My Father’s Guitar & Other Imaginary Things: True Stories

by Joseph Skibell

  “Hello?” a woman’s voice finally said.

  “Ah! I’m so glad you called,” I exclaimed, and I could almost hear her shoulders dropping. I’m so glad you called, I imagine, isn’t something a telemarketer hears every day. She seemed momentarily at a loss for words. Taking advantage of her silence, I launched into my spiel.

  “I’m soliciting funds to send a delegate to the Eighty-Eighth Annual Esperanto Congress in Sweden,” I told her, “and I was hoping I could count on your support this year. May I put you down for an eighteen-dollar contribution?”

  To be honest, I thought she’d simply hang up on me and I was surprised by her reaction. She started laughing, and she had a gorgeously vibrant and throaty voice.

  “No, you’re right, you’re right,” I said. “Eighteen dollars is a laughably small amount for such an important cause. Shall we say thirty-six, then?”

  “I can’t send you dollars,” she said.

  “But why not?”

  “Because I’m in Canada!” She laughed her glorious laugh.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” I said. “Our critics claim that Esperanto has always been supported by loonies.”

  “No, I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can do it.”

  She sounded sincerely regretful. She seemed a little starved for conversation, to tell you the truth. She’d probably have talked to me all day, and though she sounded pleasant enough, I had work to do. I was pleased to note, though, that, having refused me money, she no longer seemed to feel that she could ask me for any, and she hung up without identifying the company she worked for.

  The second telemarketer hung up on me immediately, but the third one, a young man with a foreign accent, sounded intrigued.

  “Esperanto?” he said. “What’s that?

  “Oh, well, thank you for asking,” I said to him, propping my feet onto my desk. “Esperanto is an international language designed so that people the world over can easily learn to communicate with one another. Not only would this aid science and medicine and commerce, of course, but once people of different cultures are able to communicate fully with one another, our hearts will open, and we’ll be able to look beyond the barriers that divide us. You know what I’m talking about: barriers of ethnicity, nationality, creed.”

  “Well,” he said, “I am kind of an international type of guy.”

  He actually said this.

  “Ah, well, Esperanto is right up your alley, then, and you could be proud to help sponsor a delegate.”

  “Where do I send the check?”

  “Where do you send the check?” I said.

  “Yeah, where do I send the check?”

  “I assume you have my address?”

  “Are you still at . . . ?”

  Secure in a more familiar script, he rattled off my address.

  “I am,” I said, “but I can’t take your money.”

  “No?” He sounded hurt. “Why not? I’m an international type of guy.”

  “I know, but . . . look, it’s . . . it’s just . . . I’m sorry, but . . .”

  This was too absurd. Once again, I had to beg off, and not because the telemarketer on the other end of the line was demanding my money. On the contrary, he wanted to send me money, and he wanted to talk. And he wanted to talk about Esperanto! A subject no one in my immediate household or neighborhood or circle of friends or extended family had the slightest interest in. What’s wrong with me? Here was a potential samideano, a self-described “international type of guy,” and I was treating him as though he were nothing more than a pesky telemarketer!

  What kind of Esperantisto was I?

  I had to take stock. I had to take a hard look at myself. Why was it so hard for me to treat these telemarketers as though they were real people whose lives mattered and whose interests might coincide with my own? Most of them were probably fellow writers and actors and musicians trying to cobble together a living while pursuing their underremunerative arts. I’d had jobs like that before, though—it’s true—I was never competent enough to keep them for more than a day or two.

  Worse: Dr. Zamenhof would have been ashamed of me, I knew.

  Still, I couldn’t help noting that, like the Canadian woman before him, this international type of guy neglected to identify his company and he forgot to try to sell me anything.

  The next time I asked for a donation, the man on the other end of the line started stammering. “Um, um, um, um, Joseph,” he said in a dignified-sounding voice, “I am so very thrilled that you have asked me to contribute to this wonderful, this noble cause.”

