Throwing the Game--a short story

A short story about a man who escaped Vietnam...but couldn't escape the rat race.

And please see my childhood memoir, When I Was German, available:
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Twitter @alanwynzel
alanwynzel@gmail.com

Throwing the Game

 

            Nick shut the office door.  He was remembering Vietnam.

            Firebase Cox had no earthbound anchor.  It pitched screaming atop a roaring sea of mud in a storm of flame and mortar fire.   To tip from the edge of the earth was its certain destiny.  It was Nick’s second night in-country.  He lay in the cool mud, wrapped in fear around the tree roots winding through the slit trench.  When the sergeant crawled past and shouted for him to shoot, Nick leapt and banged away with his M16.  Once the sergeant passed, he fell and clutched the roots again.  Rations and water were passed forward, ammunition replenished, even the Captain slithered past in the mud.  The NVA kept coming through the wire.  But to Nick it was all just one long storm.
            Broken only the Hueys.  They brought the supplies and replacements.  Like they brought in Nick, “the stupid, pot smoking ass who failed out of college and the Army got him”, his old man had said.  “Screwing around with his guitar when he should have been working on his Accounting degree, should have passed his exams no sweat since his old man is an accountant!”
            “Accounting is a lot of calculation, Nicky,” his old man continued, “but it’s all for the purpose of a final reckoning: what’s the value of something?  And this Vietnam, it’s not worth your life.  I can’t help you now.”  And his tearful father turned and hurried away, leaving Nick dumbstruck on the parade ground.  Then the sergeants cried out from the idling buses and all the new soldiers embarked to meet their destinies in Asia.
            Nick’s destiny was Firebase Cox.  A Huey brought him in.  But they didn’t leave empty.  They took the wounded home.
            And on his second night in Vietnam, with the NVA closing in, Nick performed his own calculations and made his own reckoning.
            With none of his squad in sight, he stuck his left foot in a small crater in the trench.  His own live hand grenade followed.  He lay back and began to scream before it even blew.
            When he awoke he was in a hospital in the Philippines.  There was a nub where his left foot should have been.  It hung all day and night from a wire before him.  He didn’t look at it.
            Three days later an Army lawyer came, sat down, and began asking questions.  His name was Captain Ballard.
            “How did your own hand grenade detonate in the trench, Private Taylor?”
            “I threw it at some gooks.”
            “They were in the trench?”
            “No, out by the perimeter wire.”
            “So how did your grenade detonate in the trench if the enemy was out by the wire?”
            “I guess they threw the grenade back at me.”
            “And it went in the shell hole.  And your foot was there.”
            “I don’t remember, sir.  Maybe I kicked it in the hole.  I’m in a lot of pain, sir.”
            Ballard closed his notebook.
            “I know what happened, Private.  You should do ten or more in Leavenworth for it.  The war isn’t over on the ground but it’s long finished in the hearts and minds.  So what’s the sense?” Ballard stood.  “You’ll get a Purple Heart.  Notch it for score one in your favor.”
            “Yes sir.”
            “What are you going to do when you get home, Private?”
            “Go back to college, sir.  Become an accountant like my dad.  Follow the straight and narrow.”
            Ballard snorted and left.
            Thirty years later Nick sat in his cool, quiet office.  He was a financial analyst for a major corporation.  He had taken the straight and narrow path and come to hate it.  He wondered whether he had lived his life since Vietnam for his father’s sake or to atone for the silent ugly thing in his left shoe.
            It didn’t matter.  He didn’t want to do this shit anymore.  And soon he wouldn’t have to.  Only a few knew, he amongst them:  the company was bankrupt.  The books had been cooked, the earnings statements were lies and despite the quiet hum of the air conditioning and the peaceful throng in the corridors, the firebase was about to be overrun.  The NVA were pouring through the wire and the whole corruption was about to pitch off the edge of the earth.  Nick wasn’t high enough to be implicated, but he knew.  The company was broke and they would all lose their jobs, their pensions, and their stock.
