The Essential Ellison Part 24

"Talk to me taste, Lance my darling. That I should live to see such a thing."

"Will you stop saying that?!?" He was getting hysterical.

"A shiksa, a Gentile yet. The shame of it."

"Mom, the goyim are for practice!"

"I'm getting the h.e.l.l out of here," Chrissy said, leaping out of the bed, long brown hair flying.

"Put on your clothes, you b.u.mmerkeh," Lance's mother shrilled. " Oh, G.o.d, if I only had a wet towel, a coat hanger, a can of Mace, something, anything!!"

And there was such a howling and shrieking and jumping and yowling and shoving and slapping and screaming and cursing and pleading and bruising as had never been heard in that block in the San Fernando Valley. And when it was over and Chrissy had disappeared into the night, to no one knew where, Lance sat in the middle of the bedroom floor weeping-not over his being haunted, not over his mother's death, not over his predicament: over his lost erection.

And it was all downhill from there. Lance was sure of it. Mom trying to soothe him did not help in the least.

"Sweetheart, don't cry. I'm sorry. I lost my head, you'll excuse the expression. But it's all for the best."

"It's not for the best. I'm h.o.r.n.y."

"She wasn't for you."

"She was for me, she was for me," he screamed.

"Not a shiksa. For you a nice, cute girl of a Semitic persuasion."

"I hate Jewish girls. Audrey was a Jewish girl; Bernice was a Jewish girl; that awful Darlene you fixed me up with from the laundromat, she was a Jewish girl; I hated them all. We have nothing in common."

"You just haven't found the right girl yet."

"I HATE JEWISH GIRLS! THEY'RE ALL LIKE YOU!".

"May G.o.d wash your mouth out with a bar of Fels-Naptha," his mother said in reverential tones. Then there was a meaningful pause and, as though she had had an epiphany, she said, "That's why I was sent back. To find you a nice girl, a partner to go with you on the road of life, a loving mate who also not incidentally could be a very terrific cook. That's what I can do to make you happy, Lance, my sweetness. I can find someone to carry on for me now that I'm no longer able to provide for you, and by the way, that nafkeh left a pair of underpants in the bathroom, I'd appreciate your burning them at your earliest opportunity."

Lance sat on the floor and hung his head, rocked back and forth and kept devising, then discarding, imaginative ways to take his own life.

The weeks that followed made World War II seem like an inept performance of Gilbert & Sullivan. Mom was everywhere. At his job. (Lance was an instructor for a driving school, a job Mom had never considered worthy of Lance's talents. "Mom, I can't paint or sculpt or sing; my hands are too stubby for surgery; I have no power drive and I don't like movies very much, so that eliminates my taking over 20th Century-Fox. I like being a driving teacher. I can leave the job at the office when I come home. Let be already.") And, of course, at the job she could not "let be." She made nothing but rude remarks to the inept men and women who were thrust into Lance's care. And so terrified were they already, just from the idea of driving in traffic, that when Lance's mother opened up on them, the results were horrendous: "A driver you call this idiot? Such a driver should be driving a dirigible, the only thing she could hit would be a big ape on a building maybe."

Into the rear of an RTD bus."Will you look at this person! Blind like a litvak! A refugee from the outpatient clinic of the Menninger Foundation."

Up the sidewalk and into a front yard.

"Now I've seen it all! This one not only thinks she's Jayne Mansfield with the blonde wig and the skirt up around the pupik, hopefully she'll arouse my innocent son, but she drives backwards like a pig with the staggers."

Through a bus stop waiting bench, through a bus stop sign, through a car wash office, through a gas station and into a Fotomat.

But she was not only on the job, she was also at the club where Lance went to dance and possibly meet some women; she was at the dinner party a friend threw to celebrate the housewarming (the friend sold the house the following week, swearing it was haunted); she was at the dry cleaners, the bank, the picture framers, the ballet, and inevitably in the toilet, examining Lance's stools to make sure they were firm and hard.

