John T. "Jack" Halley
October 7, 1930 - October 18, 2013
Tuesday, October 22, 2013
Friday, October 11, 2013
Q&A
Singin’ in San Diego asks: If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?
Dear Singin’: Okay, okay, I see what you did there. That’s what they call good old “double entendre”, defined as “a remark that is ambiguous and often suggestive”. This is the very same method often used by fancy lawyers to trip up witnesses or defendants in court, by reporters interviewing politicians on TV news shows, or by late-night talk show hosts on pretty but dim-witted starlets. So, in order to foil your attempt to trip me up, I will answer your question on all its levels.
No.
1) “would you hold it against me?” meaning: “would it piss you off?”
No! Why would someone telling me I have a beautiful body piss me off? The only person who has uttered anything even close to that in the past ten years is my husband, and that was back in 2009, when he said something like, “I had a dream last night that you had a body like that guy Wolverine in that movie.”
2) “would you hold it against me?” meaning: “would you press your hot Wolverine body up against mine?”
No. In the first place, I am married, and that gives me automatic right of refusal to hold my body up against anyone. In the second place, your signature leads me to believe that you are out in San Diego. I, as you must know, am way across the country in Cape Cod. You can compliment my beautiful body all you like, but it will take more than that to get me on a plane out west just for a little cuddle.
To be fair, there is always an exception. I would, indeed, hold my body against you if you were my beautiful blond cousin from California, and we were dancing at a wedding; or if we were in a honky-tonk bar in Laredo, with sawdust on the floor and peanuts on the bar, and a great song by the Bellamy brothers came on the jukebox. We would have to dance.
Hungry from south of Harwich wonders: Does glow in the dark food glow in your stomach?
Dear Hungry: Well, the first thing that comes to mind when I read your question was “who the hell ever heard of glow in the dark food?”. Wherever you are dining out or buying your groceries, I suggest that you make other arrangements, as quickly as possible.
But, assuming that there actually is such a thing as glow in the dark food, and assuming that you have been able to consume it without any ill effects, I am forced to consider whether it would actually glow in your stomach. At this point, the question becomes rather like the one about the tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it. But, every time I allowed myself to contemplate it, all I could see in my mind was a bunch of glowing bits of lunch or dinner bouncing around in your stomach, like glow-sticks at some kind of Digestive Tract Rave. It was all just too disturbing.
So, in a last-ditch effort to leave no stone unturned in seeking an answer to a question, I turned to one much wiser than myself for help: The Magic 8-Ball.
Here is your answer:
Reply Hazy Try Again
Curious on Conwell writes: Why did that old woman throw her purse at you?
Dear Curious: Now, what we have here is a classic case of jumping to conclusions, as you did not have enough of the facts to realize exactly what was going on.
The “old woman” is actually my maiden aunt, Aunt Frigidia. She was not throwing her purse at me, she was throwing her purse to me. And her “purse” was not a purse, but actually one of those velvet bags from an old Crown Royal bottle, which contained an old bowling trophy which we were pretending was a fertility idol.
What you failed to notice was that I was on a unicyle, and Aunt Frigidia was riding a Vespa, and the entire thing was being filmed by my 12 year-old nephew Colin, who was standing across the street with a camcorder. We were making an audition tape for the upcoming season of “The Amazing Race”.
So, I hope you see now how you should have all the facts before you draw any conclusions. I hope this satisfies your curiosity.
Homo in Harlem wonders: When did you first know that you were gay?
Dear Homo: This was a very serious question and gave me great reason for introspection. When, indeed?
It’s hard to say when I “knew” I was gay. In my worldview, that would be like “knowing” that you’re right-handed, or that you don’t like reading Anne Rice novels. You don’t really “know” it, that’s just sort of the way it is. Everyone else seemed to know I was gay long before I even knew what gay was, because they were calling me “faggot” starting in the first grade. And if my parents didn’t realize I was gay when I started hanging pictures of Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy with his shirt off up on my bedroom wall, then maybe they weren’t as bright as I give them credit for. At that point, though, I didn’t even realize or “know” that I was gay, I just thought I really, really liked the Partridge family.
There was an “a-ha” moment, though, when it all became clear to me, and maybe even got a name. I was somewhere between 10 and 12 years old, which would have made it the early ‘70s. I came across an article in one of my mother’s issues of “Cosmopolitan”. It’s hard to think of my mom as a “Cosmo Girl”, but there it is. Anyway, it was an exposé of sorts, with a title like “The Secret World of the Homos” or something like that. It was full of all kinds of sordid, tawdry details which I found absolutely delightful. At least I never had to be one of those poor kids who actually thinks that they are the only person in the world who has these feelings.
Anyway, after that, it was just a matter of the usual phases, in denial, out of denial, I’m gay, I’m not gay, I’m bi, all that nonsense, until I finally “came out” for good around age 17.
Furloughed in Falmouth writes: What are the house republicans thinking?
Dear Furloughed: You may remember a question, not long ago, about Duke the cat. I enlisted the services of Madame DeVille, Pet Psychic, in order to answer it. After reading your question, I called Madame DeVille, and I asked her if she could recommend a psychic who could read the minds of an entire Capitol building full of politicians. She referred me to one Madam Krakpotski.
I sat with Madam Krakpotski for over an hour as she read the minds of members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. She sounded as if someone were constantly turning the dial on an FM radio as she channeled their thoughts, her psychic powers jumping from one mind to the next. Here is just a tiny sample of what I heard:
“Did I leave the iron on?”
“Oh my god, who just farted?”.”
“Holy shit, did I just sext my mother-in-law?”
“How long until lunch? I hope they have the pastrami again. I like the pastrami.”
“Look how pretty the floor is in here.”
“Holy crap, is Boehner crying again?”
“ “
“Where’s Jerry? He’ll know if there’s pastrami today.”
And on and on. 435 representatives and 100 senators, and not a single thought worth having in the entire bunch.
Scared Witless writes: How the #%&+ am I going to PAY for college?
Dear Witless: It is alarming to note that a four year college education can cost the average American family upwards of $200,000. That means that even if your child gets a job immediately upon graduating, at a modest starting salary of $20-$30,000 per year, and even if they put every single cent they earned towards paying for their education, they could be working for more than ten years without even being able to buy you a Mother’s day card. Kids today should start investing heavily into very aggressive money market accounts and derivative funds at age 6 to 10 in order to have enough money saved to pay for one of their future children’s college education.
So, when it comes to paying for college, it would seem that the parent today must really learn to think out of the box. Here are some suggestions you may not have considered.
Game Shows - if you and your family go on “Family Feud”, for instance, and win Fast Money every day for five days, you will have half of a college education paid for, plus a brand new car for your kid to drive to college in!
Win a Nobel Prize - current winners are awarded nearly 1.5 million dollars. That will pay for college plus a nice new home in the Caymans.
Start a Ponzi Scheme - it worked for Bernie Madoff for decades. You only have to get away with it for four years.
Extreme Couponing - if you can hoard enough food that you can survive for four years on dried pasta and club-sized containers of soup and jarred pepperoncini, you might be able to save enough at the grocery store to offset the cost of higher education.
These are just a handful of ideas. I’m sure there are many other ideas like these, which are all just as helpful. I hope this has put you in the right mindset of “thinking outside the box”, and I’m certain you will find a way to finance your child’s future.
High in Low Country asks: How much is that doggie in the window?
Hear High in Low: Well, sir, that particular “doggie” is a 19th century Staffordshire dog figurine, fully marked, in beautiful condition and rare because of the green color of the collar. If it were a pair, they would be worth $650 - $700, but since it is missing its mate, I’m asking $300 for it.
Contemplative on the Cape writes: If you were another person, who you know intimately, who would you like to be?
Dear Cape: Wow, another thought-provoking question.
At first, I approached it from a place of envy. Was there anyone whose life I would want over my own? Anyone who lives in a castle with a 24 karat toilet and a trampoline? No. Most people who I know intimately are pretty much in the same boat as I am: a slave to the time clock and just happy to get a week at the shore once a year.
So, then I approached the question from a place of admiration. If I’m going to be someone other than myself, I might as well be someone that I admire. Looking at it this way, I would have to answer: my brother.
Now, my brother certainly doesn’t have a gold-plated toilet or a trampoline. In fact, there are aspects of my brother’s life which I wouldn’t trade with him for all the onion soup in Paris. But, the person my brother has become, the person he is, now, is certainly someone I wouldn’t mind being.
Hope I didn’t embarrass anyone.
Dear Singin’: Okay, okay, I see what you did there. That’s what they call good old “double entendre”, defined as “a remark that is ambiguous and often suggestive”. This is the very same method often used by fancy lawyers to trip up witnesses or defendants in court, by reporters interviewing politicians on TV news shows, or by late-night talk show hosts on pretty but dim-witted starlets. So, in order to foil your attempt to trip me up, I will answer your question on all its levels.
No.
1) “would you hold it against me?” meaning: “would it piss you off?”
No! Why would someone telling me I have a beautiful body piss me off? The only person who has uttered anything even close to that in the past ten years is my husband, and that was back in 2009, when he said something like, “I had a dream last night that you had a body like that guy Wolverine in that movie.”
2) “would you hold it against me?” meaning: “would you press your hot Wolverine body up against mine?”
No. In the first place, I am married, and that gives me automatic right of refusal to hold my body up against anyone. In the second place, your signature leads me to believe that you are out in San Diego. I, as you must know, am way across the country in Cape Cod. You can compliment my beautiful body all you like, but it will take more than that to get me on a plane out west just for a little cuddle.
To be fair, there is always an exception. I would, indeed, hold my body against you if you were my beautiful blond cousin from California, and we were dancing at a wedding; or if we were in a honky-tonk bar in Laredo, with sawdust on the floor and peanuts on the bar, and a great song by the Bellamy brothers came on the jukebox. We would have to dance.
Hungry from south of Harwich wonders: Does glow in the dark food glow in your stomach?
Dear Hungry: Well, the first thing that comes to mind when I read your question was “who the hell ever heard of glow in the dark food?”. Wherever you are dining out or buying your groceries, I suggest that you make other arrangements, as quickly as possible.
But, assuming that there actually is such a thing as glow in the dark food, and assuming that you have been able to consume it without any ill effects, I am forced to consider whether it would actually glow in your stomach. At this point, the question becomes rather like the one about the tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it. But, every time I allowed myself to contemplate it, all I could see in my mind was a bunch of glowing bits of lunch or dinner bouncing around in your stomach, like glow-sticks at some kind of Digestive Tract Rave. It was all just too disturbing.
So, in a last-ditch effort to leave no stone unturned in seeking an answer to a question, I turned to one much wiser than myself for help: The Magic 8-Ball.
Here is your answer:
Reply Hazy Try Again
Curious on Conwell writes: Why did that old woman throw her purse at you?
Dear Curious: Now, what we have here is a classic case of jumping to conclusions, as you did not have enough of the facts to realize exactly what was going on.
The “old woman” is actually my maiden aunt, Aunt Frigidia. She was not throwing her purse at me, she was throwing her purse to me. And her “purse” was not a purse, but actually one of those velvet bags from an old Crown Royal bottle, which contained an old bowling trophy which we were pretending was a fertility idol.
What you failed to notice was that I was on a unicyle, and Aunt Frigidia was riding a Vespa, and the entire thing was being filmed by my 12 year-old nephew Colin, who was standing across the street with a camcorder. We were making an audition tape for the upcoming season of “The Amazing Race”.
So, I hope you see now how you should have all the facts before you draw any conclusions. I hope this satisfies your curiosity.
Homo in Harlem wonders: When did you first know that you were gay?
Dear Homo: This was a very serious question and gave me great reason for introspection. When, indeed?
It’s hard to say when I “knew” I was gay. In my worldview, that would be like “knowing” that you’re right-handed, or that you don’t like reading Anne Rice novels. You don’t really “know” it, that’s just sort of the way it is. Everyone else seemed to know I was gay long before I even knew what gay was, because they were calling me “faggot” starting in the first grade. And if my parents didn’t realize I was gay when I started hanging pictures of Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy with his shirt off up on my bedroom wall, then maybe they weren’t as bright as I give them credit for. At that point, though, I didn’t even realize or “know” that I was gay, I just thought I really, really liked the Partridge family.
There was an “a-ha” moment, though, when it all became clear to me, and maybe even got a name. I was somewhere between 10 and 12 years old, which would have made it the early ‘70s. I came across an article in one of my mother’s issues of “Cosmopolitan”. It’s hard to think of my mom as a “Cosmo Girl”, but there it is. Anyway, it was an exposé of sorts, with a title like “The Secret World of the Homos” or something like that. It was full of all kinds of sordid, tawdry details which I found absolutely delightful. At least I never had to be one of those poor kids who actually thinks that they are the only person in the world who has these feelings.
Anyway, after that, it was just a matter of the usual phases, in denial, out of denial, I’m gay, I’m not gay, I’m bi, all that nonsense, until I finally “came out” for good around age 17.
Furloughed in Falmouth writes: What are the house republicans thinking?
Dear Furloughed: You may remember a question, not long ago, about Duke the cat. I enlisted the services of Madame DeVille, Pet Psychic, in order to answer it. After reading your question, I called Madame DeVille, and I asked her if she could recommend a psychic who could read the minds of an entire Capitol building full of politicians. She referred me to one Madam Krakpotski.
I sat with Madam Krakpotski for over an hour as she read the minds of members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. She sounded as if someone were constantly turning the dial on an FM radio as she channeled their thoughts, her psychic powers jumping from one mind to the next. Here is just a tiny sample of what I heard:
“Did I leave the iron on?”
