and resented these poor parents of mine to the same degree then as I seem to now, looking backward upon what I was from the vantage point of what I am-and am not? Is this truth I'm delivering up, or is it just plain kvetching? Or is kvetching for people like me a form of truth? Regardless, my conscience wishes to make it known, before the beefing begins anew, that at the time my boyhood was not this thing I feel so estranged from and resentful of now. Vast as my confusion was, deep as my inner turmoil seems to appear in retrospect, I don't remember that I was one of those kids who went around wishing he lived in another house with other people, whatever my unconscious yearnings may have been in that direction. After all, where else would I find an audience like those two for my imitations? I used to leave them in the aisles at mealtime -my mother once actually wet her pants, Doctor, and had to go running in hysterical laughter to the bathroom from my impression of Mister Kitzel on 'The Jack Benny Show.' What else? Walks, walks with my father in Weequahic Park on Sundays that I still haven't forgotten. You know, I can't go off to the country and find an acorn on the ground without thinking of him and those walks. And that's not nothing, nearly thirty years later.
And have I mentioned, vis-a-vis my mother, the running conversation we two had in those years before I was even old enough to go off by myself to a school? During those five years when we had each other alone all day long, I do believe we covered just about every subject known to man. 'Talking to Alex,' she used to tell my father when he walked in exhausted at night, 'I can do a whole afternoon of ironing, and never even notice the time go by.' And mind you, I am only four.
And as for the hollering, the cowering, the crying, even that had vividness and excitement to recommend it; moreover, that nothing was ever simply nothing but always SOMETHING, that the most ordinary kind of occurrence could explode without warning into A TERRIBLE CRISIS, this was to me the way life is. The novelist, what's his name, Markfield, has written in a story somewhere that until he was fourteen he believed 'aggravation' to be a Jewish word. Well, this was what I thought about 'tumult' and 'bedlam,' two favorite nouns of my mother's. Also 'spatula.' I was already the darling of the first grade, and in every schoolroom competition, expected to win hands down, when I was asked by the teacher one day to identify a picture of what I knew perfectly well my mother referred to as a 'spatula.' But for the life of me I could not think of the word in English. Stammering and flushing, I sank defeated into my seat, not nearly so stunned as my teacher but badly shaken up just the same… and that's how far back my fate goes, how early in the game it was 'normal' for me to be in a state resembling torment-in this particular instance over something as monumental as a kitchen utensil.
Oh, all that conflict over a spatula, Momma,
Imagine how I feel about you!
I am reminded at this joyous little juncture of when we lived in Jersey City, back when I was still very much my mother's papoose, still very much a sniffer of her body perfumes and a total slave to her kugel and grieben and ruggelech- there was a suicide in our building. A fifteen-year-old boy named Ronald Nimkin, who had been crowned by women in the building “Jose Iturbi the Second,' hanged himself from the shower head in his bathroom. 'With those golden hands!' the women wailed, referring of course to his piano playing-'With that talent!' Followed by, 'You couldn't look for a boy more in love with his mother than Ronald!'
I swear to you, this is not bullshit or a screen memory, these are the very words these women use. The great dark operatic themes of human suffering and passion come rolling out of those mouths like the prices of Oxydol and Del Monte canned corn! My own mother, let me remind you, when I returned this past summer from my adventure in Europe, greets me over the phone with the following salutation: 'Well, how's my lover?' Her lover she calls me, while her husband is listening on the other extension! And it never occurs to her, if I'm her lover, who is he, the schmegeggy she lives with? No, you don't have to go digging where these people are concerned-they wear the old unconscious on their sleeves!
