More Wandering Stars

by Jack Dann (ed)

  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?”

  “No, I just had the right amount of soul for your mother and she assumed.”

  “But, Joanie …”

  “You can call me Joan.”

  But he never called her the Maid of Orléans. And they lived happily ever after, in a castle not all that neat.

  A MINI-GLOSSARY OF YIDDISH WORDS USED IN “MOM”

  bummerkeh (bumå-er-keh) A female bum; generally, a “loose” lady.

  “Eli Eli” (aå-lee aå-lee) Well-known Hebrew-Yiddish folk song composed in 1896 by Jacob Koppel Sandler. Title means “My God, my God.” Opens with a poignant cry of perplexity: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” from Psalm 22:2 of the Old Testament. Owes its popularity to Cantor Joseph Rosenblatt, who recorded and sang it many times as an encore during concerts in early 1900s. Al Jolson also did rather well with it. Not the kind of song Perry Como or Bruce Springsteen would record.

  fressing (fresså-ing) To eat quickly, noisily; really stuffing one’s face; synonymous with eating mashed potatoes with both hands.

  latkes (lotå-kess) Pancakes, usually potato pancakes but can also be made from matzoh meal. When made by my mother, not unlike millstones.

  Litvak (litå-vahk) A Jew from Lithuania; variously erudite but pedantic, thin, dry, humorless, learned but skeptical, shrewd and clever; but used in this context as a derogatory by Lance’s mom, who was a Galitzianer, or Austro-Polish Jew; the antipathy between them is said to go back to Cain and Abel, one of whom was a Litvak, the other a Galitzianer … but that’s just foolish. I guess.

  momser (muhmå-zer) An untrustworthy person; a stubborn, difficult person; a detestable, impudent person; not a nice person.

  nafkeh (nahf Å-keh) A nonprofessional prostitute; a bummerkeh (see above); not quite a hooker, but clearly not the sort of woman a mother would call “mine darling daughter-in-law.”

  nuhdzing (noooood Å-jing) To pester, to nag, to bore, to drive someone up a wall. The core of the story: Practiced by mothers of all ethnic origins, be they Jewish, Italian, or WASP. To bore; to hassle; to be bugged into eating your asparagus, putting on your galoshes, getting up and taking her home, etc. Very painful.

  pupik (pipå-ik or puhpå-ik) Navel. Belly button.

  shiksa (shikÅ -suh) A non-Jewish woman, especially a young one.

  shmootz (shmootz) Dirt.

  shtumie (shtoomå-ee) Lesser insult-value than calling someone a schlemiel (shleh-meal å). A foolish person, a simpleton; a consistently unlucky or unfortunate person; a social misfit, a clumsy, gauche, butterfingered person; more offhand than schlemiel, less significant; the word you’d use when batting away someone like a gnat.

  shtupping (shtooooopå-ing) Sexual intercourse.

  tante (tahnå-tuh) Aunt.

  yenta (yenå-tuh) A woman of low origins or vulgar manners; a shrew; a shallow,
coarse termagant; tactless; a gossipy woman or scandal spreader; one unable to keep a secret or respect a confidence; much of the nuhdz in her. If it’s a man, it’s the same word, a blabbermouth.

  GARDNER DOZOIS

  Disciples

  One of the basic tenets of Judaism is that after various signs and portents the Messiah will come to redeem the people of Israel. In the next story by Gardner Dozois a momentous event is seen through the nervous eyes of Nicky the Horse, a panhandler who earns his meager living by spreading the word of the Lord. Although Nicky stretches out his hand to every likely passer-by and announces that the Last Days are indeed coming, he can’t quite believe that the Messiah could be Murray Kupferberg, a plumber from Pittsburgh.

  The story reminds me of these lines from Isaiah:

  The people that walked in darkness

  Have seen a brilliant light;

  On those who dwelt in a land of gloom

  Light has dawned.

  *

  NICKY THE HORSE was a thin, weaselly-looking man with long dirty black hair that hung down either side of his face in greasy ropes, like inkmarks against the pallor of his skin. He was clean-shaven and hollowcheeked, and had a thin but rubbery lower lip upon which his small yellowed teeth were forever biting, seizing the lip suddenly and worrying it, like a terrier seizing a rat. He wore a grimy purple sweater under a torn tan jacket enough sizes too small to look like something an organgrinder’s monkey might wear, one pocket torn nearly off and both elbows worn through. Thrift-store jeans and a ratty pair of sneakers he’d once found in a garbage can behind the YMCA completed his wardrobe. No underwear. A crucifix gleamed around his neck, stainless steel coated to look like silver. Track marks, fading now, ran down both his arms, across his stomach, down his thighs, but he’d been off the junk for months; he was down to an occasional Red Devil, supplemented by the nightly quart of cheap chianti he consumed as he lay in the dark on his bare mattress at the “Lordhouse,” a third-floor loft in a converted industrial warehouse squeezed between a package store and a Rite-Aid.