“Oh my god, who just farted?”.”
“Holy shit, did I just sext my mother-in-law?”
“How long until lunch? I hope they have the pastrami again. I like the pastrami.”
“Look how pretty the floor is in here.”
“Holy crap, is Boehner crying again?”
“ “
“Where’s Jerry? He’ll know if there’s pastrami today.”
And on and on. 435 representatives and 100 senators, and not a single thought worth having in the entire bunch.
Scared Witless writes: How the #%&+ am I going to PAY for college?
Dear Witless: It is alarming to note that a four year college education can cost the average American family upwards of $200,000. That means that even if your child gets a job immediately upon graduating, at a modest starting salary of $20-$30,000 per year, and even if they put every single cent they earned towards paying for their education, they could be working for more than ten years without even being able to buy you a Mother’s day card. Kids today should start investing heavily into very aggressive money market accounts and derivative funds at age 6 to 10 in order to have enough money saved to pay for one of their future children’s college education.
So, when it comes to paying for college, it would seem that the parent today must really learn to think out of the box. Here are some suggestions you may not have considered.
Game Shows - if you and your family go on “Family Feud”, for instance, and win Fast Money every day for five days, you will have half of a college education paid for, plus a brand new car for your kid to drive to college in!
Win a Nobel Prize - current winners are awarded nearly 1.5 million dollars. That will pay for college plus a nice new home in the Caymans.
Start a Ponzi Scheme - it worked for Bernie Madoff for decades. You only have to get away with it for four years.
Extreme Couponing - if you can hoard enough food that you can survive for four years on dried pasta and club-sized containers of soup and jarred pepperoncini, you might be able to save enough at the grocery store to offset the cost of higher education.
These are just a handful of ideas. I’m sure there are many other ideas like these, which are all just as helpful. I hope this has put you in the right mindset of “thinking outside the box”, and I’m certain you will find a way to finance your child’s future.
High in Low Country asks: How much is that doggie in the window?
Hear High in Low: Well, sir, that particular “doggie” is a 19th century Staffordshire dog figurine, fully marked, in beautiful condition and rare because of the green color of the collar. If it were a pair, they would be worth $650 - $700, but since it is missing its mate, I’m asking $300 for it.
Contemplative on the Cape writes: If you were another person, who you know intimately, who would you like to be?
Dear Cape: Wow, another thought-provoking question.
At first, I approached it from a place of envy. Was there anyone whose life I would want over my own? Anyone who lives in a castle with a 24 karat toilet and a trampoline? No. Most people who I know intimately are pretty much in the same boat as I am: a slave to the time clock and just happy to get a week at the shore once a year.
So, then I approached the question from a place of admiration. If I’m going to be someone other than myself, I might as well be someone that I admire. Looking at it this way, I would have to answer: my brother.
Now, my brother certainly doesn’t have a gold-plated toilet or a trampoline. In fact, there are aspects of my brother’s life which I wouldn’t trade with him for all the onion soup in Paris. But, the person my brother has become, the person he is, now, is certainly someone I wouldn’t mind being.
Hope I didn’t embarrass anyone.
FAVORITE LINES
I recently finished a book called Amy Falls Down, by Jincy Willett. The main character in the book, Amy, is a writer. She carries around a notebook, as many writers do (not me, I "dog-write"); and every so often she will jot down a word or phrase which she might encounter during her day, which she thinks of as a great title for a story. She uses the list both as an inspiration and a reminder of her own creative thought process.
In that spirit, I have decided to create a space here, for the lines in my own work which I like the best.
In almost any piece of writing I've done, there has been at least one sentence or paragraph which makes me smile quietly to myself and think, "That was a good one." Here they are:
From "Little Green Men":
I have learned that if you’re at a cocktail party, for instance, and you start a story, “I once woke up in an ATM in Mount Vernon after we went to a Grace Jones concert and bought a whole bunch of ‘ludes from this guy named Disco Donny,” people will laugh and think you’re urbane and sophisticated. But if you start a story by saying, “I saw a UFO once,” people will just think you’re crazy or some kind of conspiracy theorist.
From "Mission: H2O" (an essay about being sick with the flu):
Things which were of monumental importance to you yesterday will vanish completely from your priorities. Gotta get those whites washed? Ha! Need to check those spreadsheets on the Henderson account? Fuck the Hendersons. At this point, the world is lucky if you can stand up long enough to crank the thermostat up to 80°.
From: "Black & White":
So, I’m mentally naming the navy blue of her suit “Mediocrity” when she drops the folder on my desk and says, “Goth!”
From: "Adrift":
I had just killed Aleksandr, the marsupial demi-god who was worshipped by the little Estonian circus cult I had found myself in. Now what do I do?
and
The only German I can speak is “Sprechen-zie Deutsche?”, which means “Do you speak German?”, which is a completely useless phrase to know when you are actually in a German city.
From: "Leap of Faith":
And when the nuns were singing “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” I always imagined that was how the Sisters were talking about me when I wasn’t around; that although I seemed shy and plain and boring to everyone around me, in reality I was something special and ethereal like a moonbeam.
and
Anyway, St. Kwiatoslaw is something like 98% Polish. That’s OK with me, I don’t have anything against Polish people, except maybe their last names, which are all really long and full of too many z’s and k’s and y’s and things. Like if I was Polish, my name Smyth would be spelled Sczmythczkie or something.
From "Class of '84":
“Here you go, sweet heart,” she said. Mrs. Thornton always said “sweetheart” as if it were two words.
From "Dear John":
I mean, it’s weird: sometimes time seems to be crawling by at a snail’s pace, like on Monday morning it seems like Friday afternoon is forever away. But then before you know it, five years have flown by, and then ten, or fifteen, and it feels like you spent the whole time just trying to pay the bills and keep the living room vacuumed.
From "In-Laws, Squared":
The town where Bill grew up is called Cabot Cove, just like the one on “Murder, She Wrote.” It’s not so much a town, from what I could see, as it is a quantity of space between some stop signs, although I did see a fire hydrant and a mailbox.
From "The Raven & The Writing Desk":
She looked more as if someone had chopped off Liz Taylor’s head (fat, old, over-the-hill Liz, that is) and stuck it on a stake, like they used to do in medieval London, and then hung a Chanel suit over the stake. Her hair was enormous and exactly the color of a nice Napa Valley Merlot. Her face looked as if she had gotten a good old-fashioned facelift back in the 1970s and simply let it go since then, so she has actually had the chance to grow old and wrinkly twice.
From: "Untitled, or First Train Out of Toyland":
I never really understood what people meant when they said things like somebody “looks Jewish.” I mean, how do you look like a religion? But when I met Mary Margaret, I finally understood, because Mary Margaret looks about as un-Jewish as anyone can look.
and
People realized that it’s not always the words and the prayers that are important, it’s everybody being together and seeing each other through all the different stages in their lives, and laughing at the stuff that's actually funny, even if it is inside a church or a synagogue or whatever.
From: "Independence Day":
We started out having the kinds of conversations, in German, which only people in second-language classes have:
“Hello, Mrs. Kaufmann”
“Hello, Mr. Stubbs.”
“How are you?”
“Fine, thank you. How are you?”
“I am fine. The weather is good.”
“It is warm today.”
Then, I would say something like, “Thank you for asking me to your typewriter.”
From a Facebook status: I noticed that she smelled heavenly, sort of like warm vanilla or freshly baked Madeleines. I later learned it was some sort of orthopedic skin cream for the chronically desiccated that she was wearing, formulated by the very same Biochemical Engineer responsible for Cher's remarkable state of mummification.
In that spirit, I have decided to create a space here, for the lines in my own work which I like the best.
In almost any piece of writing I've done, there has been at least one sentence or paragraph which makes me smile quietly to myself and think, "That was a good one." Here they are:
From "Little Green Men":
I have learned that if you’re at a cocktail party, for instance, and you start a story, “I once woke up in an ATM in Mount Vernon after we went to a Grace Jones concert and bought a whole bunch of ‘ludes from this guy named Disco Donny,” people will laugh and think you’re urbane and sophisticated. But if you start a story by saying, “I saw a UFO once,” people will just think you’re crazy or some kind of conspiracy theorist.
From "Mission: H2O" (an essay about being sick with the flu):
Things which were of monumental importance to you yesterday will vanish completely from your priorities. Gotta get those whites washed? Ha! Need to check those spreadsheets on the Henderson account? Fuck the Hendersons. At this point, the world is lucky if you can stand up long enough to crank the thermostat up to 80°.
From: "Black & White":
So, I’m mentally naming the navy blue of her suit “Mediocrity” when she drops the folder on my desk and says, “Goth!”
From: "Adrift":
I had just killed Aleksandr, the marsupial demi-god who was worshipped by the little Estonian circus cult I had found myself in. Now what do I do?
and
The only German I can speak is “Sprechen-zie Deutsche?”, which means “Do you speak German?”, which is a completely useless phrase to know when you are actually in a German city.
From: "Leap of Faith":
And when the nuns were singing “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” I always imagined that was how the Sisters were talking about me when I wasn’t around; that although I seemed shy and plain and boring to everyone around me, in reality I was something special and ethereal like a moonbeam.
and
Anyway, St. Kwiatoslaw is something like 98% Polish. That’s OK with me, I don’t have anything against Polish people, except maybe their last names, which are all really long and full of too many z’s and k’s and y’s and things. Like if I was Polish, my name Smyth would be spelled Sczmythczkie or something.
From "Class of '84":
“Here you go, sweet heart,” she said. Mrs. Thornton always said “sweetheart” as if it were two words.
From "Dear John":
I mean, it’s weird: sometimes time seems to be crawling by at a snail’s pace, like on Monday morning it seems like Friday afternoon is forever away. But then before you know it, five years have flown by, and then ten, or fifteen, and it feels like you spent the whole time just trying to pay the bills and keep the living room vacuumed.
From "In-Laws, Squared":
The town where Bill grew up is called Cabot Cove, just like the one on “Murder, She Wrote.” It’s not so much a town, from what I could see, as it is a quantity of space between some stop signs, although I did see a fire hydrant and a mailbox.
From "The Raven & The Writing Desk":
She looked more as if someone had chopped off Liz Taylor’s head (fat, old, over-the-hill Liz, that is) and stuck it on a stake, like they used to do in medieval London, and then hung a Chanel suit over the stake. Her hair was enormous and exactly the color of a nice Napa Valley Merlot. Her face looked as if she had gotten a good old-fashioned facelift back in the 1970s and simply let it go since then, so she has actually had the chance to grow old and wrinkly twice.
From: "Untitled, or First Train Out of Toyland":
I never really understood what people meant when they said things like somebody “looks Jewish.” I mean, how do you look like a religion? But when I met Mary Margaret, I finally understood, because Mary Margaret looks about as un-Jewish as anyone can look.
and
People realized that it’s not always the words and the prayers that are important, it’s everybody being together and seeing each other through all the different stages in their lives, and laughing at the stuff that's actually funny, even if it is inside a church or a synagogue or whatever.
From: "Independence Day":
We started out having the kinds of conversations, in German, which only people in second-language classes have:
“Hello, Mrs. Kaufmann”
“Hello, Mr. Stubbs.”
“How are you?”
“Fine, thank you. How are you?”
“I am fine. The weather is good.”
“It is warm today.”
Then, I would say something like, “Thank you for asking me to your typewriter.”
From a Facebook status: I noticed that she smelled heavenly, sort of like warm vanilla or freshly baked Madeleines. I later learned it was some sort of orthopedic skin cream for the chronically desiccated that she was wearing, formulated by the very same Biochemical Engineer responsible for Cher's remarkable state of mummification.
Monday, October 7, 2013
EXTEMPORANEOUS WRITING - "Independence Day"
First comment: a phobia - Kevin Doherty: Agoraphobia
Second comment: a television show which is no longer on - Michael Bunn: I Dream of Jeannie
Third comment: a foreign language - Diana Back: German
Fourth comment: a U.S. city - Christopher DeBoard: Paducah
Fifth comment: when I think of the city above (#4), I think of ____ - Scott Barnett: Inbred hillbillies
I was almost finished with my first cup of coffee before I realized that it was the Fourth of July. The store was closed and technically I didn’t even have to be out of bed. But, by then it was too late, there was no turning back. It didn’t really make that much difference, anyway. The grocery business means early mornings, and I’ve been getting up early for so long that I tend to wake up by 7 or 8 in the morning anyway, even without an alarm.
I work for Higgledy Piggledy, not to be confused with Piggly Wiggly, which is a huge grocery market chain in the South. Higgledy Piggledy is a small, mom-and-pop chain of markets, if you can call three stores a chain. Two of the stores are in Coonskin Falls, Alabama, which is where I’m from, and one store is in Paducah, Kentucky, which is where I am now.
Coonskin Falls is a pretty small town, just a few miles away from Rogersville off of Route 72. I had been working for Higgledy Piggledy ever since I got out of high school, and I had been supervising the front end for a while, auditing the cash drawers and making sure the baggers weren’t out back drinking beer or smoking weed in their cars. One afternoon I got called upstairs to the office, to see Mr. Perry, the general manager of the store. The whole way up the stairs, I was wracking my brain, trying to figure out what I had done wrong. When I got to his office, he just smiled at me and motioned for me to take a seat. I tried to sneak a look at his desk to figure out what was going on, but the only thing there was an unopened, blank, manila folder.
“We’ve been watching you, Jacob,” he said.
