Rebel-Headed Level

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 10, Verse 1

"Happy is the man with a level-headed son;

sad the mother of a rebel."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Take a good, hard look at these two kitty cats:

 

                  Him                                                                             Her

God, how I love them.  

On the left, you have my father.  See the look of befuddlement, consternation, near-anguish on his face.  Note the creased brow, and the bank manager's placement of the fingers on the right hand pressed gently against his lip, beneath his massive, thoughtful Iraqi-Israeli nose.  Note the cell-phone-cum-calculator in his left meat-mit.  This is my father trying to figure out how his son, a man who earns a respectable salary-- the most he's ever made in his life-- can be simultaneously starving to death.  He calls it a problem.  I call it "multitasking."

Now, turn your attention to her.  There is very little that I can or need to say about this picture.  This, friends, is my mother.  This, at her most unguarded, is who she is.  If an ordinary, run-of-the-mill picture is worth a thousand words; this one is worth a tome.  I snapped it tonight at my sister's 37th birthday party.  My father was trying to light a candle that had no wick.  This is the reaction.  I'm so proud of myself for capturing this fleeting, illuminating moment that I now know what National Geographic photographers must feel like when they catch the cheetah the very instant it snaps a floppy gazelle's tender neck with its teeth.

It hasn't been an easy forty years of marriage for these two kooky funsters, but, then again, I suspect it could have been far worse.  After all, my father could have turned into a PTSD-riddled drug abuser, wife-basher, and my mother could have been more afraid of men than she is of her own shadow, my eldest sister could have turned out, um, worse?  My middle sister could have turned out, uh, worse?  And I could have... I don't know... been born without-- lungs or knees, I suppose.  And that wouldn't have been any fun.  How do you take a kid like that to the bank to make a deposit?  I used to love going to the bank with my mother.

 My marriage is seven years old-- we're practically marriage infants when compared with my parents, but we're gaining on them-- slowly, very slowly.  I wouldn't say that marriage is especially hard.  But it's no rainbow-fart either.  I'm at that stage in my life where I know mortality is creeping 'round somewhere, lying in wait to ambush my parents with a stroke or a fall or a clot, and I am also, not coincidentally, at that stage where I want to pump them for information about everything.  I want to know how they paid for college for all three of us.  Were they drug mules or were they smart investors (my money's on the former-- I guess it's good I don't have much money), how do they really feel about each other, when we're all gone and the lights are off and the house is still?  How do they really feel about (gulp) us?  Are we disappointments?  I have no doubt, in many ways, we are.  And that's kind of a hard thing to accept about yourself, but, in another respect, it's easy, because they've always encouraged me to live my life as I see fit.  

"Don't worry about pleasing us," my mother used to say to me, "who the hell are we?  We have our own problems to deal with."

And that they do.  That they do.  I won't bore you with them, even though they're not all that boring.  But, hey, this blog's for my problems, bitches-- and don't you forget it.  

My eldest sister was born in 1967.  Flaxen-hued hair and movie star sunglasses.  My favorite picture of her was snapped when she was maybe four-- stricken with a high fever and her cheeks all splotchy and her hair all stringy like hay, she was clad in a light blue nightshirt and was in the middle of racing across her bed.  A picture snapped at just the right moment-- a crazed look in her boiling eyes.  She looks wild and gentle and fun and haphazard all at once.  

The middle one bounded in like Tigger ten years later.  All curls and piss and vinegar-- a personality far bigger than the house that tried, in vain, to contain it.  She was and is still all over the place.  There's a picture of us on riding toys in my grandparent's driveway.  She's in a gray dress and I'm in a sailor's suit.  She's making me laugh, or maybe it's the other way around.  Either way, our heads are both thrown back in glee.  My grandfather's Chevy Impala is visible in front of us with its reverse lights on.  "Oh, look," I say, on the rare occasions when I'm looking at the photo album with someone from the family, "there's Zayda, about to back over two of his grandchildren."

1980 was my year.  I wore my bowl-cut and my sweatsuits for far too long-- but you knew that.  I wanted to change my name to "Moe."  I wanted to go to Catholic School so I could wear a tie and a v-neck sweater.  I wanted to grow up and marry a Korean girl as I watched the 1988 Seoul Olympics in wide-eyed fascination.  I found the page and the stage and my dick and its tricks and I emulated newscasters and Peter Sellers and I practiced my pratfalls in my room and in Borders Books & Music.  I don't know what my favorite picture of me is-- they all kind of make me sad, for one reason or another.  Maybe one of me onstage-- being somebody else.

