Alligator Candy

A Memoir

David Kushner

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781451682632
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

From award-winning journalist David Kushner, a reported memoir about family, survival, and the unwavering power of love—and the basis for the podcast Alligator Candy. David Kushner grew up in the early 1970s in the Florida suburbs. It was when kids still ran free, riding bikes and disappearing into the nearby woods for hours at a time. One morning in 1973, however, everything changed. David's older brother Jon biked through the forest to the convenience store for candy, and never returned.Every life has a defining moment, a single act that charts the course we take and determines who we become. For Kushner, it was Jon's disappearance—a tragedy that shocked his family and the community at large. Decades later, now a grown man with kids of his own, Kushner found himself unsatisfied with his own memories and decided to revisit the episode a different way: through the eyes of a reporter. His investigation brought him back to the places and people he once knew and slowly made him realize just how much his past had affected his present. After sifting through hundreds of documents and reports, conducting dozens of interviews, and poring over numerous firsthand accounts, he has produced a powerful and inspiring story of loss, perseverance, and memory. Alligator Candy is searing and unforgettable.

Part I

1

MY LAST MEMORY of my brother Jon was my most suspect. It was October 28, 1973, and we were on the sidewalk outside our house. I was a stocky four-year-old with a brown bowl haircut, and Jon, wiry and lean with wavy red hair, was eleven. Earlier that year, we’d moved to this small ranch house with a red Spanish-style roof in Tampa, Florida. It was the northern edge of the burgeoning suburbs, a new home on the newest street by the woods. For the kids in the neighborhood, the woods represented the great unknown, a thicket of freedom, a mossy maze of cypress and palms begging to be explored. Kids ventured into there on horseback, barefoot, on bikes. They had worn a path to the 7-Eleven convenience store across the woods, and that’s where Jon was heading this day.

Jon straddled his red bicycle, aiming for the trees. These were the Easy Rider years, and boys’ bikes were designed to resemble motorcycles, the kinds we’d see driven around town by Hells Angels. Jon’s bike had a long red banana-shaped seat, shiny chrome upright handlebars, and fat tires. For added effect, kids would tape a playing card in the back spokes to sound like a motorcycle when the tire spun. They’d lower their heads, extend their arms, and hunch their backs as they pedaled, visions of Evel Knievel in their minds.

My parents had given Jon a green ten-speed Schwinn for his birthday in September, but for some reason he decided to ride his old one this morning. Maybe he wanted something more rugged for the woods or just wanted to take one more spin on his old bike before retiring it. He wore a brown muscle shirt and cutoff blue jean shorts embroidered with a patch from his day camp, Camp Keystone. His sneakers were red, white, and blue Hush Puppies. I could tell by the way his feet bobbed on the pedals that he was anxious to leave.

“You’re going to forget,” I told him.

“I’m not,” he replied.

“I know you are.”

“I won’t.”

“Let me go with you.”

“You can’t. You’re too young.”

I wanted something specific from the store: Snappy Gator Gum. It wasn’t just gum, it was a toy. The gum came packed in the mouth of a plastic alligator head that opened and closed when you squeezed the neck. I had to have it and didn’t want anything to get in the way.

“What if it rains?” I asked Jon. I was thinking about an afternoon at our last house, when Jon had biked to a store shortly before a torrential Florida downpour. I remembered standing next to my mom in the kitchen when Jon called, and my mom telling me that we had to go pick him up in the station wagon because he was, as she said, “caught in the rain.” I hadn’t heard that phrase before, and it struck me as strange. I pictured Jon literally caught in the rain, stuck in suspended animation, hovering in a cage of falling drops.

“If it rains I’ll call,” he promised.

“Call me anyway when you get there,” I said, “so I can remind you what I want.”

“Fine.”

Jon grabbed the handlebars and pedaled quickly down the sidewalk toward the woods. I watched him ride off, still wishing I could go along. I never saw him again. It would take decades to unravel what happened. But my search would always lead me back to this spot.

2

LIKE MOST parents at the time, my father and mother, Gilbert and Lorraine, didn’t worry about Jon riding off into the woods alone. They were raising their children—Jon and me and our thirteen-year-old brother Andy—in a different age and a different spirit than the one in which I’m now raising my own.