At that point all I could hear was the blood rushing through my ears as my heart started pounding, and I’m sure my face was turning bright red. Classic fight-or-flee response. I’ve never dealt well with stressful situations.
But then I realized that he was saying things like, “...like what we see,” and “opportunity for advancement,” and the pounding in my ears started to subside.
“The company has acquired another outlet,” he was saying, “In Paducah, Kentucky.”
“Hillbillies,” was the first thought which popped into my head. “Oh my god, they’re shipping me off to work with the hillbillies.”
Mr. Perry said, “Now I know what you must be thinking, Jake. You’re thinking: ‘What the hell is there out in Paducah? A bunch of inbred hillbillies?’”
I shook my head and tried to look incredulous, as if that hadn’t been at all what I was thinking. “No…” I said.
“Nevertheless, that’s not the case at all. Paducah is as vibrant and exciting a place as Coonskin Falls, or even Rogersville. It is two states away, though, Jake. So if you did take this job, you’d be pretty much on your own out there.”
He explained that I would be moved out to Paducah, and that the company would hook me up with a place to live and all that. He told me to take the rest of the day and night to think it over.
“Sleep on it,” he said, and I promised that I would.
So, I thought about it, of course. I thought about it a lot. I never went to college, so I knew it was a good idea for me to grab at advancement, whenever it came my way. The money sounded pretty good, too; it was way more than what I was already making. And getting out of Coonskin Falls didn’t sound too bad, even if it was to someplace like Paducah.
The truth is, there really wasn’t anything keeping me in Coonskin Falls. I had been born and raised there, and lived there every one of my 28 years. But I was an only child, and Mom and Dad had moved to Florida a few years earlier, after Dad retired. I have some cousins who are really nice, but they live way down near Mobile and I really only ever see them at weddings and funerals.
I really had no friends at all in Coonskin Falls. This was not a revelation to me, in fact, it had been something that I’ve been trying to work on for quite a while. I suffer from extreme shyness. Even though I am able to interact with people normally at work and out in the world and stuff like that, when it comes to opening up and revealing the real Me to other people, I have a really hard time. This kind of makes it hard to make real friends. Truth is, though, that I would really rather be alone during my off time than be in the company of other people. But, as the years go by, I realize that this is something that is getting in the way of a lot of things, things like overall Happiness, Fulfillment, and Afternoons Watching Old Movies With Friends.
So, that night, I decided that I would make the move. I decided to come here to Paducah. But I also decided that if I was going to be making this fresh start, that I was going to try to start improving myself, too, by making an effort to reach out more to the people around me. So, the next day, I went in to Mr. Perry’s office and told him that I would take the job.
Six weeks later, there I was, standing at the end of a long walkway, and looking up at the pretty Victorian house I was to call home, as the movers hauled my belongings up the two flights of stairs to my apartment. The company had gotten me a one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of this house. The landlord was a little old lady who lived on the first floor, and the second floor was rented to some guy who I just prayed was quiet and didn’t smoke clove cigarettes.
In the foyer, as I made my way up for the first time, I noticed the names on the mailboxes. “Mrs. K. Kaufmann” said one. “D. Murphy” said the other. Someone had recently added “J. Stubbs” to my box, on paper, in that fancy, European-style script. I thought that was nice.
Up the stairs I went, and I walked into my apartment for the first time. Even with boxes everywhere and everything in complete disarray, I liked it right away. It’s a nice-sized one-bedroom, with windows on all four sides, and a decent kitchen and bathroom. It looks pretty much the way you’d expect the top floor of an 1880s Queen Anne Victorian to look: full of crazy little nooks and odd crannies, not one thing in the whole place level or plumb. It was much better than the cookie-cutter, concrete box garden apartment I had been living in back in Coonskin Falls.
A few hours later, the movers had left and I was puttering around the apartment, trying to get things livable. I had gotten the bed put together, and the stereo hooked up. The TV was plugged in, but the cable hadn’t been turned on yet, so that would have to wait. I was trying to think of things that would make my morning a little easier, because there was no time to waste, I had to be at the store at 7am the very next day. I got a shower curtain hung in the bathroom, and at least got my toothpaste and shampoo put out where I could get at them. I moved into the kitchen, and got the toaster oven and the microwave plugged in, and got some dishes and some silverware put away and somewhat organized. I got the coffee maker set up, too. I have one of those programmable coffee makers that will have your coffee all hot and ready for you as soon as you get out of bed, as long as you remember to get it set up the night before. So, I got the coffee ready for the next morning, and got the cup set out and the spoon and the non-dairy creamer, and that’s when I realized that I didn’t have any sugar. Now, I can live without a lot of things in my coffee. I can survive without my International Delight Hazelnut creamer, I can even do without milk or half and half altogether. But I can not drink my coffee without sugar. And there’s no way I was going to make it for Opening Day at the Paducah Higgledy Piggledy without coffee.
“A cup of sugar? Really?” I thought to myself, as I made my way downstairs. “They’re just gonna think I’m some kind of psychopath, with a line like that.”
Nevertheless, I found myself a few moments later on the second floor, knocking on the door of D. Murphy. Part of me, the part that finds it hard to let go of old, deep-seated assumptions and stereotypes, half expected to be greeted by a snake-handling, toothless hillbilly. Would he be like Jethro Bodine? Or more like Uncle Jed? Instead, D. Murphy looked pretty normal, at least the half of him that I could see behind the three inches of open door which the security chain would allow. Behind him I could see a small hall stand, with a vase and a small bowl which contained a stack of business cards.
“Hi, I’m Jake,” I said through the three inches. “I just moved in upstairs. Believe it or not, I need to borrow a cup of sugar.” I held my empty sugar bowl up as proof.
“Really?” he said.
“Yeah, really,” I answered.
“Look, I’m sorry, Jake. I can’t really help you. This might sound strange, but could I ask you to call me? On the phone?” He turned, and took a business card off of the pile on the table. Apparently, this was something he did a lot. He handed the card to me through the half-open door. “I’ll explain everything then.”
“Umm, okay, I guess,” I said.
“Okay. Cool,” he said, and he closed the door gently.
I looked down at the card. It just had his name, Douglas Murphy, along with a phone number and an email address, and what I recognized was the address of this house. “Strange,” I thought to myself.
I put the card in my pocket and brought my sugar bowl down to the first floor to try my luck with the landlady.
I knocked on her door. A short time later, the door was answered by what I can only describe as an adorable little old lady. This was not the sort of old lady who looks as though she could shatter at any moment like a fine Meissen figurine. Nor did she look like the sort of ornery old lady who would come out with a cane in one hand and a shotgun in the other, screaming, “Get the hell off of my sidewalk!” No, this little old lady looked right out of Central Casting. She was plump, but not fat; her grey hair pulled into a neat chignon. Her cheeks showed just a hint of pink, and her brown eyes seemed deep and wise, but mostly merry. When the door opened, the air smelled like a curious mixture of musty upholstery and rosewater perfume.
“Mrs. Kaufmann?” I said. She nodded.
“Hi, I’m Jacob Stubbs. I just moved in upstairs.” I offered my hand, which she took and shook warmly. “I wonder,” I asked, “if you have some sugar I might borrow?”
She stood there, smiling, staring at me blankly.
“Umm, Mrs. Kaufmann?” I said.
“Sorry,” she said, in a thick accent of some kind. “No English. Deutsche.”
Deutsche. I knew that meant German.
“German?” I said.
“Ja! Cherman! Ja, ja!” said Mrs. Kaufmann, her German accent thick as a Bock Beer at Oktoberfest.
I know maybe five words in German, and most of those I learned from watching reruns of “Hogan’s Heroes”. I did take two years of Spanish in high school back in Coonskin Falls. My teacher, Mr. Burnside, had such a thick Alabama drawl, I kept expecting him to say “y’all” after every sentence. “Buenas dias, y’all! ¿Cómo está todo, y‘all?”
“No comprende Deutsche,” I said, stupidly. She just smiled at me.
I thought for a moment. Then, I started an elaborate pantomime. I pretended to be bleary-eyed and drowsy, yawning and stretching, then making coffee, breathing in the aroma and licking my lips in anticipation. She was smiling and giggling a little at my performance. Then, I pointed at my empty sugar bowl and made a sad face that Marcel Marceau himself would have been proud of.
Her face lit up. “Zucker!” she exclaimed.
I was a bit taken aback. What had she just said?
She grabbed the sugar bowl from my hand. “Zucker!” she said again, and I realized that must be the German word for ‘sugar’. She disappeared into her apartment and came back a short while later with the bowl full.
“Danke schön,” I said, showing off some of my Hogan’s Heroes German. She smiled when I said that.
“Willkommen, Jacob, willkommen,” she said, taking my hand. I knew that meant ‘welcome’.
“Gracias,” I said, and went back upstairs.
Later that night, I had eaten some dinner and gotten some more things put away. I didn’t have TV, so I decided to get ready for bed even though it was only like 8:00 at night. As I emptied my pockets, I found the card that my neighbor, Douglas Murphy, had given me. Ordinarily, I would have thrown a card like that onto my dresser, and there it would sit, gathering dust before finally being thrown away months later. But I had made a decision, when I left Coonskin Falls, to start reaching out more to people around me.
No time like the present, I figured. So I got into my PJs, made a drink, and called the number on the card.
“Hello?” came the voice on the other end.
“Hi, Douglas?” I said.
“Yes.”
“It’s Jake. Jacob Stubbs. From upstairs. We just met. You, uh, you said I should call you.”
“Oh, Jake! Hi, How are you, man?” he said, as if we were old friends.
“I’m good, I guess,” I answered. “Moving is kind of a drag.”
“Yeah, for sure. For sure,” he said. “Me, I haven’t moved since I moved in here, and that was in like 2005.”
“Listen, Jake,” he went on. “I don’t want to sound like I’m blurting all this out, or like I’m laying all this on you at once. And it’s not something I would ordinarily do-”
I was getting curious now. I took a sip of my drink.
“-but since you’re going to be living here, in this house… Well, I figured it would be easier just to lay all my cards out on the table from the beginning. The reason I couldn’t really help you tonight, why I couldn’t open the door for you- well, among other things, I have agoraphobia.”
“Well, okay, but, I don’t really understand. What does an irrational fear of spiders have to do with it?”
“No, no,” he said, and I could tell he was chuckling a little. “That’s arachnophobia. Agoraphobia is a fear of open places, of the outside world, of being anywhere that you can have a panic attack. For me, that’s pretty much anywhere outside my apartment.”
“Now you know why I haven’t had to move since 2005,” he said.
I don’t know, but for a guy who hasn’t left his house in eight years, he sounded pretty normal to me. Nice, even.
We talked on the phone for a while longer. I told him about my move here with the grocery store and he told me a little bit about living here in Paducah. Once he had told me about his agoraphobia, I think we both kind of agreed not to talk about it for a while, until we could both get used to the idea.
After I hung up the phone with Douglas, I put some soft music on the stereo and sat for a while, finishing my drink. My mind was awash with all kinds of thoughts: a new job, a new home, a new town; and about three people living in one house. We were all prisoners, in a way. One, a prisoner of loneliness, one of shyness, and one of fear. I decided, as part of the New Me, my fresh start, to reach out to these two people. Maybe we could help free one another from our various bonds.
The next morning, my coffee was hot and ready for me when I woke up. As I spooned the sugar into my cup, I thought about Mrs. Kaufmann. What could I do to reach out to someone when we didn’t even speak the same language? The answer was clear: I would have to learn German.
The store opened that day, and so began the day-to-day grind of my job at the Higgledy Piggledy. The company had found an apartment that was literally a stone’s throw from the store. All I had to do was walk out of my front door, turn left, pass two houses and a dry cleaner’s, and I was there, in like two minutes.
After I made my two minute commute home a few days later and I was walking in the front door of the house, I saw a woman letting herself out of Mrs. Kaufmann’s apartment. I introduced myself, and she told me that her name was Nancy, and that she used to live in my apartment. She had grown fond of Mrs. Kaufmann and stopped by to check in and say hello every once in a while.
“She has no one,” Nancy told me.
She told me that Mrs. Kaufmann and her husband had moved here from Germany in 2004, to live with their son, who was raising a family here in Kentucky. Her husband ended up dropping dead of a heart attack two months after they moved here; and then her son and his entire family were all killed in a horrible traffic accident six days after that.
“It’s unimaginable, what that lady’s been through,” she said. “I think she’s been kind of frozen since then. She hardly ever leaves the house, and she doesn’t really know anyone here, except maybe for me and one or two people at her church. I hope you’ll keep an eye on her for me.”
I told her I would and we exchanged telephone numbers. I went straight upstairs after that, got on my computer and ordered Rosetta Stone. In German.
Over the next few days, I called Douglas a couple of times. The calls were pretty quick and mostly just small talk. I talked about work and we complained about the weather, that sort of thing. But it sounded like he was glad to have the conversation, and little by little the calls started to get a bit longer. One night, just before we hung up, he said to me, “You’re gonna have to come down, Jake. Take a look at my apartment.”
“That sounds awesome, Douglas,” I said. “We definitely have to do that.”
I hung up the phone, feeling like I was making some sort of progress.
My Rosetta Stone German lessons had arrived after a few days, and I jumped right in. At first I felt kind of stupid, sitting there with a headset on, talking to my laptop in German. But after a while, I actually started to get the hang of it, and it felt like I was making pretty good progress.
One morning, I ran into Mrs. Kaufmann in the foyer as I was leaving for work.
