Following Ezra, page 15
Cartoon characters don’t deal in subtle nuance, and Ezra has no trouble reading Elmer Fudd’s scowl, or the frightened eyes of Nemo, or the angry, creased forehead of Homer Simpson. So it’s no surprise that he would rather spend time looking at the faces he understands. (On occasions when I’m frustrated with him, he often reacts by trying to convince me to change my facial expression before anything else: “Abba, your eyebrows are down! Put them back up!”—as if altering my features will instantly change my mood, or his consequences.)
Besides the visual appeal, there’s an auditory factor to Ezra’s attraction to animation. He often flees from ordinary social exchanges because he has such difficulty deciphering the spoken language he hears. The words become garbled as his brain struggles to interpret them, causing such anxiety that he retreats and avoids conversation. At the movies, he can take in dialogue without anyone expecting him to respond—and he can play a DVD over and over until he understands the words and keep listening until he commits dialogue to memory. That explains why for several years of his childhood it’s almost impossible to engage Ezra in dialogue, but he will routinely spout movie lines like the one from The Emperor’s New Groove, “Llama? He’s supposed to be dead!” or another from Toy Story—“Mrs. Potato Head! Mrs. Potato Head!”—that usually put him into hysterics, for reasons I cannot fathom.
One morning when he’s four, Ezra crawls into our bed and starts to tell a story. It’s an elaborate tale about Simba, the patriarch from The Lion King. I start asking him questions and for once he reacts not by shutting down and fleeing, but by answering.
“Where does Simba live, Ezra?” I ask.
“He lives in the pride lands. Yeah, he’s going to run in the pride lands.”
“And then what?”
“And he’s going to see his friend Nala.”
“Good! And then what?”
“They’re going to play, yeah, and then they’ll find Zazu.”
The exchange continues, leaving Shawn and me surprised at his newfound ability to tell a story spontaneously, until he concludes:
“That’s the end of our story. If you’d like to hear it again, just turn the tape over.”
As he grows and develops, his mental catalog of movie dialogue snippets provides the basis for an additional form of communication within our family. After Ezra repeats a line of Disney dialogue a few dozen times, the other boys are first amused, then annoyed, and then they join in, reciting the dialogue back to him: “Three days? What about lunches?” they say, mimicking Winnie the Pooh trapped in Rabbit’s hole. Or the would-be superhero’s bit from The Incredibles: “Where is my supersuit?” The lines take on lives of their own, like a joke told so many times it gets old, and then absurdly funny. What started as Ezra’s involuntary tics morph into a nonsensical secret language that our children share with one another.
Of course, while movie snippets are better than silence, they are hardly real conversations. When we ask his doctor for advice about steering Ezra away from the habit, she suggests simply to label the practice movie talk and discourage it.
“Oh, that’s movie talk,” I say the tenth time he repeats the same line from Cars instead of answering my question. “I don’t want to hear movie talk. I want to hear Ezra talk.”
Sometimes that works. Sometimes it frustrates him. Sometimes he catches himself in midsentence: “Oh, that’s movie talk. You don’t want to hear that?” he says, half asking.
I often think that, given the choice, my son would opt to live in a land of animation, free from the fetters and demands of living, breathing human beings. In some ways, he already does. More than once I have happened into Ezra’s bedroom late at night to put clean laundry in the closet or straighten up, and caught him talking in his sleep—to characters from whatever movie is preoccupying him that week. Around age twelve, when he starts remembering and describing his dreams, he tells me one morning he dreamed the night before about finding himself alone at the home of some family friends late at night, somehow charged with the chore of cleaning up the place before they returned home.
“Then there was a knock on the door,” he says.
“Who was it?” I ask.
“It was Homer and Marge Simpson.”
I imagine that would delight Ezra. No, he says, the Simpsons created a huge mess and left Ezra to clean it up.
“Do you have lots of dreams with animated characters?” I ask.
“I think so,” he says. “Most nights.”