And every night there were phone calls from girls. Girls who had received impossible urges to call this number. "Are you Lance Goldfein? You're not going to believe this, but I, er, uh, now don't think I'm crazy, but I heard this voice when I was at my kid brother's bar mitzvah last Sat.u.r.day. The voice kept telling me what a swell fellah you are, and how we'd get along so well. My name is Shirley and I'm single and..."

They appeared at his door, they came up to him at work, they stopped by on their lunch hour, they accosted him in the street, they called and called and called.

And they were all like Mom. Thick ankles, gla.s.ses, sweet beyond belief, Escoffier chefs every one of them, with tales of potato latkes as light as a dryad's breath. And he fled them, screaming.

But no matter where he hid, they found him.

He pleaded with his mother, but she was determined to find him a nice girl.

Not a woman, a girl. A nice girl. A nice Jewish girl. If there were easier ways of going crazy, Lance Goldfein could not conceive of them. At times he was really talking to himself.

He met Joanie in the Hughes Market. They b.u.mped carts, he stepped backward into a display of Pringles, and she helped him clean up the mess. Her sense of humor was so black it lapsed over into the ultraviolet, and he loved her pixie haircut. He asked her for coffee. She accepted, and he silently prayed Mom would not interfere.

Two weeks later, in bed, with Mom nowhere in sight, he told her he loved her, they talked for a long time about her continuing her career in advocacy journalism with a small Los Angeles weekly, and decided they should get married.

Then he felt he should tell her about Mom.

"Yes, I know," she said, when he was finished.

"You know?"

"Yes. Your mother asked me to look you up."

"Oh, Christ."

"Amen," she said.

"What?"

"Well, I met your mother and we had a nice chat. She seems like a lovely woman. A bit too possessive, perhaps, but basically she means well."

"You met my mother...?"

"Uh-huh."

"But...but...Joanie..."

"Don't worry about it, honey," she said, drawing him down to her small, but tidy, bosom. "I think we've seen the last of Mom. She won't be coming back. Some do come back, some even get recorporated, but your mother has gone to a lovely place where she won't worry about you any more."

"But you're so unlike the girls she tried to fix me up with." And then he stopped, stunned. "Wait a minute...you met her? Then that means..."

"Yes, dear, that's what it means. But don't let it bother you. I'm perfectly human in every other way. And what's best of all is I think we've outfoxed her."

"We have?"

"I think so. Do you love me?"

"Yes."

"Well, I love you, too."

"I never thought I'd fall in love with a Jewish girl my mother found for me, Joanie."

"Uh, that's what I mean about outfoxing her. I'm not Jewish."

"You're not?"

"No, I just had the right amount of soul for your mother and she a.s.sumed."

"But, Joanie..."

"You can call me Joan."

But he never called her the Maid of Orleans. And they lived happily ever after, in a castle not all that neat.

A MINI-GLOSSARY OF YIDDISH WORDS USED IN "MOM".

b.u.mmerkeh (b.u.m-er-keh) A female b.u.m; generically, a "loose" lady.

"Eli Eli" (A-lee A-lee) Well-known Hebrew-Yiddish folk song composed in 1896 by Jacob Koppel Sandler. t.i.tle means "My G.o.d, my G.o.d." Opens with a poignant cry of perplexity: "My G.o.d, my G.o.d, why hast thou forsaken me?" from Psalm 22:2 of the Old Testament. Owes its popularity to Cantor Joseph Rosenblatt, who recorded and sang it many times as an encore during concerts in the early 1900s. AI Jolson also did rather well with it. Not the kind of song Perry Como or Bruce Springsteen would record.

fressing (FRESS-ing) To eat quickly, noisily; really stuffing one's face; synonymous with eating mashed potatoes with both hands.

latkes (LOT-kess) Pancakes, usually potato pancakes but could also be made from matzoh meal. When made by my mother, not unlike millstones.

Litvak (LIT-vahk) A Jew from Lithuania; variously erudite but pedantic, thin, dry, humorless, learned but skeptical, shrewd and clever; but used in this context as a derogatory by Lance' s mom, who was a Galitzianer, or Austro-Polish Jew; the antipathy between them is said to go back to Cain and Abel, one of whom was a Litvak, the other a Galitzianer...but that's just foolish. I guess.

momser (muhm-zer) An untrustworthy person; a stubborn, difficult person; a detestable, impudent person; not a nice person.

nafkeh (NAHF'-kuh) a b.u.mmerkeh, a "lady of easy virtue," a scarlet woman; what used to be called a " roundheels"-a ho' or hooer, as it is now commonly known. A hooker, a call girl, a B-girl, a prost.i.tute. Is that clear? Geez Louise!

nuhdzing (NOOOOOD-jing) To pester, to nag, to bore, to drive someone up a wall. The core of the story. Practiced by mothers of all ethnic origins be they Jewish, Italian or WASP. To bore, to ha.s.sle, to be bugged into eating your asparagus, putting on your galoshes, to get up and take her home, etc. Very painful.

pupik (PIP-ik or PUHP-ik) Navel. Belly-b.u.t.ton.

shiksa (sHIK-suh) A non-Jewish woman, especially a young one.

shmootz (shmootz) Dirt.

shtumie (SHTOOM-ee) Lesser insult-value than calling someone a schlemiel (shleh-MEAL). A foolish person, a simpleton; a consistently unlucky or unfortunate person; a social misfit; a clumsy, gauche, b.u.t.terfingered person; more offhand than schlemiel, less significant; the word you'd use when batting away someone like a gnat.

shtupping (SHTOOOOOP-ing) s.e.xual intercourse.

tante (TAHN-tuh) Aunt.

yenta (YEN-tuh) A woman of low origins or vulgar manners; a shrew; a shallow, coa.r.s.e termagant; tactless; a gossipy woman or scandal-spreader; one unable to keep a secret or respect a confidence; much of the nuhdz in her. If it's a man, it's the same word, a blabbermouth.

Ecowareness Once upon a time-something between 1,800,000,000 and 3,000,000,000 years ago-after the Earth had partly liquefied through loss of heat by radiation from the outside and partly by adiabatic expansion, its Mommy said gaey schluffen, the Earth had a cookie, spit up, and went to bed. It slept soundly (save for a moment in 1755 when a Kraut named Kant made a whole lot of noise trying to figure out how the sun had been created) and didn't wake up till a Tuesday in 1963 at which time-about four in the morning, a s.h.i.tty hour of the night except for suicides-it realized it was having a hard time breathing.

"Kaff kaff," it said, wiping out half the Trobriand Islands and whatever lay East of Java.

Casting about to discover what had wakened it, the Earth realized it was the All-Night Movie on Channel 11, snippets of a Maria Montez film (Cobra Woman, 1944) interrupting an aging cruiser king hustling '55 Mercs with pep pills in their gas tanks and lines of weariness in their grilles.

The Earth waited till dawn and began to look around. Everywhere it looked the rivers smelled like the grease traps in Army kitchens, the hills had been sheared away to provide clinging s.p.a.ce for American Plywood cages with indoor plumbing, the watershed had been scorched flat, valleys had been paved over causing a most uncomfortable constriction of the Earth's breathing, the birds sang off-key and the bullfrogs sounded like Eddie Cantor, whom the Earth had never much cared for anyway. And overhead, the light hurt the Earth's eyes.

Everything looked gray and funky.

"Boy," the Earth said, in its rustic way, "I don't like this a whole lot," and so the Earth began taking counter-action.

The first was against a s.h.a.ggy soph.o.m.ore from Michigan State University who, while parading around a Texaco station, carrying a placard that read STOP POLLUTION, ate a Power House bar and threw the wrapper in the gutter.

The Earth opened and swallowed him.