            Nick had three kids in college.  He was already carrying two mortgages on his house.  And he was fifty and didn’t want to start all over again.
            But Nick knew one other thing.  The company was very well insured for liability.  It had to be, since it was a shipping company.  Employees didn’t just slam their thumbs in file cabinets.  In Nick’s company they were sometimes crushed by falling crates, fell from the backs of tractor trailers, or were even run over by speeding forklifts.
            Like Nick was later that week while on an auditing assignment at a regional site.  He was crossing the warehouse floor on his way to the cafeteria, just emerging from behind a cluster of pallets when he was hit.  It was funny how he didn’t look before he crossed the redlined forklift byway.  The speeding machine crushed his right foot.
            A lawyer came to Nick within a day.  He talked about dangerous conditions on the site, poor lighting, obstructions, and improper operation of heavy equipment.  The lawyer promised a big settlement.  Nick hired him, scrawling his name in a morphine-looped script across the contract.
            A few weeks later the lawyer came to his home.  Nick was strumming the guitar his son had bought him.  “We can jam together, Dad,” his son had said.  His son was nineteen and played in a band.  Nick smiled.
            Nick and the lawyer were sitting on the sofa when the handicap-access limo, sent by the company, arrived to take them to lunch at the best restaurant in town.
            The lawyer slapped Nick on the back.  “Looks real good,” he said.
            “It does,” said Nick.
            “The company lawyers and the insurance company lawyer are going to be there.  Don’t say anything but hello.  I’ll do all the talking.  Just enjoy your lunch and relax.” 
The company lawyers were friendly and deferential.  They asked Nick about his progress.  Nick shrugged and sighed while his attorney explained that Nick would experience pain for the rest of his life and would likely never walk again.
The insurance company lawyer was late.  He didn’t arrive until the salad course was served.
            “Mr. Taylor, a pleasure to meet you,” he said.  “I’m Steven Ballard.”
            “Captain,” Nick paled and fainted in his mixed greens.
            He was surrounded by four concerned attorneys and the restaurant manager when he came to.
            “Do you want to go home?  We can postpone the meeting until later in the week.”
            “No.”  Nick looked at Ballard.  “No, forget the meeting.  Forget the whole damn thing.”
            “Nick, let’s get you home,” his lawyer said.
            “No.”  Nick nodded at Ballard.  “He knows me.  The game is up.  I walked in front of the forklift.  I did it on purpose, for the money.  Just like I wanted out of Vietnam, so I fragged my own foot.  He was there.  He knew my game.  Right, Ballard?”
            Ballard said nothing.
            The company lawyers stormed off, outraged and threatening a countersuit.  Nick’s lawyer stared at him for a long time.  Then he shook his head and rose.
            “Better find yourself a good attorney, Mr. Taylor.  An expert in Insurance Fraud.”
            Ballard remained, staring.
            “So, what are you going to tell me? Now justice is done?”  Nick said.
            “No.  You should have kept your mouth shut.”
            “Why?”
            “I knew it was you as soon as I saw the paperwork.  I never forgot you.  For a long time I despised you for what I thought was cowardice and treachery.  But that was too simple an explanation. Dammit, you took your own foot to get out of a bad place!  Maybe, I came to think, it took courage to do something like that to survive.”
            “No.  I’m a coward.  And I’m sick, so very, very sick.”
            “I don’t think so.  Taylor, I’m in the trench now.  I was in practice with a crooked partner.  He made shady deals and we went bankrupt.  Now I’m lucky to have this job with the insurance company, and it doesn’t pay worth shit.  The bank is foreclosing on my home.  We would have paid you a million to keep this out of court.  I was pushing for it, for you.  And me.  We could have split it.”
            Nick fought the impulse to pitch beneath the table.
            “You tried it twice, Taylor.  But you’re only one for two, because you threw the game, you fool.”
            Ballard shrugged and left.

