Skinny White Freak

By Paul Haddad

Los Angeles, 1978. Skateboarding and tanned bods rule the SoCal landscape. Compared to his groovy peers, 13-year-old Adam Lipsitz is an outcast. He is too skinny, too pale, too brainy. To make matters worse, just as his parents are separating, he’s cast off to Kamp Kickapoo, where he faces the prospect of being tormented by a bully named &

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newhalltown
• Release date: Nov 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780786755592

Book preview

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Table of Contents

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Acknowledgments

About the Author

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1.

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When I was 13 years old, a book came out called If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? I was too young to understand much of the adult humor in that best-seller from 1978. But I vividly recall the funny drawing on the front cover of a family staring into a huge bowl of cherries. One of the family members had fallen face-first into the cherries and couldn’t get out. Even though I didn’t know what the book was about, the title and its cover spoke volumes to me. Saddled with a gangly physique, premature acne and a classic case of middle-child syndrome, I found myself lurching and stumbling into the dreaded teen years – the sad-sack kid who had fallen into the abyss of cherries, which were no doubt bruised and moldy and infested with fruit flies.

Nineteen seventy-eight was in fact a bad year not just for me, but all of Los Angeles. A couple of serial killers nicknamed The Hillside Stranglers had the entire city quaking in its flip-flops. Mandatory student busing drove a wedge between parents and the L.A. school district. And a terrible brushfire wiped out dozens of homes in Mandeville Canyon, just over the ridgeline from our modest ranch house in Encino, a suburb in the San Fernando Valley. I remember a plume of thick black smoke smothering the sky against the flames’ candy-corn red glow. It reminded me of an erupting volcano. Dad didn’t sleep for a week, parking himself on our rooftop with a garden hose and a cooler full of beer. Thankfully, the fire never jumped the ridge.

The dark undertow that tugged at the City of Angels seemed to foreshadow my own personal demons, which plumbed new depths during that bummer of a summer. But before I get into that, it’s important to understand something about me. You see, I suffer from an acute physical disorder known as paleface (not to be confused with the Native American word for Caucasians). Like the name says, a paleface is someone with an extremely fair complexion. My chalk-white condition was inherited from my pasty-skinned father, Ben Lipsitz, a rocket scientist at Rocketaire Laboratories, where his first job was to help design engines that propelled astronauts to the moon. Nowadays, everyone worries about the sun’s damaging effects on our skin. You can be pale yet still be cool. But in those groovy days in Southern California, nothing was more important to an L.A. boy or girl than achieving a sun-kissed tan that rivaled the plastic brown tones of a Ken or Malibu Barbie doll.

Add in my boney frame, big freckles, greasy hair, and stiff-collared shirts from Sears, and I was your classic pencil-necked dweeb. Making matters worse was the fact that both my older brother and younger sister were spared my affliction. Mitchell and Megan were products of my mom’s natural olive complexion. They sported golden, SoCal tans straight out of a Coppertone sunscreen ad. Mitch had the added advantage of being blessed with a naturally muscular V-frame at his 15 years. An avid skateboarder and born leader, his was a world I could only imagine from afar – tube-top girlfriends, puka shells, Hang Ten T-shirts, feathered blond hair, and the perennial fat brush in the back pocket of his strategically torn, flared Levis.

As the youngest sibling, Megan was not as stylish as Mitchell, but even at 11 years she wasn’t above showing off her superiority over me due to her naturally bronze bod. Let’s compare tans was a favorite game of hers, where I had to line my arm up to hers, then sit there patiently as she expressed utter shock that someone could live with themselves with such pale skin! I wasn’t so much a brother as I was her own personal freak show. I never went so far as wearing long sleeves to cover my offensive arms, but I did make a point of only wearing long pants in order to cover my white legs, even when temperatures regularly soared above a hundred degrees. Discomfort, I figured, was far easier to live with than ridicule.