The next step was taken against fifty-six thousand Green Bay Packers fans as they crawled in imitation of a thousand-wheeled worm toward Lambeau Field, where their CroMagnon idols had waiting for them a sound trouncing at the hands and feet of the New Orleans Saints. The Earth, choking on the exhaust fumes of the automobiles, caused a lava flow to erupt from a nearby hillside, boiling down on the lines of traffic, solidifying instantly into a marvelous freeform sculpture of thirty thousand hot-rock-encased autos containing fifty-six thousand fried fans.

The next step was taken against the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, gathered in the Hollywood Bowl before a single-throated horde of Jesus People. They were singing Laura Nyro's "Save the Children" when the Earth re-channeled seven underground rivers and turned the amphitheater into the thirteenth largest natural lake in the United States.

Then followed in madcap array, a series of forays against prominent individuals. Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, speeding along the Lake Sh.o.r.e Drive, was inundated by seventy thousand tons of garbage from the burning dumps lining the scenic route; Ralph Nader's office in Washington, D.C., was struck by bolts of lightning for twenty minutes. Barbra Streisand's town house in Manhattan suddenly vanished into a bottomless pit that yawned in the middle of the fashionable East Fifties. Her C above high C was heard for hours. Diminishing.

Volcanos destroyed the refineries, storage depots, administration buildings and Manhattan offices of Standard Oil of Ohio, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, California, Texas and Rhode Island. The Earth took along Rhode Island in its entirety, possibly out of pique.

Eventually, when the mene mene tekel was written across the Grand Tetons in letters of burning forest fire, people began to get the idea.

The automobile was banned. All a.s.sembly lines shut down. Preservatives were eliminated from foods. Seals were left alone. A family of auk were discovered in New Zealand, doing rather nicely, thank you. And in Loch Ness, the serpent finally came up and took a deep breath.

And from that day to this, there has never again been a blotch of climatic s.m.e.g.m.a on the horizon, the Earth has settled down knowing the human race has learned its lesson and would never again take a ka-ka in its own nest, and that is why today the National Emphysema Society declared itself out of business.Now isn't that a nice story.And f.u.c.k you, too.

The Outpost Undiscovered By Tourists A tale of three kings and a star for this sacred season They camped just beyond the perimeter of the dream and waited for first light before beginning the siege.

Melchior went to the boot of the Rolls and unlocked it. He rummaged about till he found the air mattress and the inflatable television set, and brought them to the cleared circle. He pulled the cord on the mattress and it hissed and puffed up to its full size, king size. He pulled the plug on the television set and it hissed and firmed up and he snapped his fingers and it turned itself on.

"No," said Kaspar, "I will not stand for it! Not another night of roller derby. A King of Orient I are, and I'll be d.a.m.ned if I'll lose another night's sleep listening to those barely primate creatures dropkicking each other!"

Melchior glowed with his own night light. "So sue me," he said, settling down on the air mattress, tidying his moleskin cape around him... You know I've got insomnia. You know I've got a strictly awful hiatus hernia. You know those latkes are sitting right here on my chest like millstones. Be a person for a change, a mensch, it couldn't hurt just once."

Kaspar lifted the chalice of myrrh, the symbol of death, and shook it at Melchior. "Hypochondriac! That's what you are, a fake, a fraud. You just like watching those honkytonk bimbos punching each other out. Hiatus hernia, my fundament! You'd watch mud wrestling and extol the esthetic virtues of the balletic nuances. Turn it off... or at least, in the name of Jehovah, get the Sermonette."

"The ribs are almost ready," Balthazar interrupted. "You want the mild or the spicy sauce?"

Kaspar raised his eyes to the star far above them, out of reach but maddeningly close. He spoke to Jehovah: "And this one goes ethnic on us. Wandering Jew over there drives me crazy with the light that never dims, watches inst.i.tutionalized mayhem all night and clanks all day with gold chains... and Black-is-Beautiful over there is determined I'll die of tertiary heartburn before I can even find the Savior. Thanks, Yahweh; thanks a lot. Wait till you need a favor."

"Mild or spicy?" Balthazar said with resignation.