Short Stories

I used to think of my father as "the old guy." For one thing, he was old enough to be my grandfather. For another, he was short and gnarled, like a bonsai. You'd never have guessed that he had been an infantryman in World War I or a boxer. But the real reason was that he just seemed like some old guy who happened to live in the same tiny duplex apartment as my mother and me.

There's a certain kind of old Jew who's so obsessed with making money that he doesn't know how to be human anymore. I want to say to them, "You're the kind of Jew that gives anti-Semitism its good name in this country." The old guy was like that.

Once he said to me, in that challenging hoarse voice of his, "So, my son, so what have you done for me lately?" Even the words "my son" grated metallically on my ears, like a knife scraping across a tin plate.

I guess I was nine or ten then, and I didn't know what he wanted me to say, so, my heart palpitating with anxiety, I told him the truth. "I loved you, papa."

He shrugged his narrow, bony shoulders and jerked his knobby white hands out in front of him, calloused palms upward, as though to prove to me how empty my words had left him. "So big deal," he announced sarcastically, the ubiquitous unfiltered Camel cigarette stuck to his cyanotic lower lip underscoring his point like a conductor's baton.

"Big deal" was the old guy's favorite put-down. Nothing meant anything to him unless he could attach a price tag to it.

The only human thing I can remember the old guy ever doing for me was bringing home a puppy one of the customers on his milk route had given him. It was just a brown mongrel, but I loved him like the brother I had never had, the best friend I could never find anywhere. I called him Duke.

But Duke had been taken away from his mother too soon, and his whimpering at night kept the old guy, who had to get up at one o'clock in the morning, awake. So Duke was taken away from me after only three days. Later I heard the old guy authoritatively advise the stranger to whom he was giving Duke that a wind-up alarm clock, to mimic the heartbeat of the puppy's mother, and a hot-water bottle, to simulate her warmth, would quiet his crying. The look he shot at me, the Camel cigarette bobbing with malicious glee, made my face blaze with shame.

Every night for weeks after Duke left I went to sleep with his green leather leash pressed against my face. I dreamed of scouring the world until one day I found my friend. But, of course, I never found him; I never even looked for him. Even now the thought of that long-dead puppy makes my eyes sting with tears.

In the morning I would hide the leash under my pillow so the old guy wouldn't see it.

One day I came home from school to find Duke's leash lying on my bed. My heart thundered with horror, because I knew that this was the old guy's way of telling me he had found out my shameful secret. When I turned around, there he was in the doorway, his contemptuous, knowing smirk made even more accusatory by the smoldering Camel cigarette.

My only escape from the emotional concentration camp I lived in was the movies. While other kids my age might openly revel in the antics of Laurel and Hardy or The Three Stooges, I snuck off to indulge, in guilty solitude, in the lush romances of Lana Turner and Greer Garson. I could never tell my friends about these furtive pleasures, nor, of course, could I ever let on to the old guy: His Camel cigarette would have pointed at me like an indicting finger as his thin, purplish lips expressed his silent derision for such sentimentality.

When I liked a movie, and I never saw one I didn't like, except for the March of Time documentaries, I wanted to relive the experience by reading the book. That's why I started writing: creating my own mental movies was another tunnel out of my solitary confinement.

When I was thirteen, I took all my paper-route and bar-mitzvah money and bought a typewriter, a secondhand L.C. Smith upright so black and clunky and clangorous that it reminded me of the iron horses in the old Western movies. From then on, the old guy referred to me sardonically as "my son the big-shot writer." Whenever I typed, he would dramatically strike his ridged forehead with the calloused heel of his bony hand and complain hoarsely about my incessant "banging." His Camel cigarette would nod agreement.

In those days you could send a manuscript to Writer's Digest and for a small fee they would critique it. Once they wrote, "Shows promise. Keep up the good work." The story was about Duke and how sad I felt when I lost him, and I was secretive and embarrassed about it because it exposed feelings that I was ashamed to let anyone see.

You would have thought that by then, in my mid-teens, I would have known better, but I ran straight to the old guy with my good news. I never seemed to get over the idea that somehow I could earn his love, although neither my good grades in school nor my good behavior outside of it ever merited more than the traditional caustic "big deal."