It was the early seventies. The Age of Aquarius had given way to the “Free to Be You and Me” generation. We were unbuckled and unrestrained, free from seat belts or helmets or meticulously organized playdates. Our parents let us climb over the seats of our smoke-filled station wagon, puffing on candy cigarettes and, on road trips, sleeping way in the back. When we had a stretch of hours to play, they let us put the free in free time, wandering off to learn and explore and find adventures. They shared our innocence. They hadn’t learned to be afraid.

My dad had been fending for himself since his early days in the Bronx. He grew up poor with his mother, Sarah, and older sister, Esther, after his father, Abraham, died of malaria when he was nine. But my dad, who was born two and half months premature in 1933 and narrowly missed being smashed by a falling tree branch one day in his stroller, was a scrappy survivor. Weaned on stickball and Woody Guthrie, he was exacting but sensitive, musical and argumentative, a tall, bearded intellectual in black-rimmed glasses. He prided himself on being a tough New York Jew, born in the Bronx but raised for a time in Palestine, where his father worked as a contractor and his cousin was the second prime minister of Israel, Moshe Sharett.

Dad played folk songs in Greenwich Village and, skipping a grade, studied his way up the ranks of two of the city’s most competitive schools: the Bronx High School of Science, and City College of New York. It was at CCNY where he discovered anthropology, a burgeoning social science that was not just a career but also, as he often told me, a way of looking at the world, participating and observing. Perhaps it had something to do with how displaced he felt after his father suddenly died at sea. My dad told me he had no memories of his life before the year his father died. The traumatic loss had somehow erased his data. Anthropology allowed him to explore a fundamental question of his life: how the culture of a people, particularly oppressed peoples, survives.

One night in 1958 at a party while completing his master’s in anthropology at the University of Arizona, a young woman asked him for a light, and he decided he couldn’t survive without her. Her name was Lorraine, a raven-haired Minneapolitan with movie star looks who was passing through on her way to California. Rainy, as she was known by family and friends, was the youngest of three children of a successful attorney, Sam, and a homemaker, Ann.

She’d become enamored of jazz music and, while working at a jazz record distribution company, befriended many artists and musicians (including pianist Dave Brubeck, who dedicated his song “Sweet Lorraine” to her when he was playing in town). This world of music and adventure appealed to her more than the provincial life at the University of Minnesota and so, at the age of twenty-four, she left for California, where a friend and a new future awaited.

The wonderful thing about chasing freedom—whether on a bus to California or a bike through the woods—is that you never know what you will find. What my mother found, during a stop in Tucson to stay with her brother’s family, was my dad. Meeting him at the party, he seemed exotic yet familiar, a New York intellectual who knew both union songs and the best place in town for bagels. Now that he was in the Southwest, my dad had taken to faded jeans and turquoise belt buckles, the folk songs of Mexican singer Miguel Aceves Mejia, and looked like a beatnik cowboy. They fell hard, and quickly, harmonizing together as my dad strummed Pete Seeger songs on his nylon-stringed guitar. He confessed that a mutual friend had told him that if he ever met Rainy from Minneapolis, they would get married. Just a week after meeting, he got down on one knee and proposed.

Together they sang folk songs in living room hootenannies and, after moving to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where my dad was in graduate school, joined early civil rights sit-ins. Freedom and revolution were in the air, and Dad cut a single of the mountain ballad “Old Joe Clark” with a buddy under the name Mike and Gil from Chapel Hill. In 1960, while pregnant with her first child, my mother turned her activism to women’s rights—particularly, the rights of mothers and families in childbirth. At the time, mothers were being drugged in delivery rooms, their husbands banned from entering, and their babies born limp from the anesthetic. The doctors prided themselves on delivering quiet, albeit sedated, babies.

But my mom saw another way, when she read a book published in 1959 called Thank You, Dr. Lamaze. It described a technique—popularized by a French obstetrician, Fernand Lamaze, in Europe—that taught women to breathe their way through delivery in lieu of sedation. In America, it was still a relatively unknown and radical method.

For Andy’s birth, my mom refused anesthetic and breathed through the labor, just as she had taught herself to do. “I know what you’re doing,” her doctor told her. “Keep it up.” Empowered, she decided to take on the largely conservative birth industry—which favored speedy and predictable deliveries—by teaching women how to enjoy and experience on their own what at the time was called “natural childbirth.”

