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.

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