A Horse Walks into a Bar

by David Grossman

  I start preparing for a quick departure. No, he can’t complain. I made the effort, I came from Jerusalem, listened to him for almost half an hour, I found no youth and no devotion, and now it’s time to cut my losses.

  He delivers another enthusiastic tirade against “the messed-up idea of the immor-fucking-tality of the soul.” It turns out that if he could choose, he wouldn’t think twice before picking the body. “Picture a body, unencumbered!” he shouts. “No thoughts, no memories, just a dumb body prancing around in a meadow like a zombie, eating and drinking and fucking mindlessly.” And here he illustrates, skipping back and forth as he merrily thrusts his hips and grins. I signal the waitress for my check. I can do without the honor of being his guest. I don’t want to owe him anything. I walk around this world like a pincushion as it is. It was a big mistake to come here. He picks up my gesture to the waitress, and his face falls, really collapses.

  “No, seriously!” he exclaims, and speeds up his speech. “Do you understand what it means these days to keep up a soul? It’s a luxury, no shit! Do the math and you’ll see it costs you more than magnesium wheels! I’m talking about a base-model soul, not some Shakespeare or Chekhov or Kafka—great stuff, by the way, so I’m told, I personally haven’t read any—I’ll make an emotional confession now, I am severely dyslexic, terminally, I swear, it was discovered when I was still a fetus, the doctor who diagnosed me suggested my parents consider abortion—”

  The crowd laughs. I don’t. I vaguely remember that he used to mention books I’d heard of and knew I’d be tested on in a couple of years when I matriculated, but he talked about them as if he’d actually read them. Crime and Punishment was one, and if I’m not mistaken there was also The Trial or The Castle. Now, onstage, he spews out a stream of titles and authors, assuring the audience he’s never read any of them. I start to get an itch on my upper back, and I wonder if he’s just ingratiating himself with the crowd, hawking some kind of down-home folksiness, or whether he’s scheming something that will end up targeting me. I give the waitress an impatient look.

  “Because what am I, at the end of the day?” he screams. “I’m a bottom-feeder, am I not?” And here he turns to me with his whole body and shoots me a bitter smile: “Because what is stand-up, after all? Have you ever considered that? Take it from me, Netanya, when it comes right down to it, it’s a pretty pathetic form of entertainment, let’s be honest. Do you know why? Because you can smell our sweat! Our effort to make you laugh! That’s why!” He sniffs his armpits and grimaces, and the audience laughs a little, confused. I straighten up in my chair and cross my arms over my chest, because I believe this is a declaration of war.

  “You can see the stress on our face.” He raises his voice even more. “The stress of having to make people laugh at any cost, and how we basically beg you to love us.” (These lines, too, I imagine, are selected pearls from our phone call.) “And that is precisely the reason, ladies and gentlemen, why I would now like to welcome, with great excitement and deference, from the country’s highest seat of justice, Supreme Court justice Avishai Lazar, who came here this evening unannounced, in order to publicly support our pathetic, miserable art! Ladies and gentlemen, the Supreeeeeme Court!”

  And the treacherous jester stands at attention and clicks his heels together, then bows deeply in my direction. More and more people turn to look at me, some applaud with mindless obedience, and I stupidly mumble: “District, not Supreme. And anyway, I’m retired.” He lets out a warm, rolling laugh and forces me to pretend I’m smiling with him.

  I knew all this time that he wouldn’t let me get out of here easily. That the whole business, the invitation and the ridiculous request, was a trap, his private revenge, a trap I walked into like an idiot. From the minute he announced it was his birthday—a detail he did not mention at all when we spoke—I started to feel the suffocation. The waitress, a paragon of bad timing, brings me the check. The whole audience stares. I try to figure out how to respond, but it’s all a little too quick for me, and in fact since the evening began I’ve been feeling how slow my lonely life is, how sluggish it makes me. I fold the check, slip it under the ashtray, and stare at him.

