Or is that going a little too far? Alton C. Peterson? And so preoccupied am I with not forgetting whom I would now like to be, so anxious to make it to the boathouse while she is still changing out of her skates- and wondering, too, what I'll say when she asks about the middle of my face and what happened to it (old hockey injury? Fell off my horse while playing polo after church one Sunday morning- too many sausages for breakfast, ha ha ha!)- I reach the edge of the lake with the tip of one skate a little sooner than I had planned- and so go hurtling forward onto the frostbitten ground, chipping one front tooth and smashing the bony protrusion at the top of my tibia.
My right leg is in a cast, from ankle to hip, for six weeks. I have something that the doctor calls Osgood Shlatterer's Disease. After the cast comes off, I drag the leg along behind me like a war injury- while my father cries, 'Bend it! Do you want to go through life like that? Bend it! Walk natural, will you! Stop favoring that Oscar Shattered leg, Alex, or you are going to wind up a cripple for the rest of your days!'
For skating after shikses, under an alias, I would be a cripple for the rest of my days.
With a life like mine. Doctor, who needs dreams?
Bubbles Girardi, an eighteen-year-old girl who had been thrown out of Hillside High School and was subsequently found floating in the swimming pool at Olympic Park by my lascivious classmate, Smolka, the tailor's son…
For myself, I wouldn't go near that pool if you paid me- it is a breeding ground for polio and spinal meningitis, not to mention diseases of the skin, the scalp, and the asshole-it is even rumored that some kid from Weequahic once stepped into the footbath between the locker room and the pool and actually came out at the other end without his toenails. And yet that is where you find the girls who fuck. Wouldn't you know it? That is the place to find the kinds of shikses Who Will Do Anything! If only a person is willing to risk polio from the pool, gangrene from the footbath, ptomaine from the hot dogs, and elephantiasis from the soap and the towels, he might possibly get laid.
We sit in the kitchen, where Bubbles was working over the ironing board when we arrived- in her slip) Mandel and I leaf through back numbers of Ring magazine, while in the living room Smolka tries to talk Bubbles into taking on his two friends as a special favor to him. Bubbles' brother, who in a former life was a paratrooper, is nobody we have to worry about, Smolka assures us, because he is off in Hoboken boxing in a feature event under the name Johnny 'Geronimo' Girardi. Her father drives a taxi during the day, and a car for The Mob at night- he is out somewhere chauffeuring gangsters around and doesn't get home until the early hours, and the mother we don't have to worry about because she's dead. Perfect, Smolka, perfect, I couldn't feel more secure. Now I have absolutely nothing to worry about except the Trojan I have been carrying around so long in my wallet that inside its tinfoil wrapper it has probably been half eaten away by mold. One spurt and the whole thing will go flying in pieces all over the inside of Bubbles Girardi's box- and then what do I do?
To be sure that these Trojans really hold up under pressure, I have been down in my cellar all week filling them with quart after quart of water- expensive as it is, I have been using them to jerk off into, to see if they will stand up under simulated fucking conditions. So far so good. Only what about the sacred one that has by now left an indelible imprint of its shape upon my wallet, the very special one I have been saving to get laid with, with the lubricated tip? How can I possibly expect no damage to have been done after sitting on it in school- crushing it in that wallet- for nearly six months? And who says Geronimo is going to be all night in Hoboken? And what if the person the gangsters are supposed to murder has already dropped dead from fright by the time they arrive, and Mr. Girardi is sent home early for a good night's rest? What if the girl has the syph! But then Smolka must have it too! – Smolka, who is always dragging drinks out of everybody else's bottle of cream soda, and grabbing with his hand at your putz! That's all I need, with my mother! I'd never hear the end of it! 'Alex, what is that you're hiding under your foot?' 'Nothing.' 'Alex, please, I heard a definite clink. What is that that fell out of your trousers that you're stepping on it with your foot? Out of your good trousers!' 'Nothing! My shoe! Leave me alone!' 'Young man, what are you- oh my God! Jack! Come quick! Look – look on the floor by his shoe!' With his pants around his knees, and the Newark News turned back to the obituary page and clutched in his hand, he rushes into the kitchen from the bathroom- Now what?' She screams (that's her answer) and points beneath my chair. 'What is that, Mister- some smart high-school joke?' demands my father, in a fury- 'what is that black plastic thing doing on the kitchen floor?' 'It's not a plastic one,' I say, and break into sobs. 'It's my own. I caught the syph from an eighteen-year- old Italian girl in Hillside, and now, now, I have no more p-p- p-penis!' 'His httle thing,' screams my mother, 'that I used to tickle it to make him go wee-wee- ' 'DON'T TOUCH IT NOBODY MOVE,' cries my father, for my mother seems about to leap forward onto the floor, like a woman into her husband's grave- 'call-the Humane Society- ' 'Like for a rabies dog?' she weeps. 'Sophie, what else are you going to do? Save it in a drawer somewhere? To show his children? He ain't going to have no children!' She begins to howl pathetically, a grieving animal, while my father… but the scene fades quickly, for in a matter of seconds I am blind, and within the hour my brain is the consistency of hot Farina.
