by Max Shulman
So whenever Bridget started in grinding and pumping and hollering, “Take me, eaglet!” I would just peel her off politely and give her a few pats to quieten her down. Then I’d go back to smelling her hair, which might not sound like such a big deal to you, but to me it was one of the truly outstanding nights of my entire life.
Well, the next night was not. I took out Celeste like I promised and it was lousy. But I’ll be fair: for Celeste it was even lousier.
The trouble was I couldn’t get it up. Who knows why? Something to do with loving Bridget maybe. All I can tell you is it came as one hell of a shock. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before, not once. “Ever-ready Morris,” they used to call me on Selby Avenue because I never failed with anybody and believe me, some of them were ugly enough for a circus. Most, maybe.
But tonight it just wouldn’t work, no matter what. Celeste got crabby as hell of course. “A fine romance, my friend, this is!” she said, and gave me a kick.
“Look, these things happen,” I said. “Ask your father.”
“Well, it better not happen tomorrow night,” she said.
“I got to work at the bank tomorrow night,” I said.
Well, naturally Celeste threw six fits, but I held firm because this was my plan: alternate nights for each broad. I don’t know if anybody ever had a worse plan. I doubt it.
With Celeste things kept getting tenser and tenser. True, I did manage to get it up the next time I took her out, but the time after that, again it was nothing doing. That’s how it went: some nights I could, some nights no. The hell of it was I never knew in advance. And another problem came up: Celeste got so nervous worrying whether I could or couldn’t, that sometimes when I could she couldn’t. It was bad, I tell you, and I knew something had to snap soon.
Meanwhile with Bridget I could also feel trouble closing in. First of all, she kept shlepping me to the museum and the concert hall and naturally I had to keep pretending I was practically soiling my trousers from pleasure. I’d bat my eyes and suck in my breath and clap louder than everybody in the whole place put together. Not at the museum though; I learned that quick: don’t clap in museums. I’m talking about concerts. At one concert, in fact, I clapped so loud that the bald-headed Greek who led the band came back and did four encores that nobody wanted. For a while there I thought the audience might lynch me.
But that wasn’t the main trouble, the concerts and the museum. I still didn’t have a poem; that was the main trouble. My cousin Crip was still laying in the Mayo Clinic and the weeks kept rolling by and nobody knew for sure when he was coming back including my Aunt Ida. So every time I saw Bridget I had to dream up some new excuse, and every time she believed me less.
Finally one night—Crip had been gone nearly a month by now—I walked into the women’s dorm to pick up Bridget and there she stood in the lobby with her arms folded and her face like stone and I knew my time had come.
“Hi, there,” I said.
“Bruce Albright has been phoning me,” said Bridget.
“Don’t listen to him,” I said. “He is insane from jealousy and a painful crotch injury.”
“He says you’re a big liar and you couldn’t write a poem to save your life,” said Bridget.
“See? Nutty as a fruitcake,” I said. “If I was you, I’d get a new phone number.”
“Morris,” she said, “when exactly am I going to have your poem?”
“Bridget,” I said, “with poems you can’t guarantee a delivery date. It’s not like I was making you a potholder.”
“Morris,” she said, “I am not going out with you tonight.”
“Why are you listening to crazy Bruce?” I said. “Listen to me who loves you.”
“And I love you, Morris,” she said. “Perhaps too much already. That is why I cannot risk more. I will not see you again until you bring me a poem. No, Morris, don’t argue. My mind is made up.”
I could see that it was. I could also see where I’d made my mistake: I should have boffed Bridget a long time ago and not waited around for fields of daisies. I’d have had her eating out of my hand by now, not asking tough questions. Well, what was done was done and there was no way to change it now, especially with the house mother watching.
So what next? Well, that was obvious: a trip to Rochester. No more waiting for Crip to get home; I had to go and see him. Of course Rochester wasn’t exactly a streetcar ride; it was a good seventy-five miles away. Still, it wouldn’t be too tough to make it back and forth in one day, especially in a new Olds.