“Guten Morgen, Frau Kaufmann,” I said.
She did a double-take, surprised and tickled at my German greeting. “Guten Morgen, Herr Stubbs. Es ist ein schöner Tag, ja?”
I knew what she meant. She meant, “Isn’t it a lovely day?” It was pouring rain outside.
“Ja, sehr schön,” I said. Yes, very lovely.
Mrs. Kaufmann just stood there for a moment, her hands clasped across her bosom and smiling broadly. “Ja. Sehr, sehr schön.” It was a lovely day, even if it was raining.
That very night, there was a message on my answering machine when I came home. It was Douglas.
“Hey, Jake, it’s Douglas, from downstairs,” he said. He sounded nervous. “Listen, if you feel like it, maybe you’d like to come down tonight after you get home. You know, hang out for a while. Just, knock on the door if you feel like it, okay? Cool. See ya later.”
Amazing! Of course, I decided to go. So I ate a quick dinner, grabbed a six-pack out of the fridge and went downstairs to Douglas’ apartment. I knocked on the door. It opened, all the way this time.
There stood Douglas Murphy, who I was seeing for the first time, even though we had been living in the same house for almost three months. If I thought there would be something about him which said “Agoraphobe”, there wasn’t. He just looked like any normal, ordinary guy, maybe a little skinny and pale, and in need of a haircut, but normal.
“Come in,” he said. “Come on in, Jake.”
I really wasn’t sure what to expect, walking into the home of an agoraphobic. I suppose I expected a cluttered, oppressive place, like one of those houses on “Hoarders”; or else a Paranoid’s Command Center, like a wall full of computer monitors and radar screens and things, designed to keep Government Gamma Rays at bay. What I found, instead, was a perfectly tidy, perfectly neat little mid-century room, filled with clean, spindly, blond wood furniture and just enough wood paneling to make it look like an apartment right out of a 1968 edition of “Better Homes & Gardens”.
“Very nice!” I said, looking around and handing Douglas the six-pack. “I like it.”
“Thanks,” said Douglas, as he placed the beers in the fridge. He brought back two bottles for us.
I sat down on the couch and Douglas turned the TV on. We just talked for a while, small talk mostly, drinking our beers, but as we did, I kept looking around the apartment. There was something about it, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. But somehow or other, the room looked really familiar to me, as if I had somehow seen it before.
After a while, I said, “Douglas, I’m having the strongest sense of déjà vû right now. Do you believe in that sort of thing?”
“What do you mean?” he said.
“I could swear I’ve been in your apartment before. And I know that I haven’t.”
Douglas’ face broke into a huge grin. “Really?” he said. “It’s not déjà vû, Jake. But you have seen this apartment before.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Douglas just folded his arms across his chest and blinked hard. He was looking at me as if I were supposed to react.
He blinked again. I had no idea what was going on. Maybe this was some sort of OCD thing that agoraphobics have.
Douglas looked exasperated, like there was some sort of joke that I just wasn’t getting. “C’mere,” he said, finally.
He led me down to the end of the hallway, where he opened a closed door and turned on the light. I looked inside.
I could not believe my eyes. I saw a room, wallpapered in a purple metallic paper decorated with elaborate Moorish designs. I saw a couch, a circular couch, filling nearly the entire room, upholstered in purple velvet and piled high with pillows of all different colors. I was looking at the inside of Jeannie’s bottle, from “I Dream of Jeannie”.
“Oh, my god,” I said. “That is awesome.”
Then I realized why it had all seemed so familiar. Douglas had turned his apartment into Major Nelson’s house in Cocoa Beach.
“Remember that first night when you called,” Douglas said, “and I told you that I have agoraphobia, “among other things”? Well, one of the “other things” is this, this little “obsession” I have with ‘I Dream of Jeannie’”.
“So I see,” I said, as I flopped down onto Jeannie’s purple couch. “So I see.”
“When I was little,” he told me, “I wished I could be like Jeannie. I wished that I could just blink my eyes and blink away all the bad things; that I could just blink and everything would be different, everything would be okay. Over the years, I guess, it sort of turned into this.” He gestured to the room around him.
“Well, I love it,” I told him. “I think it’s fantastic. I could live in this room.”
Douglas seemed relieved in a way, that I actually kind of admired his obsession. And I did. I mean, it was cool, and funky. Weird and obsessive, yes, but still cool and funky. Most of the cool and funky people I’ve met in my life also turned out to be sort of weird and obsessive anyway, so it was kind of no big deal.
So, we hung out there in Jeannie’s bottle for a while, drinking beer and talking about old TV shows and stuff. We argued for a while over who would win in a fight: Jeannie or Samantha Stevens from “Bewitched”? We settled on Jeannie because Douglas would never be satisfied otherwise, and I thought it best not to upset an agoraphobic.
As we finished the last of our beers, Douglas began to open up a little about his phobia. His entire world had basically become the inside of this apartment. Once a night, after he was sure everyone else was asleep, he would screw up the courage he needed to tiptoe down the stairs and get his mail, and once a month he would slip his rent check underneath Mrs. Kaufmann’s door. “I’ve never even met her, Jake,” he said, “and I’ve lived here for eight years.”
I told him the little I knew about Mrs. Kaufmann, and he looked positively wounded as he contemplated her sorrow. He sat for a while, quiet, and then he said, “You know, Jake, I need to meet her, face to face. Sometime soon, some time when I’m ready, do you think you could take me to meet her?”
“Sure, Douglas. Sure I could. That would be nice,” I said.
Soon after that I said that I had to be at work in the morning and that I needed to get going. I turned as I left the apartment, and Douglas and I regarded one another for a moment. We were both smiling. Douglas took a single step out of his apartment.
He grabbed my hand and shook it. “I’m really glad you moved in here, Jake,” he said to me. “And I’m really glad that you’ve become my, well, my friend. I feel like my world is opening up a little bit.”
“Thanks, Douglas,” I said. “So do I.”
He closed his door and I went upstairs to my apartment. I began to get an idea, about widening Douglas’ world. I mean, if we started with his apartment and occasionally the foyer and the mailboxes, maybe I could talk him into trying out the rest of the house. My apartment, maybe Mrs. Kaufmann’s apartment, eventually his world could include the entire house, and from there, who knows?
I started working really hard on my German lessons, and calling Douglas every day, and even dropped by on the weekend when we watched the ball game sitting on Jeannie’s purple round couch.
A few days later, Mrs. Kaufmann came out of her door when I got home from work, as if she had been waiting for me.
“Herr Stubbs!” she said. “Möchten Sie zum Essen kommen?”
She was inviting me to dinner. I think she was trying very hard to speak slowly and clearly and in easy Beginner German.
“Ja, sehr gut!” I answered, accepting with enthusiasm.
Dinner at Mrs. Kaufmann’s was delightful. Sitting in her apartment was like sitting in a stage set for “Arsenic and Old Lace” or “The Whales of August”. It looked like Grandmother’s house because that’s exactly what it was. The furniture was all old and soft and comfortable, well worn but never threadbare, upholstered in warm burgundy velvets. There were fade marks on the arms of the sofa where the sun had hit it in the same place day after day. Lace curtains on the windows, lace doilies on the armchairs, and black and white photographs of stern-looking Edwardian ancestors lined the walls. The food she served was delicious and plentiful, and it seemed to me that she missed cooking for someone else. I think it pleased her that I asked for second helpings of everything, including dessert.
We started out having the kinds of conversations, in German, which only people in second-language classes have:
“Hello, Mrs. Kaufmann”
“Hello, Mr. Stubbs.”
“How are you?”
“Fine, thank you. How are you?”
“I am fine. The weather is good.”
“It is warm today.”
Then, I would say something like, “Thank you for asking me to your typewriter.”
She would laugh, and eventually I’d catch my mistake. Soon, though, I began to feel more comfortable, and even though our conversations were simple and kind of superficial, we managed to actually communicate with one another. I told her about my home town and my family, and she told me that she had been a teacher back in Germany. That explains why she was able to communicate with me so easily as if I were a dim-witted little German child.
Before the meal ended, we talked a little bit about Douglas. I tried to explain his agoraphobia to her as best I could in my halting German. She is not a stupid woman, and I think she understands pretty well. I asked her how she felt about meeting him, and she said, I think, that it would be lovely.
I tried to tell Mrs. Kaufmann how much I enjoyed the evening as well as I could with my broken German, and she told me that she enjoyed having me very much. I kissed her gently on the cheek before I left.
“Gute Nacht, liebe Dame,” I said. Good night, dear lady.
“Gute Nacht, lieber Freund,” she answered. She had called me a “dear friend”.
Over the next couple of weeks, things started to happen more quickly. I was continuing my German lessons on Rosetta Stone, and a few times a week, I would stop in to Mrs. Kaufmann’s apartment and we would have tea and work on conjugating my verbs and stuff like that. I started seeing her in the store now and then, and I would help her find things when she was having trouble; and before long I saw her smiling at the other patrons and cooing over babies, that sort of thing.
I managed to get Douglas to come up to my apartment one night for pizza. Mrs. Kaufmann and I had to promise to stay behind closed doors, and he found the strength to leave his apartment and climb the stairs up to my door. When he knocked, I opened the door and found him there, pale and sweating, and gnawing the fingernails on his left hand. In his right hand he held a six-pack of beer, which I knew must have been piss warm, because I know for a fact that it had taken him nearly 45 minutes to get from his apartment to mine. I could hear the sound of his jacket as he tried to slide his way up the stairs with his back pressed up against the wall, and every few minutes I could hear him hyperventilating, probably sitting on the steps.
“Hi Jake,” he said, forcing a smile and trying to appear nonchalant. “Thanks for inviting me over.”
I asked him to come in and he did, although I could tell it wasn’t easy at all for him. I just acted like everything was completely normal and everyday, and once Douglas got settled in the living room and we started talking and watching TV and stuff, he started to relax.
After a while, I could tell that Douglas wasn’t looking at the TV at all. He was just looking around himself, at my apartment, and the view through my windows and things like that. My apartment is nothing special, it’s not so much ‘decorated’ as it is ‘furnished’. I’ve always called my style “Early Salvation Army”. But it dawned on me that Douglas hadn’t seen anything, really, beyond his own four walls, in eight years. He seemed to be drinking it all in, letting it wash over him, the newness, the tiny taste of the outside world.
At the end of the night, I heard him fairly skipping down the steps in one shot. It took him about 30 seconds, and I think he was humming the whole time.
Two days later, when I came home from work, I came across Douglas, standing by his mailbox in the foyer, leafing through that day’s mail. It was like 6 o’clock, the sun was still up, and everyone in the house was, presumably, awake.
He glanced in my direction when he heard me come in. “Oh, hi Jake,” he said, as if this were nothing at all remarkable. “What’s up?”
“Nothing much,” I answered. “Same shit, different day.”
“Mmm-hmm,” he muttered.
I breezed past him and went upstairs to my apartment. Same shit, different day, I thought. Hardly.
That weekend, Mrs. Kaufmann invited us both to her apartment for dinner. Douglas and I both wore jackets and ties, and Mrs. Kaufmann put on a beautiful dress that made her look fifty years younger in the soft light.
Mrs. Kaufmann and I had to promise to be safely ensconced in her apartment before Douglas could come out and make his way downstairs. He seemed to come down pretty quickly, though. I think he spent more time at the door of Mrs. Kaufmann’s apartment, stressing out and hyperventilating about actually knocking.
He did knock, eventually, though, and when he did, the rapport between the two of them was instantaneous. He treated her as if she were visiting royalty, and she treated him like a long-lost nephew. I was able to act as translator, but before long, the three of us found a rhythm in our conversation which made it very easy for all of us to understand what was being said, and for all of us to contribute.
After another one of Mrs. Kaufmann’s amazing meals, we all went in to the parlor for some strong German coffee. She put an old classical record on the record player, and the three of us just sat there for a while, sipping our coffee as the music played, saying absolutely nothing. And it was okay. I think sometimes it’s harder to be quiet around people than it is to make constant chatter. But the three of us had begun to feel comfortable around one another, like a little family.
All three of our worlds were expanding.
And soon it was the Fourth of July. We made plans to have a good old-fashioned Independence Day picnic in the backyard. This would be a big deal for Mrs. Kaufmann, who has never had a Fourth of July anything, and an even bigger deal for Douglas. He had gotten pretty comfortable within the confines of the house; he could move pretty freely among all three apartments, even when Mrs. Kaufmann and I were still around. But he still hadn’t stepped outside. He only agreed to even think about it because the back yard is enclosed by a huge high hedge all around, and there is a door to the back yard only feet away from the stairs back up to his apartment.
So, after getting up early for no reason on that day, I put together the classic Fourth of July Picnic for my little dysfunctional Paducah family. I made potato salad, cheeseburgers, hot dogs, corn on the cob, cole slaw, baked beans, jello, a cake with red white and blue sprinkles, and s’mores. There was enough food for about fifty people, even though I knew there was only three of us.
Mrs. Kaufmann and I were waiting for Douglas in the back yard. It was just getting dark. He had been wrestling with his demons for quite a while just within earshot. When he finally appeared in the doorway to the house, he was waving a tiny American flag in one hand. “Happy Independence Day, y’all,” he said.
Mrs. Kaufmann walked over to him slowly. He took a few, tentative steps outside the house and froze. When Mrs. Kaufmann reached him, she simply enveloped him in her arms, embracing him as if she were embracing her whole, lost family. They stood there for a moment, and then she led him over to the picnic table.
“Hi, Jake,” he said.
