sprung from this obsession with fellatio and fornication, from romance and fantasy and revenge-from the settling of scores! the pursuit of dreams! from this hopeless, senseless loyalty to the long ago!
In 1950, just seventeen, and Newark two and a half months behind me (well, not exactly 'behind': in the mornings I awake in the dormitory baffled by the unfamiliar blanket in my hand, and the disappearance of one of 'my' windows; oppressed and distraught for minutes on end by this unanticipated transformation given my bedroom by my mother)-I perform the most openly defiant act of my life: instead of going home for my first college vacation, I travel by train to Iowa, to spend Thanksgiving with The Pumpkin and her parents. Till September I had never been farther west than Lake Hopatcong in New Jersey -now I am off to loway! And with a blondie! Of the Christian religion! Who is more stunned by this desertion, my family or me? What daring! Or was I no more daring than a sleepwalker?
The white clapboard house in which The Pumpkin had grown up might have been the Taj Mahal for the emotions it released in me. Balboa, maybe, knows what I felt upon first glimpsing the swing tied up to the ceiling of the front porch. She was raised in this house. The girl who has let me undo her brassiere and dry-hump her at the dormitory door, grew up in this white house. Behind those goyische curtains! Look, shutters!
'Daddy, Mother,' says The Pumpkin, when we disembark at the Davenport train station, 'this is the weekend guest, this is the friend from school whom I wrote you about-'
I am something called 'a weekend guest'? I am something called 'a friend from school'? What tongue is she speaking? I am 'the bonditt,' 'the vantz,' I am the insurance man's son. I am Warshaw's ambassador! 'How do you do, Alex?' To which of course I reply, 'Thank you.' Whatever anybody says to me during my first twenty-four hours in Iowa, I answer, 'Thank you.' Even to inanimate objects. I walk into a chair, promptly I say to it, 'Excuse me, thank you.' I drop my napkin on the floor, lean down, flushing, to pick it up, 'Thank you,' I hear myself saying to the napkin-or is it the floor I'm addressing? Would my mother be proud of her little gentleman! Polite even to the furniture!
Then there's an expression in English, 'Good morning,' or so I have been told; the phrase has never been of any particular use to me. Why should it have been? At breakfast at home I am in fact known to the other boarders as 'Mr. Sourball,' and 'The Crab.' But suddenly, here in Iowa, in imitation of the local inhabitants, I am transformed into a veritable geyser of good mornings. That's all anybody around that place knows how to say-they feel the sunshine on their faces, and it just sets off some sort of chemical reaction: Good morning! Good morning! Good morning! sung to half a dozen different tunes! Next they all start asking each other if they had 'a good night's sleep.' And asking me! Did I have a good night's sleep? I don't really know, I have to think-the question comes as something of a surprise. Did I Have A Good Night's Sleep? Why, yes! I think I did! Hey-did you? 'Like a log,' replies Mr. Campbell. And for the first time in my life I experience the full force of a simile. This man, who is a real estate broker and an alderman of the Davenport town council, says that he slept like a log, and I actually see a log. I get it! Motionless, heavy, like a log! 'Good morning,' he says, and now it occurs to me that the word 'morning,' as he uses it, refers specifically to the hours between eight A.M. and twelve noon. I'd never thought of it that way before. He wants the hours between eight and twelve to be good, which is to say, enjoyable, pleasurable, beneficial! We are all of us wishing each other four hours of pleasure and accomplishment. Why, that's terrific! Hey, that's very nice! Good morning! And the same applies to 'Good afternoon'! And 'Good evening'! And 'Good night'! My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn't just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you've got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren't only bombs and bullets -no, they're little gifts, containing meanings!
Wait, I'm not finished-as if the experience of being on the inside rather than the outside of these goyische curtains isn't overwhelming enough, as if the incredible experience of my wishing hour upon hour of pleasure to a houseful of goyim isn't sufficient source for bewilderment, there is, to compound the ecstasy of disorientation, the name of the street upon which the Campbell house stands, the street where my girl friend grew up! skipped! skated! hop- scotched! sledded! all the while I dreamed of her existence some fifteen hundred miles away, in what they tell me is the same country. The street name? Not Xanadu, no, better even than that, oh, more preposterous by far: Elm. Elm! It is, you see, as though I have walked right through the orange celluloid station band of our old Zenith, directly into 'One Man's Family.' Elm. Where trees grow-which must be elms!