I make efforts to join Ezra in celebrating his beloved animated world, to build a relationship based on what he values. It’s not always easy. Often, my attempts—even those that seemed most benign and simple—fail.
When Ezra is six, I take him to Disneyland. It’s a hot August day; Ami will be visiting another theme park with his day camp, and Noam is still too young for the more dizzying theme park rides, so just the two of us head for Anaheim, about forty-five minutes from home. It’s his first visit, and my first in many years. Since Ezra is so captivated by Disney movies (at the moment, he’s lingering in his Winnie the Pooh phase), I am certain that he will revel in encountering a supersize Mickey Mouse wandering the streets of the Magic Kingdom. As we barrel down Interstate 5 through dull, industrial stretches of Orange County in the blue Camry, I envision him posing with Goofy and Pluto and goggling at his beloved Pooh friends in full, gigantic costume. I wonder how I will ever pry him away once he comes across these larger-than-life, colorful creatures.
I don’t need to worry about that. He devours the thrill rides, particularly the Mad Tea Party, where he chooses a red cup and together we grasp the circular handle, spinning ourselves until I am on the verge of vomiting and Ezra looks calmer and happier than I have seen him in months. (Spinning always has a soothing effect on him, magically lulling his body.) When the ride finally slows down and the cup stops spinning, I feel relieved and Ezra begs for more.
“Again! Again!”
It’s when we head to Disneyland’s Toontown section, where the costumed Disney characters walk about, that I am taken by surprise. From a distance, I spot a line of children waiting to visit with Mickey Mouse. An expression of worry flashes across Ezra’s face.
“Come on, Ezra,” I say. “He wants to meet you!”
We’re still a hundred feet from the five-foot rodent when Ezra catches sight of the protruding black ears and the gigantic, eager eyes. Just at the moment when I expect him to break into a run—forward—he stops walking, plants his sneakers, and begins backing up.
“I don’t want to . . .” he says.
“Of course you do!” I say. “That’s why we came.”
“No!” he insists, then fully turns his body, walking quickly in the opposite direction.
In another part of the park, I spot his favorites, Tigger and Winnie the Pooh—vivid bursts of bright orange and golden yellow fabric—signing autographs for a crowd of tykes.
“Wanna go see Pooh?” I ask.
Ezra looks as nauseous as I felt on the teacups ride. The same boy who just minutes earlier smiled and laughed through Splash Mountain, with its terrifying waterfall plunge, suddenly looks panicked and meek, eyeing the gigantic cartoon characters as if they are armed thugs.
Witnessing how utterly unsettling the encounter is becoming, I grab Ezra’s hand and together we scurry away through the crowd, moving on to the next ride. At Disneyland, though, it is difficult to avoid large costumed creatures. We’re walking together on a quiet pathway near the Sleeping Beauty Castle when suddenly another one appears from behind a building. It’s the Beast from Beauty and the Beast—seven feet of artificial fur, protruding horns, and terrifying fangs. Ezra reacts by simply slapping his palms over his eyes, crying “No! No!”
He’s had enough.
On the drive home, I contemplate how I could have been so wrong—why the parts I expected to be his favorites turned out to be nearly torturous for him. Perhaps what draws him to his animated movies is the retreat they provide him from reality, which assaults his system with overwhelming sensations, making him feel anxious and out of control. What appeals to him is the predictability of that world, the lack of surprises. Ezra doesn’t want Winnie the Pooh to exist in the same plane of reality that causes him such discomfort. He wants his characters in the videos where they do the same things and say the same words over and over and over. What appeals to him is a world where the characters don’t ask anything of him, where things are predictable, and where Ezra feels in control.
One way he exerts control is by gaining a command of the material. When Ezra memorizes dialogue, pores for hours over animation books, commits premiere dates to memory, or puzzles through movie plots—when he pours his energy and efforts into these pursuits, I feel him striving to gain a sense of mastery and control.