So on Sunday, which I figured was the best day to con Celeste out of her car, I went over to her house about ten in the morning. The second I got there I saw something strange was going on. First of all, I heard this crazy noise, loud and shrill like a factory whistle, coming from inside the house. Second, Celeste’s car was parked in the driveway with all four doors wide open and inside the car was A. M. Zimmerman behaving like a lunatic. His hair was wild and his eyes were popping and he was punching and poking into every corner of the car, jabbing the upholstery, yanking out the seats, lifting up the floor boards, digging in the glove compartment, the ashtrays, the side pockets.
“Good morning, Mr. Zimmerman,” I said.
“I’ll give you good morning, you bullshitter,” he hollered. “Night watchman, huh? I checked with the First National.”
“Oh-oh,” I said.
“You got another broad, you cockaroach,” he hollered. “And you’re shtooping her in my car!”
“Honest I’m not,” I said. “I swear on my mother.”
“Bullshit,” he said, and went back to searching the car.
“Is that Celeste I hear screaming?” I said because the noise was still going on, getting louder in fact.
“Aha!” hollered Mr. Zimmerman, holding up something he found in the corner of the seat—a gold cross on a thin gold chain which I suddenly remembered Bridget had been wearing around her neck one night. “All right, fuzzynuts,” he said to me, “how did this get here?”
“Say, I bet I know how,” I said. “I saw this elderly nun hitchhiking the other night so naturally I gave her a lift. Sister Mary Frances, her name was.”
“Celeste!” he hollered, running up on the porch with the gold cross. “Look!”
Celeste and her mother came out on the porch. They were both of them crying which accounted for the volume.
“Good morning, Mrs. Zimmerman and Celeste,” I said.
“See?” said Mr. Zimmerman, holding up the cross in front of Celeste.
She flang up her hands and shrank back like Count Dracula altogether.
“Now will you get rid of this low-life?” said Mr. Zimmerman to Celeste.
“Oh, why didn’t I listen to my parents who gave me birth?” hollered Celeste.
“Can’t we sit down and discuss this in a civilized manner over brunch?” I said.
“Get out out of here, you cockaroach, and don’t ever come back,” said Mr. Zimmerman to me.
I left with what you’d call mingled emotions. First I felt good and then I felt bad. What made me feel good was losing Celeste. What made me feel bad was I had to get her back.
Still I wasn’t too worried at this point. I figured I’d ask Crip for two poems instead of one when I got to Rochester, one poem to re-hook each broad. Of course that would put me right back up the same crick—stuck with two broads and not able to dump either one—but that was something to worry about later.
Right now the problem was getting to Rochester. Naturally Celeste’s car was out. And so was Albert’s. Since he found out I was still hanging on to Bridget, he hadn’t even talked to me, that’s how mad he was. So I got out on the highway and started thumbing.
It’s never much trouble hitchhiking to Rochester because there’s always someone heading down there who’s so sick he’s happy to have an extra driver along in case he topples over in a coma. Sure enough I got picked up within five minutes by an old guy with a colostomy pouch. He stopped about a hund
red times to empty it behind Burma Shave signs, but even so we made it easy by noon.
So I went and found Crip’s room and I got to tell you it was the biggest shock of my life when I walked in. Now, I had seen Crip in a lots of different casts before, big ones and little ones, regular-shaped casts for legs and arms, custom jobs for clavicles and cheekbones, all varieties and sizes. But I never saw anything like the one I saw this time. It didn’t even look like a cast; it looked like an Egyptian mummy. My entire cousin was in plaster from the head down—shoulders, arms, torso, legs, feet, toes—everything in one long continuous plaster mummy case.
“Well, Crip,” I said, “I sincerely hope this treatment turns out to be a total and complete success.”
“Thanks, Morris,” he said.
“Because if it don’t,” I said, “they’re gonna find two dead doctors at the bottom of the Rochester reservoir.”
“Thanks,” he said again. “So how’s things at home?”
“That’s why I came,” I said. “There’s kind of an emergency.”
“Gee, I hope you don’t need a poem,” he said.
“As a matter of fact, I need two,” I said.
“Oh, Morris, I’m so sorry,” he said. “But as you see, I can’t use my hands so how can I write?”