Mrs. Nimkin, weeping in our kitchen: 'Why? Why? Why did he do this to us?' Hear? Not what might we have done to him, oh no, never that-why did he do this to us? To us! Who would have given our arms and legs to make him happy and a famous concert pianist into the bargain! Really, can they be this blind? Can people be so abysmally stupid and live? Do you believe it? Can they actually be equipped with all the machinery, a brain, a spinal cord, and the four apertures for the ears and eyes- equipment, Mrs. Nimkin, nearly as impressive as color TV-and still go through life without a single clue about the feelings and yearnings of anyone other than themselves? Mrs. Nimkin, you shit, I remember you, I was only six, but I remember you, and what killed your Ronald, the concert- pianist-to-be is obvious: YOUR FUCKING SELFISHNESS AND STUPIDITY! 'All the lessons we gave him,' weeps Mrs. Nimkin… Oh look, look, why do I carry on like this? Maybe she means well, surely she must-at a time of grief, what can I expect of these simple people? It's only because in her misery she doesn't know what else to say that she says that God-awful thing about all the lessons they gave to somebody who is now a corpse. What are they, after all, these Jewish women who raised us up as children? In Calabria you see their suffering counterparts sitting like stones in the churches, swallowing all that hideous Catholic bullshit; in Calcutta they beg in the streets, or if they are lucky, are off somewhere in a dusty field hitched up to a plow… Only in America, Rabbi Golden, do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedalpushers and mink stoles-and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn't their fault they were given a gift like speech-look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic. Yes, yes, maybe that's the solution then: think of them as cows, who have been given the twin miracles of speech and mah-jongg. Why not be charitable in one's thinking, right. Doctor?
My favorite detail from the Ronald Nimkin suicide: even as he is swinging from the shower head, there is a note pinned to the dead young pianist's short-sleeved shirt -which is what I remember most about Ronald: this tall emaciated teen-age catatonic, swimming around all by himself in those oversized short-sleeved sport shirts, and with their lapels starched and ironed back so fiercely they looked to have been bulletproofed… And Ronald himself, every limb strung so tight to his backbone that if you touched him, he would probably have begun to hum… and the fingers, of course, those long white grotesqueries, seven knuckles at least before you got down to the nicely gnawed nail, those Bela Lugosi hands that my mother would tell me-and tell me-and tell me-because nothing is ever said once-nothing!-were 'the hands of a born pianist.'
Pianist! Oh, that's one of the words they just love, almost as much as doctor. Doctor. And residency. And best of all, his own office. He opened his own office in Livingston. 'Do you remember Seymour Schmuck, Alex?' she asks me, or Aaron Putz or Howard Shiong, or some yo-yo I am supposed to have known in grade school twenty-five years ago, and of whom I have no recollection whatsoever. 'Well, I met his mother on the street today, and she told me that Seymour is now the biggest brain surgeon in the entire Western Hemisphere. He owns six different split-level ranch-type houses made all of fieldstone in Livingston, and belongs to the boards of eleven synagogues, all brand-new and designed by Marc Kugel, and last year with his wife and his two little daughters, who are so beautiful that they are already under contract to Metro, and so brilliant that they should be in college-he took them all to Europe for an eighty-million-dollar tour of seven thousand countries, some of them you never even heard of, that they made them just to honor Seymour, and on top of that, he's so important, Seymour, that in every single city in Europe that they visited he was asked by the mayor himself to stop and do an impossible operation on a brain in hospitals that they also built for him right on the spot, and-listen to this-where they pumped into the operating room during the operation the theme song from Exodus so everybody should know what religion he is-and that's how big your friend Seymour is today! And how happy he makes his parents!'
And you, the implication is, when are you going to get married already? In Newark and the surrounding suburbs this apparently is the question on everybody's Ups: WHEN IS ALEXANDER PORTNOY GOING TO STOP BEING SELFISH AND GIVE HIS PARENTS, WHO ARE SUCH WONDERFUL PEOPLE, GRANDCHILDREN? 'Well,' says my father, the tears brimming up in his eyes, 'well,' he asks, every single time I see him, 'is there a serious girl in the picture. Big Shot? Excuse me for asking. I'm only your father, but since I'm not going to be alive forever, and you in case you forgot carry the family name, I wonder if maybe you could let me in on the secret.'
Yes, shame, shame, on Alex P., the only member of his graduating class who hasn't made grandparents of his Mommy and his Daddy. While everybody else has been marrying nice Jewish girls, and having children, and buying
