“So what’s this gazpacho?” asks a man.
“I’ve had it; it’s a mechaya. It’s Spanish. Like from Spain.”
“Nu?”
“I tell you, you’ll love it. Young lady, could you or could you not plotz from it?”
“I think so,” says Tania, uncertainly.
“Pfeh,” says the man, waving dismissively. “Give me the cream of asparagus.”
“Fine. Suit yourself. I’ll take the gazpacho. Then you can sit here with a face on you that you could drag across the carpet until I offer to switch. And,” she adds, “I hate cream of asparagus.”
“Pfeh,” says the man.
“Now tonight,” continues the compere, “in addition to the contemporary sounds of David Lubash and his Love Rush, we have some really prime entertainment. Direct from some very wellreceived engagements in the tristate area, we’re happy to bring you without any further ado the very funny Jules Farber.”
Here the small band strikes up a jaunty, snare-driven theme, to which the compere sings words in a vaguely cantorial tenor:
Settle back, it’s time to laugh,
the land of comedy is down this path
And if you want to know the man who rules,
I’m here to tell you that his name is Jules
He’s awful special, yeah, he’s okey-doke,
Julie Farber is a man who’s awful quick with a joke.
On today’s events he’s got a unique take,
so why not give the guy an even break?
Welcome Jules Farberrrrrr!
With the closing brrr the compere jokily wraps his arms around himself as if to indicate enclosure in a walk-in freezer and then, perhaps realizing the ambiguity of this gesture, begins to applaud while backing off the stage. Farber enters the small circle of light that surrounds the microphone stand and stands there for a moment, looking blearily into the audience. He is about forty and wears a rumpled business suit and has the general mien of a man searching the carousel for his checked baggage after the worst commuter flight in the history of commercial aviation. He waits with visible impatience for the house to settle down. He then begins, appropriately enough given his appearance, with a story about airports and air travel. Glamour of the jet age. Well, there’s the pilot with his Captain America voice. The buxom stewardess demonstrating the life jacket, wink. The turbulence moment. The in-flight movie, the meals and snacks. Barf bags and “occupied.” Fear of hijacking. A Cuba joke. A Cuban cigar story. The uncle who rolled cigars. His Aunt Malka, who lives in Florida. A Collins Avenue story. The audience is polite and attentive, though the waiters are just beginning to serve dinner and each crash and tinkle seems to send a frisson of nervous energy through Farber’s body. He wipes his palm on his jacket, examines it, essays a look into the audience.
“So I have to ask,” he says. “Didn’t this week just wring you out? A new president, wow. Anticlimactic, a little. The thing of it is the show’s over. Ford’s like your high school guidance counselor taking over from the Wicked Witch of the West. A little quiet, kind of a stiff, actually, always trying to get you to apply yourself, get your marks up. Question is, am I relieved, nauseous, bored, or all three? I mean, we’re all glad Nixon’s out of there. Across the political spectrum, as they say. Whatever our individual reasons. It’s too late to do any good, but for form’s sake. So they’ll look back at us kindly in the future and say, ‘How well they preserved our democracy for us!’ This is some shortsighted posterity, no? An honest historical appraisal of Richard M. Nixon and his times would approach the subject like a documentary about typhoid or bubonic plague. ’What conditions allowed him to germinate, to thrive?’ Those are the good questions. But who wants to imagine a posterity that’ll be critical of us? How deflating. We want from the future what we want from our kids: Sit up straight and listen. ‘Oh, we are the greatest generation! We defeated Hitler, we made the desert bloom, we moved to South Orange, and last but not least we got Nixon the hell out of there. So, love, honor, obey, cherish, venerate, adore, and—please—call once, make it twice, a week.’”
This draws a smattering of applause, mostly from among the older women in the audience.