“Hey, Douglas. Beer?”
He nodded yes, and I walked over to the cooler. Just then, the first of the fireworks started over the river. We could see them between the two old oaks at the far end of the yard. As I walked over toward my friends, my family, I watched them as they looked up towards the sky and smiled, and laughed.
I began to realize how much I had done for myself, for them- how much anyone can do, by reaching out. We’re all a little happier.
Second comment: a television show which is no longer on - Michael Bunn: I Dream of Jeannie
Third comment: a foreign language - Diana Back: German
Fourth comment: a U.S. city - Christopher DeBoard: Paducah
Fifth comment: when I think of the city above (#4), I think of ____ - Scott Barnett: Inbred hillbillies
I was almost finished with my first cup of coffee before I realized that it was the Fourth of July. The store was closed and technically I didn’t even have to be out of bed. But, by then it was too late, there was no turning back. It didn’t really make that much difference, anyway. The grocery business means early mornings, and I’ve been getting up early for so long that I tend to wake up by 7 or 8 in the morning anyway, even without an alarm.
I work for Higgledy Piggledy, not to be confused with Piggly Wiggly, which is a huge grocery market chain in the South. Higgledy Piggledy is a small, mom-and-pop chain of markets, if you can call three stores a chain. Two of the stores are in Coonskin Falls, Alabama, which is where I’m from, and one store is in Paducah, Kentucky, which is where I am now.
Coonskin Falls is a pretty small town, just a few miles away from Rogersville off of Route 72. I had been working for Higgledy Piggledy ever since I got out of high school, and I had been supervising the front end for a while, auditing the cash drawers and making sure the baggers weren’t out back drinking beer or smoking weed in their cars. One afternoon I got called upstairs to the office, to see Mr. Perry, the general manager of the store. The whole way up the stairs, I was wracking my brain, trying to figure out what I had done wrong. When I got to his office, he just smiled at me and motioned for me to take a seat. I tried to sneak a look at his desk to figure out what was going on, but the only thing there was an unopened, blank, manila folder.
“We’ve been watching you, Jacob,” he said.
At that point all I could hear was the blood rushing through my ears as my heart started pounding, and I’m sure my face was turning bright red. Classic fight-or-flee response. I’ve never dealt well with stressful situations.
But then I realized that he was saying things like, “...like what we see,” and “opportunity for advancement,” and the pounding in my ears started to subside.
“The company has acquired another outlet,” he was saying, “In Paducah, Kentucky.”
“Hillbillies,” was the first thought which popped into my head. “Oh my god, they’re shipping me off to work with the hillbillies.”
Mr. Perry said, “Now I know what you must be thinking, Jake. You’re thinking: ‘What the hell is there out in Paducah? A bunch of inbred hillbillies?’”
I shook my head and tried to look incredulous, as if that hadn’t been at all what I was thinking. “No…” I said.
“Nevertheless, that’s not the case at all. Paducah is as vibrant and exciting a place as Coonskin Falls, or even Rogersville. It is two states away, though, Jake. So if you did take this job, you’d be pretty much on your own out there.”
He explained that I would be moved out to Paducah, and that the company would hook me up with a place to live and all that. He told me to take the rest of the day and night to think it over.
“Sleep on it,” he said, and I promised that I would.
So, I thought about it, of course. I thought about it a lot. I never went to college, so I knew it was a good idea for me to grab at advancement, whenever it came my way. The money sounded pretty good, too; it was way more than what I was already making. And getting out of Coonskin Falls didn’t sound too bad, even if it was to someplace like Paducah.
The truth is, there really wasn’t anything keeping me in Coonskin Falls. I had been born and raised there, and lived there every one of my 28 years. But I was an only child, and Mom and Dad had moved to Florida a few years earlier, after Dad retired. I have some cousins who are really nice, but they live way down near Mobile and I really only ever see them at weddings and funerals.
I really had no friends at all in Coonskin Falls. This was not a revelation to me, in fact, it had been something that I’ve been trying to work on for quite a while. I suffer from extreme shyness. Even though I am able to interact with people normally at work and out in the world and stuff like that, when it comes to opening up and revealing the real Me to other people, I have a really hard time. This kind of makes it hard to make real friends. Truth is, though, that I would really rather be alone during my off time than be in the company of other people. But, as the years go by, I realize that this is something that is getting in the way of a lot of things, things like overall Happiness, Fulfillment, and Afternoons Watching Old Movies With Friends.
So, that night, I decided that I would make the move. I decided to come here to Paducah. But I also decided that if I was going to be making this fresh start, that I was going to try to start improving myself, too, by making an effort to reach out more to the people around me. So, the next day, I went in to Mr. Perry’s office and told him that I would take the job.
Six weeks later, there I was, standing at the end of a long walkway, and looking up at the pretty Victorian house I was to call home, as the movers hauled my belongings up the two flights of stairs to my apartment. The company had gotten me a one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of this house. The landlord was a little old lady who lived on the first floor, and the second floor was rented to some guy who I just prayed was quiet and didn’t smoke clove cigarettes.
In the foyer, as I made my way up for the first time, I noticed the names on the mailboxes. “Mrs. K. Kaufmann” said one. “D. Murphy” said the other. Someone had recently added “J. Stubbs” to my box, on paper, in that fancy, European-style script. I thought that was nice.
Up the stairs I went, and I walked into my apartment for the first time. Even with boxes everywhere and everything in complete disarray, I liked it right away. It’s a nice-sized one-bedroom, with windows on all four sides, and a decent kitchen and bathroom. It looks pretty much the way you’d expect the top floor of an 1880s Queen Anne Victorian to look: full of crazy little nooks and odd crannies, not one thing in the whole place level or plumb. It was much better than the cookie-cutter, concrete box garden apartment I had been living in back in Coonskin Falls.
A few hours later, the movers had left and I was puttering around the apartment, trying to get things livable. I had gotten the bed put together, and the stereo hooked up. The TV was plugged in, but the cable hadn’t been turned on yet, so that would have to wait. I was trying to think of things that would make my morning a little easier, because there was no time to waste, I had to be at the store at 7am the very next day. I got a shower curtain hung in the bathroom, and at least got my toothpaste and shampoo put out where I could get at them. I moved into the kitchen, and got the toaster oven and the microwave plugged in, and got some dishes and some silverware put away and somewhat organized. I got the coffee maker set up, too. I have one of those programmable coffee makers that will have your coffee all hot and ready for you as soon as you get out of bed, as long as you remember to get it set up the night before. So, I got the coffee ready for the next morning, and got the cup set out and the spoon and the non-dairy creamer, and that’s when I realized that I didn’t have any sugar. Now, I can live without a lot of things in my coffee. I can survive without my International Delight Hazelnut creamer, I can even do without milk or half and half altogether. But I can not drink my coffee without sugar. And there’s no way I was going to make it for Opening Day at the Paducah Higgledy Piggledy without coffee.
“A cup of sugar? Really?” I thought to myself, as I made my way downstairs. “They’re just gonna think I’m some kind of psychopath, with a line like that.”
Nevertheless, I found myself a few moments later on the second floor, knocking on the door of D. Murphy. Part of me, the part that finds it hard to let go of old, deep-seated assumptions and stereotypes, half expected to be greeted by a snake-handling, toothless hillbilly. Would he be like Jethro Bodine? Or more like Uncle Jed? Instead, D. Murphy looked pretty normal, at least the half of him that I could see behind the three inches of open door which the security chain would allow. Behind him I could see a small hall stand, with a vase and a small bowl which contained a stack of business cards.
“Hi, I’m Jake,” I said through the three inches. “I just moved in upstairs. Believe it or not, I need to borrow a cup of sugar.” I held my empty sugar bowl up as proof.
“Really?” he said.
“Yeah, really,” I answered.
“Look, I’m sorry, Jake. I can’t really help you. This might sound strange, but could I ask you to call me? On the phone?” He turned, and took a business card off of the pile on the table. Apparently, this was something he did a lot. He handed the card to me through the half-open door. “I’ll explain everything then.”
“Umm, okay, I guess,” I said.
“Okay. Cool,” he said, and he closed the door gently.
I looked down at the card. It just had his name, Douglas Murphy, along with a phone number and an email address, and what I recognized was the address of this house. “Strange,” I thought to myself.
I put the card in my pocket and brought my sugar bowl down to the first floor to try my luck with the landlady.
I knocked on her door. A short time later, the door was answered by what I can only describe as an adorable little old lady. This was not the sort of old lady who looks as though she could shatter at any moment like a fine Meissen figurine. Nor did she look like the sort of ornery old lady who would come out with a cane in one hand and a shotgun in the other, screaming, “Get the hell off of my sidewalk!” No, this little old lady looked right out of Central Casting. She was plump, but not fat; her grey hair pulled into a neat chignon. Her cheeks showed just a hint of pink, and her brown eyes seemed deep and wise, but mostly merry. When the door opened, the air smelled like a curious mixture of musty upholstery and rosewater perfume.
“Mrs. Kaufmann?” I said. She nodded.
“Hi, I’m Jacob Stubbs. I just moved in upstairs.” I offered my hand, which she took and shook warmly. “I wonder,” I asked, “if you have some sugar I might borrow?”
She stood there, smiling, staring at me blankly.
“Umm, Mrs. Kaufmann?” I said.
“Sorry,” she said, in a thick accent of some kind. “No English. Deutsche.”
Deutsche. I knew that meant German.
“German?” I said.
“Ja! Cherman! Ja, ja!” said Mrs. Kaufmann, her German accent thick as a Bock Beer at Oktoberfest.
I know maybe five words in German, and most of those I learned from watching reruns of “Hogan’s Heroes”. I did take two years of Spanish in high school back in Coonskin Falls. My teacher, Mr. Burnside, had such a thick Alabama drawl, I kept expecting him to say “y’all” after every sentence. “Buenas dias, y’all! ¿Cómo está todo, y‘all?”
“No comprende Deutsche,” I said, stupidly. She just smiled at me.
I thought for a moment. Then, I started an elaborate pantomime. I pretended to be bleary-eyed and drowsy, yawning and stretching, then making coffee, breathing in the aroma and licking my lips in anticipation. She was smiling and giggling a little at my performance. Then, I pointed at my empty sugar bowl and made a sad face that Marcel Marceau himself would have been proud of.
Her face lit up. “Zucker!” she exclaimed.
I was a bit taken aback. What had she just said?
She grabbed the sugar bowl from my hand. “Zucker!” she said again, and I realized that must be the German word for ‘sugar’. She disappeared into her apartment and came back a short while later with the bowl full.
“Danke schön,” I said, showing off some of my Hogan’s Heroes German. She smiled when I said that.
“Willkommen, Jacob, willkommen,” she said, taking my hand. I knew that meant ‘welcome’.
“Gracias,” I said, and went back upstairs.
Later that night, I had eaten some dinner and gotten some more things put away. I didn’t have TV, so I decided to get ready for bed even though it was only like 8:00 at night. As I emptied my pockets, I found the card that my neighbor, Douglas Murphy, had given me. Ordinarily, I would have thrown a card like that onto my dresser, and there it would sit, gathering dust before finally being thrown away months later. But I had made a decision, when I left Coonskin Falls, to start reaching out more to people around me.
No time like the present, I figured. So I got into my PJs, made a drink, and called the number on the card.
“Hello?” came the voice on the other end.
“Hi, Douglas?” I said.
“Yes.”
“It’s Jake. Jacob Stubbs. From upstairs. We just met. You, uh, you said I should call you.”
“Oh, Jake! Hi, How are you, man?” he said, as if we were old friends.
“I’m good, I guess,” I answered. “Moving is kind of a drag.”
“Yeah, for sure. For sure,” he said. “Me, I haven’t moved since I moved in here, and that was in like 2005.”
“Listen, Jake,” he went on. “I don’t want to sound like I’m blurting all this out, or like I’m laying all this on you at once. And it’s not something I would ordinarily do-”
I was getting curious now. I took a sip of my drink.
“-but since you’re going to be living here, in this house… Well, I figured it would be easier just to lay all my cards out on the table from the beginning. The reason I couldn’t really help you tonight, why I couldn’t open the door for you- well, among other things, I have agoraphobia.”
“Well, okay, but, I don’t really understand. What does an irrational fear of spiders have to do with it?”
“No, no,” he said, and I could tell he was chuckling a little. “That’s arachnophobia. Agoraphobia is a fear of open places, of the outside world, of being anywhere that you can have a panic attack. For me, that’s pretty much anywhere outside my apartment.”
“Now you know why I haven’t had to move since 2005,” he said.
I don’t know, but for a guy who hasn’t left his house in eight years, he sounded pretty normal to me. Nice, even.
We talked on the phone for a while longer. I told him about my move here with the grocery store and he told me a little bit about living here in Paducah. Once he had told me about his agoraphobia, I think we both kind of agreed not to talk about it for a while, until we could both get used to the idea.
After I hung up the phone with Douglas, I put some soft music on the stereo and sat for a while, finishing my drink. My mind was awash with all kinds of thoughts: a new job, a new home, a new town; and about three people living in one house. We were all prisoners, in a way. One, a prisoner of loneliness, one of shyness, and one of fear. I decided, as part of the New Me, my fresh start, to reach out to these two people. Maybe we could help free one another from our various bonds.
The next morning, my coffee was hot and ready for me when I woke up. As I spooned the sugar into my cup, I thought about Mrs. Kaufmann. What could I do to reach out to someone when we didn’t even speak the same language? The answer was clear: I would have to learn German.