The next year, she and my dad were on a boat with one-year-old Andy, bound for Israel, where my dad had arranged to research and write his PhD dissertation on Jews who had emigrated from the Cochin region of India. They moved into a small, bare concrete home with an outhouse and no hot water. It was in Mesilat Zion, a moshav—a cooperative agricultural community. The Cochin embraced the young family like their own. For my parents, it was a magical time of new experiences and adventure. My father spent his days researching and writing; my mother, tending to Andy and visiting with relatives. There in Israel, they conceived their second child, Jonathan.

3

ANDY WAS only two years older than Jon, an age difference that, as most siblings know, is both a blessing and a curse. You’re close enough in age to be friends, sharing common references and interests. But you’re also close enough to be rivals. In the early years following Jon’s birth, however, the sibling rivalries were still far away. Instead, Andy and Jon enjoyed the playfulness of camaraderie amid the excitement of a young family still finding its roots.

At first, it seemed that the roots might lead them back to Tucson. After finishing his PhD research in Israel and teaching briefly at the University of Houston, my father had planned to return to complete his PhD at Chapel Hill. My dad had always been outspoken about his support of Israel and, while at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, butted heads with a powerful, anti-Israel professor. The next thing my dad knew, he was informed that he couldn’t come back. Devastated and angry, he told my mother he was considering giving up his pursuit of the PhD and just settling for his master’s. But my mother reassured him that he’d survive, and thrive. “You can’t quit,” she said. “You have to keep going. Don’t let this stop you.” So he didn’t. A mentor of his at the University of Arizona, Edward Spicer, encouraged him to finish his PhD there.

For Andy, the mid-1960s in Tucson were an idyllic time with Jon, a spry boy with fiery red hair inherited from my mother’s father, Sam. Though my dad was hard at work on his doctorate and writing his dissertation, he made a point to take the family out into the desert whenever he could, packing a lunch of fried chicken, made by my mother from a recipe she’d learned in Chapel Hill. Andy would always remember sitting on the rocks among the cacti at the Saguaro National Monument Park, dipping fried chicken in honey with Jon.

On the days that my dad was writing or teaching, my mom relished her life with her two boys. She took them to theme parks and to visit her brother’s family nearby. On Mother’s Day, Jon and Andy dressed her in a homemade paper crown and handed her a long paper staff with a star on top to hold. She taught Lamaze to local women when she could, and made the local papers when she was among the first in town to pick up what was then heralded as a new form of recreational exercise: jogging.

But, as with any struggling family, there were challenges. Money was tight. The future was unknown. My dad was prone to worrying about finances, and how he’d support his children and send them to college. He was also besieged with a rare form of severe headaches called cluster headaches, which struck at random and left one side of his face temporarily paralyzed as if he had had a stroke. The headaches lasted for around twenty minutes or so and defied medical treatment. He was told to avoid alcohol, though occasionally he downed a shot or two of his favorite mescal. Other than that, he just had to hope the headaches wouldn’t debilitate him at inopportune moments, and ride them out when they hit.

The stress would wear him down at times, and he could be strict, snapping with frustration over mounting bills or a messy house. He was never abusive, physically or mentally, but had that New Yorker trait of being able to scream at someone and then, minutes later, scream that he wasn’t screaming. My mother worried that sometimes my dad was too hard on the boys.

With his PhD soon complete, my father accepted a position at the State University of New York at Brockport, where I was born in 1968. My mother would never forget bringing me home in the middle of winter to see Jon and Andy’s eager faces pressed against the window. In the haste of delivery, they had forgotten to pack me baby clothes, so I arrived in a thin blue hospital gown. Eight years younger than Andy and six years younger than Jon, I became the family plaything. Andy and Jon delighted in toting me around, and scooting down the stairs beside me. My father would play songs on his guitar while my mom accompanied him on piano.

In the summer of 1969, my parents celebrated their fourteenth wedding anniversary. I have a small black-and-white picture of the five of us around the cake. My father, with a trim, dark beard and black-framed glasses, leans against my mother, who is holding me as I laugh while they blow out the candles. Andy and Jon are seated alongside, smiling. Jon’s hands are pressed together, midclap. Our family of five is complete.