  He had just scavenged some two-day-old doughnuts from a pile of boxes behind a doughnut store on Broad Street, and bought a paper container of coffee from a Greek delicatessen where the counterman (another aging hippie, faded flower tattoos still visible under the bristly black hair on his arms) usually knocked a nickel or two off the price for old time’s sake. Now he was sitting on the white marble steps of an old brownstone row house, eating his breakfast. His breath steamed in the chill morning air. Even sitting still, he was in constant motion—his fingers drumming, his feet shuffling, his eyes flicking nervously back and forth as one thing or another—a car, some wind-blown trash, pigeons taking to the air—arrested and briefly held his attention; at such times his shoulders would momentarily hunch, as if he expected something to leap out at him.

  Across the street, a work crew was renovating another old brownstone, swarming over the building’s partially stripped skeleton like carrion beetles; sometimes a cloud of plaster-powder and brick dust would puff from the building’s broken doorway, like foul air from a dying mouth. Winos and pimps and whores congregated on the corner, outside a flophouse hotel, their voices coming to Nicky thin and shrill over the rumbling and farting of traffic. Occasionally a group of med students would go by, or a girl with a dog, or a couple of Society Hill faggots in bell-bottomed trousers and expensive turtlenecks, and Nicky would call out “Jesus loves you, man,” usually to no more response than a nervous sideways glance. One faggot smirked knowingly at him, and a collegiate-jock type got a laugh out of his buddies by shouting back “You bet your ass he does, honey.” A small, intense-looking woman with short-cropped hair gave him the finger. Another diesel dyke, Nicky thought resignedly. “Jesus loves you, man,” he called after her, but she didn’t look back.

  When his butt began to feel as if it had turned to stone, he got up from the cold stoop and started walking again, pausing only long enough to put a flyer for the Lordhouse on a lamp pole, next to a sticker that said EAT THE RICH. He walked on, past a disco, a gay bookstore, a go-go bar, a boarded-up storefront with a sign that read LIVE NUDE MODELS, a pizza stand, slanting south and east now through a trash-littered concrete park full of sleeping derelicts and herds of arrogantly strutting pigeons, stopping now and then to panhandle and pass out leaflets, drifting on again.

  He’d been up to Reading Terminal early that morning, hoping to catch the shoppers who came in from the suburbs on commuter trains, but the Hairy Krishnaites had been there already, out in force in front of the station, and he didn’t like to compete with other panhandlers, particularly fucking groups of them with fucking bongos. The Krishnaites made him nervous anyway—with their razor-shaved pates and their air of panting, puppyish eagerness, they always reminded him of ROTC second-lieutenants, fresh out of basic training. Once, in front of the Bellevue-Stratford, he’d seen a fight between a Krishnaite and a Moonie, the two of them arguing louder and louder, toe to toe, until suddenly they were beating each other over the head with thick rackets of devotional literature, the leaflets swirling loose around them like flocks of startled birds. He’d had to grin at that one, but some of the panhandling groups were mean, particularly the political groups, particularly the niggers. They’d kick your ass up between your shoulder blades if they caught you poaching on their turf, they’d have your balls for garters.

  No, you scored better if you worked alone. Always alone.

  He ended up on South Street, down toward the Two-Street end, taking up a position between the laundromat and the plant store. It was much too early for the trendy people to be out, the “artists,” the night people, but they weren’t such hot prospects anyway. It was Saturday, and that meant that there were tourists out, in spite of the early hour, in spite of the fact that it had been threatening to snow all day—it was cold, yes, but not as cold as it had been the rest of the week, the sun was peeking sporadically out from behind banks of dirty gray clouds, and maybe this would be the only halfway decent day left before winter really set in. No, they were here alright, the tourists, strolling up and down through this hick Greenwich Village, peering into the quaint little stores, the boutiques, the head-shops full of tourist-trap junk, the artsy bookstores, staring at the resident freaks as though they were on display at the zoo, relishing the occasional dangerous whiff of illicit smoke in the air, the loud blare of music that they wouldn’t have tolerated for a moment at home.