  “So I can count on your support, then?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Thank you for calling, anyway,” I said.

  “No, thank you, sir. Thank you. And you have yourself a wonderful, no, a marvelous evening.”

  He, too, neglected to identify his company, and I was able to get off the phone without feeling either bilked or guilty for having turned down a good cause. Even more, I was pleased to see that this simple act of stepping out from behind the masks we wear—he playing the ambushing telemarketer; I, the besieged householder—had an enlivening effect on us both.

  In the end, though, I couldn’t keep it up. There were too many telemarketers, and these conversations were proving too time-consuming. I barely had enough energy for the people in my life who mattered to me. I couldn’t be available for every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a phone book.

  Dr. Zamenhof wasn’t like this, of course. A gentle utopian dreamer, he gave of himself to everyone who crossed his path, seeing to his patients during the day, treating the poorer ones for no fee or in exchange for milk or butter or eggs, while working late into the night, first to create and then to promote, as a gift for all humankind, a universal language so that the man-made borders that divide us might be crossed, and the human heart, which we too often hold closed, like a fist, against our fellows, might open, and the world’s wealth—our material, spiritual, and cultural heritage—might be shared with all its inhabitants, ushering in an epoch of universal brotherhood and peace.

  What’s so funny about that? I still want to know.

  Dr. Zamenhof was so beloved, in fact, that when he died in 1917 at the age of fifty-eight, droves of mourners accompanied his coffin to the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery, and many of the poorer folk among them had no idea that their simple, saintly doctor had invented an artificial language and led an international movement that had spread that language all over the world.

  These days, it seems, we only talk to one another when we need something. It’s as though we’ve all become telemarketers, pestering each other for the recognition and the love we need. American life is so fundamentally economic that it’s hard to justify doing something that doesn’t have an economic advantage to it: sitting with friends, chatting with a stranger on the phone, learning a silly made-up language for the sake of world peace.

  Now whenever I get a call from Out of Area, I let the phone ring, and as the ringing fills my house, I can’t help thinking that Dr. Zamenhof was right. We do need a new way of speaking to each other. But a universal language isn’t enough. It’s our hearts that must answer the call.

  IF YOU WERE SMITHS

  I didn’t ask him to do it, but on his own, my cousin posted one of those customer reviews of my second novel on Amazon.com. I’ve always been wary of those pithy critiques that anyone can post on book-selling websites, suspecting that writers ask their friends and relatives to send in ecstatic responses to their books under various pseudonyms, and I was reluctant to involve myself in what, at heart, seemed a deception, and not because I believe in the Invisible Hand of the Free Market either. I don’t assume that every deserving book will find its audience, that every worthy novel will create its own hullabaloo. It’s more that I know that these reviews, written by an author’s relatives and friends, never convince anyone.

  I learned this lesson early.

  When I was kid, among the commercial properties my family owned w
as a restaurant called Hobo Joe’s. The name always mystified me. Who’d want to eat a meal cooked by a hobo? The sign featured a black-and-white drawing of a miserable fellow dressed in rags, smoking a cigar that he held to his mouth on the end of a toothpick. The place had been originally a Denny’s, and it had had several incarnations after that, all of them unspectacularly profitless. My family wanted to get rid of it, but buyers were few and far between.

  Late one afternoon, though, I came home and my sister Cindy told me, “Hurry up and get dressed. We’re going to Hobo Joe’s.”

  “But why?” I said. “It’s a horrible restaurant.”

  “I know, but there’s a buyer,” she said. “Now come on!”

  It’s no good showing an empty restaurant to a potential buyer, so Skibells were summoned from across the city, commanded by patriarchal fiat to appear at Hobo Joe’s at the dinner hour. We were the only people there, but we’re a large family and we filled the booths and the tables. When we saw my father and my uncle Albert through the plate-glass windows getting out of a car in the parking lot with a stranger in tow, we ceased shouting across the restaurant to one another and spoke to our tablemates in hushed tones, appropriate for dinner conversation, instead.