           

***

           

The Last Shot--excerpt from my memoir

An excerpt from my childhood memoir, When I Was German.  Here I'm about eleven years old, out on a Saturday morning with my father after dropping my mother off at work.  And here, I cross the Rubicon and leave him behind.

My childhood memoir When I Was German is now available for Kindle at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FM254KM

***

                         I remember the last time I went out with my old man on a Saturday morning.

             There was a drugstore uptown.  It had a soda counter, and an old man, almost as old as mine, worked behind it.  There were more old men who sat at the counter every Saturday.  My old man made friends with these men.  They looked and smelled like bums.  These old men were a lot like my old man.  They told stupid stories about the old days and they bragged how about how important they thought they were, or how important they thought they used to be.
            This last Saturday was a cool summer morning.  I was sleepy from staying up half the night listening for a fight, for a Goddamn Screw, so sleepy I didn’t argue when my old man said, let’s go, come with me while take your mother to work.  I went.
             We dropped her off and he parked outside the drug store.  Let’s go, I wanna see the boys, my old man said.
              What boys?
             The buncha guys here, a buncha old time guys who come from the Big City, like me.
             I went inside behind my old man and I quickly found the comics.  The store had lots of comics.  It also sold dirty books covered with pictures of naked ladies, not far away.  I looked over the comics and I tried to peek at the covers of the dirty books at the same time.  I could hear my old man’s big mouth.  He was bullshitting with his bums.  They were bullshitting back to him.  They chuckled and bragged out loud.
            My old man waved to me.  Come here!
            I stepped out from behind the comic rack.  My old man dragged me by the arm to the counter, inside the circle of bums.  Come on, for Christ’s sakes, my old man hissed.  He gripped my shoulders too tight.
           His friends needed shaves.  They smelled like booze.  My mother told me that the only good thing about my old man was that he didn’t drink.  I was glad, because I hated that sweet, hot smell.
           Nice lookin’ boy ya got there, Joe.
           My old man tapped his crotch.
           Yeah, he’s my last shot!
           I knew what he meant.  Even though he was an old man like the other bums his dick still worked.  He gave my mother the Goddamn Screw and he made me.
            I was his Last Shot.
            His hand still dug in my shoulder.  The bums chuckled.  They were impressed.
            I hated him.
           We went home.

***

Love and Loss: Tales in Human Ink

           An excerpt from my novel, The Seventh Round, to be published soon:

            I don’t sleep well in my bed.  It makes me see things in dreams that I don’t want to see anymore.

            I took the bed from my house when I got divorced.  My wife and I slept in it in the last few years of our marriage.  I took it to my first bachelor apartment, and I had no problem sleeping on it.  No sorrows, no sentiments, no associations.  I took a few other women to bed in it.  Pull back the sheet and you can read in the brown and oval stains the story of the denouement of my marriage and the sex and brief infatuations that followed.
            The bed was fine for a few years like this.
            Then I met Johanna and fell in love again.  We wrote a new story in the bed to overlay the old, in human ink and in whispers: “I never loved anyone as much as you.”   We took the bed as ours when we shared a home, along with her two kids and mine.  But it fell apart before it even started.  We were great lovers, but we could not live together.  We could find joy only in the bed, and out of it, not much more than sorrow.  She didn’t want me there, and soon, I didn’t want to be there.  In the midst of this, I lost my job.  Money soon became a problem.  I went bankrupt.  Break up, reconciliation, infidelity and reconciliation again; finally, she told me to go.  That was a year ago.  I came here and brought the bed with me.  I was glad to go and it was fine for a while.  A brief vignette with another woman, done before the ink dried, was written not long after.  And then I settled into the bed, alone. 
            And then the dreams began.  Johanna came to me.
            I thought I hated her.  And I suppose I do.  But I can’t stop loving her, either.  She comes to me, or I bring her, and does it matter?  She is here, and I make love to her in my dreams.  But there is no joy in it.  There is me, and Johanna, and an awful space between.
            I can’t sleep well anymore unless I’m dead drunk.  And tonight I am not.  I’m awake in the frozen dark, panting and sweating from an unbearable flush of heat.  I toss the quilt aside for relief.
            Later, when I calm down, I know that I have to get her back.  And if I can’t, I have to settle this once and for all.

Ode to a friend

Excerpt from my memoir about a friend with a home much like mine.  I met him in the 6th grade.

When I Was German is available on Amazon and Smashwords:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FM254KM

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/LakeValleyRoad

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/alanwynzel

 

 

            Andrew was the friend who understood.

                        Andrew’s mother came from Germany, too.  She was younger than my mother, but she remembered the war.  She was from the other end of Germany, from Hannover, in the far north.  A Prussian, my mother said, even though Andrew’s mother wasn’t really a Prussian.  Bavarians called all northerners Prussians.  Andrew’s mother sounded more German than my mother.  She sounded so German it was funny.  She laughed about it too.  She couldn’t say Chicken.  Instead she said Shicken.  And then she laughed.  She didn’t care.

                        Andrew’s mother lost her father in the war, too.  He went down in a boat that was sunk on its way to Africa.  He was going to fight in the Afrika Korps, but he never made it.  Instead of drowning in sand and dust, he drowned in water and salt.

