Chapter One
When Jeanne Granelles met Bernard Rifkin in the late forties, she was already considered advanced by the standards of the day. While most of her childhood friends settled for a conventional life of domesticity, she had pursued a college education. After meeting her husband, whom everyone called Ben, she accompanied him to Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College, which is now called Oklahoma State University. Jeanne took graduate courses in education and eventually taught an art class there. Ben received a degree in architectural engineering.
Both of them were native New Yorkers, which is where they settled after completing their studies in the early fifties. They leased an apartment in the Bronx and planned to start a family. In late 1958, when Jeanne was thirty-six and Ben was forty, they were approved for an adoption by the Louise Wise Services in Manhattan, an agency that specialized in placing Jewish children with Jewish families. Although Jeanne was not Jewish by birth, she had converted to Judaism after marrying Ben. Before long they were presented with a beautiful baby boy who had weighed eight pounds, six ounces when he was born three weeks earlier, on January 20, 1959. His biological mother was a twenty-year-old student; his father, a student as well as an army veteran, was her twenty-three-year-old boyfriend. The Rifkins named their bundle of joy Joel David.
As happy a time as it was, Ben felt great sadness over the fact that his mother had died less than a year earlier and missed meeting her first grandchild. But the happy family soon moved into a brand new home in Rockland County, a northern suburb of New York City that has since become a civil servant Mecca. Within two years they had adopted a second child, a girl born to different biological parents whom they named Jan. Rockland County was extremely rural back then and Joel remembers leading a Mark Twain-like existence that was mostly filled with happiness. Just before Joel started kindergarten, the family moved to East Meadow on Long Island after Ben landed a job with an architectural firm named Thompson and Zark. The move would prove to be devastating to young Joel, who still refers to the times "before the move" and "after the move" as comparative periods of great joy and immense pain in his life.
"The happiest period of my life keeps going back to Rockland County," he explained. "The beginning of my conscious memory, when I was four, [we had] a very open backyard, maybe a half acre, surrounded by woods on both sides, across the street and behind us. So I had my frogs to play with, my tadpoles, and newts. Whatever crawled in the woods, that was my toy. That was before anybody [bullies] really started getting abusive. So that was a great time."
That was the one period of his life where Joel felt most unencumbered by neuroses. It was also, he recalls, the only time he ever felt like an accepted member of a group. "I remember the woods, the frog pond and that whole bit," he said. "I remember there was this drainage ditch. And I took my troop of friends and decided to go wandering down this drainage ditch. We saw a housing development down at the other end of this drainage ditch and we came back. We didn't know that we were gone for an hour or two, maybe three hours. We had every parent in the neighborhood freaking out. I was more confident back then, I guess. And I went to nursery school with the same bunch of kids, and I didn't have that many problems."
After the family moved to East Meadow in 1964, Joel's sense of impermanence grew more intense by the day. "Because of my birthday I had to wait a year to go to school," he recalled. "I didn't make the cutoff for the district, and there weren't that many kids my age. I went from having a lot of kids my age to practically none. The older kids would play stickball out on the curb, [but] I didn't have the coordination to join in. The only kid my age was my direct neighbor. They let him play all the time because he happened to be an athlete."
Things got even worse when Joel started kindergarten. Already feeling like a misfit because of his lack of both athletic ability and self-confidence, Joel had a host of learning disabilities that were beginning to surface. Besides suffering from undiagnosed dyslexia that impaired his ability to read, he would often stutter when beginning to speak, his mind would wander in mid-sentence, and it was difficult for him to follow simple instructions. Although it was later determined that he had an IQ well above average, many people meeting him for the first time believed that he was mentally impaired.
His feelings of inadequacy only intensified when he attracted the attention of a class bully who he believes dramatically changed the direction of his life. "[In] my kindergarten class there was one guy who would have been inside the [prison] system ahead of me, but he ended up killing himself in a motorcycle accident," said Joel. "He was completely out of control. Because of him I then had a reputation that invited other guys to join in. If you wanted to establish your rep[utation] as a tough guy, I was the guy you looked for. So I just created a nice little secret life for myself. I didn't hang out with other kids. I had very few friends."
Causing Joel even more grief were his always-growing feelings of incompetence around his father. A standout athlete, Ben tried futilely to get Joel involved in sports soon after he learned to walk. But like so many of their father-and-son activities, things did not work out the way either would have liked. "[My father] had been an athlete as a child," recalled Joel. "Had he had the grades under today's situation he would have been a college player in football. Those were the days when quarterbacks were more like running backs and you played both sides. No face mask and leather helmet type stuff. He wanted to take the baseball and the football out and play with his kid in the street. I had as much chance of catching the ball with my face as I did my hands. I was terrible."
Adding to Joel's woes was the fact that his next-door neighbor, a boy who was the same age as he, excelled at everything Joel didn't. By watching his success, Joel began to feel as if his own failures were continually rubbed in his face. To make matters worse, throughout their entire school career they almost always sat next to each other in home room because their last names were so close in alphabetical order. "He was the exact opposite of me," said Joel. "He could whack a Spaldeen [baseball] for ten hours straight, so he was always playing with the older kids. He was the athlete I wasn't. He was socially popular, I wasn't. He played with kids in the street, which I couldn't. He was president of the school. I went to Nassau Community [College], he went to Princeton. You know, the complete opposite. Total."
The dyslexia Joel suffered from was still a largely unrecognized condition in the sixties. His old-school father, who loved numbers almost as much as he loved sports, and was equally adept at both, would spend hours working with his son, but eventually grew infuriated at his inability to grasp the rudiments of math. "It irked him that he could do these crazy math things [and I could not]," said Joel. "These were back in the slide rule days. It took him a while to adapt to little hand-held calculators, [but] you could give him a nine-digit series and come back to him ten minutes later and he'd give it back to you. He could give it back to you backwards if you wanted. He could do mathematical equations and word problems in his head. Me, I couldn't memorize a multiplication table. There would be many nights where he'd sit with me and we'd go over and over it and he'd get frustrated and have to walk away. He finally just gave up."
Ben's frustration only served to make Joel feel more and more like a coloss