4

IN 1970 my father accepted a job as professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, which had an up-and-coming anthropology department. The prospect of moving to Florida thrilled my parents. We were northern Jews making the pilgrimage south just like so many of our leathery forebearers. But, like many, they equated Florida with South Florida. As a kid, my mother had gone on vacation to Miami Beach with her family, and still cherished the memories of lounging on the white sands. My dad had an uncle Sid, who was a nightclub pianist in Miami Beach, performing under the less Semitic stage name Mickey O’Toole. The prospect of raising their three boys in the warmth—no snow to shovel, no ice to clear—delighted my parents, who hoped this might be the last in what had been a long string of moves.

But it didn’t take long after they arrived in Tampa to realize this wasn’t a city of liberal New Yorkers. While looking at one home to buy, they noticed a grimy toilet in the garage. The realtor told them it was for the “shvarzte” help—a word that had not lost its fashion here despite this being 1970. A popular restaurant chain in town was called Sambo’s. The walls inside had paintings of the restaurant’s mascot, Sambo, a little black boy in a watermelon field.

Though steeped in Cuban history and billed as the “cigar capitol of the world,” Tampa was still rural, and felt more like Georgia than Florida. It represented the paradox of the Sunshine State: the farther north you go, the more southern it gets. People drove pickup trucks in Tampa, spoke with southern accents, chewed tobacco, and bought rusty tools at flea markets. The Florida State Fair, held in nearby Plant City since 1904, wasn’t just an annual diversion, it represented a way of life. The Tampa Bay area was America’s capital of carnies and circus performers. Sarasota had the headquarters for the famous Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus, and Gibsonton was the year-round home for the largest concentration of self-described sideshow “freaks” on the planet, such as Monkey Girl and Lobster Boy—the latter of whom, a man born with clawlike hands and feet, later became notorious for murdering his daughter’s fiancé.

As my parents were finding their way in this new city, they soon faced a new challenge of their own. Something seemed off with Jon. Though playful, bright, and affectionate, he seemed to have trouble processing information. He found it difficult to understand basic instructions and sometimes jumbled words. One time at synagogue, the rabbi posed a question to the children, and Jon gave a nonsensical response that left others feeling uncomfortable.

My brother’s struggles created tension between my parents. My dad put a high value on intellectual prowess. As someone who had used his brain to pull himself out of the Bronx, he feared what might be in store for Jon—especially when Andy and I were doing fine. What Jon needed, they agreed, was the right school. But after looking around town at different prospects, my parents grew discouraged when they went to one place where the students were in uniforms and being ordered to sit up straight. They thought this would be too much for Jon, who they felt needed more nurturing and support. And that’s just what they found when they drove up to Independent Day School, a small private school on the north side of town.

IDS, as it was nicknamed, seemed hatched from a hippie dream. There were long-haired kids sitting in trees, and teachers wearing faded jeans and beards that rivaled my dad’s—which now hung down low on his chest alongside his long dark hair. The entire school, which ran from kindergarten through seventh grade, had fewer than a hundred students. The campus spread over eight leafy acres of ponds, creeks, and cypress and citrus trees. A former orange grove, IDS teemed with wild peacocks—an especially surreal sight in the suburbs. The birds had been brought to the area by a farmer in the 1920s to ward off trespassers. In a promotional brochure, IDS cheekily referred to the birds as the school’s “watchdogs.”

Instead of the usual square brick buildings, classes at IDS took place in a half dozen circular brown pods and, for the sixth- and seventh-graders, a giant yellow geodesic dome in the fashion of Buckminster Fuller. The Dome, as it was nicknamed, and the “Domies” inside, represented the pantheon of IDS-ness. Students aspired to the Dome and the day that they would become Domies. Walking inside the three-story-high building felt like entering a moon colony of Deadheads. Everyone seemed to have long, straight hair—the men and women, boys and girls—and some shade of bell-bottoms with patches of peace signs and rainbows. Instead of orderly desks and chairs, the room was a jumble of metal folding chairs and wood-paneled tables.

Inside the Dome, a colorful banner read “Happiness ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright