Rubber Balls and Liquor (6 page)

At this point, most readers are probably asking themselves, “Gee, Gilbert, with a hands-on, take-charge father like that, how did you turn out to be such a pussy?”

Well, I have my mother to thank, if you must know. Or, to blame—not that she was in any way responsible, but I learned early on that someone has to take the blame for every shortcoming or failing in your life, and if you can't blame a Jewish mother then who can you blame? And, as long as we're pointing fingers, there was quite a lot I could hold against my mother. At a time when most women got married and kept house, my mother actually went to college and earned her degree. Then she got married and kept house. She raised me and my two older sisters in a cramped apartment, directly over my father's hardware store, and every once in a while she would remind us she had a college degree.

Now readers are probably saying, “Oh gee, Gilbert. Let me rephrase the question. With a hands-on, take-charge father like that, and a strong, independent woman for a mother, how did you turn out to be such a
fucking
pussy?”

Another good question, I must admit. And here again, I have no good answer, but that won't keep me from distracting you with an irrelevant aside. Here goes: back then, when my parents were young and just starting out, you didn't have an option to be a pussy.

(Note to filmmakers: perhaps it's time to permanently retire the phrase “Failure is not an option,” unless you happen to be making a movie about a census taker who takes his job way too seriously, in which case the phrase could be reasonably made to apply.)

(A follow-up note to filmmakers: “Not on my watch!” is another tired line that should be banned from all future productions, and as long as I'm on it let's make it against the law in Hollywood for a character to recognize that he or she is an unusual situation and to remark that they're not in Kansas anymore.)

Back to me and my plain, nonpussy existence: there were no Mommy & Me groups, no playdates, no DVDs like
Baby Einstein,
which as far as I know give you valuable tips on how to be … well, a baby Einstein. For that, in my day, we just went to our snake oil salesman.

We kids were left on our own a lot. We learned to amuse ourselves, which in my case turned out to pay dividends in the jerking off department, where I soon demonstrated a certain degree of proficiency. My parents were too busy to chase after us. That, or they couldn't be bothered. Or maybe their interests lay elsewhere. My father was always downstairs, working, but I never saw any customers in his store. For all his expertise, for all his nuts and bolts, for all his abilities with a hammer and screwdriver … every time I went in there, the place was empty. I don't know why he even had locks on the doors, other than to advertise the fact that he sold them inside. You could have had a girl lying next to an open cash register with her legs hanging open and no one would have walked into that store, which was called “Gilbert's Father's Hardware Store,” because even then my family was cashing in on my name—although, looking back, having a girl with her legs open lying next to the cash register would have been a useful accessory for my developing skills as a world-class masturbator.

My father wasn't much of a businessman, but he could sniff an opportunity. Literally. For a while when I was growing up, young people in New York City were into sniffing glue. Nowadays, kids experiment with all kinds of illegal drugs, but in my day all it took was a tube of model airplane glue to get high. It was a much more wholesome brand of drug abuse, and it was all the rage.

(Ah, life was so much simpler back then … just ask Norman Rockwell.)

You'd see kids walking down the street in the middle of the day with their noses pressed into brown paper lunch bags and think for a moment they were inhaling some exotic new blend of tuna fish sandwich. Or, they'd be sitting on a stoop, passing a bag back and forth, and you'd wonder how many bites there could be in one little tuna fish sandwich, that so many people could share it.

As a result of all this glue sniffing and apparent tuna fish sandwich sharing, there was an ordinance passed in New York City restricting the sale of model airplane glue. Under the new law, you couldn't sell model airplane glue unless you were also selling a model as part of the same transaction. It was a stupid law, really, because it didn't account for those actual model airplane hobbyists who might have already purchased their model and simply run out of glue, but my father wasn't the sort of businessman to question a new local ordinance. He only cared that he could make money from it, so he dusted off the cheapest model airplane kit he could find on the back of one of his shelves. In fact, it was the only model airplane kit in the store, and it had been there forever. It was a Wright Brothers model, and if I'm not mistaken it was actually made by the Wright Brothers.