For a time, when he is nine, his obsession becomes Wallace & Gromit, the clay characters created by a British animator named Nick Park. Practically overnight, he switches his enthusiasm from Disney and Pixar to this eccentric English inventor and his silent, mouthless white dog. He sees the movie Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, a quirky tale involving an entire world foreign to Ezra: magical garden gnomes, Rube Goldberg contraptions, a vicar, a vegetable-growing contest. Ezra begins compulsively drawing pictures of the characters, and I notice him squirreling away pieces of loose-leaf paper in a nightstand drawer.
One night when he’s sleeping, I open it and find scores of sheets of paper, all densely decorated with hundreds of Wallace & Gromit drawings and sentence fragments describing the various characters: “Gromit doesn’t make any noise at all. He doesn’t talk and doesn’t have a mouth.”
I show them to Shawn, and the two of us sit together and flip through the stack, an enigmatic window into how he is struggling to understand this miniature universe. The scrawl on the pages reveals his obsessive thoughts but they also divulge something else: Lacking the kind of statistics he likes to gather from the nutrition panels of cereal boxes or listings he has devoured in animal almanacs, he is trying to create his own database. Ezra is endeavoring to make sense of things, to achieve a sense of control.
There is another way to control an animated world: by creating it yourself. With his consistent and pervasive fascination with animation, I sometimes wondered when Ezra was in elementary school whether he might ever be able—or willing—to try creating animated characters of his own. He struggles with fine motor control issues that hinder his handwriting, but occasionally he experiences bursts of interest in drawing, periods when he obsessively fills sketchpads and reams of paper with cartoonish drawings of animals, colorful alphabets, and rainbows. For a few months around age nine, he becomes enamored with billiard balls, memorizing their colors, the solids and stripes, and using felt markers to draw them over and over.
Soon after that, he discovers Charlie Brown and begins filling the same pads and sheets with remarkably detailed and accurate knockoffs of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts cast: Snoopy and Woodstock, Lucy and Linus. He is copying from Schulz’s drawings in a couple of anthologies he received as birthday gifts, but his renderings are not childlike stick figures but extraordinarily faithful and detailed imitations. He fills one pad after another, day and night.
And then he stops. He won’t draw, and even when we encourage him to, and when he tries, his drawings become cruder, his efforts less focused.
“Why won’t you draw?” I ask.
“It doesn’t look the same,” he says. He has trained himself to so scrutinize the details of his beloved animated characters that he won’t tolerate inexact replicas—even his own. He goes back to looking, only occasionally showing an interest in drawing.
In the summer when he’s twelve, our family is visiting Portland when my mother arranges a meeting for Ezra. Months earlier, she met a visual artist who runs a nonprofit called CHAP—Children’s Healing Art Project—that encourages kids coping with serious illnesses and other challenges to create art. When she learned that the program teaches animation, she mentioned her grandson, and the director suggested that Ezra visit sometime.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” I tell her that morning. “Ezra likes talking about animation, but I have no idea whether he’ll be willing to do any.” I have become frustrated myself with his recent refusal to draw—particularly since he once showed such promise. It’s the kind of impasse Ezra frequently hits, and from which it can be impossible to budge him.
“Well,” says Mom, “it’s worth a try.”
Ezra and I find our way to the studio, in a cavernous loft space on the top floor of an old brick warehouse that also houses a brewery. There, we meet Frank, the director, who sports a funky goatee and greets us with enthusiasm. While Ezra sweeps through the space as if he lives there, examining the colorful canvases on the walls and making his way into closets and bins, I tell Frank briefly about my son.
“He knows everything about animation, but he tends to get stuck in his own thoughts,” I say. “So I don’t know . . .”
Frank waves me off.
“He’ll do great,” he says, and dismisses me. “We’ll see you in a couple hours.”
I leave my cell phone number, and, with some hesitation, head downstairs, certain that Frank will call within a few minutes to report that Ezra is unable to focus. I simply know that for all of Frank’s purported skill, he won’t get through to my son.