                        Andrew understood, because he was German, like me

                        Andrew’s father was also No Good.  He drank a lot of booze and was drunk a lot.  He was from Yugoslavia, a Slav, like my old man the Russian.  He fled from Tito, he washed dishes in Italy and Paris and then he came to America.  He got Andrew’s mother pregnant and then he married her.  Andrew’s parents fought all the time.  His father wrecked the house, he wrecked cars, and he wrecked his jobs.  Andrew’s father did construction for a living.  He was young and he still worked, he wasn’t a lazy bum like my old man, but even though he worked he was still No Good.  He got drunk and ruined his work; people wouldn’t pay him and there was no money coming into their house.  Andrew’s mother had to go out and get a job.  Andrew’s father was a very smart man, though; he studied medicine in Yugoslavia but he had to flee the country.  He couldn’t get into school in America, so he had to fix houses and paint them to support his family.  He did a good job, too, when he was sober.  But he was miserable thinking he could have been a doctor.  He couldn’t stop drinking and wrecking everything.  He hit Andrew’s mother and he hit Andrew too.  He didn’t hit Andrew’s little brother Matt, because Matt was his favorite.

                        Andrew was German.  His mother lived through the bombs and the raids.  His father was No Good.  There was screaming and fighting in his house all the time.  They had no money, they had very little food and couldn’t afford heat in the winter.

                        Andrew understood.

***

 

***

Excerpt from my memoir: A Stranger Comes Calling

An excerpt from my childhood memoir, When I Was German.  Some context:  it's 1970 or 1971, I'm 6 or 7 and my "half-brother", whom I didn't even know existed, drops in for a surprise visit.

My memoir is available at Smashwords:  https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/LakeValleyRoad

Follow me on Twitter:  @alanwynzel

 ***          

            It was a golden Sunday morning, maybe summer’s last Sunday.  Second grade was about to start.  My old man put down the phone and said, your brother is coming.

            My brother?
            My old man pulled two framed photos from the top drawer of his dresser where he kept his socks and underpants.  Each photo was of a man, a young man about the age of a soldier, like the soldiers I saw on television fighting the war in the jungle somewhere.  The war my brother-in-law Francis was afraid to have to fight in.
            The men in the photos were handsome and dark.  They were smiling.
            These are your brothers, Sam and Charlie.
            Where are they?  I asked.
            I don’t know where Charlie is.   He’s a busy guy and I lost track of him.  But Sam is coming today.  He just got married.  He’s stopping by later with his new wife and his new car.
            I asked my mother about my brothers.
            They are not my sons, she said.  Your old man was married before.  I met Sam once, when you were still a baby.  Charlie, he doesn’t want to come around.  They’re grown men now, old enough to be your father.
            Sam didn’t come in time for our dinner.  My mother and old man liked to eat early.  We ate at four like always on Sunday.  My mother prepared drinks and snacks and we were waiting on the tiny porch when Sam rolled up.  He was driving a bright red Pontiac Bonneville convertible.  It was the biggest Pontiac on the road, as long as a truck and it was brand new.  The top and the seats were white, leather white.  It had big spoked wheels.
            But a Pontiac, not a Plymouth!  What would my old man say? I wondered.  And was the tall dark man coming out of this Pontiac really my brother?  He was a man and I was just a kid.  There was a woman on his arm, beautiful, blond, like a television star.  My old man rushed out the door and yelled, hello, he jumped down the walkway and slapped Sam on the back.  He grabbed the blonde all over and kissed her.  Sam tugged her away.   Easy pops, Sam said.  She’s mine.
            They came inside the porch.  Sam kissed my mother, shook my hand, and introduced the blonde as My wife Glenda.  Glenda smiled with a mouth full of white teeth.
            Sam was dark and thin like my old man.  He had a deep voice and he sounded like my old man, like New York.  He was loud and moved all over the place when he talked.  Glenda sounded like New York too.  Like my aunts and uncles.  She’s a Yiddische girl, and Sam is a Yiddische boy, my old man said.
            We sat on the porch around a card table and had drinks, eggrolls, and franks in blankets.  I had soda.  My mother had her Radler.  She told the story of the Radler.  From the old country, my old man said, she’s from the old country.  I’m from Germany, my mother insisted.  My old man had a drink, a booze drink with whiskey, the first booze drink I ever saw him have.  Sam and Glenda had whiskey too, the way my old man had it, with Coke.
            I’m in real estate, Sam said.  We both are.  We rent apartments.  We just got married and we got this car and we’re going out to California for our honeymoon.
            You’re doing good, my old man said.  He turned to my mother and said, he always has an angle.  Always a gimmick to make good.  And what a car, a beaut.
            Just bought it, Glenda said.  My dad and mom helped us get it.  She checked her lipstick.
            You hear from your brother? my old man asked.  Where is he?
            Screwing around in New York.  Working for the city.
            Why don’t he ever come around?  What’s his problem?
            I don’t know, you ask him.
            I can’t, I don’t know where the hell he is!
            We ate our snacks and drank our drinks.  They talked a long time.  Soon it was dark, late summer night.  I was cold.  My mother put a sweater on me.  Some mosquitoes got in the porch through rips in the screen and bit us.  I scratched at the bites.
            Calamine lotion! barked my old man.  Don’t scratch like that!  Calamine lotion!
            I was almost asleep when I jumped because my old man and Sam were shouting at one another.   But they were only talking loud, and not fighting.
            Then Sam and Glenda left.  Here kid, he said, and gave me a five-dollar bill.  Don’t know what toys you like, so you can buy yourself whatever you want at the Woolworths. 
            Oh no, that’s too much, said my mother.  Too much.  He can put it in his bank.
            Sam and Glenda waved and shouted and my old man yelled, Goodbye, come back soon! and there were the beginnings of tears in his eyes.  The Pontiac came to life with a roar.  Sam put the top down and zoomed away, honking once at the corner before disappearing for twenty years.
            The next time my mother and I went for a Ride, I asked about my brothers. 
            Who is their mother?
            Your old man was married before I met him, she said.  They had two boys, Sam and Charlie.  our old man drove their mother crazy and she had to go to a mental hospital, a place for people who are sick in the head.  He wouldn’t take care of the boys, they were very little, so he sent them away to foster homes.  They stayed for years in the foster homes until their mother got better, and she took them back.  And that’s why they don’t come to visit, because he abandoned them, and they hate him.  Some father he was.