Sometime during the Bicentennial summer of ‘76, a new family moved in next store – the Grunbergs. Their kids, Dustin and Hope, were about my brother’s and my ages, respectively. The Grunberg kids’ sole mission in life was to have the darkest, most evenly tanned skin in all of Encino. And so the Grunbergs spent almost every waking second at home laying out by their swimming pool, contorting their limbs in just-so positions in order to equally distribute the sun’s rays. My siblings admired the great lengths they went to achieve the perfect tan, and looked up to them as sort of role models. They eagerly accepted Dustin and Hope’s invitations to attend frequent tan parties, where all the kids from the neighborhood lounged poolside on reflective silver blankets like so much sizzling bacon. Attendees achieved instant membership in the Grunbergs’ self-proclaimed West Valley Tanning Club, which, as far as I could tell, included Five Commandments of Tanning to which all pledged their allegiance.

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Holed up in my bedroom like some misunderstood cave troll, I tried to convince myself I was better off playing with our fat tabby cat Solomon and reading comic books. Who wanted to be subjected to Dustin’s militant commands anyway? The guy had set an egg-timer to go off every 15 minutes, followed by instructions for everyone to change positions. All afternoon, my room was filled with the odd strains of Bing! Turn! Bing! Turn! Bing! Turn!

And so it was with some dread when I opened up an invitation from the Grunbergs in June of ’78 to attend a backyard birthday party for Hope. On the bottom of the invite they had scrawled: BRING YOUR SWIMSUIT!!! To this day, no three words in the English language ever struck greater fear. Getting out of the party was not an option – even Dad was going, and he never went to these things. Once there, I would only look like the odd-man out if I didn’t join the others in the pool. I could claim a bad head cold, but how many times could I keep using that as an excuse?

On the day of Hope’s party, my family and I walked over to the Grunbergs with a carton of Neapolitan ice cream and a gift for Hope. Mitchell and Megan were already in their swimsuits, and wasted no time tumbling into the pool, merging with a sea of coffee-colored flesh in games of volleyball and Marco Polo. I was still fully clothed, wearing my trunks under my pants. Maybe if I stalled long enough, everyone would get bored and wander out of the pool for cake and ice cream.

Hope spotted me. Hey Adam, what’re you waiting for? Come on in! I always held a secret crush on Hope. Sure, she had a weird tanning obsession, but she was no different from any other Valley girl in that respect. She was one of the few girls I knew who didn’t avoid me like a leper, even laughing at my jokes. It was always a fake laugh, but I appreciated it anyway. Now I was torn – do I risk disappointing Hope, who might harbor a crush on me, by not going in? If I played it cool, I could at least retain my dignity, along with any future fantasies – however outlandish – of us going steady. On the other hand, if I just went ahead and took the plunge, I would show I don’t care what others think, and that in itself takes courage. Girls dig courage... or so I gathered from DC Comics.

I took a deep breath. Just do it and maybe everyone’ll stop thinking of you as a freak. They’re so busy playing, they probably won’t even notice. After exhaling, I wandered over to a chaise lounge near the screen door and casually removed my sneakers. I had barely pulled my socks off when someone’s voice cut through the air.

Whoooooaaa!

I looked up. Dustin was standing next to me, dripping water and eating a Grape Popsicle. His lips were purple.

Your feet, he marveled. They’re so... pale. You look like a ghost. He said it with drop-dead astonishment, as if he really had seen an apparition. I sighed. If he thought my feet were pale, wait’ll he got a load of the rest of me. The mere thought that I had to expose My Royal Whiteness under Dustin’s prying eyes froze me in my tracks. Even then, I couldn’t figure out who would be more traumatized – me or Dustin.

Well....? said Dustin, catching a chunk of Popsicle before it hit the ground. You goin’ swimming or what?

As I slipped my shirt over my head, I made sure to keep my arms as close to my chest as possible to make my rail-thin body appear fuller than it was. I could swear the glare from my torso was casting a sheen on Dustin’s face. Next to come off were my long pants. Stripped down to my swim trunks, I was now standing naked unto the world in all my pallid glory. Dustin had the look of a guy watching a TV show – eyes glazed over, simultaneously mesmerized and detached.