“But what explanation is there for Nixon’s ascent, his ascendancy, his political longevity? Remember this is the oracle of the past getting quizzed by an unfortunately skeptical future, its answers coming out of some smoky void, a deep voice, Lincolnesque, theatrical, like God in The Ten Commandments, though what I’m actually picturing in my head is a columnist for a major metropolitan newspaper in a drip-dry suit. ‘No, sir, you have the question backwards. It is not a matter of Nixon’s being unsuited to high office. It is not a matter of a small-minded opportunist taking the expedited route to ultimate success in his chosen field of endeavor. It is not a matter of a man who at every crucial moment made himself over to reflect whatever generosity or meanness of spirit moved the times. It’s not a matter of how did he make it at all. What it’s a matter of is how did he fail.’ Yeah, the old tragic flaw. The great man, done in by hubris. The old op-ed shuffle.”
Stiffly, Farber thrusts his arms into the air, forming the familiar V signs with the fingers of either hand. “‘Peace,’” he says, in a Nixon voice. Then, thoughtfully: “‘That ought to look good on my résumé.’” There is some laughter, and the audience settles down for an impression, for some of the traditional comedy trademarks. You can see them leaning back, settling in after the jagged beginning, relaxing after that edgy way an audience partakes of failure. But Farber waves the conceit away, dispelling it like smoke in the hazy air, and then drops his arms and shrugs to resettle the creased jacket on his shoulders, like a bird ruffling its feathers.
“You want to find at least a trace of something to admire about this Nixon, though. Sift the ashes a little, you should pardon the expression. What you have to is you have to admire Nixon sticking it out as long as he did. What is the word, tenacious. Forget the shifty eyes, the concentration camp guard posture, the black sandy jowls. Forget these things, file them someplace dark and inaccessible, beside maybe the Instamatic snaps of your second cousin Rebecca’s bat mitzvah which they held at the Village Temple. In the on deck circle, Sheldon and Bruce, awaiting the celebration of their union. A lovely reception to follow at Marc Ballroom. So forget these things. Certainly Becca you should forget. She’s just your average nice Jewish girl from the West Village—going to Elisabeth Irwin, living on salted popcorn, and dreaming of rhinoplasty. Likewise forget the eyes, the Treblinka mien, the hairy face. And what you have is you have a bulldog, nah, a doberman, hanging on for dear life. Does a Jew know an attack dog when he sees one? Growling, ropes of gamy-looking spit looping out from between the jaws, swinging there, those powerful yellow teeth pressing down into their quarry, the front paws paddling with excitement at the empty air.”
“Tell a joke!” someone shouts.
“Jokes, you want. Question: How many Hasidic rebbes does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: What is a lightbulb?”
Silence.
“OK, so you didn’t like the dog, the image of the dog? This is a unique, strange face, Nixon’s. Let alone the brain doing its crazy gavotte behind it. Gavotte! The words smart Jews make their very own! Aggravation. Tumult. Excellent words. Unimpeachable goyish pedigrees, like nice shiksa girls named Mary and Betty; they went to Smith, Radcliffe, and Barnard, and now they’re in the hairy hands of these Jewish boys from Ocean Parkway, these nonmatric students at Brooklyn College, ogled and defiled like the pictures in the old stroke books. But a strange face. The mind gropes for comparisons. Only America makes a face like this. Healthy, but sick. Well fed, but malnourished. Intelligent, but lit by instinct. You look at your old Action Comics, Whiz Comics, Star Spangled Comics. The archvillains, well, you’re talking typecast. I mean, villains they were conceived, and villains they shall come off the drafting table, ever more. But if you look, schlepping around in the background of one of those comics you’ll always see the shoe clerk, the guy sellin
g train tickets behind the barred window, the guy running the elevator, the guy who blends in and pledges his allegiance to the front runner—and that’s the face of Nixon.”
“Tell a joke!” shouts somebody.