***

"Stiffs"--a short story by Alan Wynzel. ADULT CONTENT, please skip if easily offended. Or read if your interest is piqued....

Stiffs

 

            He was surfing porn when it happened.  A lightless flash, a sickening sideways lurch, a quaking at the molecular level.  He pitched from the chair to the floor.  Next came the crash of cars and the howl of alarms.  An airliner roared as it plunged from the sky, followed by a shudder and boom as it shattered somewhere across the city.  But not one human scream.

            He pulled himself to his feet, struggling in the tangle of trouser laced around his ankles.  The two lesbians still leered at him from the monitor, entangled in an impossible knot of limbs and nylon.

            "What the hell was that?"  From the window he looked down upon the bright summertime street.  It was choked with a tangle of cars entangled in a pileup that stretched beyond sight.  The pavement was a Jackson Pollock rendering in oil, coolant, and gasoline.  Steam hissed and curled upward from fractured hoods.  A hundred bodies lay within sight on the sidewalks.  He stared, unbelieving, for a long time.  Then he pulled up his pants and raced downstairs.

            On the street, he wandered aimlessly, mute as the dead open mouths that lay all about.  Everyone, the fallen dead where they last stood, walked, or drove.

            After a while he cried, although there was no one for him to cry for.  No family, and really, no friends; just co-workers.  Nearly all his ostensibly human interaction occurred on the Internet.  Really, inside his head, in endless recycling porno fantasies.  Relationships consummated and ended in a mouse click.  A new romance for each new picture.  And now, that was all there ever could be for him, because, as he soon concluded, whatever did this appeared to have wiped out the entire human race.  He soon deduced its scope by surfing every possible television channel and radio frequency, by making random cross-country calls on his cell phone, and after raising nothing from the radio in a stalled police car.

            "Now how am I ever gonna get laid?"  he shouted in the midst of a major intersection, besieged by the dying caterwauls of automotive security systems.  He was in anguish, because even if his sex life had been virtual, at least there had been a chance he could make it real.  Now, none.  All he could hope for was that the electricity would stay on so he could keep surfing.  But it had no appeal for him, anymore.

            Then he saw the dead girl who had fallen face first across the bus stop bench.  Her short skirt lifted and fell with the whimsy of the breeze.  Candy apple perfection, bisected by a pink thong.  He felt that familiar need.  And he had a fantastic idea.

            Gasping with excitement, he found a mailman's cart and wheeled her down the avenue to a nearby apartment building.  There he took for himself a room, pitching the previous occupant, a toothless old lady, from the bedroom window.  And there on the old lady's former bed, reeking of powder and lilacs, he took the girl, in every way he could imagine, all night long.

