My parents grew up believing in the boogie man. For both my mother and my father, that faceless monster lurking under the bed and in the shadows trying to kill them was no fictitious character from a Grimm fairy tale. He was an all-too-grim reality.
My grandmother used to tell us stories of being stalked like prey, in the early days of Nazi-occupied Vienna. She told us how shrieks of horror and gun shots would punctuate the eerie silence of the empty dim streets. When the shrieks got louder, she explained, she would grab my father, then four years old, and his older brother and hide in the closet. All they could do was wait and pray that theirs would not be the house chosen that night. They were lucky. Many of their friends, and my relatives, were not. This was my father’s childhood.
My mother’s boogie man was not from Vienna. My grandparents on her side of the family emigrated from Russia during the pogroms, eruptions of anti-Semitic violence that lasted for decades. The ceaseless terror led to the deaths of thousands of Jews and the diaspora of millions. My grandparents came to Brooklyn afraid of everything, trusting no one. This was my mother’s childhood.
I was a young boy of 7 or 8 years old when a dark force dragged my mother out onto the mean New York streets. The anxiety that had always lurked just beneath the surface of her skin had blossomed into full-blown terror. Threats were everywhere. Everyone was coming to take her away. They called it paranoid schizophrenia. I know it was the boogie man. She ran from him, the monster chasing her soul, the Golem from the pogroms, until the day she died.
That boogie man had lurked in the shadows of my own childhood memories. In the wake of my mother's death, he seized on my despair and came for me as well. As dark as my mother's days were while she was alive, there was always a sliver of hope, even while she slept on park benches and subway grates, that she may one day find the escape door out of her hell and experience love and joy again, and we may experience being mother and son again. With her death, that door had permanently shut. And with that undeniable end of hope came a chill that set in in me, a chill that held me captive for endless days. And with that deep chill came an endless string of sleepless nights, until dreams intruded upon my waking reality as the two states blurred beyond distinction, and the tales told by my relatives of the anti-Semitic horrors inflicted upon our family and our people became indistinguishable from my own memories.
I felt at times, during the darkest moments of my grief, that I was not only losing touch with my sanity, but my humanness as well. I saw the hairs on my arm and torso grow thick one night, until my entire body was covered in blue fur. In this animal space, I felt a rumbling in the pit of my stomach crawl up my chest until it escaped out of me as a guttural wail. Once more, the rumbling came, and once more I wailed in primal agony. I began to breathe deeply and rapidly, and with each exhale came another howl. At first, the sound was stilted and crude, but over time it took on more melodic tones until I had erupted in full song. I noticed, as I sang, that my breathing began to slow, and become deeper. I noticed, as well, that, to my great surprise and profound relief, I was feeling calmer and more grounded than I had in weeks…perhaps years.
I sat on the edge of my bed and rejoiced in my newfound stillness. The pall that had hung over me for what felt like an eternity was clearly gone, replaced suddenly and shockingly by a mild euphoria. I did not know if that boogie man would ever come for me again but I was grateful that, for at least one night, by virtue of some mysterious sonic alchemy, I was able to convert my grief into grace and sing him back into the darkness.