  Of course, he wasn’t the only one feeding on this rich stream of marks: there was a juggler outside of the steak-sandwich shop in the next block, a small jazz band—a xylophone, a bass, and an electric piano—in front of the communist coffeehouse across the street, and, next to the upholsterer’s, a fat man in a fur-lined parka who was tonelessly chanting “incense sticks check it out one dollar incense sticks check it out one dollar” without break or intonation. Such competition Nicky could deal with—in fact, he was contemptuous of it.

  “Do you have your house in order?” he said in a conversational but carrying voice, starting his own spiel, pushing leaflets at a businessman, who ignored him, at a strolling young married couple, who smiled but shook their heads, at a middle-aged housewife in clogs and a polka-dot kerchief, who took a flyer reflexively and then, a few paces away, stopped to peek at it surreptitiously. “Did you know the Lord is coming, man? The Lord is coming. Spare some change for the Lord’s work?” This last remark shot at the housewife, who looked uneasily around and then suddenly thrust a quarter at him. She hurried away, clutching her Lordhouse flyer to her chest as if it were a baby the gypsies were after.

  Panhandling was an art, man, an art—and so, of course, of course, was the more important task of spreading the Lord’s word. That was what really counted. Of course. Nevertheless, he brought more fucking change into the Lordhouse than any of the other converts who were out pounding the pavement every day, fucking-A, you better believe it. He’d always been a good panhandler, even before he’d seen the light, and what did it
was making maximum use of your time. Knowing who to ask and who not to waste time on was the secret. College students, professional people, and young white male businessmen made the best marks—later, when the businessmen had aged into senior executives, the chances of their coming across went way down. Touristy types were good, straight suburbanites in the 25–50 age bracket, particularly a man out strolling with his wife. A man walking by himself was much more likely to give you something than a man walking in company with another man—faggots were sometimes an exception here. Conversely, women in pairs—especially prosperous hausfraus, although groups of teenage girls were pretty good too—were much more likely to give you change than were women walking by themselves; the housewife of a moment before had been an exception, but she had all the earmarks of someone who was just religious enough to feel guilty about not being more so. Brisk woman-executive types almost never gave you anything, or even took a leaflet. Servicemen in uniform were easy touches. Old people never gave you diddley-shit, except sometimes a well-heeled little old white lady would, especially a W.H.L.O.W.L. who had religion herself, although they could also be more trouble than their money was worth. There were a lot of punkers in this neighborhood, with their ’50s crewcuts and greasy motorcycle jackets, but Nicky usually left them alone; the punks were more violent and less gullible than the hippies had been back in the late ’60s, the Golden Age of Panhandling. The few remaining hippies—and the college kids who passed for hippies these days—came across often enough that Nicky made a point of hitting on them, although he gritted his teeth each time he did; they were by far the most likely to be wiseasses—once he’d told one “Jesus is coming to our town,” and the kid had replied, “I hope he’s got a reservation, then—the hotels are booked solid.” Wiseasses. Those were also the types who would occasionally quote Scripture to him, coming up with some goddamn verse or other to refute anything he said; that made him uneasy—Nicky had never really actually read the Bible that much, although he’d meant to: he had the knowledge intuitively, because the Spirit was in him. At that, the hippie wiseasses were easier to take than the Puerto Ricans, who would pretend they didn’t understand what he wanted and give him only tight bursts of superfast Spanish. The Vietnamese, now, being seen on the street with increasing frequency these days, the Vietnamese quite often did give something, perhaps because they felt that they were required to. Nicky wasn’t terribly fond of Jews, either, but it was amazing how often they’d come across, even for a pitch about Jesus—all that guilt they imbibed with their mother’s milk, he guessed. On the other hand, he mostly stayed clear of niggers—sometimes you could score off of a middle-aged tom in a business suit or some graying workman, but the young street dudes were impossible, and there was always the chance that some coked-up young stud would turn mean on you and maybe pull a knife. Occasionally you could get money out of a member of that endless, seemingly cloned legion of short, fat, cone-shaped black women, but that had its special dangers too, particularly if they turned out to be devout Baptists, or snakehandlers, or whatever the fuck they were: one woman had screamed at him, “Don’t talk to me about Jesus! Don’t talk to me about Jesus! Don’t talk to me about Jesus!” Then she’d hit him with her purse.