The store opened that day, and so began the day-to-day grind of my job at the Higgledy Piggledy. The company had found an apartment that was literally a stone’s throw from the store. All I had to do was walk out of my front door, turn left, pass two houses and a dry cleaner’s, and I was there, in like two minutes.
After I made my two minute commute home a few days later and I was walking in the front door of the house, I saw a woman letting herself out of Mrs. Kaufmann’s apartment. I introduced myself, and she told me that her name was Nancy, and that she used to live in my apartment. She had grown fond of Mrs. Kaufmann and stopped by to check in and say hello every once in a while.
“She has no one,” Nancy told me.
She told me that Mrs. Kaufmann and her husband had moved here from Germany in 2004, to live with their son, who was raising a family here in Kentucky. Her husband ended up dropping dead of a heart attack two months after they moved here; and then her son and his entire family were all killed in a horrible traffic accident six days after that.
“It’s unimaginable, what that lady’s been through,” she said. “I think she’s been kind of frozen since then. She hardly ever leaves the house, and she doesn’t really know anyone here, except maybe for me and one or two people at her church. I hope you’ll keep an eye on her for me.”
I told her I would and we exchanged telephone numbers. I went straight upstairs after that, got on my computer and ordered Rosetta Stone. In German.
Over the next few days, I called Douglas a couple of times. The calls were pretty quick and mostly just small talk. I talked about work and we complained about the weather, that sort of thing. But it sounded like he was glad to have the conversation, and little by little the calls started to get a bit longer. One night, just before we hung up, he said to me, “You’re gonna have to come down, Jake. Take a look at my apartment.”
“That sounds awesome, Douglas,” I said. “We definitely have to do that.”
I hung up the phone, feeling like I was making some sort of progress.
My Rosetta Stone German lessons had arrived after a few days, and I jumped right in. At first I felt kind of stupid, sitting there with a headset on, talking to my laptop in German. But after a while, I actually started to get the hang of it, and it felt like I was making pretty good progress.
One morning, I ran into Mrs. Kaufmann in the foyer as I was leaving for work.
“Guten Morgen, Frau Kaufmann,” I said.
She did a double-take, surprised and tickled at my German greeting. “Guten Morgen, Herr Stubbs. Es ist ein schöner Tag, ja?”
I knew what she meant. She meant, “Isn’t it a lovely day?” It was pouring rain outside.
“Ja, sehr schön,” I said. Yes, very lovely.
Mrs. Kaufmann just stood there for a moment, her hands clasped across her bosom and smiling broadly. “Ja. Sehr, sehr schön.” It was a lovely day, even if it was raining.
That very night, there was a message on my answering machine when I came home. It was Douglas.
“Hey, Jake, it’s Douglas, from downstairs,” he said. He sounded nervous. “Listen, if you feel like it, maybe you’d like to come down tonight after you get home. You know, hang out for a while. Just, knock on the door if you feel like it, okay? Cool. See ya later.”
Amazing! Of course, I decided to go. So I ate a quick dinner, grabbed a six-pack out of the fridge and went downstairs to Douglas’ apartment. I knocked on the door. It opened, all the way this time.
There stood Douglas Murphy, who I was seeing for the first time, even though we had been living in the same house for almost three months. If I thought there would be something about him which said “Agoraphobe”, there wasn’t. He just looked like any normal, ordinary guy, maybe a little skinny and pale, and in need of a haircut, but normal.
“Come in,” he said. “Come on in, Jake.”
I really wasn’t sure what to expect, walking into the home of an agoraphobic. I suppose I expected a cluttered, oppressive place, like one of those houses on “Hoarders”; or else a Paranoid’s Command Center, like a wall full of computer monitors and radar screens and things, designed to keep Government Gamma Rays at bay. What I found, instead, was a perfectly tidy, perfectly neat little mid-century room, filled with clean, spindly, blond wood furniture and just enough wood paneling to make it look like an apartment right out of a 1968 edition of “Better Homes & Gardens”.
“Very nice!” I said, looking around and handing Douglas the six-pack. “I like it.”
“Thanks,” said Douglas, as he placed the beers in the fridge. He brought back two bottles for us.
I sat down on the couch and Douglas turned the TV on. We just talked for a while, small talk mostly, drinking our beers, but as we did, I kept looking around the apartment. There was something about it, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. But somehow or other, the room looked really familiar to me, as if I had somehow seen it before.
After a while, I said, “Douglas, I’m having the strongest sense of déjà vû right now. Do you believe in that sort of thing?”
“What do you mean?” he said.
“I could swear I’ve been in your apartment before. And I know that I haven’t.”
Douglas’ face broke into a huge grin. “Really?” he said. “It’s not déjà vû, Jake. But you have seen this apartment before.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Douglas just folded his arms across his chest and blinked hard. He was looking at me as if I were supposed to react.
He blinked again. I had no idea what was going on. Maybe this was some sort of OCD thing that agoraphobics have.
Douglas looked exasperated, like there was some sort of joke that I just wasn’t getting. “C’mere,” he said, finally.
He led me down to the end of the hallway, where he opened a closed door and turned on the light. I looked inside.
I could not believe my eyes. I saw a room, wallpapered in a purple metallic paper decorated with elaborate Moorish designs. I saw a couch, a circular couch, filling nearly the entire room, upholstered in purple velvet and piled high with pillows of all different colors. I was looking at the inside of Jeannie’s bottle, from “I Dream of Jeannie”.
“Oh, my god,” I said. “That is awesome.”
Then I realized why it had all seemed so familiar. Douglas had turned his apartment into Major Nelson’s house in Cocoa Beach.
“Remember that first night when you called,” Douglas said, “and I told you that I have agoraphobia, “among other things”? Well, one of the “other things” is this, this little “obsession” I have with ‘I Dream of Jeannie’”.
“So I see,” I said, as I flopped down onto Jeannie’s purple couch. “So I see.”
“When I was little,” he told me, “I wished I could be like Jeannie. I wished that I could just blink my eyes and blink away all the bad things; that I could just blink and everything would be different, everything would be okay. Over the years, I guess, it sort of turned into this.” He gestured to the room around him.
“Well, I love it,” I told him. “I think it’s fantastic. I could live in this room.”
Douglas seemed relieved in a way, that I actually kind of admired his obsession. And I did. I mean, it was cool, and funky. Weird and obsessive, yes, but still cool and funky. Most of the cool and funky people I’ve met in my life also turned out to be sort of weird and obsessive anyway, so it was kind of no big deal.
So, we hung out there in Jeannie’s bottle for a while, drinking beer and talking about old TV shows and stuff. We argued for a while over who would win in a fight: Jeannie or Samantha Stevens from “Bewitched”? We settled on Jeannie because Douglas would never be satisfied otherwise, and I thought it best not to upset an agoraphobic.
As we finished the last of our beers, Douglas began to open up a little about his phobia. His entire world had basically become the inside of this apartment. Once a night, after he was sure everyone else was asleep, he would screw up the courage he needed to tiptoe down the stairs and get his mail, and once a month he would slip his rent check underneath Mrs. Kaufmann’s door. “I’ve never even met her, Jake,” he said, “and I’ve lived here for eight years.”
I told him the little I knew about Mrs. Kaufmann, and he looked positively wounded as he contemplated her sorrow. He sat for a while, quiet, and then he said, “You know, Jake, I need to meet her, face to face. Sometime soon, some time when I’m ready, do you think you could take me to meet her?”
“Sure, Douglas. Sure I could. That would be nice,” I said.
Soon after that I said that I had to be at work in the morning and that I needed to get going. I turned as I left the apartment, and Douglas and I regarded one another for a moment. We were both smiling. Douglas took a single step out of his apartment.
He grabbed my hand and shook it. “I’m really glad you moved in here, Jake,” he said to me. “And I’m really glad that you’ve become my, well, my friend. I feel like my world is opening up a little bit.”
“Thanks, Douglas,” I said. “So do I.”
He closed his door and I went upstairs to my apartment. I began to get an idea, about widening Douglas’ world. I mean, if we started with his apartment and occasionally the foyer and the mailboxes, maybe I could talk him into trying out the rest of the house. My apartment, maybe Mrs. Kaufmann’s apartment, eventually his world could include the entire house, and from there, who knows?
I started working really hard on my German lessons, and calling Douglas every day, and even dropped by on the weekend when we watched the ball game sitting on Jeannie’s purple round couch.
A few days later, Mrs. Kaufmann came out of her door when I got home from work, as if she had been waiting for me.
“Herr Stubbs!” she said. “Möchten Sie zum Essen kommen?”
She was inviting me to dinner. I think she was trying very hard to speak slowly and clearly and in easy Beginner German.
“Ja, sehr gut!” I answered, accepting with enthusiasm.
Dinner at Mrs. Kaufmann’s was delightful. Sitting in her apartment was like sitting in a stage set for “Arsenic and Old Lace” or “The Whales of August”. It looked like Grandmother’s house because that’s exactly what it was. The furniture was all old and soft and comfortable, well worn but never threadbare, upholstered in warm burgundy velvets. There were fade marks on the arms of the sofa where the sun had hit it in the same place day after day. Lace curtains on the windows, lace doilies on the armchairs, and black and white photographs of stern-looking Edwardian ancestors lined the walls. The food she served was delicious and plentiful, and it seemed to me that she missed cooking for someone else. I think it pleased her that I asked for second helpings of everything, including dessert.
We started out having the kinds of conversations, in German, which only people in second-language classes have:
“Hello, Mrs. Kaufmann”
“Hello, Mr. Stubbs.”
“How are you?”
“Fine, thank you. How are you?”
“I am fine. The weather is good.”
“It is warm today.”
Then, I would say something like, “Thank you for asking me to your typewriter.”
She would laugh, and eventually I’d catch my mistake. Soon, though, I began to feel more comfortable, and even though our conversations were simple and kind of superficial, we managed to actually communicate with one another. I told her about my home town and my family, and she told me that she had been a teacher back in Germany. That explains why she was able to communicate with me so easily as if I were a dim-witted little German child.
Before the meal ended, we talked a little bit about Douglas. I tried to explain his agoraphobia to her as best I could in my halting German. She is not a stupid woman, and I think she understands pretty well. I asked her how she felt about meeting him, and she said, I think, that it would be lovely.
I tried to tell Mrs. Kaufmann how much I enjoyed the evening as well as I could with my broken German, and she told me that she enjoyed having me very much. I kissed her gently on the cheek before I left.
“Gute Nacht, liebe Dame,” I said. Good night, dear lady.
“Gute Nacht, lieber Freund,” she answered. She had called me a “dear friend”.
Over the next couple of weeks, things started to happen more quickly. I was continuing my German lessons on Rosetta Stone, and a few times a week, I would stop in to Mrs. Kaufmann’s apartment and we would have tea and work on conjugating my verbs and stuff like that. I started seeing her in the store now and then, and I would help her find things when she was having trouble; and before long I saw her smiling at the other patrons and cooing over babies, that sort of thing.
I managed to get Douglas to come up to my apartment one night for pizza. Mrs. Kaufmann and I had to promise to stay behind closed doors, and he found the strength to leave his apartment and climb the stairs up to my door. When he knocked, I opened the door and found him there, pale and sweating, and gnawing the fingernails on his left hand. In his right hand he held a six-pack of beer, which I knew must have been piss warm, because I know for a fact that it had taken him nearly 45 minutes to get from his apartment to mine. I could hear the sound of his jacket as he tried to slide his way up the stairs with his back pressed up against the wall, and every few minutes I could hear him hyperventilating, probably sitting on the steps.
“Hi Jake,” he said, forcing a smile and trying to appear nonchalant. “Thanks for inviting me over.”
I asked him to come in and he did, although I could tell it wasn’t easy at all for him. I just acted like everything was completely normal and everyday, and once Douglas got settled in the living room and we started talking and watching TV and stuff, he started to relax.
After a while, I could tell that Douglas wasn’t looking at the TV at all. He was just looking around himself, at my apartment, and the view through my windows and things like that. My apartment is nothing special, it’s not so much ‘decorated’ as it is ‘furnished’. I’ve always called my style “Early Salvation Army”. But it dawned on me that Douglas hadn’t seen anything, really, beyond his own four walls, in eight years. He seemed to be drinking it all in, letting it wash over him, the newness, the tiny taste of the outside world.
At the end of the night, I heard him fairly skipping down the steps in one shot. It took him about 30 seconds, and I think he was humming the whole time.
Two days later, when I came home from work, I came across Douglas, standing by his mailbox in the foyer, leafing through that day’s mail. It was like 6 o’clock, the sun was still up, and everyone in the house was, presumably, awake.
He glanced in my direction when he heard me come in. “Oh, hi Jake,” he said, as if this were nothing at all remarkable. “What’s up?”
“Nothing much,” I answered. “Same shit, different day.”
“Mmm-hmm,” he muttered.
I breezed past him and went upstairs to my apartment. Same shit, different day, I thought. Hardly.
That weekend, Mrs. Kaufmann invited us both to her apartment for dinner. Douglas and I both wore jackets and ties, and Mrs. Kaufmann put on a beautiful dress that made her look fifty years younger in the soft light.
Mrs. Kaufmann and I had to promise to be safely ensconced in her apartment before Douglas could come out and make his way downstairs. He seemed to come down pretty quickly, though. I think he spent more time at the door of Mrs. Kaufmann’s apartment, stressing out and hyperventilating about actually knocking.