            The next day dawned still and hot and at first he thought it had all been a dream.  But the sickly sachet of the wet sheets and the girl's stiff body, curled on the floor, proved otherwise.  He gazed upon the girls pale flesh and he thought, "Nice, but there are plenty more fish in the sea."   After a hearty breakfast of the old lady's bacon and eggs, he was out on the street, trembling with excitement.  There, the flies were already at work.

            "Damn!  Why couldn't this have happened in winter?"

            And that thought begat his second fantastic idea.

            Armed with the hand cart and an enormous SUV, stripped of its seats, he let his libido lead him as he collected the stuff of his wildest dreams, what had kept fresh overnight inside air-conditioned interiors.  A coed from a coffee shop, a buxom MILF from a hair-salon, a pair of waitresses, even an elegant grandmother beside the watch case at the jewelers.  Soon, he had a dozen beauties stacked in the truck behind him, and was crawling like a beetle around the snarled traffic as fast as he could.  He was squirming in his seat and licking his lips, but he dare not indulge until he ensured his collection wouldn't spoil.  It was midday when he pulled up to the supermarket.

            He raced into the store, stumbling over the fallen bodies and slipping in spilled milk.  In the back room he found the meat locker, filled with meat frozen hard as stone.  

            He wheeled his ladies inside the locker where they would keep as long as the electricity did.  And if it didn't, well, he could always move them someplace where the juice still flowed.  Or pickle them in bathtubs of alcohol. 

            He was dying to romance one of them, but first he had to find a suitable place, a  true base of operations.  A few blocks away stood a luxury apartment building and there he found a large ground floor apartment.  He could walk his dates home and pass them inside through the window.

            Later, in the cool twilight, freshly showered and dressed, he came for a girl.  This time he chose one of the waitresses.  He wheeled her home, chatting gibberish, more verbose than he'd ever been on any dates in his old life. 

            Back in his room, when he laid her naked on the bed and saw what a good choice he had made, there was no necking, no foreplay.  Just a massage to loosen her cold, stiff limbs.  Then a home run at first bat.  And even though he wanted to go and pick up another girl, she was so good, he had her again.  Then he said, "Time to go.  I promised your folks you'd be home by midnight."

            Back at the locker, he chose the girl without a curfew, the hot MILF.  He wheeled her home, mixed two cocktails, drank both, and finally understood Mrs. Robinson's appeal.  It was dawn when he brought her home, although he wanted her to stay.  But he didn't think she'd have the same appeal after laying around his apartment all day.  It wasn't a suitable atmosphere for a long-term relationship.

            And so his life went for a year.  He gathered up more beauties, iced them, and satisfied all his hungers at the supermarket, in particular, at the meat locker.  He made a daily withdraw from there, and while the steaks soon ran out, the women didn't.

            Then one day, on the street, he met the girl.  A real girl.  She was tall, blonde, and gorgeous.

            "Hi there," she grinned.

            "I...I didn't think anyone else survived." 

            "Well, some did."  She reached out and curled his hair.  "You live near here?"

            "Yup."

            "Let's go," she said.

            Inside his apartment he stuttered apologies for the mess.

            "Shut up," she whispered, and kissed him.  Then she began to take off his clothes.

            "Don't fight it, baby."  She pulled a bottle of vodka from her backpack and poured a great slug down his gagging throat.  Then another.  Before long she had him naked and drunk.  She pushed him down to the floor and shoved a handful of pills in his mouth.

            "What the hell?"

            "Horny Goat and Viagra, baby.  Let's ride!"

            The pill cocktail hit him like a crate of raw oysters.  He felt like a crazed stallion in heat.  But she held him down and rode him like a bronco buster.  When she was finally satisfied, he still swayed like a flagpole in the wind.  "Priapism", he mumbled.  "It won't go down for hours."

            "It won't go down forever, honey," she said, and then broke the vodka bottle against his temple.

            It was dark when he awoke.  He was rolling along atop an auto mechanic's wheeled creeper.  And that he was tied to it, naked.  And still stiff as a pipe.  He groaned.  The girl, towing him just beyond his sight, laughed.

            "Almost there!"

            When she wheeled him inside a butcher's shop he began to thrash against his bindings.  But they were far too tight.

            Inside the meat locker that he knew was his destination before he even saw it, were some dozen of his fellows.  All strapped naked to creepers and pointing skyward in eternal salute.  Like a hospital ward of frostbitten priapriatics.  One was even still alive.  He rolled his eyes feebly in the sudden light.

            The girl stood over him with a watering can.