  What the buyer saw, as my uncle and father showed him the salad bar and the kitchen, was a crowded restaurant full of people who more or less resembled one another: olive-skinned Jews with curly dark hair and dark eyes, all of them pretending not to see the three men conducting business in their midst.

  No one was fooled, and all we got for our trouble was an inedible meal.

  AND SO IT was with a certain amount of trepidation, if not outright dread, that I read the email from my cousin Jeremy complimenting me on my new book and informing me that not only had he enjoyed the novel but he had posted his own review of it on Amazon.com.

  “Nothing wrong with a little shilling,” he said.

  A little shilling? I thought. Get dressed, we’re going to Hobo Joe’s!

  I immediately logged onto the website and looked up my book, and there, as promised, was Jeremy’s review. I have to say, my cousin was lavish with his praise. Titling his critique “A Positively Great Read,” he gave the book five stars. He made the odd claim that the book came highly recommended (By whom? I wondered. By his father? By my father?), stating in conclusion that “the internal monologues are so readable and funny, they make the book worth it on their own.”

  Unfortunately, due to a technical glitch on the website, the critique was signed not only with his first but also with his last name, which, of course, is my last name, and so his review appeared to be exactly what it was: a little shilling.

  NOT LONG AFTER that, at the rehearsal dinner for a family wedding in Dallas, Jeremy’s mother approached me.

  “You know Jeremy wrote a nice review for you on Amazon .com, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I know,” I said, “but unfortunately, it’s signed with his own name.”

  Aunt Janice’s brow creased.

  “Well, that’s no good. I’ll have to tell him. He’ll have to change it.”

  The next evening, at the reception following the wedding, Aunt Janice took me by the arm. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I spoke with Jeremy this afternoon, and he said he’d fix the name thing, and he mentioned that he also left you a review on the Barnes & Noble website.”

  “Did he?” My heart sank. “How very nice of him.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, at my sister Cindy’s house, I checked BN.com on the computer in her kitchen. Once again, Jeremy gave the book five stars, and this time, he signed the review with only his first name. Here, though, for some reason, he saw fit to quibble with the novel, specifically with the internal monologues he had praised in his earlier review, writing, “Some of the tangents don’t work as well as others.”

  Oh, so this is how he gets even with me for embarrassing him in front of his mother! I thought. I made him look foolish for signing his own name, and now he takes his revenge?

  I searched through my Yahoo! account to see if I had his email address. I didn’t. I looked to see if there were any e-pistles from relatives who might have sent out a bulk mailing that included him as well as me. There was one from my uncle Bernard, and there it was, his email address, Jeremy @zillium.com. Before I knew what I was doing, I had sent him an angry note. Beneath the heading PLEASE STOP DOING ME FAVORS!!!, I wrote:

  Dear Jeremy,

  It’s bad enough you signed your own name to the Amazon.com reader’s review—but to fucking quibble with the fucking book on the fucking Barnes & Noble page—are you fucking crazy!!! Get some sense into your head and stop fucking with my livelihood!!!

  Joseph

  A few hours later, I got on a plane and flew home to Atlanta. I anxiously checked my email upon my return. As expected, there was a reply from Jeremy@zillium.com. I opened it nervously, regretting that I’d lost my temper. Still, I was unprepared for what I read next.

  “You must have the wrong Jeremy,” the message said, “because I don’t know you and I didn’t write any reviews of your books.”

  It was signed Jeremy Rivenburgh.

  I immediately sent Jeremy Rivenburgh a reply under the subject heading AI-YI-YI!

  Dear Mr. Rivenburgh,

  So sorry! I thought you were a cousin of mine. Please forgive me!

  “Maybe Rivenburgh’s Jeremy’s pseudonym,” Barbara said. “Maybe he’s finally using one.”

  I next sent an email to Jeremy’s father, my uncle Benjamin, asking for Jeremy’s email address, and he wrote me back almost immediately. The correct address was JeremyS @zillium.com. The address I’d copied from Uncle Bernard’s bulk mailing had dropped the S. I wanted to resend the note, but Barbara convinced me not to.

