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By Root 7466 0

—the terror bred into my bones! What in their world was not charged with danger, dripping with germs, fraught with peril? Oh, where was the gusto, where was the boldness and courage? Who filled these parents of mine with such a fearful sense of life? My father, in his retirement now, has really only one subject into which he can sink his teeth, the New Jersey Turnpike. “I wouldn’t go on that thing if you paid me. You have to be out of your mind to travel on that thing—it’s Murder Incorporated, it’s a legalized way for people to go out and get themselves killed—” Listen, you know what he says to me three times a week on the telephone—and I’m only counting when I pick it up, not the total number of rings I get between six and ten every night. “Sell that car, will you? Will you do me a favor and sell that car so I can get a good night’s sleep? Why you have to have a car in that city is beyond my comprehension. Why you want to pay for insurance and garage and upkeep, I don’t even begin to understand. But then I don’t understand yet why you even want to live by yourself over in that jungle. What do you pay those robbers again for that two-by-four apartment? A penny over fifty dollars a month and you’re out of your mind. Why you don’t move back to North Jersey is a mystery to me—why you prefer the noise and the crime and the fumes—”

And my mother, she just keeps whispering. Sophie whispers on! I go for dinner once a month, it is a struggle requiring all my guile and cunning and strength, but I have been able over all these years, and against imponderable odds, to hold it down to once a month: I ring the bell, she opens the door, the whispering promptly begins! “Don’t ask what kind of day I had with him yesterday,” So I don’t. “Alex,” sotto voce still, “when he has a day like that you don’t know what a difference a call from you would make.” I nod. “And, Alex”—and I’m nodding away, you know—it doesn’t cost anything, and it may even get me through—“next week is his birthday. That Mother’s Day came and went without a card, plus my birthday, those things don’t bother me. But he’ll be sixty-six, Alex. That’s not a baby, Alex—that’s a landmark in a life. So you’ll send a card. It wouldn’t kill you.”

Doctor, these people are incredible! These people are unbelievable! These two are the outstanding producers and packagers of guilt in our time! They render it from me like fat from a chicken! “Call, Alex. Visit, Alex. Alex, keep us informed. Don’t go away without telling us, please, not again. Last time you went away you didn’t tell us, your father was ready to phone the police. You know how many times a day he called and got no answer? Take a guess, how many?” “Mother,” I inform her, from between my teeth, “if I’m dead they’ll smell the body in seventy-two hours, I assure you!” “Don’t talk like that! God forbid!” she cries. Oh, and now she’s got the beauty, the one guaranteed to do the job. Yet how could I expect otherwise? Can I ask the impossible of my own mother? “Alex, to pick up a phone is such a simple thing—how much longer will we be around to bother you anyway?”

Doctor Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life, and I’m living it in the middle of a Jewish joke! I am the son in the Jewish joke—only it ain’t no joke! Please, who crippled us like this? Who made us so morbid and hysterical and weak? Why, why are they screaming still, “Watch out! Don’t do it! Alex—no!” and why, alone on my bed in New York, why am I still hopelessly beating my meat? Doctor, what do you call this sickness I have? Is this the Jewish suffering I used to hear so much about? Is this what has come down to me from the pogroms and the persecution? from the mockery and abuse bestowed by the goyim over these two thousand lovely years? Oh my secrets, my shame, my palpitations, my flushes, my sweats! The way I respond to the simple vicissitudes of human life! Doctor, I can’t stand any more being frightened like this over nothing! Bless me with manhood! Make me brave! Make me strong! Make me whole! Enough being a nice Jewish boy, publicly pleasing my parents while privately pulling my putz! Enough!