Like every other item in the store, my father had pretty much given up on the thought of selling this one model airplane kit, but then this ordinance happened and it was a regular Christmas miracle—except for the fact that it was nowhere near Christmas at the time. This one model airplane kit was so cheap my father could price it for about a quarter. Also, it was so cheap that if you bothered to actually build the model and then stood back to admire your handiwork, it would fall apart if you looked at it too closely. Whatever wood there is in nature that's flimsier than balsa wood, that's what they used for these kits. He put this one model airplane kit next to the rack where he kept the modeling glue, hoping the nutty neighborhood kids would reach for it so they could go off and get high without breaking the law. The model was like a necessary ingredient, the key to the whole transaction, but he knew the kids didn't give a shit about the model. He knew all they'd care about was that it only cost a quarter.

But get this: the first group of kids who bought the cheap model tossed it in the trash as soon they left. My father found it in the garbage can by the side of the store later that afternoon. This was the Christmas miracle part of the story. The kids hadn't even opened it, so my father picked it up and brought it back inside so he could sell it again. And again. It got to where the kids would leave the store and he'd count to three. Then he'd go outside and reclaim the unopened kit. Over and over, he did this. For years, this was our major source of income, all these quarters, until the neighborhood kids found some other way to get high and my father was stuck once again with this one cheap kit, which I believe he finally took as a tax deduction.

He was ahead of his time, my father, one of the original recyclers. And a regular entrepreneur. Some kids, they get to walk around the neighborhood boasting that their fathers were in the airline industry, or that they worked at the airport, but my father the model airplane magnate was in a different end of the business. The lower-than-balsa-wood end.

I don't want to give the impression that my father played fast and loose with the law in his hardware store, because that certainly wasn't the case. There was nothing fast about him, just loose. In fact, there was one time when he was so completely
not fast
that the law caught up to him. Specifically, it caught up to his brother, my Uncle Seymour, who ran the store with my father. Why you needed two people to run a store that was barely a one-man operation was beyond me, but they were partners. And it was a good thing, too, because the police came by one day looking for illegal merchandise. It happened to be a day when my father was out of the store, probably scouring the city for unopened model airplane kits. The police had received a hot tip that my father and uncle were selling party poppers. Remember party poppers? They were little plastic champagne bottles, with a string hanging from the top where the cork was meant to be. You'd pull the string and the thing would “pop” open and spit confetti all over the place. Fun for the entire family and all that.

Well, the cops told Uncle Seymour that it was against the law to sell this novelty item. (The hot tip, it turned out, was the fact that my father and uncle had thought to display these items in the window—a misguided attempt at marketing, it turned out.) The cops said the poppers were some sort of illegal firearm, and they dragged poor Uncle Seymour from the store in handcuffs. Really. Okay, maybe not
really
, but this was how Uncle Seymour always told the story. He liked to embellish, probably because he wanted my father to feel bad for being out of the store that day. In any case, Uncle Seymour wound up spending the day in jail. Really. Okay, okay … maybe not
really
, but he was there for a couple hours, which was more than enough time for him to bend for the soap in just the wrong way.

Despite his run-ins with the law, my father the drug dealer and illegal firearms merchant was a hard worker. He was almost always at the store when I was growing up. In this way, he was like everyone else. Fathers weren't around much in those days. They were always working. Not like today, when they're supposed to be around all the time, starting in the delivery room. This is a disgusting new development, if you ask me. It's even pretty disgusting if you don't ask me. Speaking personally, and from the heart, which means you should probably put your ear to my chest if you care to make out what I'm saying, I miss the old days when expectant fathers rolled up their sleeves and paced back and forth in the hospital waiting room, loosening their ties and smoking cigarettes and waiting for their babies to be born so they could get back to work. At least, that's how I
think
it used to happen, although it's possible I might have gotten this from an
I Love Lucy
episode. (Or was it
Dick Van Dyke
? I can't be sure.)

To be clear, my father wasn't in the delivery room when I was born. I don't think my mother was there, either. She was working at the time.

