Origin Story #1

It was the summer of 1951...

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Origin Story #1

One of his earliest memories is on a sailboat in the Hudson River, on a day when the bottle green water sparkled as it churned. The emotion he associates with this early memory is frustration. He’d clutched his mother’s soft thigh in hopes of being swept up onto her lap to be cuddled and shielded from the wind. But she was not a reliable person. With her, you never knew. She did not keep you in mind after she’d turned away. In her favor, she was richly fragrant (the powdery money of Chanel No. 5), and her gleaming blond hair was piled atop her head like a satin pillow, but if you managed to crawl into her lap, you couldn’t stay there long.

“Donald, go bother your sisters. I have a headache in this wind,” his mother said, swatting his little hand off her leg. She did have that sense of humor. “Go be terrible in another room,” she’d sometimes say, or, “I can’t understand a word you little American boys say. Speak English English.”

He must have been four that day on the Hudson. He did not go to his sisters, who were sitting together at the prow, both gripping tightly to the pulpit with one hand, their bare white legs bent identically and shining with oil, their large dark sunglasses making them look like famous houseflies. He also did not go to his brothers, who were standing on either side of his father, their shirts dancing on their immobile backs tensed against the boat’s movements and their father’s words. The little boy was sure their father was saying something.

His father was hot fire and stabbing glares and words that made real things happen. He would twist a toddler’s arm in a way that made it look like he was only steadying you, gripping your upper arm so you didn’t toddle away. Sometimes he would pretend to lean in to whisper into one of his son’s ears only to bite that ear. Not hard enough to draw blood, and sometimes with his lips folded over his teeth, but hard enough to hurt like hell.

Pain—sudden, unexpected pain—always feels deserved. Why is that? Donald wondered if it worked the other way. If he inflicted pain on someone, would they be instantly filled with shame or at least the feeling that they had brought it upon themselves?

By the time he was ten, Donald was experienced in inflicting quick, unexpected pain on his classmates and siblings. Once he told his oldest sister “You remind me of Barbara Stanwyck but not as good-looking,” and she laughed. It was true and it stung, but it was also funny to not be as good-looking as an actress known in their house as the least good-looking movie star.

And that same year, he expanded his reach by biting his own father’s ear, much to his father’s surprise and admiration.

“Ha!” his father shouted before giving Donald a glare from beneath his scraggly eyebrows. But he didn’t retaliate, and he never hurt Donald again.

That the whole family was on a 45-foot sailing yacht on the Hudson with an impressive view of Manhattan was amusing, if you think about it now. They were not a sporty family, nor old money. They didn’t end up buying a yacht in the end, but if sailing was something rich Americans did, it was something his father was going to try without trepidation and without humor. They were rich Americans, after all. The captain was a chubby twenty-one-year-old named Chip Lehman, who had been sent down from Princeton that spring on academic probation.

Donald doesn’t remember much else about that day, but it did leave him with a lifelong distaste for yachts. He preferred dry land, where you weren’t stuck as if on a theater stage with whatever characters were in this scene of the play, a play written by some playwright somewhere and in the past.

He grew up preferring to glide at will between plays, backstage, out of site, or holed up somewhere where nobody could find him, doing whatever he wanted to do and not having to ever ask permission or wait on a mother to notice him or a father to bite or not bite him or sisters to tolerate him.