Maybe this one, from "Pirates of Penzance."  Maybe because it's the last time I felt like I really had control, command, like I really knew what I was doing.  Maybe because you can see my wife, if you squint, lurking there in the background, backing me up.  Maybe because I really am the very model of a modern Major-General.  Maybe because this is what I was meant to do.

Maybe.      

Sugadaddy

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 23, Verses 1, 2, & 3

"When dining with a rich man, be on your guard and don't stuff yourself,

though it all tastes so good; for he is trying to bribe you,

and no good is going to come of his invitation."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

I have decided that, if my twins are going to have progress in a somewhat linear trajectory towards the American Dream (viz. have teen orthodontia/angst, first cars with side curtain airbags, middle school wardrobes that don't entirely come from thrift shops, and at least a mediocre college experience) I am going to have to do the following, in no necessary chronological order:

* sell my organs/throat/antique typewriter collection/semen/soul

* film myself having sex with a prominent politician (preferably a female, but I can't afford to be picky) in the lavatory of a highway rest-stop and option it to Gawker

* kill myself

* take out approximately eight mortgages on my home

* turn my Volvo wagon into a mobile, high-end brothel crammed with Swedish prostitutes

* get a higher-paying job

* renounce my Israeli citizenship (that won't help me financially, but I've always wanted to renounce something, and I'm not currently using my Israeli citizenship for anything other than impressing people and, really, nobody's impressed, so what's the point?)

* learn enough banjo chords to busk properly

* pray to God that the doctor who gives me my first rectal exam finds gold hiding behind my pancreas and is honest enough not to just put it in his pocket while I'm not looking because, believe me, I won't be looking

* try following my dreams as opposed to giving up on them, and, failing that, try giving up on them again

* skin myself and sell it to an anti-Semitic lamp-shade maker

(Whoa.  Too soon?)  

* invade a foreign country, you know-- not just me, with some of my friends

* steal the Pink Panther diamond, preferably by detonating a bermb

* kick unprecedented ASS at "Dancing with the Stars" with G. Gordon Liddy as my tango partner

* get a sugar daddy

And that, I think, is really my best option.  And it doesn't have to be a sex thing (but, like I said, I'm open to it all, you lucky, freaky world, you) it can be like in days of yore when talented young musicians in perriwig ponytails and stocking tights and broached jackets were paid large quantities of gold coins to compose airs and marches and operas and masses and fugues.  And they named their pieces "Herr Schmatzfieldzenkrakendorf's March" or "Die Danse Muzik auf zer Beegkunt Judenstompfer." 

And everything was going fine.

Because they had these people, patrons, they were called (Patronzdeinzuuntsfumpf, unt zer mater-tongue) and the patrons looked after these tender, fragile young talents and saw to it that they had what they needed to basically work like slaves on their compositions.  And that's kind of what I want.  Not that I'm Hayden or Mozart or even some other penisbreath that nobody remembers.  Like Diertrich Buxtehude-- anyone erudite enough to remember him?

If you're reading this, chances are, no.  

Well, apparently, Bach once walked 250 miles (from Arnstadt to Lubeck) to hear Buxtehude play. I hear there was some hot piece of ass in Lubeck at the time, too.  And I also hear that Bach took a fucking cab back to Arnstadt, and that he made Buxtehude pay for it.  But that's hearsay.  

If I had a sugar daddy-- sorry-- patron, I'm not exactly sure I know what he'd pay me to do.  

Blog, I guess.  

That would have to be a really seriously fucked up patron.  Someone with a dent in his skull and a song in his heart, no doubt.  Someone with a few too many drinks and few too few chromosomes.  Don't get me wrong, I'm sure these people exist, but I'm not sure that they have enough money to finance my family's lavish lifestyle.  And that's kind of the lynch-pin right there, if you think of it.  

Well.  I hope Liddy's practicing his fucking dance steps.  I've got the rose clenched in between my teeth and I probably should have de-thorned it first.  But maybe it's better with the thorns.  Life's always better with the thorns.  

I hear Buxtehude said that, too.

To Mock a Killingbird

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 1, Verse 26

"Some day you'll be in trouble, and I'll laugh!  Mock me, will you?  I'll mock you!"

