Lost in Place: Growing Up Absurd in Suburbia

208 Pages·2012·0.96 MB·English

by  Salzman Mark

MARK SALZMAN’s
ACCLAIM FOR
LOST IN PLACE
“Mark Salzman’s strange but wonderful addiction to kung fu makes Lost
in Place come alive.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Mark Salzman provides us with an entertaining memoir about growing
up different in suburban Connecticut.… He has produced a surprisingly
funny and warm-hearted book.”
—Star Ledger (Newark, N.J.)
“[Lost in Place] is funny and all of it is instructive, especially if you are a
parent or a curious, idealistic teenager.”
—Detroit Free Press
“Salzman’s story is refreshing in depicting the small triumphs of middle-
class life and how even a gifted guy had to struggle.”
—People
“This memoir … is funny and far off the beaten path.”
—Ann Arbor News
“Mark Salzman has written a memoir of his youth that is extraordinary
in its details and evocation of adolescent emotions.”
—Playboy

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JULY 1996
Copyright © 1995 by Mark Salzman
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in
the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and
simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in
hardcover by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1995.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and Gower Publishing Limited for
permission to reprint excerpts from Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu, translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane
English. Copyright © 1972 by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English. Rights throughout the British
Commonwealth are controlled by Gower Publishing Limited. Reprinted by permission of Alfred
A. Knopf, Inc. and Gower Publishing Limited.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the
Random House edition as follows:
Salzman, Mark.
Lost in place / Mark Salzman.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Salzman, Mark—Childhood and youth.
2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography.
3. Ridgefield (Conn.: Town)—Social life and customs.
I. Title.
PS3569.A4627Z473 1995
813′.54—dc20 95-7847
eISBN: 978-0-30781426-5
Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/
v3.1
Although this is a work of nonfiction and represents the whole,
unsullied, objective truth, I am advised of the slim chance that
some of the people described in this book might remember
things differently. To accommodate that absurd possibility, all
of the names except for those of my immediate family have
been changed.
The world is a hell of a place, but the universe is a fine thing.
—Edwin Arlington Robinson
It has been asserted that we are destined to know the dark beyond
the stars before we comprehend the nature of our own
journey … but we also know that our inward destination lies
somewhere a long way past the reef of the Sirens, who sang of
knowledge but not of wisdom.
—Loren Eiseley
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
Dedication
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
1