  “This is the kind of thing,” she said, “that can split up families forever.”

  For a moment, I considered taking the risk, but then, reluctantly, I agreed.

  And the next time I checked my email, I was surprised to see that Jeremy Rivenburgh had responded to my apologetic note:

  Hey, no problem. Your mail certainly stood out from a mailbox full of spam, I must say. Give my regards to your idiot cousin. You’re right, though, he really shouldn’t sign those reviews with his last name. If you were Smiths, it’d be different! :)

  Jeremy

  CALL MORRIS

  During the seven years I spent struggling as a screenwriter in Los Angeles, my father constantly implored me to call Morris. “Call Morris,” he said, again and again, as though this single call might put an end to all my professional woes.

  “Call Morris. Why don’t you call Morris?” he’d say.

  But calling Morris was something I resisted doing. I’m not sure why. I was too shy, for one thing, too timid to reach out to a relative I barely knew. Also, my father and I had a complicated relationship, and I’m sure that had something to do with it. Dad and I lived in different worlds; the rules of his world didn’t seem to apply in mine, and whenever I followed his advice, the results were semidisastrous.

  My first professional writing assignment, for instance, was for Rolling Stone magazine. Right out of college, I was commissioned to write a piece on how Lubbock remembered Buddy Holly, its most famous—and, at the time, famously neglected—son.

  Dad insisted I wear a coat and a tie to conduct the interviews in.

  “You’re representing the family,” he said.

  “Actually, Dad, I’m representing Rolling Stone magazine.”

  “Change,” he said. “You can’t go out of the house looking like that.”

  To please him, I did the interviews, stiff and uncomfortable, in slacks and a tie, and the story never ran.

  Another time, when a hard-bitten New York agent turned down my plays, Dad suggested I send her flowers. I can still remember her poisonous little thank-you note: Little yellow roses: how dainty, how ladylike.

  I was leery about following his advice, but even more, his invoking Morris confused me. You have to understand: from
the moment I announced as a teenager that I wanted to be a writer, my father initiated a vehement counter campaign against those ambitions. You’d have thought I’d chosen lechery and chicanery as a career path, so dire were the predictions he painted of my prospects: an uncertain life of poverty and the unmasculine humiliations associated with the inability to provide for your wife and children. All through my adolescence, he attempted to argue, wheedle, reason, cajole, persuade, hector, lecture, and frighten me out of what I, with a teenage purity of heart, considered a noble calling, and whenever he sensed he was losing the argument, he pulled Morris out as his trump card.

  “Look at your uncle Ike,” he’d say. “Look at Tiger! Look at Morris Berger, for God’s sakes! Is that really the kind of life you want for yourself?”

  IKE, TIGER, MORRIS: these were the ne’er-do-wells, the luftmenschen, of our family. Ike was my mother’s kid brother. He hadn’t made much of himself, I suppose it’s true. He’d worked behind an airline counter at O’Hare for a while after college but quit to take care of his mother, and he lived with her, escorting her here, escorting her there, until she died.

  Tiger was Jack Tiger, my father’s first cousin, a filmmaker manqué and a bit of a flim-flam man.

  Morris was Morris Berger, a distant cousin on my mother’s side. In the late 1950s, Morris went out to Hollywood. He changed his name to Jeff Morris and became an actor, playing small parts on television in westerns like Bonanza and Death Valley Days and later in the movies.

  When I was a kid, Dad occasionally called me into the den and pointed at our television set. “There’s your cousin,” he’d say, gesturing towards a lanky, long-faced, blond-haired man, more often than not in a cowboy hat.

  In my father’s view, these men—Ike, Tiger, Morris—were not serious men. They had no money—that was one thing—but even more, they did no work. Or no real work. They lived their lives like children. They lived children’s lives, lives without heft, without weight, without burden or responsibility.