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Terry Gross did a "Late Night Week" thing on her show all of last week.  She interviewed Letterman and whathisname with the chin already-- Conan and Jimmy Fallon, too.  It started on Monday when she played an older recording of an interview she did with Fred de Cordova, the Executive Producer of "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson.  This guy, as far as I can tell, was a legend, from a time where legends knew how to tie a Windsor knot and they all smoked and somehow lived to be 90, their skin was tanned and leathery as a handbag and they could get away with white socks and dress pants.  

de Cordova lorded over "The Tonight Show" and the legend of whether a comic made it or not being determined by receiving a wink from Johnny turns out to be not so much-- it was really getting "the wave over" from de Cordova, as Jay Leno himself spoke of when he got the wave over in 1977, while wearing a suit that looked like it was made from a skinned lizard.  That's how you knew your act killed and it was time to take a seat next to Johnny Carson.  Kings were made, empires fell, who knows how many useless schmucks killed themselves after not getting that de Cordova wave over, but that's show business.

There was a lot of introspective navel-gazing (the technical term for this is: "omphaloskepsis", in case you were wondering-- and, hey-- save some dirty lint for me, okay?  Bloggers gotta eat too, you know.) during these interviews about comedy-- what is it and how do you find it?  Is it under a rock or inside your navel or does it grow in Brooklyn?  

Jimmy Fallon was talking about how most of his humor is "nice", that he's "not too mean".  

I like that.  I respect that.  But I don't particularly understand it.  I don't know, I don't think, how to be funny without being mean.  Dirty.  Cruel.  Harsh.  

My meanness was honed at our family's dining room table.  They say good things happen when families eat dinner together, and maybe that's so, but, when my family ate together, it was show time.  There was no need for a tv or a radio, I was Johnny and the guests all rolled into one.  Impressions, sarcasm, voices, songs, faces-- it was all there.  Passover was the high point of the year for me, because it meant that

a.) I got a MUCH bigger house and,

b.) I got to dress up (Windsor knot and everything) and,

c.) My lines were already WRITTEN DOWN!

(You know, in the haggadah.)

In our house, the 4 Questions were done in Indian, Chinese, English, Scottish, and Irish accents, depending on the year and what films I had seen recently.  Sometimes, they were done in the voice and manner of people our family knew-- friends, and doctors, mostly.  Sometimes, I improvised a little.  Sometimes, I got in trouble a little.  But, for me, it was like being on tv, and I loved it.  

But being funny at the dinner table as I got older got a little bit harder.  It's easy to be precocious and get a laugh or two when you're impersonating your rheumatologist (yes, unfortunately, I had one of those, and he was Indian, and he was hiLARious) as a younger kid, and it's another to still be funny when you're a smarmy little fifteen-year-old that nobody likes, not even you.  But I found that something usually worked, and that was meanness.  

Being offensive, which I was sometimes inadvertently as a younger child and which was severely frowned upon (especially at Seder), was somehow not only okay when I was a burgeoning teenager, but something that was rewarded with a prize all boys, no matter how old, endlessly seek: their mothers' smile.  Whether it was a cutting remark about someone we all knew, or some outrageous comment about something going on in the news or the family, the darker and more sinister it was, the louder the maternal laugh.  And I didn't think too terribly much about trends I might be setting for myself or the family, I just knew what was working and, like any comic with half a brain, I kept at it.  

Look, at dinner, I killed.  Who could ask for anything more?

Of course, I sometimes wonder what I would have been like had I been encouraged to "be nice", or at least "nice-er".  What would my personality have been like?  Who might I have attracted, or turned away?  What would my omphaloskepsis on comedy yield?  I'll never know, and I suspect, unfortunately or not, that the kind of children I am going to rear are going to realize that what gets daddy going, what will win them the wave over, is raucous and unrefined, imitations of an unflattering nature and a heavy dose of envelope-pushing.  

And I guess they'll roll with what works.  And maybe, hopefully, they won't get quite as addicted to the results as I did.     

Partners

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 4, Verse 23

"Above all else, guard your affections."

---

CHIPPED WISDOM:

Mothers and sons have scripts.  They are steady scene partners, and they can read each other's rhythms and faces and pauses like old vaudeville performers.  When Larry Fine was in his seventies and nearing his death, he and Moe Howard were still performing together, even at the nursing home where Larry was recovering, or trying to, from his latest stroke.  The story goes that Moe was running late and Larry had to go on without him.  He was terrified.  It was the first time he had gone out on stage without his beloved friend and comedy partner by his side in over fifty years.    