He did knock, eventually, though, and when he did, the rapport between the two of them was instantaneous. He treated her as if she were visiting royalty, and she treated him like a long-lost nephew. I was able to act as translator, but before long, the three of us found a rhythm in our conversation which made it very easy for all of us to understand what was being said, and for all of us to contribute.
After another one of Mrs. Kaufmann’s amazing meals, we all went in to the parlor for some strong German coffee. She put an old classical record on the record player, and the three of us just sat there for a while, sipping our coffee as the music played, saying absolutely nothing. And it was okay. I think sometimes it’s harder to be quiet around people than it is to make constant chatter. But the three of us had begun to feel comfortable around one another, like a little family.
All three of our worlds were expanding.
And soon it was the Fourth of July. We made plans to have a good old-fashioned Independence Day picnic in the backyard. This would be a big deal for Mrs. Kaufmann, who has never had a Fourth of July anything, and an even bigger deal for Douglas. He had gotten pretty comfortable within the confines of the house; he could move pretty freely among all three apartments, even when Mrs. Kaufmann and I were still around. But he still hadn’t stepped outside. He only agreed to even think about it because the back yard is enclosed by a huge high hedge all around, and there is a door to the back yard only feet away from the stairs back up to his apartment.
So, after getting up early for no reason on that day, I put together the classic Fourth of July Picnic for my little dysfunctional Paducah family. I made potato salad, cheeseburgers, hot dogs, corn on the cob, cole slaw, baked beans, jello, a cake with red white and blue sprinkles, and s’mores. There was enough food for about fifty people, even though I knew there was only three of us.
Mrs. Kaufmann and I were waiting for Douglas in the back yard. It was just getting dark. He had been wrestling with his demons for quite a while just within earshot. When he finally appeared in the doorway to the house, he was waving a tiny American flag in one hand. “Happy Independence Day, y’all,” he said.
Mrs. Kaufmann walked over to him slowly. He took a few, tentative steps outside the house and froze. When Mrs. Kaufmann reached him, she simply enveloped him in her arms, embracing him as if she were embracing her whole, lost family. They stood there for a moment, and then she led him over to the picnic table.
“Hi, Jake,” he said.
“Hey, Douglas. Beer?”
He nodded yes, and I walked over to the cooler. Just then, the first of the fireworks started over the river. We could see them between the two old oaks at the far end of the yard. As I walked over toward my friends, my family, I watched them as they looked up towards the sky and smiled, and laughed.
I began to realize how much I had done for myself, for them- how much anyone can do, by reaching out. We’re all a little happier.
Friday, October 4, 2013
COMMERCIAL BREAK
DRAMA-LERT™
As the commercial begins, we hear the desperate cries of a woman’s voice.FADE IN- As the camera pulls backward and the view widens, we see the figure of a WOMAN, sprawled on the floor, a white carpet. We begin to notice a wide pool of crimson in the carpet beside her. She his clutching her DRAMA-LERT device.
VOICE OVER- (should be a MAN’s voice, sort of like Hal Holbrook meets Matlock) “Sure, we all know those great services they offer for people with real, life-threatening emergencies. Slips and falls, massive heart attacks, “Stranger Danger”- all those wacky, zany things that can happen out there. Well, we here at DRAMA-LERT wondered: ‘What about all those emergencies that are emergencies, well, only to you?’”
Testimonial Segment
CUT: interior, kitchen setting. HUSBAND sits at table, DRAMA-LERT device prominent around his neck.
We notice WIFE in background, who has stopped in the midst of preparing a meal. She is nodding slowly and we cannot help but notice the butcher knife in her hand.
During these few seconds we have a series of QUICK CUTS showing some “Give-a-DarnÔ” Specialists at work:
“That is so bogus, man,” we hear the reassuring voice. “They just don’t get you, bro.”
CRACKHEAD looks directly into the camera, and smiles a big, gap-toothed meth-addict grin. “Thanks, Drama-Lert!”
“Void in Utah and where prohibited by law.”
Saturday, September 28, 2013
EXTEMPORANEOUS WRITING - "Untitled"
first comment: a life event - Star Chicaderis - Bar Mitzvah
second comment: a well-known book (hopefully which I know) - Casey Fogle - Green Eggs & Ham
third comment: a cartoon or cartoon character - Bill Duggan - Daffy Duck
fourth comment: a texture - Jim Thompson - stubbly
fifth comment: based on the above, the title of the piece should be: ___________ -(no response)
Dear Grandma,
Hi. How are you? I am fine. It would be much easier and much faster for me to write to you if you had email, but dad keeps saying, “that’s not going to happen,” so I guess I’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way. I hope you don’t mind if I type everything rather than writing it out in my own handwriting, but my hand always gets really cramped up if I have to write more than a couple of paragraphs, and besides, my penmanship is so lousy anyway that you probably wouldn’t be able to read a thing. Plus, I am using a really clear font and making it bigger than usual because I know that sometimes you have a hard time seeing things. Dad keeps saying that you‘re “blind in one eye and can’t see out of the other one!” , but I tell him that that’s not funny and besides you can see out of both eyes, just not very well. And I don’t think the glasses you wear look anything like “Coke bottles”, no matter what he says. Your glasses are nice because they make your eyes, which are really pretty, even prettier because they make them look much, much bigger.
Anyway, I wanted to write to you and tell you all about the exciting weekend I just had. I don’t know if you remember my friend Sam from grade school. He used to live at the end of our block on Pleasant Street. Anyway, Sam is Jewish, and it was his Bar Mitzvah last weekend, and I was invited to go. But there’s much more to it than just that, because I got to take the Amtrak down to Washington, DC and everything, all by myself, which was pretty cool.
Sam and I have been really good friends since kindergarten or first grade. His last name begins with “G”, just like ours, so our desks were always right near each other in class, and we were always next to one another in line and stuff like that. The fact that his family is Jewish and our family isn’t never really came up, except that his family celebrated different holidays than we did, and a couple of times Sam missed Cub Scouts if it was on a Friday. Sam always said that his family was “Reform” Jews, which I guess meant that they weren’t too strict about religion. I figured that it was pretty much the same as “fallen” was for Christians, since that’s what Dad always says we are.
Sam and his family moved away though, about a year and a half ago. His dad got some kind of job with the government, so they had to move down to DC. It seems like it’s not that big of a deal; Mom says that Washington is only 50 miles away from us here in Baltimore, but for some reason I haven’t even seen Sam once since they moved. So I was really excited when I got a really fancy invitation in the mail a couple of months ago when they requested the honour of my presence at Sam’s Bar Mitzvah. Mom made some phone calls, and as soon as she heard that I could stay overnight at Sam’s house, she said I could go, and that she was even going to let me make the trip all by myself. I was really excited, but instead of just picking up the phone and calling Sam, which is what I really wanted to do, Mom said I had to fill out the little reply card that was inside the invitation, and check off the part that said I was delighted to attend, and mail it back to “Master Samuel Goldman”. It took forever and it seemed like an awful lot of trouble, but Mom said that was how it was supposed to be done. So I was really happy when Sam finally called like a week later and he said he was glad that I was coming.
The first thing I had to do was find out exactly what a Bar Mitzvah is. I looked on the internet, and I found out that basically it is a ceremony in the Jewish religion that takes place when a boy or girl turns 13. If it is a girl, they call it a “Bat” Mitzvah. Anyway, according to that religion, this is the point when the young person is entering into adulthood. So, it seemed I was going to go and help my friend become a man. Sounded OK to me.
Anyway, Sam’s Bar Mitzvah was on a Saturday, so I got excused from class on Friday so I could take the train down to Washington. When I came home from school on Thursday, Mom told me that she had packed all my clothes for the trip.
“The suitcase is on your bed,” she said. “Go take a look and make sure you have everything you need.”
“OK,” I said, and I took the stairs two at a time because this is my first big trip and I was kind of excited to make sure everything was going to be right. I got to my bedroom and opened the door. There, in the center of my bed, sat my little sister’s Hannah Montana suitcase. My mother had stuck a piece of masking tape over the word “Hannah” and written “Joey G.” on it in magic marker, so at first glance the bag look like it belonged to a teenage girl named Joey G. Montana.
Oh my god, she didn’t really think I was going to get on a real Amtrak train dragging a Hannah Montana suitcase along behind me, did she?
I ran downstairs.
“Mom!” I yelled, “Where’s my suitcase?”
“You don’t have a suitcase, dear,” she said, as if there was absolutely nothing wrong here, “You’ve never been anywhere.”
“Well, neither has Becky!” I answered, as if that would actually make a difference.
“Yes she has,” said Mom, “she went to that Campfire Girl thing last fall. Anyway, it will be fine. Nobody cares what’s on your suitcase.”
“You’re kidding, right?” I said. “Of course they care! I care! There is no way I’m going anywhere with that suitcase.”
“Well, we’ll just have to ask your father when he gets home,” Mom said, in a way which I knew that any further discussion would be pointless. I went upstairs and took everything out of the suitcase anyway, because even if Dad didn’t care, I was not giving in on this one. I would put my clothes in trash bags if I had to.
Luckily, I didn’t have to do that, because here is what happened when Dad got home from work that day:
I was in the den watching TV and I heard Dad come in through the kitchen door. They started having one of their “discussions”. I couldn’t hear the words they were saying but I could hear the tone of their voices and they both sounded a little irritated. Then I heard Dad’s steps as he went up to take a look in my bedroom, so I turned the TV down really low and sat by the door to try to hear what would happen next.
I heard him open my bedroom door, and I heard the little ‘click’ when he turned on the light. Then all I heard was my dad saying something like, “Oh. My. God,” and then busting a gut laughing. As he came back down the stairs, he said something like, “You’ll just never get it, sweetheart,” and he went right out into the garage.
The next thing I knew, Dad was calling me. “Joey!” he said, “Come and get this bag packed!”
The suitcase he had brought in was the one he uses sometimes to go on business trips and stuff. It is humongous; Dad says it’s the biggest size the airlines will allow without being “screwed with baggage fees”, whatever that means. It’s almost as tall as I am, but I don’t really care. It’s got wheels, and anything is better than Hannah Montana.
Anyway, I basically ended up just re-packing everything that Mom had picked out for me. She’s much better at that sort of thing than I am, just not so good at picking out luggage, I guess. I put some comic books and my Ipod in there along with my headphones. I still carry an Ipod, because my cell phone is only an old-fashioned flip phone and Mom and Dad say I can’t get an actual Smart Phone until I’m sixteen and only if I keep my grades up. I packed my cell phone, too; but even with all that stuff I had only filled like a tenth of that gigantic suitcase.
So, the next afternoon, there I was, walking into Penn Station in Baltimore, rolling this huge suitcase along behind me. I didn’t really mind, though. I thought that in a way it made me look kind of important, like people would see me and think, “That young man must be a real go-getter, he’s heading off somewhere for a long time, with that big suitcase,” or something.
Anyway, Mom kept looking at me all weepy-eyed for some reason, and saying stuff like, “Our little man” and “Soon, soon…” Finally, when they announced my train, she made me stop and she took my picture with the giant luggage, and then she burst out crying.
Dad just rolled his eyes. He looked at me and mouthed the words, “Go, Son,” so I turned around and followed the crowd down to the train.
Penn Station is a pretty cool old train station. Dad said that it had been “recently renovated”, but it still looked pretty old to me. The benches were wood instead of plastic and the lights and the doors and fixtures and things all looked like they were from the olden days. I could almost picture people way back, like in the 1920s or 30s, rushing off to their trains in their long coats and their hats and all in black and white.
Once I got on the train, though, there was nothing old-timey about it. I hadn’t really thought about what the inside of a train would look like. I guess I thought it would be kind of old-fashioned like the train station, like trains look in the movies and old reruns of “Wild, Wild West”. But in reality, they are all modern and no-nonsense, just row after row of identical seats and stuff like that. Kind of like a school bus, but with no driver in sight and a lot more plush, like a school bus for an ultra high-tech school for millionaire kids in Japan.
Anyway, I found a seat for myself. I was lucky, because I found two seats together and I didn’t have to sit next to anyone. The gigantic suitcase was too big to fit in the overhead storage thingy, but I was able to leave it at the front of the car, and I could see it from my seat. Good luck to whoever wanted to steal that thing.
Before long, the conductor came along to take my ticket. He stood there and looked at it for a minute, and then he said, “Unaccompanied minor.”
“Umm, yeah, I suppose,” I said. I mean, I guess that was me.
He stood there and looked at me over his glasses for a minute. It looked like he was trying to memorize me, what I was wearing, what I looked like, everything. Then he handed me an Amtrak card with his name and a cell phone number on it.
“Something happens, find me,” he said.
He really didn’t look like a very nice person and I hoped I would never have to call him, but I tucked the card into my pocket. “Thanks,“ I said. It felt good to know that at least one person on this train had my back, because for the first time in my life Mom and Dad weren’t around, and not even a teacher or babysitter or anything. I was pretty much on my own. At least for the hour-long train ride to DC.
Dad had told me to just “stay in your seat and shut the hell up” for the whole train ride, but after a while I got bored and decided to walk from one end of the train to the other. My seat was pretty far to the back of the train, so I stuck my earphones in my ears, even though they weren’t attached to anything and there was no music or anything. If you have earphones in your ears, you can act like you don’t hear people if they try to talk to you, and then you don’t look rude if you ignore them and walk away.
I walked all the way to the front of the train, and then turned around and walked back. This is when it got interesting, because walking this way, I could actually see the faces of all the people on the train, and what they were wearing, or reading, and who they were talking to, and stuff like that. I took my time as I went. There were people who looked rich and people who looked like they had everything they owned right there with them. There were people who looked happy to be going wherever they were going, and people who looked like they had been crying the whole way. There were families with kids and old people; and people wearing strange and beautiful clothes from places like India and Africa.