To be truthful, I must admit that I am not able to draw such a conclusion first thing upon alighting from the Campbell car on Wednesday night: after all, it has taken me seventeen years to recognize an oak, and even there I am lost without the acorns. What I see first in a landscape isn't the flora, believe me-it's the fauna, the human opposition, who is screwing and who is getting screwed. Greenery I leave to the birds and the bees, they have their worries, I have mine. At home who knows the name of what grows from the pavement at the front of our house? It's a tree-and that's it. The kind is of no consequence, who cares what kind, just as long as it doesn't fall down on your head. In the autumn (or is it the spring? Do you know this stuff? I'm pretty sure it's not the winter) there drop from its branches long crescent-shaped pods containing hard little pellets. Okay. Here's a scientific fact about our tree, comes by way of my mother, Sophie Linnaeus: If you shoot those pellets through a straw, you can take somebody's eye out and make him blind for life. (SO NEVER DO IT! NOT EVEN IN JEST! AND IF ANYBODY DOES IT TO YOU, YOU TELL ME INSTANTLY!) And this, more or less, is the sort of botanical knowledge I am equipped with, until that Sunday afternoon when we are leaving the Campbell house for the train station, and I have my Archimedean experience: Elm Street… then… elm trees! How simple! I mean, you don't need 158 points of I.Q., you don't have to be a genius to make sense of this world. It's really all so very simple!
A memorable weekend in my lifetime, equivalent in human history, I would say, to mankind's passage through the entire Stone Age. Every time Mr. Campbell called his wife 'Mary,' my body temperature shot into the hundreds. There I was, eating off dishes that had been touched by the hands of a woman named Mary. (Is there a clue here as to why I so resisted calling The Monkey by her name, except to chastise her? No?) Please, I pray on the train heading west, let there be no pictures of Jesus Christ in the Campbell house. Let me get through this weekend without having to see his pathetic punim-or deal with anyone wearing a cross! When the aunts and uncles come for the Thanksgiving dinner, please, let there be no anti-Semite among them! Because if someone starts in with 'the pushy Jews,' or says 'kike' or 'jewed him down'- Well, I'll Jew them down all right, I'll jew their fucking teeth down their throat! No, no violence (as if I even had it in me), let them be violent, that's their way. No, I'll rise from my seat-and (vuh den?) make a speech! I will shame and humiliate them in their bigoted hearts! Quote the Declaration of Independence over their candied yams! Who the fuck are they, I'll ask, to think they own Thanksgiving!
Then at the railroad station her father says, 'How do you do, young man?' and I of course answer, 'Thank you.' Why is he acting so nice? Because he has been forewarned (which I don't know whether to take as an insult or a blessing), or because he doesn't know yet? Shall I say it then, before we even get into the car? Yes, I must! I can't go on living a lie! 'Well, it sure is nice being here in Davenport, Mr. and Mrs. Campbell, what with my being Jewish and all.' Not quite ringing enough perhaps. 'Well, as a friend of Kay's, Mr. and Mrs. Campbell, and a Jew, I do want to thank you for inviting me-' Stop pussyfooting! What then? Talk Yiddish? How? I've got twenty-five words to my name-half of them dirty, and the rest mis- pronounced! Shit, just shut up and get in the car. 'Thank you, thank you,' I say, picking up my own bag, and we all head for the station wagon.
Kay and I climb into the back seat, with the dog. Kay's dog! To whom she talks as though he's human! Wow, she really is a goy. What a stupid thing, to talk to a dog- except Kay isn't stupid! In fact, I think she's smarter really than I am. And yet talks to a dog? 'As far as dogs are concerned, Mr. and Mrs. Campbell, we Jews by and large-' Oh, forget it. Not necessary. You are ignoring anyway (or trying awfully hard to) that eloquent appendage called your nose. Not to mention the Afro-Jewish hairpiece. Of course they know. Sorry, but there's no escaping destiny, bubi, a man's cartilage is his fate. But I don't want to escape! Well, that's nice too-because you can't. Oh, but yes I can-if I should want to! But you said you don't want to.