In middle school, I filmed a few episodes of a mock news program that was set in the late 1700s.  A friend of mine and I were co-anchors of a show called "A Bit of History", and we read phony news dressed in silk stockings (okay, they were very long gym socks) and white perriwigs bought from the local Halloween Adventure store.  My father steadfastly filmed these episodes which were originally done for school projects, and were slated to run on the local cable access channel, but we never could get our act together.  Now, Greg, my comic partner, is a successful alt/folk singersongwriter out west and I'm, well, here.  He and I, fully clothed and submerged in water, pretended my family bathtub was a colonial warship, we tramped through local creeks, frightened neighbors, and destroyed my parents' dining room with huge custard pies that we threw at each other and, you know, missed.  I cajoled other hapless schmucks to join me in comedic misadventures, sometimes for a camera, sometimes for a live audience since then, but Greg was always my favorite comic partner.  

My first comic partner, though, was my mother.  We did scenes together.

Me: Mommy, I love you.

Her: That's very sweet, honey.

Me: Mommy, don't you love me, too?

Her: Of course I do!

Me: Then SAY it!

---

Her: You're my best boy.

Me: Mommy!  But I'm your ONLY boy!

---

This was the first bit of rehearsed dialogue I ever did with anyone.  I thought we were hilarious.  What did I know-- this was before I discovered Moe and Larry on my Bubba's enormous wood-encased television, and long before I discovered Greg in 7th grade formaldehyde biology class.  The lines my mother and I spouted back and forth to each other were always delivered with the same pitch, pace, rhythm and I liked the rehearsals because they differed in no way from the performances.  I enjoyed the predictability of the script, and we never deviated or improv'd.  

She was a good scene partner.

Nowadays our dialogue isn't rehearsed, and it's more spontaneous and more dangerous, and less satisfying and less happy.  While she lives less than half-a-mile from my house, I feel like she's off somewhere very far away.  Our pauses aren't Pinter-esque, they're just heavy, and hard.  And, some days, I feel just as lost and frightened as Larry staring out into the house with no Moe beside him. 

We were very vocal about our love for each other, that family of mine and I.  I will never forget how my father, a hardened sabra who fought in two wars and who has taken the lives of others on this earth, taught me about how to show love.  He didn't always know what to say or do, and he didn't always know how to respond to me, definitely his most eccentric and perhaps his most needy child, but he never ever failed to show his love.  The man let me eat bacon on Shabbat and he let me drink coffee at age 8.  He nurtured every crazy thing I was into-- nevermind if it was antique Volkswagen Beetles or Bach harpsichord concertos, navy blue three-piece suits from Mennonite-run thrift shops, the Civil War or 1970s British comedy.  He even indulged my desire to become a police officer.  

That one didn't come easy, though.  

We went out to dinner as a family-- maybe the last time, actually, now that I think about it-- to a restaurant in New Jersey shortly after I had graduated from college.  All five of us in one car.  We were on Route 73 and a New Jersey State Trooper lit up his overhead lights and pulled over a dark green Mitsubishi with heavily tinted windows.  

"He probably pulled that guy over cuz he's black," my middle sister said authoritatively.

"What the fuck makes you the expert on traffic stops?  You can't even see if he's black-- his windows are tinted so dark you can't see shit."

"Fuck you!  What do you give a shit?" she spat back at me.  What was she, stupid?  I had just written and published a book on cops as an undergraduate in college.  

"I give a shit because you don't know anything about what they go through and you sit back and make fun and criticize and you don't care and that cop could die tonight shot by that asshole in that car and he'd never see it coming and you think it's all a big fucking joke!"

My sister and I fought like animals the whole way home.  Late that night, in the living room, I told my father I was enrolling in the academy.  And he and I sobbed hysterically together on our knees, pressed up against each other so tight I could barely breathe, clutching onto each other's shirts for dear life.  A few weeks later, he was running alongside me on the track of my old high school to help me prepare for the mile-and-a-half run, which I blew the doors off of.

The weight-lifting test... not so much.  And that's the way that one went.  

In the salty heat of our embrace on the living room floor, I felt his love forever-- his terror, too.  My mother and I still have our scripts, we just don't rehearse as often as we should.  She has two grandsons now, and a granddaughter, too.  I'm no longer her only boy, but that's okay.  I know.  I'd have to be a real lamebrain not to.