I drive to Powell’s Books, just a few blocks away. Ten minutes pass. Twenty. Thirty. I check to make sure my phone is switched on. I contemplate calling to check in. After an hour and forty-five minutes, nobody has called, and I return to the brick warehouse and ascend the stairs, certain that when I get to the studio, Ezra will be zoned out on a computer, waiting for me.
“He’s doing great,” the woman who works with Frank says when I arrive.
“Really?” I ask.
“Amazing,” she says, pointing to the back of the studio. “Go look.”
In the next room, I discover Ezra, deeply ensconced in work with a teacher who introduces himself as Steve.
“We’re not quite done,” Steve tells me.
“Has he . . .” I don’t finish. Steve just smiles and nods with approval.
I watch Ezra mold tiny clay balls he has created, manipulating them in a small box next to a camcorder on a tripod. He is creating clay animation. His own Wallace & Gromit.
“I’m doing great, Abba!” Ezra says with enthusiasm.
Each ball is a different color, like the pool balls he once compulsively drew. He has made a house from construction paper and attached a yellow sliver of a moon against the backdrop. I watch for a few minutes as Ezra, with only minimal prompting from Steve, shoots the final few moments of his film. Ezra is completely absorbed in the process—not pacing, not spinning, not displaying anxiety—and clearly pleased with himself.
When they finish, Steve connects a cable from the camcorder to a laptop.
“It’ll take a minute to download,” he says. Now Ezra paces the creaky hardwood floors as we wait. When Steve is ready, I gather around with the two of them and Frank to watch.
Ezra has called his movie The Twelve Balls. One at a time, the tiny clay spheres, each a different color, roll into the house. The door closes behind the last. Then another ball shows up—this one brown, with pointy protruding ears.
“Wait, don’t forget about me!” says Ezra’s voice on the sound track. The door opens, and the little doggy ball hurries inside. The credits roll. I look at Ezra, a huge smile crossing his face. The whole film lasts all of twelve seconds, but it tells a sweet story and has many of Ezra’s loves: animation, a variety of colors, even a dog.
As we descend the stairs, I take in the aroma of hops emanating from the brewery below and think about how, after years of obsessing about animation, Ezra has taken his first steps in a new direction.
“Abba,” he says as we reach the car, “I’m an animator now. You’re very proud of me.”
Indeed I am.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Is Your Dog Friendly?
I steer into the parking lot, find an open space, slide open the minivan door—and they’re off. Ezra hops out, grasping the leash as Sasha, our mini shepherd mix, barrels past a baseball diamond and an asphalt basketball court toward the familiar grassy slope: our neighborhood dog park.
This is the highlight of the week for Sasha and Ezra alike, the moment they both come alive with excitement and pure joy. Sasha dashes toward a spot in the shade of a eucalyptus tree, where she playfully runs circles around a Chihuahua, until an energetic Labrador retriever lures her away. Ezra extends both arms upward, twirls in place a couple of times, and then begins surveying the crowd like a schoolteacher taking roll.
“Look, it’s Otto!” he calls to me, pointing out an ivory-colored German shepherd. Ezra rushes toward the dog’s owner, a twentyish fellow who, as usual, is tossing gnarled yellow tennis balls for his pet to fetch. After a quick hello, Ezra bounds across the grass to greet a woman nearby. “Where’s Bagel?” he asks. She points across the lawn to her Boston terrier, and Ezra skips with glee to greet the pooch with a pat on the head.
As it happens, ours isn’t a bona fide, officially designated dog park. It is against the law in Los Angeles County to let a dog off leash in public—a misdemeanor punishable by a $113 fine. This is the only illegal thing I do routinely: come to this grassy expanse dotted with sycamore trees with my son and our dog. I do roll through an occasional stop sign and make illicit U-turns now and then, but I have been caught for that. One afternoon I am returning with Ezra from visiting a petting zoo outside L.A. when a patrol car stops me. As the trooper arrives at my window, Ezra speaks up from the backseat.