“What’s the problem?” I said. “You dictate and I’ll take it down.”
“That’s no good,” he said. “My Muse don’t work unless I can actually write the words on paper.”
“What the hell kind of a Muse is that?” I said.
“I’m afraid you got to take the one they give you,” he said.
“How long you got to be in this cast?” I said.
“The doctors are pretty vague,” he said. “My guess is another month or two.”
“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll go get a tire iron and pry your hands loose. Wait right here.”
“No, Morris,” he said. “The whole idea is total immobility. The least little movement and I got to start all over.”
“Well, we can’t have that,” I said. “So here’s what we’ll do. Since you can’t dictate any new poems, dictate some of your old ones. That’ll do just as good.”
“I’m sorry, Morris, but they don’t stay in my mind once they’re written,” he said. “All I can remember is the most recent.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“To Celeste,” he said.
“Rats,” I said because now I could see clearly what my situation was. Hopeless, that’s what.
“I’m sorry, Morris,” Crip said again. “Honest.”
“Not your fault,” I said, and gave him a pat on the cast. “Well, I’ll be going. Stay loose, Crip.”
So I left Mayo and thumbed a ride home. This time I got picked up by a guy with cataracts on both eyes. I asked several times if he wanted me to drive, but he didn’t answer because he was deaf too. So I just settled back in the seat and relaxed, figuring maybe this was the best solution after all—a quick death on the Rochester-St. Paul highway.
But this wasn’t my day; we got back safe.
Chapter Eight
Wait: it gets grimmer.
When I came home that night the house was full of people. What happened was Libbie had been hocking Ma every day to have a reception for Jonathan Kaplan but Ma had been saying no, hoping Jonathan would disappear. But he didn’t, so finally Ma broke down and invited my uncles and aunts over to meet the groom.
I’ll tell you about my uncles and aunts. My uncles were even more unemployed than my father, which you’ll understand in a minute. The oldest, Uncle Benny, was a florist, a profession the 1936 labor market needed almost as bad as buffalo skinners. And here’s something else about Benny. This was a man who suffered from terrible hay fever, so he went and picked the floristry business to go into. And what’s more, he went and picked St. Paul, the hailstorm capital of the world, to put up a greenhouse. That’s the kind of thinkers I had for uncles.
Uncle Shimen, the next oldest, was Crip’s father. He was a piano tuner, which is right behind florist on the list of essential occupations. I don’t think Shimen netted fifty dollars in a good year, and Aunt Ida pissed it all away on fruit.
The next oldest, Uncle Herschel, was the hardest of all to believe. He was a spats-maker, for Christ sakes! I’m not kidding; he really was. I bet the last time Herschel saw a customer was under Coolidge.
The only uncle who might have made it except he had this fatal flaw in his character was the youngest, Uncle Labe. He was my cousin Albert’s father but you never would have guessed it. Albert, as you know, was rougher than a cob, but Labe had a heart made out of pure mush and that’s what ruined him. He was a credit dentist which is not a bad business at all but, believe me, you got to be ruthless. The minute a customer misses a payment, don’t hesitate. Grab the dentures right out of their mouth, at mealtime if possible, otherwise they walk all over you. But Labe could never bring himself to do it so of course the word got around to every rotten-toothed deadbeat in town. Pretty soon all Labe had was accounts receivable and they came and took away the chair, the drill, the sink, and everything.
Well, you can see my uncles weren’t exactly the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame. But my aunts were something else again. There were four of them too—Lena, Ida, Bryna, and Esther—and they were pisscutters, take my word. Maybe they weren’t in a class with my mother, but they weren’t too far behind. Everybody on Selby Avenue was scared of them, including butchers and landlords, even though they were little teensy women, none of them much bigger than a ferret. And what’s more, they were all in terrible health. Every one had diabetes at least and most had a fallen womb. The sickest, I guess, was Aunt Bryna, Herschel’s wife. In addition to all the regular sicknesses, she had a goiter and high blood pressure too. For one condition she had to have salt every day, and for the other she dassn’t, so she was always swoll up at one end or the other.
