On Second Thought, I’m Almost Positive I Was Adopted

Shirley and Seymour

I never had anything to do with those people. Well, they fed me and gave me a roof over my head ’til I was 18. And they mostly left me alone and let me do my thing. And I had a little bit of a bond with Shirley. But I had more of a bond with her parents than with the two people who were supposed to be mine. And maybe they were; I can’t be sure.

I know they were married in 1944 and I was born in 1948 and they had been under tremendous pressure from Shirley’s parents to have a child. Her mother, Jean, always told me how special I was and how they prayed and prayed that I would arrive. Whatever that means.

A few years ago, Fern reminded me their club— their high school friends, the Renroc Lodge— bought burial plots on Long Island for themselves and the members and their families. I thought they might be valuable and suggested we sell them since Fern and Michelle had their own families and I’m into cremation. Fern said there are 6 plots— one for Shirley, one for Seymour, two for Michelle and two for Fern. None for me. I think they bought those plots in the late 1950s; latest the 1960s.

And about that roof over my head. I had a room of my own when we lived in Valley Stream and when we lived in Roosevelt (in houses) and when I went to PS 197 and Madison (and lived in a large flat on 17th Street between Avenue P and O). Then they moved to Atlantic Towers in Sheepshead Bay and it was a 2-bedroom apartment. Fern and Michelle shared a room. They put up a flimsy, slatted, unpainted wooden wall that created a little space for me in their room. I didn’t like it. They suggested I could use the convertible couch in the foyer. So I did. No privacy at all. I was happy to go to out-of-town college. I was lucky state college was still free back then. I got a loan for room and board and books and stuff but I was soon making way more than that selling drugs.

I never really related to Seymour; in fact, when I was growing up, we didn’t speak for years at a time. I hate this photo. He wanted to dress me up like him. I think he was disappointed in me. I think he was disappointed with the way his life turned out in general. I'm pretty sure he graduated high school but I’m not 100% sure. He met Shirley in high school— Lincoln in Brooklyn I think. I left Madison and went there for 2 hours when they moved to Sheepshead Bay. I was in honor classes in Madison but whoever assigned me my classes at Lincoln saw the “H”s on my records and thought they were “M”s... for modified. So they sent me to a class where the kids weren’t discussing the interplay between human nature and free will and the juxtaposition between historical determinism with the role of chance and individual agency in shaping events in Tolstoy’s War and Peace but were discussing how to remember the difference between “peace” and “piece.” I got on a bus, went back to Madison and said it had all been a big mistake and I was re-enrolled. I probably told Shirley and she probably told Seymour. Or maybe not.

I wasn’t into anything they were into and they weren’t into anything I was into. We had nothing to talk about. They didn’t like anything I liked and I didn’t like anything they liked. I also didn’t like their friends, who were all kind of like them. They all smoked and drank. I never smoked a cigarette or drank a beer in my life. I owe them that. They thought I was a freak because I liked to read books. I think the only time Seymour ever respected me was when I was dating a model, Chris, in my sophomore year of college and brought her over one night and we slept on the convertible couch in the foyer. Seymour was drooling and could barely talk to her.

Me (looking away), Shirley, Abe, Jean, Fern (on her lap), Michelle; Seymour took the photo

He died in 1969. I wouldn’t have guessed that was the year but Fern told me it was and I'll assume she knows. I remember that year as when I left the country and I remember a lot of things that year— my week in Iceland; the sounds and smells of Africa when the ferry from Algeciras approached Ceuta; Bob Dylan singing “I Threw It All Away” in a light drizzle at the Isle of Wight the day before Martha flew back to New York; waiting in my van in Pakistan at the Indian border in the broiling sun when my desire for drugs was ripped out of me… forever— but him dying that year? Nope. I kind of recollect visiting him in the hospital once before he died. I hated hospitals back then— so sterile and cold and forbidding. 5 decades late and I find my hospital familiar and kind of comforting; I was there yesterday for a transfusion. I don’t remember what Seymour and I said to each other. Like I said, we never really had much of a relationship. He may have tried, but probably not too hard. I have only the vaguest recollection of his mother and none at all of his father. My "grandparents" were Shirley's parents. I was very, very close to them.

Not counting two skylights, there are 26 windows in my natatorium and when I swim especially early, a ray of sunlight comes over the trees through one window and I always feel it’s him saying hello and telling me not to worry about death. No one else who has died ever visits me that way… and he has for over a decade.

UPDATE

Over the weekend, I spoke to one of my oldest friends and told him I was working on this recollection. He told me he doubted I was adopted and that I had a physical resemblance to my mother. He suggested that she might have had an affair with someone else who was my actual father. Another old friend, a psychologist, sent me an e-mail: “So Brooklyn Jewish. How sad for you with your parents. It must have been hurtful.”