I am so glad I’m not you, he muttered absently, gnawing on his Popsicle stick.

Mrs. Grunberg stepped outside with several boxes of pizza. Who wants Shakey’s? The kids squealed their approval and scrambled out of the water. Great. Now I would have to stand around in my swimsuit like all the other kids while we ate lunch. Putting my clothes back on in 95 degree heat would only draw more attention.

Dustin hollered to his sister as she dashed by. Hey Hope, check out how white Adam is.

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Hope stopped in her tracks to look me over. A circle of kids gathered behind her. Tilting her head like a puppy, she thrust her index finger onto my rib-lined belly, pushing down with some force before removing it. She was looking for the white circle that forms when you press on tan skin. Needless to say, there was no mark. Maybe I really was a ghost. I certainly felt like one, because people started talking about me as if I were invisible.

Do you think he’s an albino?

Nah, albinos have pink eyes.

I bet his butt is as white as his body.

He’s so skinny. He looks like one of those concentration camp people.

He needs to come to our tan parties.

Can we see your butt?

After everyone had their turn poking and prodding the human Petri dish, only one person hadn’t said anything yet. She was just standing there, taking in the spectacle the way one weighs a piece of modern art. All eyes turned to birthday girl Hope, purveyor of pigmentation, presider of perspiration, Ra goddess of the West Valley Tanning Club.

She shrugged. I’ve seen worse. Then she went over and got pizza.

2.

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, it never occurred to me that my skin wasn’t predisposed to tan like my siblings’ or my neighbors’. I had come to believe what everybody else was saying – that I simply wasn’t trying hard enough. Even before the incident at Hope’s party, I went to extreme measures to achieve nice, even tans with spectacularly failing results. My preferred technique was to find the most shadeless spot in our yard, burn my skin to a crisp and endure a couple days of humiliating sunburn. Then, magically, I would watch my burn turn to tan, only to follow with a week of blistering and peeling before shedding a layer of skin like a human snake. It was a vicious, painful cycle. But as a popular gym commercial maintained at the time: no pain, no gain.

Of course, it wasn’t always possible to find time to lay out, especially during the school year, but I had this figured out too. Many nights when I took a break from homework, I headed out to our garage when no one was looking. There we had a homemade heat lamp that one of Dad’s co-workers made out of spare rocket parts. The enterprising engineer had given it to my father when he was laid up with a ruptured Achilles tendon in the early ‘70s. The idea was that since Dad couldn’t always make his way outside, the heat lamp would give him the sensation of being under the sun and ward off depression. The lamp didn’t just emit warmth, it was actually a primitive tanning machine, emitting a Star Trek red glare on the person who lay underneath it. That seemed good enough for me. Cranking the machine on high, I stuck my face and body parts under the cancerous rays with full abandon, only pulling away once the burn of cooked flesh became unbearable. The results scared women and children. Literally. I remember walking into my seventh grade homeroom class and Mrs. Weinstock and the class gasping at my beet-red face. Convinced I had scarlet fever, my teacher told me to see the school nurse immediately. I told her I was fine, just a little sunburn. She then called the nurse herself to tell her she had a student who was not only ill, but delirious.

Something else happened after weeks under that cancer machine. The freckles on my face started to multiply. Faint freckles that already existed suddenly became darker, including one giant dot smack dab in the middle of my nose that made me look like Howdy Doody, the 1950s marionette. I was so disgusted by Super Freckle that one night I completely annihilated it under several bloody tracks carved by a thumb-tack. My hope was that when the skin healed, the freckle would be gone. The next day, as I walked into class with a giant round Band-Aid over my sun-fried nose, Mrs. Weinstock stopped herself from saying something. She didn’t have to. Her face said it all: Hopeless.

Unnerved by the scary Rocketaire contraption, I eventually migrated to a more experimental route to capture that elusive tan. I had always been a sucker for special offers found in the back pages of comic books, whether it was a box of Sea Monkeys or magic playing cards. No matter how many times I was duped by the product – which was always – such ads cast a spell over me by their unlimited promise to revolutionize my