  “So anyway, I’m talking about a simple soul.” He swallows down a little smile and motions for the club manager to send me another beer, on him. “A rookie soul, no upgrades, no bling, your basic regular soul, just the soul of a man who wants to eat well and drink a little and get high and come once a day and fuck once a week and not have to worry about anything, but then it turns out the fucking pain-in-the-ass soul has demands up the wazoo! It’s even got its own union rep!” He holds his hand up again and counts on his fingers: “Heartache—one! And pangs of conscience—two! And messengers of evil—three! And nightmares and tossing and turning from the fear of what’s going to happen and how it’ll go down—four!”

  People nod sympathetically, and he laughs. “I swear to God, the last time in my life I didn’t have any problems was when I still had a foreskin.” The crowd roars with laughter. I shove handfuls of nuts in my mouth and grind them like they were his bones. He stands in the middle of the stage, directly under the spotlight, eyes closed, nodding as if he were articulating an entire philosophy of life. Here and there a few claps ring out, accompanied by sudden, crude screams of “Wooh!” Especially from the women. This man, I think, is not handsome or exciting or attractive, but he’s figured out how to touch people in exactly the places that turn them into a rabble, into riffraff.

  As if he can read my mind, he hushes the audience with his hand, his face crumples, and I see in him the absolute opposite of what I just thought: the very fact that they agree with him, that someone, whoever it is, agrees with him about something, seems to provoke in him aversion and even disgust—that grimace, those wrinkled nostrils—as if all these people sitting here are crowding in on him, trying to touch him.

  “Now is the time, ladies and gentlemen, to give thanks to the one person who brought me this far, who was willing to stick by me unconditionally, even after I’d been left and dumped and abandoned by women and children and colleagues and friends”—he throws me a pinprick glance and bursts out laughing—“and even by my school principal, Mr. Pinchas Bar-Adon, let us all unite in prayer for the ascension of his soul—he’s still alive, by the way—who kicked me out of school at age fifteen straight into the College of Street Sciences and went so far as to elucidate on my report card—listen closely, Netanya—‘An aged cynic like this boy I have never encountered during my entire career.’ Powerful stuff, heh? Trenchant! And after all that, the only one who never walked out on me and never abandoned me and never left me in the field was only me myself. Yep.” His hips sway, and he runs his hands up and down his body seductively. “Take a good look, my friends, and tell me what you see. I’m serious, what do you see? Human dust, not so? Practically zero matter, and with a nod and a wink to the hard sciences, I might even say antimatter. You can tell this is a case of a man headed for the scrapyard, right?” He chuckles, throws me a wink, flattering me, perhaps asking that, despite my anger, I keep my promise.

  “But just look, Netanya! Look at what it means to be loyal, devoted, for fifty-seven pretty lousy years. Look what it means to be dedicated and diligent in pursuit of the failed project of being Dovaleh! Or even just being!” He darts across the stage like a windup toy, cackling: “Being! Being! Being!” He stops and slowly turns to the room with the gleaming face of a crook, a thief, a pickpocket who got away with it. “Do you even grasp what a stunning idea it is to just be? How subversive it is?” He puffs his cheeks out and makes a soft pffff, like a bubble bursting. “Dovaleh G, ladies and gentlemen, aka Dovchik, aka Dov Greenstein, particularly in the files of the State of Israel versus Dov Greenstein re: alimonial misdemeanors.” He looks at me with tormented innocence and wrings his hands. “Good Lord, it’s amazing how much food those kids eat, Your Honor! I wonder how much child support a father in Darfur has to pay. Mr. G, ladies! The one and only in the fucking un
iverse who is willing to spend a whole night with me for free, which to me is the purest, most objective measure of friendship. That’s how it is, el audienco! That’s how this life turned out. Man plans; God fucks him.”

  —

  Twice a week, on Sundays and Wednesdays at three-thirty, we would finish our lesson with the tutor, a forlorn religious man who never looked us in the eye and had a nasal, barely intelligible way of speaking. Stunned from the stifling air in his house, crazed by the smells of his wife’s cooking, we would walk out together and immediately break away from the other boys in the group. We’d walk down the middle of the quiet neighborhood street, where cars seldom passed, and when we got to the number 12 bus stop, next to Lerman’s corner store, we’d look at each other and concur: “On to the next one?” We’d walk past five or six bus stops like that until we got to the Central Bus Station, which was near his neighborhood, Romema, and there we would wait for my bus to Talpiot. We’d sit on a crumbling stone wall overgrown with weeds and talk. Or, rather, I would sit; he was incapable of sitting or standing in one place for more than a couple of minutes.