“What, you want jokes, tonight? All right already. How many Lubavitchers does it take to change a lightbulb? Hmm? None; it’ll never die. OK? But listen, with that face, on Monday it’s ‘Floor, please,’ and Tuesday he’s hanging from your trouser leg, growling and snapping. The dog within. I like that, I can see it on the checkout rack at the A&P, Bantam, right next to The Sensuous Woman and The Strange Case of Alice Galton, which might actually be the same book. The Dog Within. By Kate Millett. It’s all about keeping that dog tied up in there, out of sight. You take a Nixon and you reduce him to the sum of his ad campaign. Nasty, Brutish, Short, Nixon’s the One, and then it’s just a matter of time until, oh yeah, they’re playing ‘Hail to the Chief’ while your guy’s waving his way down the gangplank of Air Force One, stomach all abubble over the prospect of tearing some ass, Pat with her Valium stare grafted to his side. So far so good, right? And then the product just, like, implodes. Like if the pilot of every plane in Pan Am’s fleet decided to nosedive into the ground the same day. The horror. The betrayal. The sense of having been taken. The thing is, Nixon did it to himself. Can’t you see them, the ad men, sitting in a room where the walls are covered with beautifully framed tampon ads, the window has a million dollar view of Birdshit Plaza, ‘Nu, Dick? Why? We had it all. China, detente, peace with honor, law and order. What a package. The only thing we didn’t deliver was good water pressure and a Sunday Times with no missing sections.’ McGovern was finished. A zero. Half of America thought he was a pinko. The other half thought he was Gene McCarthy in drag. And the third half thought they were both the same thing. Eagleton was the last nail in that coffin. Yeah, a VP fanning his lower lip with his index finger, making with the buh-buh noises? Little too close to the bone for comfort. This is the age of the VP ascendant. Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Truman. All of them succeeding men who’d basically died in office. Nixon had it all sewed up. But I always knew he’d screw things up in the end. The guy’s like Charlie Brown. It’s so long to the White House, the big valedictory speech, the ultimate Norma Desmond moment, and what comes naturally are the applause lines that used to wow those Chamber of Commerce luncheons back in Whittier. ‘This country needs good farmers, good businessmen, good plumbers, good carpenters.’ Genetically designed to run an employment agency on Fourteenth Street. What a brain, he always belonged behind that Steelcase desk, brown-bagging it or fried chicken from the five-and-ten lunch counter, real treyf, a blackboard behind him listing steam table jobs, housepainting work. ‘You got a chauffeur’s license, Mr. Kissinger? No? How about shoe sales? You think you could handle it? Fastpaced environment? See Mr. Dugatkin at Brunell’s.’ Later Dugatkin calls up. ‘Nixon, what’s with this Kissinger you’re sending me? He insults Mrs. Weinapple and her daughter Caitlin who shows such a talent for the folk guitar. He says Caitlin’s feet are like two lake bottom canoes. Since she’s this big I’m fitting this girl for her Keds and I’ll grant you she’s needing a little extra support in the arches, but size is not an issue. And after lunch—a seventy-minute lunch, but who counts?—he takes fifty-six cents from the March of Dimes box.’ Nixon’s mad, but in a prefab sort of way. He knows Dugatkin’s just kvetching, that the guy has every foot in Stuyvesant Town locked up. He wonders what the fuck is up with Kissinger, though. He had such an excellent presence. Very commanding. And that sexy accent. Who would have expected this? So he feels a gesture is incumbent upon him. So you want to know what he does, what he does is he sends Kissinger the next day to work for Shimmy Pressman, whose own Gala Shoe is just a few blocks up First Avenue from Brunell’s. Shimmy’s got the same stranglehold on Peter Cooper Village that Dugatkin’s got on Stuy Town. Same turnover problem too. I mean neither of these guys is a breeze to deal with, let’s face it; Dugatkin’s son ran away from dentistry school to dig clams out of Portsmouth Bay, Pressman’s daughter is a large animal veterinarian who communicates via ham radio from remote locations out west only during the High Holy Days. The kids grew up together, know each other from Camp Emanu-El, were on the same side in the yearly campwide maccabead. Team Masada. ‘Ya gotta! Ya gotta! Root for Masada!’ Great, suicide cults of the ancient world.”
A hand reaches out for Tania, clutches her sleeve.
“What type Jell-O? What type Jell-O have you got tonight?” It’s an old man, his eyes rheumy behind the unbelievably thick lenses of his eyeglasses. The words come out of a soft mouth that seems to be lacking many teeth. But his grip is like iron.
“He wants to know,” says a woman at his table, helpfully, “what the kind of Jell-O is that you’ve got here tonight.”