Tacked above the Girardi sink is a picture of Jesus Christ floating up to Heaven in a pink nightgown. How disgusting can human beings be! The Jews I despise for their narrow-mindedness, their self-righteousness, the incredibly bizarre sense that these cave men who are my parents and relatives have somehow gotten of their superiority- but when it comes to tawdriness and cheapness, to beliefs that would shame even a gorilla, you simply cannot top the goyim. What kind of base and brainless schmucks are these people to worship somebody who, number one, never existed, and number two, if he did, looking as he does in that picture, was without a doubt The Pansy of Palestine. In a pageboy haircut, with a Palmolive complexion- and wearing a gown that I realize today must have come from Fredericks of Hollywood! Enough of God and the rest of that garbage! Down with religion and human groveling! Up with socialism and the dignity of man! Actually, why I should be visiting the Girardi home is not so as to lay their daughter- please God!- but to evangelize for Henry Wallace and Glen Taylor. Of course! For who are the Girardis if not the people, on whose behalf, for whose rights and liberties and dignities, I and my brother-in-law-to-be wind up arguing every Sunday afternoon with our hopelessly ignorant elders (who vote Democratic and think Neanderthal), my father and my uncle. If we don't like it here, they tell us, why don't we go back to Russia where everything is hunky-dory? 'You're going to turn that kid into a Communist,' my father warns Morty, whereupon I cry out, 'You don't understand! All men are brothers!' Christ, I could strangle him on the spot for being so blind to human brotherhood!
Now that he is marrying my sister, Morty drives the truck and works in the warehouse for my uncle, and in a manner of speaking, so do I: three Saturdays in a row now I have risen before dawn to go out with him delivering cases of Squeeze to general stores off in the rural wilds where New Jersey joins with the Poconos. I have written a radio play, inspired by my master, Norman Corwin, and his celebration of V-E Day, On a Note of Triumph (a copy of which Morty has bought me for my birthday). So the enemy is dead in an alley back of the Wilhelmstrasse; take a bow, G.I., take a bow, little guy … Just the rhythm alone can cause my flesh to ripple, like the beat of the marching song of the victorious Red Army, and the song we learned in grade school during the war, which our teachers called 'The Chinese National Anthem.' 'Arise, ye who refuse to be bond-slaves, with our very flesh and blood'-oh, that defiant cadence! I remember every single heroic word!-'we will build a new great wall!' And then my favorite line, commencing as it does with my favorite word in the English language: 'In-dig-na-tion fills the hearts of all of our coun-try- men! A.-rise! A.-rise! A-RISE!'
I open to the first page of my play and begin to read aloud to Morty as we start off in the truck, through Irvington, the Oranges, on toward the West-Illinois! Indiana! Iowa! O my America of the plains and the mountains and the valleys and the rivers and the canyons… It is with j'ust such patriotic incantations as these that I have begun to put myself to sleep at night, after jerking off into my sock. My radio play is called Let Freedom Ring! It is a morality play (now I know) whose two major characters are named Prejudice and Tolerance, and it is written in what I call 'prose-poetry.' We pull into a diner in Dover, New Jersey, just as Tolerance begins to defend Negroes for the way they smell. The sound of my own humane, compassionate, Latinate, alliterative rhetoric, inflated almost beyond recognition by Roget's Thesaurus (a birthday gift from my sister)- plus the fact of the dawn and my being out in it- plus the tattooed counterman in the diner whom Morty calls 'Chief'- plus eating for the first time in my life home-fried potatoes for breakfast- plus