  He asked questions and I answered. That was our division of labor, which he established and I was seduced by. I was not gregarious; on the contrary, I was a taciturn, introverted boy with a slightly ridiculous—so I imagine—halo of toughness and darkness, which I didn’t know how to shake off even if I’d wanted to.

  Perhaps through my own fault, or perhaps because my family moved around so much for my father’s business, I never had a soul mate. Here and there I had buddies, brief friendships forged in schools for kids of diplomats and expats. But since we’d come back to Israel and moved to Jerusalem, to a neighborhood and a school where I knew no one and no one made any effort to get to know me, I had become even more solitary and prickly. And then this little joker popped up, and he went to a different school and didn’t know that he was supposed to be intimidated by me and my prickliness, and he was quite unimpressed by my lugubrious affectations.

  “What’s your mom’s name?” That was the first question he asked when we walked out of the tutor’s apartment. I remember letting out an astonished giggle: the impertinence of this freckled little gnome to insinuate that I even had a mother!

  “Mine’s named Sarah!” he proclaimed. He suddenly ran past me, then spun around and faced me: “What did you say your mom’s name was? Was she born in Israel? Where did your parents meet? Are they also from the Holocaust?”

  The buses to Talpiot would come and go as we kept talking. This is how we looked: I sit on the wall, a long thin (yes, yes) kid with a narrow, tough face and pursed lips, who avoids smiling. All around me runs a little boy, at least a year younger than me, with black hair and very fair skin, who can pull me out of my shell with cunning persistence and slowly make me want to remember, to talk, to tell him about Gedera and Paris and New York, about the Carnival in Rio, about Día de los Muertos in Mexico, and the sun celebrations in Peru, and a hot-air-balloon ride above herds of gnu on the Serengeti.

  His questions led me to comprehend that I had a rare treasure: life experience. That my life, which up to then I had endured as a burdensome whirlwind of travel and frequent changes of apartments and schools and languages and faces, was actually an enormous adventure. I quickly discovered that exaggerations were warmly welcomed: no pinpricks would deflate my hot-air balloons, and it turned out that I could and should tell each story over and over again with embellishments and plot twists, some that were real and others that could have been. I did not recognize myself when I was with him. I did not recognize the enthusiastic, animated boy who emerged from me. I did not recognize the hotness in my temples, which burned with thoughts and images. And mostly I did not recognize the pleasure I took in the reward for my new talent: the eyes that grew wide with amazement and happiness and laughter. The deep-blue splendor. Those were my royalties, I suppose.

  We kept this up for a whole year, twice a week. I hated math, but because of him I tried not to miss a single lesson. The buses came and went and we stayed there absorbed in our world until we really had to part. I knew he had to pick his mother up from somewhere at exactly five-thirty. He told me she was a “senior official” in a government office, and I didn’t understand why he had to “pick her up.” I remember he had a grown-ups’ Doxa watch that covered his thin wrist, and as it got closer and closer to the time, he would glance at it with increasing agitation.

  Each time we parted there were possibilities hovering in the air that neither of us dared to say out loud, as though we still did not trust reality to know how to treat this delicate, fragile story: Maybe we could just meet up sometime, not after class? Maybe go to a movie? Maybe I could come over to your place?

  —

  He waves both arms in the air: “Since we’re on the topic of the Big Buggerer, allow me, ladies and gentlemen, at this early point in the evening, and for the sake of historical justice, to give a heartfelt thanks, on behalf of you all, to Woman. To all the women in the world! Why not aim big, my friends? Why not admit for once where our pink bird of happiness really lies, what represents the purpose of our existence and drives our search engine? Why not bow down for once and give proper thanks to the hot and sweet spice of life we were given in the Garden of Eden?” And then he really does bow, bobbing his head and upper body repeatedly toward a series of women in the audience, and each one of them, it seems to me, even the ones sitting with their partners, responds almost involuntarily with a quick glint in her eyes. He waves his arms to encourage the men in the crowd to follow suit. Most sneer, a few sit frozen beside their equally frozen women, but four or five get up from their seats with embarrassed giggles and bow stiffly to their partners.

