Strange Wine

by Harlan Ellison

  “I was talking to myself?” he suggested, hoping she’d go for it.

  “Lance, you’re a very ordinary person. You don’t talk to yourself.”

  “I’m distraught. Maybe unhinged.”

  “Who were you speaking to?”

  “The Sparkletts man. He delivered a bottle of mountain spring mineral water. He was passing his condolences.”

  “He certainly got out the door fast as I came in; I heard you talking before I came in.”

  “He’s big, but he’s fast. Covers the whole Van Nuys and Sherman Oaks area all by himself. Terrific person, you’d like him a lot. His name’s Melville. Always makes me think of big fish when I talk to him.”

  He was babbling, hoping it would all go away. Hannah looked at him strangely. “I take it all back, Lance. You’re not that ordinary. Talking to yourself I can believe.”

  She went back to the groaning board. Sans gefilte fish.

  “What a pity,” said the voice of Lance Goldfein’s mother. “I love Hannah, but she ain’t playing with a full deck, if you catch my drift.”

  “Mom, you’ve got to tell me what the hell is going on here. Could Hannah hear your voice?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What do you mean: you don’t think so? You’re the ghost, don’t you know the rules?”

  “I just got here. There are things I haven’t picked up yet.”

  “Did you find a mah jongg group yet?”

  “Don’t be such a cutesy smartmouth. I can still give you a crack across the mouth.”

  “How? You’re ectoplasm.”

  “Don’t be disgusting.”

  “You know, I finally believe it’s you. At first I thought I was going over the edge. But it’s you. What I still want to know is why?!? And why you, and why me? Of all the people in the world, how did this happen to us?”

  “We’re not the first. It happens all the time.”

  “You mean Conan Doyle really did speak to spirits?”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “Nice man. Probably still eligible. Look around up there, you’re bound to run into him. Hey, by the way: you are up there, aren’t you?”

  “What a dummy I raised. No, I’m not up there, I’m down here. Talking to you.”

  “Tell me about it,” he murmured softly to himself.

  “I heard that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The door from the dining room swung open again and half a dozen relatives were standing there. They were all staring at Lance as though he had just fallen off the moon. “Lance, darling,” said Aunt Rachel, “would you like to come home tonight with Aaron and me? It’s so gloomy here in the house all alone.”

  “What gloomy? It’s the same sunny house it’s always been.”

  “But you seem so…so…distressed….”

  From one of the kitchen cabinets Lance heard the distinct sound of a blatting raspberry. Mom was not happy with Rachel’s remark. Mom had never been that happy with Rachel, to begin with. Aaron was Mom’s brother, and she had always felt Rachel had married him because he had a thriving poultry business. Lance did not share the view; it had to’ve been true love. Uncle Aaron was a singularly unappetizing human being. He picked his nose in public. And always smelled of defunct chickens.

  “I’m not distressed, Rachel. I’m just unhappy, and I’m trying to decide what I’m going to do next. Going home with you would only put it off for another day, and I want to get started as soon as I can. That’s why I’m talking to myself.”

  They stared. And smiled a great deal.

  “Why don’t you all leave me alone for a while. I don’t mean it to sound impertinent, but I think I’d like to be by myself. You know what I mean?”

  Lew, who had more sense than all the rest of them put together, understood perfectly. “That’s not a bad idea, Lance. Come on, everyone; let’s get out of here and let Lance do some thinking. Anybody need a lift?”

  They began moving out, and Lance went with them to the front room where Hannah asked if he minded if she put together a doggie bag of food, after all why should it go to waste such terrific deli goodies. Lance said he didn’t mind, and Hannah and Rachel and Gert and Lilian and Benny (who was unmarried) all got their doggie bags, savaging the remains on the card tables until there was nothing left but one piece of pastrami (it wouldn’t look nice to take the last piece), several pickles, and a dollop of potato salad. The marabunta army ants could not have carried out a better program of scorching the earth.

  And when they were gone, Lance fell into the big easy chair by the television, sighed a sigh of release, and closed his eyes. “Good,” said his mother from the ashtray on the side table. “Now we can have a long mother-son heart-to-heart.”

  Lance closed his eyes tighter. Why me? he thought.

  He hoped Mom would never be sent to Hell, because he learned in the next few days that Hell was being a son whose mother has come back to haunt him, and if Mom were ever sent there, it would be a terrible existence in which she would no doubt be harassed by her own long-dead mother, her grandmothers on both sides, and God only knew how many random nuhdzing relatives from ages past.

  Primary among the horrors of being haunted by a Jewish mother’s ghost was the neatness. Lance’s mother had been an extremely neat person. One could eat off the floor. Lance had never understood the efficacy of such an act, but his mother had always used it as a yardstick of worthiness for housekeeping.

