Chapter 1

The canvass: A hospital in Miami Beach. My mother in stirrups. My mother, a decent, learned lady, was wailing in anguish. Her svelte frame contorting. Her curly, short brown hair sweaty and matted to her scalp. Her almond eyes flashing fire red.

Me: Like Rosemary’s Baby. I’m unnatural. I should never have existed. I’m a demon. Injected like a heroin needle.

You may balk at this, but there was an unholy conception. A train of ghosts and pool of blood.

I emerged from my mother’s pussy, on an unseasonably cold December Miami Beach morning. Labor went through the night where a light dusting of snow caked the swaying palm trees. The blast of polar air trumpeting my arrival.

I was born into a puddle of shit, diarrhea, and bloody mucosa and placenta as my poor mother screamed, and the nurses performed reconnaissance.

A luscious Latina, of Cuban or Colombian eugenics, her voice full of diphthongs, passed forceps to the Jewish doctor, son of a holocaust survivor, and he poked and prodded in between my mother’s legs, into her vaginal lacuna, and with skill, unearthed me, pulled me, slimy, bloody and shit-stained into a slimy, bloody and shit-stained planet Earth.

My father, the bearded man, was berserk, snapping photos. A biologist, a U of Miami professor, he documented every moment of the birth, scientifically, pictorially, hoping to commemorate and eliminate any degree of evanescence.

Of course, nowadays this might be documented on social media, posted about, heralded to the world, accumulating tons of endorphin inducing “likes.”

But this was 1977.

The event was on film and glued into a photo album. A laminated, plastic one!

Those photo albums, now, seem like tubers growing on a potato...

I was a fat and healthy baby. Placed into a maternity ward, farm of babies, screaming, crying, in rows, in the tabernacle, not knowing what Earth had in store for us. Not knowing why we’d been expelled from the warmth of the womb. Not knowing if we’d grow to be millionaires, rapists, teachers, mass murderers, engineers, actors, accountants, lawyers, football players, homeless, veterans, drug dealers, Presidents of the USA, or janitors.

All our various fates. Our alleles. The rows of cherubs, cute as koalas. Us, on the barrier island of Miami Beach, Collins Avenue.

Us, innumerable souls, meticulously placed in oblong boxes, our first box of life, well, second after the one we’d emerged from, and we were given ducal care.

The nurse who’d feed me, a wraith, her olfactory senses, being around all those babies, daily, had to be finely tuned or non-existent.

I imagine her loving care. Her touching us with tenderness. Immutable, as our mothers recovered, got their vaginas stitched up, slept off the pain, trauma and excitement, joy of childbirth.

2

My father was a pharaoh. In a past life. My first memory is a foggy recollection of him taking me to a baseball game. Orioles versus Yankees, spring training, somewhere in Florida.

When I was a fetus, I moved with my parents, from NYC to Miami Beach, where I grew up, because my Pops had gotten a research position, professorship at the University of Miami.