            "Time to water my garden," she said, and sprinkled his privates.  The frost hardened instantly.

            "Now go to sleep.  I may see you tomorrow, because you're new and exciting.  Unlike these two losers.  Booooring!"

            With her booted foot she kicked two green-tinged men bound to creepers out the door.  Then she shut and locked it, sealing him in a cold eternity of ecstasy.  He pondered that for some time.  Then he smiled.

 

***

My father's Black and White World

An excerpt from my childhood memoir, When I Was German.  Like the previous excerpt, this one concerns my father.  He was born in 1910, somewhere in New York City.

My childhood memoir When I Was German is now available for Kindle at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FM254KM

My old man didn’t concern himself with money.  He earned enough to survive

and ensure a pension but budgets and savings meant nothing to him.  Truly, he only cared

to provide, barely, for himself.  And his Social Security and pension would take care of

that, soon enough.  He didn’t care to make it in the world; the sooner he could retire and

quit it, the better.  He did his job dutifully, even admirably; he worked years without

taking a sick day.  He could pride himself on his diligence and feel entitled to the rewards

of retirement.

And his reward was to sit back and enjoy himself.  How?  He had no hobbies, no

passions.  He was content with a roof, some food, and a woman’s welcoming backside, a

Goddamn Screw, when the need gripped him.

He so dramatized the few childhood stories he told that it was hard to separate

them from the black and white movies he was addicted to.  On the High Holy Days, he

told me in hushed tones, the Wops and Micks would come after us Jew boys with

baseball bats.  You dirty Kikes, they would yell.  Sometimes we had to run to our fathers

and uncles for help.  Other times, when they cornered us, we had to fight.  We broke the

bastards’ jaws with punches like you blacked my eye with!

My old man made jabs in the air across fifty years of time at little Irish and Italian

boys, acting out forgotten battles in vanished Lower East Side alleys.

Television was my old man’s link with his own lost time.  Sometimes he tried to

convey enthusiasm for small fragments of the past to me through his movies.  He spoke

lovingly of old cars, clothes, music and dances.  With almost sixty years between us it

was difficult.  And I never had the feeling he actually participated in the lost times he

spoke of; instead, I felt he stood and watched them as they passed, like his movies, until

it was time to sleep, and then he would switch off the set.  The show, and his life, was

over.

He was an old man, but like a small child, he screamed and stamped his feet when

couldn’t have his way or when his comfort was disturbed.  He loved others, but he was

too concerned with himself.  Also like a child.  He had two sons before me and he gave

them away to foster care because he didn’t know how to care for them when their mother

was committed to a mental institution.  He insisted I was a Jew but he gave it up because

it was too much trouble to stand up to my mother.  And he stayed with my mother

through years of misery because that was easier than washing his own clothes.

My old man screamed about things he would let go.  But when he was quiet,

talking softly without seeing, I knew his words came truly from his heart:

“One Passover it was just me and my Mama.  She put in the dinner and said, Wake

me up later, I need a little nap.  She shut her eyes, and she passed away.  Just like that.”

I can picture my old man standing in a dark little parlor, somewhere in New York

City, before his lifeless mother, snug in her chair, arms folded, no longer breathing.  The

soup was boiling over, running down the stove and my old man, not believing, didn’t

know what to do.

And he would never know.

That briefly whispered story told me more about him than anything else he ever

said.

***

November 1970-Your Bible-Love, your Daddy

My childhood memoir When I Was German is available for Kindle at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FM254KM

Some context:  In this passage I'm 6 years old and the "good times" I had with my father were drawing to a close.  My parents were fighting more and more and very soon I would come to see my father as the bad guy.  And my Jewish identity, at it's high point here, would gradually unravel.  I would soon "become" German.

Copyright 2013 by Alan Wynzel

           When it grew colder and snow was on the ground, my old man gave me a bible.  Inside he wrote: November 1970-Your Bible-Love, your Daddy.  He called it the Old Testament.   He said it was the book of God from the time before Christ, from over five thousand years ago.

            My old man read the Bible to me on Saturdays during the winter.  He read to me in the morning, and sometimes late in the afternoon, until my mother came home from work.  He started reading Bible during Hanukkah, when the light burned for eight days.  For Hanukkah he gave me chocolate dollars and a dreidle to spin.

            When my old man read me the Bible he expected me to repeat back to him what he said.  He began with the story of God creating the earth and the stars, the animals and people.  The first people, Adam, and Eve, from Adam’s rib.  He made me repeat the story, and I couldn’t get it right.  I tried three times.  He stomped his feet and yelled, No, no dammit! Listen to me.  God rested on the seventh day, on the Sabbath!