  Lance, on the other hand, was a slob. He liked it that way, and for most of his thirty years umbilically linked to his mother, he had suffered the pains of a running battle about clothes dropped on the floor, rings from coffee cups permanently staining the teak table, cigarette ashes dumped into the waste baskets from overflowing ashtrays without benefit of a trash can liner. He could recite by heart the diatribe attendant on his mother’s having to scour out the wastebasket with Dow Spray.

  And now, when by all rights he should have been free to live as he chose, at long last, after thirty years, he had been forced to become a housemaid for himself.

  No matter where he went in the house, Mom was there. Hanging from the ceiling, hiding in the nap of the rug, speaking up at him from the sink drain, calling him from the cabinet where the vacuum cleaner reposed in blissful disuse. “A pigsty,” would come the voice, from empty air. “A certifiable pigsty. My son lives in filth.”

  “Mom,” Lance would reply, pulling a pop-tab off a fresh can of beer or flipping a page in Oui, “this is not a pigsty. It’s an average semiclean domicile in which a normal, growing American boy lives.”

  “There’s shmootz all over the sink from the peanut butter and jelly. You’ll draw ants.”

  “Ants have more sense than to venture in here and take their chances with you.” He was finding it difficult to live. “Mom, why don’t you get off my case?”

  “I saw you playing with yourself last night.”

  Lance sat up straight. “You’ve been spying on me!”

  “Spying? A mother is spying when she’s concerned her son will go blind from doing personal abuse things to himself? That’s the thanks I get after thirty years of raising. A son who’s become a pervert.”

  “Mom, masturbation is not perversion.”

  “How about those filthy magazines you read with the girls in leather.”

  “You’ve been going through my drawers.”

  “Without opening them,” she murmured.

  “This’s got to stop!” he shouted. “It’s got to end. E-n-d. End! I’m going crazy with you hanging around!”

  There was silence. A long silence. Lance wanted to go to the toilet, but he was afraid she’d check it out to make sure his stools were firm and hard. The silence went on and on.

  Finally, he stood up and said, “Okay, I’m sorry.”

  Still silence.

  “I said I was sorry, fer chrissakes! What more do you want from me?”

  “A little respect.”

  “That’s what I
give you. A little respect.”

  More silence.

  “Mom, you’ve got to face it, I’m not your little boy anymore. I’m an adult, with a job and a life and adult needs and…and…”

  He wandered around the house but there was only more silence and more free-floating guilt, and finally he decided he would go for a walk, maybe go to a movie. In hopes Mom was housebound by the rules for ghost mothers.

  The only movie he hadn’t seen was a sequel to a Hong Kong kung fu film, Return of the Street Fighter. But he paid his money and went in. No sooner had Sonny Chiba ripped out a man’s genitals, all moist and bloody, and displayed them to the audience in tight closeup, than Lance heard the voice of his mother behind him. “This is revolting. How can a son of mine watch such awful?”

  “Mom!” he screamed, and the manager came down and made him leave. His box of popcorn was still half full.

  On the street, passersby continued to turn and look at him as he walked past conversing with empty air.

  “You’ve got to leave me alone. I need to be left alone. This is cruel and inhuman torture. I was never that Jewish!”

  He heard sobbing, from just beside his right ear. He threw up his hands. Now came the tears. “Mommmm, please!”

  “I only wanted to do right for you. If I knew why I was sent back, what it was for, maybe I could make you happy, my son.”

  “Mom, you’ll make me happy as a pig in slop if you’ll just go away for a while and stop snooping on me.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  And she was gone.

  When it became obvious that she was gone, Lance went right out and picked up a girl in a bar.

  And it was not until they were in bed that she came back.

  “I turn my back a second and he’s shtupping a bum from the streets. That I should live to see this!”

  Lance had been way under the covers. The girl, whose name was Chrissy, had advised him she was using a new brand of macrobiotic personal hygiene spray, and he had been trying to decide if the taste was, in fact, as asserted, papaya and coconut, or bean sprout and avocado, as his taste buds insisted. Chrissy gasped and squealed. “We’re not alone here!” she said. Lance struggled up from the depths; as his head emerged from beneath the sheet, he heard his mother ask, “She isn’t even Jewish, is she?”

  “Mom!”

  Chrissy squealed again. “Mom?”

  “It’s just a ghost, don’t worry about it,” Lance said reassuringly. Then, to the air, “Mom, will you, fer chrissakes, get out of here? This is in very poor taste.”

  “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 hell out of here,” Chrissy said, leaping out of the bed, long brown hair flying.

  “Put on your clothes, you bummerkeh,” Lance’s mother shrilled. “Oh, God, 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 horny.”

  “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 God 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 cleaner’s, 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 Saturday. This 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, glasses, 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 bumped 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 recorporeated, but your mother has gone to a lovely place where she won’t worry about you anymore.”

  “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?”