"Can I show you something, Pop?" I asked tentatively, stammering slightly as I always did whenever I confronted him, although I never stammered with anyone else. The crinkly white paper rustled in my trembling hand.

The old guy was sitting with my mother at the rectangular dinette set with a Formica top that was trying to pass itself off as a parquet floor, reading The Bulletin. My mother, a withered twig of a woman who never knew how to react to anything, whether it was happy or catastrophic, unless her husband reacted first, looked to him with her Old Faithful perplexity and anxiety.

Unlike the walls of Jericho, the old guy's newspaper did not fall down just because I had spoken. "So they liked that crap. So big deal. So where's the check, big-shot writer?" His rasping voice grated at a wound I didn't know I had.

Then he lowered the paper and I saw his beady black pig's eyes glittering with spiteful joy. The Camel cigarette embedded in his bluish lower lip was like a bazooka aimed at my heart.

Every now and then I have what I call a crystallizing experience, when everything in my entire life seems to fall into place, and I suddenly understand something that I've always known but never knew I knew. As I looked into the old guy's malevolent face, and I realized that he had been secretly reading my stories, that he had opened the letter and that he had been sitting there in joyous anticipation of the stinging slap across the face he was about to deliver, I knew that I could never make him love me, no matter how much I tried. And so, finally, I stopped trying.

I didn't leave home, although perhaps I should have; I just wasn't there anymore. I became a ghost, haunting my own life, seeing unseen.

When I found out years later, as I always found things out in that apartment, by overhearing them, that the old guy had lung cancer, I found myself smiling with a certain triumphant satisfaction. My decades-long war with the Camels was finally over.

When the old guy's left lung was removed, it was like reading about an earthquake in Turkey: it was regrettable, but it was somewhere else.

One evening after work, as I crossed the living room on the way to my bedroom and my electric typewriter, the old guy complained gruffly, "You never sit and watch TV with us."

"I'm thirty years old. Television bores me," I answered.

"You never ask me how I am."

"How are you?" I asked.

Enveloped in his thick blue-and-white striped terrycloth robe and almost lost in the huge tapestry-covered wing chair, he reminded me of a newborn baby.

"I know I haven't been a good father to you," he said.

Without the Camel cigarette dangling from his bloodless lower lip, he seemed as frail as a spider plant. Now that I could see his windburned brown face clearly for the first time, it did look surprisingly like an infant's, except for the incongruity of the boxer's broken nose.

"It was the war."

It was always something else, wasn't it? I thought.

"It changed me. It made me hard."

The deathbed confession, I thought. Now that I'm sick, now that I'm dying, forgive me, love me.

But my lifelong war with the Camels had made me hard too.

"I was always interested in everything you did."

The last time I saw the old guy alive was in the intensive-care unit of Jeanes Hospital.

He was in an oxygen tent, misted with water vapor from his breath. Overhead was a sign that said, with the coolly cruel, unintentional irony of the medical mind, "No smoking." I had never wanted one of the old guy's Camels so much in my life.

That windburned baby face of his was now cadaver-grey and sprouting white stubble like feathery food mold. Out of the boxer's broken nose came a translucent tube, as though he were plugged into an old-fashioned telephone switchboard.

Although he was unconscious, his eyes were open and turned up under his eyelids until almost all I could see were the whites. His head was twisted backwards as though he were trying to see something high up in the sky.

The next time I saw the old guy he was in his coffin. They had closed his eyes and shaved the moldy white stubble off his grey face and replaced it with peaches-and-cream makeup. They had even painted his cyanotic lips red and molded them into a beatific holy-picture smile. They had made that mean-spirited old man look a Kewpie doll.

"So, nu, Mrs. Goldstein bubeleh," the undertaker chirruped, rubbing his pink, cherubic hands gleefully together, like Uriah Heep. "So doesn't our dearly beloved Abie look just like any second he's going to sit up and say, 'Hello, Becky honey, how's tricks?'"

Becky looked at me in terror.

I lit up one of Abie's Camels.

"Big deal," I said.

©1993 The Advocate