But sick and sawed-off as they were, these old broads were dynamite. Whatever little money came into their house, they went out and made. There was nothing they wouldn’t hustle. They did dressmaking, baked strudel for bar mitzvahs, cooked moonshine, cut lawns, toilet-trained babies, cured sties, flicked chickens on Friday, hawked chrysanthemums outside the football stadium on Saturday, and parked cars in the St. Paul Auditorium Garage on fight nights and, mind you, not a one of them could drive.
So this was the gathering at my house that night. Actually there were two gatherings: the uncles were gathered around Jonathan on one side of the room, and the aunts were gathered around Ma on the other. Naturally all of them had come over, both the uncles and the aunts, thinking Jonathan must be some kind of a stiff if Libbie hooked him, but Jonathan charmed the ass off the uncles in no time at all, especially after he started analyzing their handwriting and telling them they were bold, resourceful, dynamic, and creative. So the uncles, and my father too of course, were all huddled around Jonathan laughing and applauding like a regular fan club. But the aunts, just like Ma, were immune to Jonathan’s tricks. They didn’t even crack a smile at his gags and as for his graphology, that was a total bust because they didn’t know how to write any more than Ma did. So they all sat across the room, glaring at Jonathan, shaking their heads, and giving Ma sympathetic pats. And in between was Libbie, running back and forth in the white gloves kissing everybody nervously and passing a tray of Velveeta on Ritz Crackers.
“Well, Pearl,” Aunt Lena said to Ma—Aunt Lena was Albert’s mother, the former owner of the famous fur coat—“Well, Pearl,” she said, “look at the bright side. At least Libbie ain’t gonna be a old maid like everybody said.”
“And at least he’s Jewish,” said Aunt Bryna. “Even a liar wouldn’t lie about that.”
“So you’ll make a nice little wedding at home,” said Aunt Ida. “How much could it cost?”
Then Ma dropped the bombshell. “No,” she said, “the wedding ain’t gonna be at home. The wedding is gonna be by the Lowry Hotel in the Grand Ballroom.”
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sp; “What?” hollered everybody including Libbie and me.
“You heard me,” said Ma. Her jaw was sticking out which meant her mind was made up and there was no chance in the world to change it. “By the Lowry Hotel in the Grand Ballroom,” she said. “With flowers, a ice sculpture, and music by Ralph Rifkin and his Rhythm Ramblers.”
“Oh, Mother!” Libbie hollered. “For me?”
“For you?” said Ma, giving Libbie a look. “You crazy or what?”
“For who then?” said Libbie.
“For the boychik,” said Ma, turning to me.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Of course you don’t understand,” said Ma. “That’s why you got a mother. So listen. This Kaplan I want in my house like I want mice. But as long as it’s gonna happen, let’s get some benefit.”
“How?” I said.
“I’m inviting A. M. Zimmerman to the wedding,” said Ma.
I gave a gasp.
“You think he won’t come?” said Ma. “Don’t worry, he’ll come. You know why? Because Celeste Zimmerman is gonna be maid of honor.”
“But, Mother,” said Libbie, “I’ve already asked my oldest and dearest friend Ruthie Baumgarten.”
“Shut up, I’m talking,” said Ma. “Celeste is maid of honor in a pink taffeta formal which I will make her myself. And you, my boychik”—she gave my cheek a pinch—“are best man in a tuxedo altogether. And there you’ll be under the chupah, Celeste in the pink formal and you in the tuxedo, by the Lowry Hotel in the Grand Ballroom with the flowers and Ralph Rifkin and his Rhythm Ramblers and I guarantee you, sonny, when A. M. Zimmerman sees what kind of classy people we are, he ain’t gonna stand in your way no more.”
“She’s right, your Ma,” said Aunt Esther. “If there’s one thing that shtoonk Zimmerman respects, it’s class.”
“Naturally,” said Aunt Lena. “Look what kind of a classy family he comes from. His father stole clothes from clotheslines and his mother went in the cellar with the landlord.”
“But this will cost a fortune,” I said.
“Worth it, dolly,” said Aunt Ida. “If you ain’t got the father on your side, you’ll never get the daughter, I don’t care if you’re yentzing her six times a day.”