“Pressman’s on the phone even before the noon break: ‘Nixon! I’m sympathetic, the man is down on his luck. He shows initiative and he takes an interest. But then he tells Mrs. Glassman she’d have a better shot at getting a good fit if she went to the rowboat concession in Central Park.’ So Nixon, you know, he feels he’s accomplished something. A balance. Shuttle discourtesy. Plus, you know, it keeps Henry away from the office. He sits in that straight chair on the other side of Nixon’s desk, eyeing Nixon’s Woolworth chicken, kibitzing when Nixon has to take a phone call, erasing things on Nixon’s chalkboard when his back is turned.
“But that’s all finished now. Nixon’s back in San Clemente. Guys in suits out on the lawn, behind the flower beds, talking into their lapels. Neighbors complaining about the noise, the lights, the traffic; it’s their own personal Götterdämmerung. Nixon’s picking up the Trimline phone in the living room to call Pat in the kitchen to ask her to bring him in some sunflower seeds, please. Sure he has things to do: Match Game’s on at ten-thirty. He likes all those game shows where the secrets are concealed under sliding panels, behind rotating sections of a big lit-up board. So much friendlier than the hearings. If it had been Gene Rayburn instead of Peter Rodino doing the questioning, we all would have been out of there in nothing flat, goes his way of thinking.
“All finished. The laws of physics have won; this is a body at rest. But since he wasn’t ever interested in laws, why should now be any different? The tenacity, while it lasted, back from the dead, back again and again, it’s like a picture Roger Corman said the hell with. Because you want to show everybody. Hanging in there, sticking to those rusty old six guns. You want to show everybody. I got rachmones, standing up here, believe it. His what they call political base is gone, man. He may have been the one climbing onto that helicopter waving bye-bye, but the people are the ones who left him. They’re wiping the dust off their ColorTrak TVs with lemon Pledge, prepping the tube so it’s fit to receive its first images of the new top man. President Whatshisface. Well, far as they’re concerned, anybody’s better. Polls show people hate Nixon worse than they hate Hitler, Jack the Ripper, Count Dracula, and Idi Amin, in that order. They’ll all come back, though. He’ll come back. After all, it was just a third-rate burglary. For that he gets this? What about all those old report cards he sweated out? He participated, he got along well, he showed respect, he obeyed rules, he showed self-control, he followed directions, he worked neatly, he had excellent penmanship. He scored a four-hole outhouse for the annual bonfire at Whittier. Only president to visit all fifty states. His own mother said he was the best potato masher, to die for. He’s got one more act coming, and he knows it.”
Someone hollers, “Say something funny!”
“Something funny, he says. OK. How many congregants does it take to change a lightbulb in a synagogue? ‘Change? You’re wanting we should change the lightbulb? My grandmother donated that lightbulb!’”
Diffuse laughter.
“For now, though, it’s all over. We’re all going to have to spend some time healing, recuperating from this long national nightmare. I see myself in a hospital bed, being spoon-fed Junket and kneaded with VapoRub by a round-the-clock team
of nurses who look like Yvonne DeCarlo, Virginia Mayo, and Jane Greer, though all votes for Gloria Grahame will be counted. Thank God for major medical.”
“Young lady,” says an older man holding a menu, who then, having gotten Tania’s attention, turns to a young woman seated beside him. “You eat what you want. Get whatever pleases you, not a word I’m saying. It’s your stomach. But stop trying to have an influence.” The young woman rolls her eyes.
“Young lady,” he says again. “You got a nice piece of boneless chicken breast? It’s fresh? It’s not just sitting there in the kitchen under lights? All right, bring me a piece of boneless chicken. And make sure it’s all the way cooked.” He turns again to his companion. “You want to eat chazerai, go ahead. Be my guest. Not one word from me. You’re big. It’s your stomach.”
“Chicken. God, Daddy.”
“The whole time, though, I’ll be waiting for him to come back. I’ll be waiting, you’ll be waiting, he himself will be waiting. In the meantime, what? A little notecard to Rose Mary Woods? Rose Mary, she put in her time, God knows. She just wants to do her linoleum cuts of woodland scenes and have a second piece of coffee cake, for Christ’s sake. A little paint by numbers. She’s got nothing but time. She knows she’ll get a call in a couple of years and she’s willing to wait.”
Trance Page 33