            It was the same with Cain who slew Abel and Noah and all the animals on the Ark.  I couldn’t tell the stories right the first time and my old man got mad.  I tried hard to think and quietly listen to the stories.  I couldn’t wait for Bible reading to be finished.  Sometimes we were still reading when my mother came home and she would be mad at my old man for yelling at me.  Then Bible reading would be over.  But just my old man yelling was better than both of them yelling.  I tried hard to learn the Bible stories so that when my mother came home there would be no fighting that night.  So that instead we would get our Saturday take-out dinner. 

            Every Saturday night we ordered supper, either Chinese food or deli sandwiches.  If we got Chinese we always had Chicken Chow Mein and eggrolls.  Never anything different.  Even when we went to the Chinese restaurant, once or twice a year, that’s what we ordered.  My old man would always announce Jews don’t eat pork and he refused to eat the egg rolls.  The Chinaman puts pork in them, he said.  My mother and I ate them.

            If we got our dinner from the deli we had corned beef and pastrami, rye bread, pickles, mustard, coleslaw and potato salad.  The pastrami was for my old man.  He ate it on rye bread with mustard, and a pickle on the side.  My mother wouldn’t eat it because she thought it was too spicy and she wouldn’t let me have any because she worried it would keep me up at night with a sick stomach from the spices and mustard.  I wanted to tell her that the fear of their fighting kept me awake most nights, waking me up like a bad dream that wouldn’t go away, so let me have the pastrami.  But I knew that would cause trouble so I ate my corned beef without mustard and only two bites of pickle, and kept quiet.  I also had some coleslaw, not because I liked it but because I wanted to be a merry old soul like old King Cole, who I knew was Black like Nat King Cole.  Nat King Cole who was Black like my old man who looked Black, but instead was a Jew, and of all the Jews in synagogue he was the darkest.  I wasn’t sure what being merry was, I supposed it meant happy because that’s what Christmas was and everybody said Merry Christmas.  It sounded happy, King Cole was merry and so was Nat King Cole, Black like my old man, who liked the coleslaw.  I ate some, hoping, but it never made me a merry old soul.

            November 1970-Your Bible-Love, your Daddy: I still called him my Daddy then.  He wasn’t my old man yet.  He was my Daddy and that year on Pine Street was a year of walks uptown, naming the cars going by, and cheering the Plymouths and the Dodges because they were the best.  Walking, holding his hand, sitting in the park with Uncle Sammy, watching the hippies under the willow play their guitars and sing.  Walking and holding his hand in the cold and the heat.  Wearing mittens in the snow, feeling his strong, lean hand, like a coil of wire, grip mine.  Dragging me along when I was slow.  Yanking me back from the curb and the dangerous street beyond.

My Daddy yelled at a lot of things and a lot of people.  But he didn’t yell when I gave him a black eye.  You put a spot right there, he said.  Your muscles, like iron.  Feel that, just like iron, and he squeezed my clenched arm.

            My Daddy was dark and quick like a boxer.  Like Muhammed Ali.  He got in a fight with a man at work.   Some guy in the garage called me a dirty Kike!  That’s a bad name for a Jew.  Don’t let anybody call you that, boy.  So I threw a garbage can over his head and kicked him in the knees.  Sonofabitch won’t call anybody a Kike again.

            This all passed like Uncle Sammy.  This came and went like the Saturdays that summer, hot and drowsy, with blurry cars and people passing on the street in the morning glare.  Faded and muddled like the slow hazy days of a heat wave.  This all passed, but I still feel it, clinging to the past’s horizon, a wavering desert mirage, heat glare rising off the street as my old man tugged me home for lunch.  In 1970, this is what I saw:  Gigantic shiny cars with spoked wheels.  Men with hats and men with crewcuts.  Hippies and freaks in rags and beads, singing songs of love in the park.  Cops in blue and black chasing them out of town.  Films of exploding jungles, screaming jet planes, and tired soldiers on the television screen.  Then November 1970-Your Bible-Love, your Daddy.  Hanukkah came and went, a winter freeze settled upon everything, folding the dead grass inward, and that year on Pine Street was over.  There would be other walks, other rides in the Plymouth, more visits to Wayne and Bob and more auto races.  But the war was spreading, and soon I would have to choose sides.  1970 passed, along with my fleeting innocence.

 

***