bright tradition, not Christ, never Christ. The holiday had simply become my deracinated version of my father’s Passover: a celebration emptied of its meaning.
In the end, as I considered my conversion, I thought: No. It wasn’t that night at Mina’s house that made Jesus Christ central to my thinking. It wasn’t that picture on the wall that made his presence pervasive in my imagination. It wasn’t even the Christmases through the following years that made him matter to me so much.
It was stories. It was literature. He came to me that way.
CHAPTER 5
T OUGH G UYS
I ’ve always loved tales of adventure. Stories of suspense, action, danger, fear. Superheroes against arch-villains. Cops against killers. Men against monsters. As a boy, I couldn’t get enough of monsters. Creatures limping through misty graveyards in the dead of night—they were some of my favorite things. When I was seven, the Aurora company started bringing out plastic monster models from the old Universal movies I loved to watch on TV. They were thirteen-inch-tall figurines that came in pieces that you assembled and glued together, painting them if you liked. Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and so on. I got them all, every one. My mother worried I was growing morbid. When I was ten, I had to beg her to let me buy the new Creepy magazine. But oh man, I had to have it. A monthly collection of black-and-white comic strip spook stories with macabre twist endings. The vampire turned out to be the heroine’s suitor. The werewolf turned out to be the hero’s wife. The last line of dialogue was almost always the same wordless shriek of terror: “Aiiiyeeeeee!”
Alfred Hitchcock, though, he was my Homer. He was a movie director first, of course, but as the “master of suspense,” he also became a brand. That was my brand. I never missed his weekly TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents . A new tale of murder and mayhem every week. More macabre twist endings. The killer wife feeds her husband’s body to the police disguised as a leg of lamb. A wife identifies her rapist and her husband kills him, but the wife has gone mad and is pointing at every man she sees.
Sometimes when the show was on, my best friend and I would build a tent of blankets and chairs in my bedroom to create a spooky inner chamber. We’d roll the wheeled television stand under the canopy and sit on the floor
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