We didn't have a lot of money when I was growing up, but that didn't keep my parents from wanting to indulge us with some of the finer things in life. Money isn't everything, you know, even when it might appear to be
most
things.

(Note to
goyim
readers: not every Jew who grew up in Brooklyn was rich. And as long as I'm on it, here's another note: fuck you. That's all. Whether or not you assumed we were rich, if you're a
goyim
, fuck you. But keep reading, and tell your friends to buy the book.)

Okay, now that I've gotten that bit of unpleasantness out of the way, I'll share another childhood memory. This one is mostly true, and the parts I've made up are mostly inconsequential. One summer, my father decided we should all go away on vacation, so he rented a bungalow in Brighton Beach. Now, if you know anything at all about Brooklyn, you'll know that Brighton Beach is about a five-minute walk from Coney Island, but this was my father's idea of getting away from it all and making a family memory. (It's possible he got this idea from Oprah, but she was still in preschool at the time and I don't think her show had gone national.) We packed up our suitcases and threw everything into our beat-up old car and in less than two minutes we arrived at our bungalow. The whole way there, I sat in the backseat and kept asking, “Are we there yet?” I think I might have even thrown up, but that's just me and long car trips. To this day, if you pick me up in your car and offer me a ride around the block, you'll do well to put down some newspapers on the backseat, just to be safe. Actually, it's probably better for both of us if you don't offer me a ride at all, because the last thing you need is a motion-sick Jew and my cardiologist tells me I could probably use the exercise so I might as well walk.

We pulled up in front of our rented bungalow and spilled out of the car and my father said, “Okay, everyone. Let's have a fun vacation.”

That vacation turned out to be a fiasco. The weather was lousy, so we packed up and went home.

Another summer, my parents sent me off to a Jewish camp in upstate New York. I don't remember the name, but it rhymed with Auschwitz. (Also, mostly true.) I think we were served three meals a week, which was plenty, believe me. I still have my old camp T-shirt somewhere. It's faded with the years, but you can still make out the camp colors—smoke and ash. And you can still read the message beneath the camp's spirited hammer-and-sickle-and-swastika logo. It says, “I survived the camp.” Only in my case I barely made it through a single session. My father made it through World War II, and I couldn't handle one week of sing-alongs. (This might be another instance of delicious irony, but it still leaves a bad taste.) That should tell you something, and what it tells you is this: I hated camp. With a passion. Which worked out well, because the other kids in my cabin also hated me. Also, with a passion. I don't think there has ever been so much passion passed around among a group of eight-year-old boys.

The camp was run by a couple of Jews who thought it would be worthwhile to devote an entire day of activities to honoring those who died during the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I never understood why this was more meaningful to our camp directors than honoring the victims of Pearl Harbor, say, or the victims of the German concentration camps that seemed to bear a passing resemblance to our own little hellhole, but I was eight and I didn't have it in me to question authority. And so we honored the fallen Japs. It was a politically incorrect time, so we ran through the woods with our eyelids taped down. This was our way of showing respect. Then we made lanyards. Then we hiked into the woods so the mountainfolk could rape us.

It was like
Deliverance,
only with bug spray.

(Yeah, yeah … I know. That makes two
Deliverance
jokes, and we're not even halfway through this thing, but that should pretty much cover us, here on in.)

Which reminds me … why is it that Jews play into all these offensive stereotypes when we have something to celebrate or commemorate? It's innate to our species, I guess. On Hanukkah, we give each other chocolate coins. Whose idea was that? Jews running hither and yon with sacks of money, chocolate or not, doesn't exactly do much to dispel the notion that we're a money-grubbing lot. (And when was the last time you ran hither and yon, anyway?) You don't see Asians taping down their eyelids on their holidays, unless it's at Camp Auschwitz in the Catskills, on Hiroshima Day. You don't see African-Americans walking around in blackface, eating watermelon and singing minstrel tunes. And on Irish holidays, the Irish don't go running around, drinking themselves shit-faced and getting into fights in the street for no apparent reason and then puking their guts out in between parked cars … oh, wait a minute. Forget I said that.