W
hen I was thirteen years old I saw my first kung fu movie, and before
it ended I decided that the life of a wandering Zen monk was the life for
me. I announced my willingness to leave East Ridge Junior High School
immediately and give up all material things, but my parents did not
share my enthusiasm. They made it clear that I was not to become a
wandering Zen monk until I had finished high school. In the meantime I
could practice kung fu and meditate down in the basement. So I
immersed myself in the study of Chinese boxing and philosophy with the
kind of dedication that is possible only when you don’t yet have to make
a living, when you are too young to drive and when you don’t have a
girlfriend.
First I turned our basement into what I thought a Buddhist temple
should look like. I shoved all the junk to one side, marked off boundaries
with candles and set up a shrine on a coffee table. I outfitted the shrine
with objects from a cookware shop, the only store in town that carried
Oriental gifts: a bamboo placemat, a package of chopsticks, a sake cup,
which I turned into an incense burner, and a plastic Chinese kitchen
deity with the character for “tasty” painted on his stomach. Next to the
shrine I placed my sacred texts: the World Book Encyclopedia volumes
containing entries for China, Buddhism and Taoism and Bruce Tegner’s
book Kung Fu & Tai Chi, seventh in a series of manuals by Mr. Tegner, a
crew-cut ex-marine and our country’s most prolific authority on hand-to-
hand combat.
Back in those pre–smoke alarm days I was able to burn as much
incense as I wanted, and as far as I was concerned a kung fu temple
wasn’t a kung fu temple if you could see more than five feet in front of
you. Sadly, the only place in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where one could
buy incense was a store called Ye Olde Head Shop, which specialized in
black-light posters and rolling papers, and their incense display didn’t
feature traditional Asian scents like sandalwood or frankincense. Ye Olde
Head Shop carried Apricot, Watermelon, Passion Fruit and something
called Black Love, which came packaged in a long cardboard pouch
illustrated with the silhouette of a naked man and woman, both with
huge Afro haircuts, having sex. I did not dare ask the brooding hippie
behind the counter for a pack of Black Love or even the more temperate-
sounding Passion Fruit, so I stuck with the sexually neutral varieties,
which did remind one of apricot and watermelon when you sniffed the
box but as soon as you lit the cones smelled like burning cardboard.
There were other details. I needed an outfit for my training sessions,
but the kung fu uniforms advertised in the martial arts magazines were
too expensive. I settled on dyeing my green pajamas black, but the dye
did not fix properly and my uniform came out an olive-purple. Tying it
with my father’s red bathrobe sash, I looked like an eggplant wrapped
for Christmas. Trickiest of all, however, was what to do about my hair.
Real Zen masters shave their heads, as anyone who has watched the
Kung Fu series on television knows. My father had never liked my long
hair, and had often said that he wished he could shave it all off, so I
went directly to him and asked if he’d like to have a wish come true. His
response was to raise one eyebrow, which I understood from experience
to be a no.
As an alternative I ordered something called a Surprise Bald Head Wig
from the back of a comic book. If, as advertised, it was good enough to
surprise one’s friends, I figured it would be good enough for my
basement training sessions. When the wig arrived by mail four long
weeks later, it turned out to be a disappointment. It was floppy, dimpled
and a sickly gray color. I modified it by painting the reverse side of it
with pink and orange Magic Markers, then powdering it with something
out of my mother’s cosmetics drawer. Eventually the wig did take on a
fleshy appearance, but then I had to figure out what to do with all the
hair my father had insisted on protecting, which stuck out from under
the back and sides and hung down over my shoulders. My little brother,
Erich, two years younger than I am, happened to wander into the
bathroom before I had worked this problem out and declared that I
looked more like Ebenezer Scrooge than “any of those bald guys on TV
who wear dresses and kick people.” My sister, Rachel, two years younger
than Erich, thought I looked like a giant fetus. Not everyone felt about
kung fu the way I did.
In the end I scrunched the extra hair up into a ball and stuffed it under
the back of the wig. When I looked in the mirror I saw a determined
young acolyte prepared to go through anything to achieve physical and
spiritual mastery, but my parents, catching glimpses of me when I had to
run upstairs to the bathroom, saw something else. The lumpy powdered
head, the purple pajamas and the clouds of smoke that appeared behind
me whenever I opened the basement door convinced them that I was
headed for a career as a finger-cymbal player in airport lobbies.
That first summer of kung fu, while our family was in western Ohio
visiting my mother’s parents, Bruce Lee died. We were all having
breakfast in the kitchen and my grandmother was calling my grandfather
a “BB-brain” for having burned the toast yet again.
“Hold on,” my father said, interrupting them and turning up the sound
on their old black-and-white kitchen television set. It was on a tray with
wheels so my grandmother could watch the news while she peeled
potatoes, shucked corn, kneaded pie crust dough, washed the dishes or
ironed clothes. “Look at this, Mark,” my father said.
“The King of kung fu is dead at thirty-three!” the local newscaster
announced. “Asia’s biggest movie star died under mysterious
circumstances in an actress’s apartment in Hong Kong, on the eve of the
release of his first American feature film. Here is a clip from one of his
earlier movies.” It was the famous scene from The Chinese Connection
where Bruce jumps straight up into the air and kicks a wooden sign to
pieces. That sign, a version of which actually did hang at the entrance to
a park in foreign-occupied Shanghai earlier this century, had warned,
NO
. That one scene made Bruce Lee a symbol of Chinese
DOGS OR CHINESE ALLOWED
national pride overnight. It didn’t matter that his character got executed
by a firing squad at the end of the movie; the scene where he
demolished the sign brought millions of ecstatic Chinese filmgoers to
their feet and rocketed Bruce Lee to massive superstardom in Asia.
I couldn’t believe he was dead. I went out to our car and sat in it all
day, crying. My father felt so sorry for me he offered to take me all the
way to Dayton to a drive-in movie theater that, by coincidence, was