  This cheap sentimental gesture strikes me as silly, and yet, to my surprise, I find myself giving a brief, almost imperceptible bow to the empty chair next to me, which only serves to prove once again how tenuous and insecure I am here tonight. To be fair, it was just a slight nod of the head, and a little wink escaped, too, the wink she and I always shared, even in the middle of a fight, two sparks flying from eye to eye: the me-spark in her, the she-spark in me.

  I order a shot of tequila and take my sweater off. I didn’t realize how hot it would be in here. (I think the woman at the next table whispers: “Finally.”) I cross my arms over my chest and watch the man onstage, and in his faded eyes I see myself and him, and I remember that feeling of us. I recall the blaze of excitement, and also the constant embarrassment I felt when I was with him: boys didn’t talk like that back then. Not about those things and not in that language. In all my fleeting friendships with other boys there had been a sort of mutual anonymity that was comfortable and masculine, but with him…

  I rummage through my pockets, my wallet. A few years ago I would never have left home without a notebook. Little orange notebooks slept in bed with us in case, while I was falling asleep or dreaming, I conjured up an argument I could work into a ruling, or a salient metaphor, or an idea for an eye-opening quote (I was somewhat notorious for those). I find three pens but not one scrap of paper. I motion at the waitress and she brings me a small stack of green napkins, flapping them in her hand from afar and smiling stupidly.

  Actually, it was a pretty sweet smile.

  “But most of all, my brothers and sisters,” he roars, almost tearing up with joy at the napkins and the pens, “after giving general thanks to all the women in the world, I would like to especially thank all the precious things who privatized my own global sex initiative, all those who from age sixteen have gone down on me and up on me, who jerked me, pumped me, sucked me, rode me…”

  Most of the audience is pleased, but a few turn up their noses. Not far from me a woman slips her foot out of a narrow shoe and rubs it against the calf of her other leg, and my gut wrenches for the third or fourth time tonight—Tamara’s strong, solid legs—and I hear my own moan, the kind I’d long ago forgotten.

  Onstage I see his old smile, charming and keen, and a little br
eathing room opens up: the distress that has weighed down the show from the start seems to dissipate a little, and I give in and smile at him. It’s a good moment, a private moment between the two of us, and I remember how he used to skip around me, cheering and shouting and laughing as though the air itself were tickling him. In his eyes now there is the same luminance, a little beam of light aimed at me, believing in me, and it’s like everything can still be repaired, even for us, for me and him.

  But the smile vanishes in an instant, like it always does, snatched from under our feet, and from my own feet in particular. Again I sense a profound, dark deception, the kind that occurs in a place words cannot reach.

  “I don’t believe it!” he suddenly roars. “You, the little one with the lipstick, yes, you, the one who put her makeup on in the dark! Or does your makeup artist have Parkinson’s? Tell me, dollface, do you think it’s reasonable that while I’m up here busting my ass to make you laugh, you’re texting?”

  He’s addressing the tiny lady sitting alone at a table not far from me. She has an odd, complicated tower of hair, a sort of braided cone with a red rose embedded in it.

  “Is that any way to behave? I’m breaking a sweat over here, pouring my heart out, exposing my guts, disrobing—disrobing?! Stripping down from head to prostate! And you sit there sending text messages? Would you mind telling me what you were texting that is so, so urgent?”

  She answers in an utterly serious, almost reproachful tone: “I’m not texting!”

  “It’s not nice to lie, sweetie, I saw you! Click-click-click! Quick little fingers! By the way, are you sitting or standing?”

  “What?” She quickly hunches her head between her shoulders. “No…I was writing to myself.”

  “Oh, to yourself…” He stares wide eyed at the audience, conspiring against her with them.

  “I have this app for taking notes,” she murmurs.