As I walked backwards through the train, I began to realize how, well, kind of sheltered my life has been so far, with Mom and Dad and my family. I began to realize exactly how much there is about the world that I don’t know. And I began to think about how once this train stopped and we all got off, how everyone would scatter and go their separate ways and live their lives, but for the moment we were all doing the same thing: riding this train. Africans, Jewish people, Fallen Christians like me, all heading in the same direction and just trying not to bump into one another when the train shifts. I guess in some ways that’s what life in the real world is like, or at least it should be.
Anyway, I got back to my seat eventually and it was only a few more minutes before we were in DC.
I was really relieved to see Sam and his parents in the station, because Union Station in Washington is huge and I really didn’t want to have to call that conductor guy from the train. I spotted Mr. and Mrs. Goldman first. I almost didn’t recognize Sam, because he has actually grown like an inch and a half since the last time I saw him. In a way, though, it doesn’t look quite right, like his arms and legs are growing at a different rate than the rest of his body. I don’t know, maybe it’s just my imagination.
Anyway, we drove out to their house, which isn’t actually in Washington, DC, but in Maryland, in a place called Chevy Chase. I thought that was funny because there is a movie actor whose name is Chevy Chase. I put the giant suitcase away up in Sam’s room, and that night they invited me to join in a huge family dinner they were having with all the aunts and uncles and cousins and everyone who had come in to town for the Bar Mitzvah.
Dinner was really nice. We all sat at one big table, instead of being split into the “kids’ table” and everyone else. I wasn’t sure what to expect, because I had never been to a Jewish family dinner before. But the food was really good, even though I had trouble pronouncing some of the names of what they were. Everyone was laughing and talking really loud, and most of the women were trying to get everyone to eat more food and kept spooning extra helpings onto everyone’s plates. The grown-ups were all hollering at each other from one end of the table to the other one, and most of the kids were either stuffing their faces with food or couldn’t wait until dinner was over. Basically, it was exactly the same as our family dinners, and we’re Italian. I guess people aren’t really all that different from one another, after all.
At one point, Sam’s big sister, Rachel, said something like, “Sam, have you warned Joey about Daffy?”
Mrs. Goldman shot her a look and nobody said a word, but I looked at Sam and saw that he couldn’t suppress a big grin.
Then one of the Aunts or Grandmothers said something like, “Ever been to a Jewish family dinner before, Joe?”
“No, ma’am,” I said, “but it’s been really nice.”
“What religion is your family?” she asked.
“No religion, ma’am. My mom’s family is Unitarian, and Mom just says they believe in everything. Dad was brought up Catholic, but he says he hasn’t been in a church since he was 15.”
“Why is that?” someone asked.
“I’m not really sure,” I said. “I’ve heard Dad a few times, saying stuff like, he had ‘issues’ with a priest when he was a teenager, but he won’t say much about it, at least not to me.”
For some reason the room went really quiet at that moment. The adults were all looking at each other and one of the older teenagers started to chuckle under his breath. I hoped I hadn’t said anything I wasn’t supposed to. People can be very touchy about religion.
Fortunately, one of the babies started bawling or something at that point, and everyone was able to go back to laughing and spilling gravy and hollering at one another.
Later that night, after the dinner was over and everyone had left, Sam and I were up in his room, trying to fall asleep. He was in his bed, and I got to sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor, which was pretty cool. We weren’t all that tired, and we spent a long time just talking to one another. We caught up on what had been going on since the Goldmans moved away, about school and people we knew and stuff like that. Sam told me that he was really, really nervous about the Bar Mitzvah the next day. Turns out he had to go to a special school and everything to get his Bar Mitzvah; he had to practically learn an entire new language and memorize prayers and songs and all these rituals and everything. I tried to reassure him and tell him he was going to be great, but in the back of my mind I kept thinking that if it was me, I’d probably be scared out of my mind and would just want to run and hide and call the whole thing off.
“Especially some of the prayers,” he said. “Sometimes I just forget what I’m supposed to be saying, and when I look down the Hebrew letters just look like nonsense to me.” I could tell he was really nervous about the whole thing. “And then, Daffy-”
“Who is ‘Daffy’?” I jumped in.
Sam looked at me and grinned again. “Oh my god, you cannot react!”
“What do you mean?” I said. “React to what?”
“Our Rabbi looks, acts, and sounds exactly like Daffy Duck.”
A Rabbi is what Jewish people call a priest.
“You can not laugh when you see him. But you might want an umbrella for when he starts talking.”
“What? What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Every time he says a word with an ‘S’ in it, he sprays.”
“Oh my god. No way.”
“Way,” said Sam. “And I am not saying another word.”
At least I had gotten him to forget how nervous he was.
We talked for a while longer, but we were starting to get a little sleepy. Just before we fell asleep, though, Sam told me that I had actually taught him how to read.
“Yeah,” he said, “we were in kindergarten, in Miss Conway’s class, and she used to have all these books along one wall. One day you grabbed a copy of “Green Eggs and Ham” and we sat down at one of those little tables and you started reading it to me.
I liked it because it had my name in it,” he said, “and every day we would sit down together and you would say the words while I looked at the letters on the page. One day I recognized my name, ‘Sam’, there on the page, and then I figured out what other words were.
So you see, Joey,” he said, “You taught me how to read.”
“That’s cool,” I said, because it is.
A few minutes later, I heard Sam, nearly asleep. “I do not like them Sam, you see.
Not in a house. Not in a box.
Not with a mouse. Not with a fox.
I will not eat them here or there.
I do not like them anywhere!”
“You do not like green eggs and ham?” I answered, smiling.
“I do not like them, Sam-I-am,” he said, and we both drifted off to sleep.
The next day was the actual Bar Mitzvah.
We were rushing through the morning, but at one point, while we were getting ready, Sam called me into the bathroom. He was staring at himself in the mirror, and one hand was rubbing his chin. “Come here,” he said. “Do I feel, I dunno, stubbly- to you?”
I walked over and touched his chin. I guess it felt stubbly. I mean, I’m not really sure what stubbly actually feels like. I’ve felt my dad’s face when he hasn’t shaved for a few days, and Sam’s face didn’t feel anything like that. It might have felt more like my mom’s legs after she hasn’t felt like shaving them for a while.
“I don’t know,” I said to him. “I guess so.”
“I’m going to shave today, Joey,” he told me. “Part of becoming a man.”
He held up a razor which he had found in the shower. It was bright pink and decorated with flowers.
“Umm, do you know how to shave?” I asked him.
“Technically, no,” he said, “ but I’ve seen tons of guys shaving on TV and in commercials and stuff.”
“OK,” I said.
“I do feel stubbly,” he said, turning back to the mirror.
When he came out of the bathroom, half an hour later, he was pale, and he had about fifteen little pieces of tissue stuck all over his face. He was smiling from ear to ear.
We had to go to the church, which they call a synagogue. The Goldmans were all really nervous and running around shaking hands and saying hi to everybody and stuff. So, Mrs. Goldman introduced me to this girl named Mary Margaret O’Shaugnessy, probably because neither one of us if Jewish, and I guess she just expected the two of us to entertain ourselves and figure everything out.
I never really understood what people meant when they said things like somebody “looks Jewish.” I mean, how do you look like a religion? But when I met Mary Margaret, I finally understood, because Mary Margaret looks about as un-Jewish as anyone can look. She is fair, with pale red hair and freckles everywhere, and she wore this dress and these little white gloves that made her look like she had just come from Sunday school or First Communion. She was pretty nice, at least, and the two of us ended up getting a seat in the very back of the synagogue, along with some younger kids and some grown-ups who didn’t really “look Jewish” either, but who did look a little awkward and out of place. I had to wear a yarmulke, which is a tiny little hat that Jewish men wear. They had a big box to pick from if you didn’t have your own, so Mary Margaret helped pick one out for me that she said matched my tie, and then she had to pin it onto my head with a bobby pin. I liked wearing the yarmulke in a way, because even though it was just a little piece of cloth bobby pinned to my hair, it reminded me that I was in the presence of God and that I needed to be respectful and reverent, even though I had no idea what was happening around me.
The ceremony began, and I found it harder to be respectful and reverent as I began to realize who “Daffy” was. Even underneath his fancy robes and everything, I could see it. He was really skinny, and dressed all in black. He had huge feet which stuck out from beneath his robes in bright, almost yellow shoes. He had three locks of black hair which stood up from the top of his head like feathers. He had heavy-lidded, shifty eyes; and a protruding upper lip and a smirk which made him look as if he were up to, well, something. And when he started to speak- well, let’s just say that I found out that there are just as many ‘S’ words in the Jewish language as there are in English, and every once in a while, Sam had to stop and try to wipe off his face with his prayer shawl.
“Oh my god,” Mary Margaret said to me. “It’s…”
“I know,” I said to her, elbowing her in her ribs. “We cannot react. If we do, he might not allow Sam to enter adultery.”
“Okay,” she said, but every once in a while one or the other of us would start giggling.
Sam was doing really well up there, I guess, and I was really proud of him. He had to carry this huge scroll around and had to read prayers in Hebrew and chant and everything. Mary Margaret and I weren’t paying too much attention because neither one of us really knew exactly what was going on. At one point, though, while Sam was reading something in Hebrew from one of the giant scrolls, everything had gone quiet. Sam, it seems, had forgotten exactly what he was supposed to be saying, and looking down at the Hebrew alphabet wasn’t helping at all. I saw him looking around the room, looking, I guess, for some kind of help. There was still one piece of blood-soaked toilet paper stuck on his chin. He saw me, and we looked each other in the eye for a split second. He shrugged at me, and all I could do was shrug back, and smile.
“So I will eat them in a house,” Sam said, so quietly that he could barely be heard.
“And I will eat them with a mouse.”
He looked up now, and his voice was getting a little louder. “And I will eat them here and there. Say! I will eat them anywhere!”
Now he was looking right at me and smiling, while Daffy Duck shifted and tried to figure out what was happening. “I do so like green eggs and ham!”
I jumped right up from my seat. “Thank you! Thank you, Sam-I-am!” I shouted.
I had forgotten to be respectful and reverent. Rabbi Daffy looked like he was going to have a fit and Mrs. Goldman kept hiding her face in her hands like people you see on the news on “perp walks”. I didn’t know what to expect. But you know what happened, Grandma? People laughed. They laughed, and some of them clapped, and everybody looked like a huge weight had just been lifted off of their shoulders and relaxed a little bit. The Rabbi got Sam back on track with his prayers, which were just about over anyway. People realized that it’s not always the words and the prayers that are important, it’s everybody being together and seeing each other through all the different stages in their lives, and laughing at the stuff that's actually funny, even if it is inside a church or a synagogue or whatever.
After the synagogue we all got together for a party. It reminded me a lot of Aunt Peggy’s wedding: everybody was laughing and dancing and catching up on old times, and all the old people kept saying things like “Look how tall you are!” and “The last time I saw you, you were only this big!”. Except instead of a bride and a groom, there was Sam. I watched him for a while, as people shook his hand and gave him presents and stuff, and as I did, I thought to myself that yes, I could see it. My friend Sam was becoming a man. I wondered if I was, too.
So, I took the train home to Baltimore the next day, but by then I had done that already and the novelty had sort of worn off. By then it was just a boring, hour-long train ride, and I was glad I had brought my Ipod along for real this time.
Mom and Dad met me at the train station and we went home and life pretty much went back to normal after that. But not completely normal. In some small way, I feel like I took a step myself that weekend. Maybe a step closer to “becoming a man”, whatever that means.
But for now, I think I’ll just work on being 13. That seems to be enough.
Love you Grandma.
Love,
Joey
second comment: a well-known book (hopefully which I know) - Casey Fogle - Green Eggs & Ham
third comment: a cartoon or cartoon character - Bill Duggan - Daffy Duck
fourth comment: a texture - Jim Thompson - stubbly
fifth comment: based on the above, the title of the piece should be: ___________ -(no response)
UNTITLED
-or-
First Train Out of Toyland
Anyway, I wanted to write to you and tell you all about the exciting weekend I just had. I don’t know if you remember my friend Sam from grade school. He used to live at the end of our block on Pleasant Street. Anyway, Sam is Jewish, and it was his Bar Mitzvah last weekend, and I was invited to go. But there’s much more to it than just that, because I got to take the Amtrak down to Washington, DC and everything, all by myself, which was pretty cool.
“You don’t have a suitcase, dear,” she said, as if there was absolutely nothing wrong here, “You’ve never been anywhere.”
“Well, we’ll just have to ask your father when he gets home,” Mom said, in a way which I knew that any further discussion would be pointless. I went upstairs and took everything out of the suitcase anyway, because even if Dad didn’t care, I was not giving in on this one. I would put my clothes in trash bags if I had to.
The suitcase he had brought in was the one he uses sometimes to go on business trips and stuff. It is humongous; Dad says it’s the biggest size the airlines will allow without being “screwed with baggage fees”, whatever that means. It’s almost as tall as I am, but I don’t really care. It’s got wheels, and anything is better than Hannah Montana.
“Who is ‘Daffy’?” I jumped in.
“Our Rabbi looks, acts, and sounds exactly like Daffy Duck.”
A Rabbi is what Jewish people call a priest.
“What? What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Oh my god. No way.”
“Way,” said Sam. “And I am not saying another word.”
Love,
Joey
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)