by Ira Wood
The limousine company had sent a new car. The air conditioning worked perfectly. I sat alone in the plush back seat. The bar was stocked. Scotch. Vodka. Beer and ice cubes in a miniature refrigerator. Cashews. Peanuts. When we pulled up to my building it was past one in the morning. The click of my footsteps echoed in the deserted lobby.
I pressed my ear to the door of my apartment. Not a sound. I removed my shoes and turned the key, gently, gently, guiding the door to avoid the squeak. But the lights in the foyer were on, every one and every lamp in the living room as well. My parents sat upright, legs crossed, arms folded on opposite ends of the couch, waiting up for my arrival so they could ignore me. “Why does he hate us so much?” my mother began.
“He doesn’t hate you, he hates me,” my father said.
“But he told them we were both dead.”
“I’m the one who lost his business,” my father insisted. “I’m the one who made us sell the house.”
My mother was indignant. “And I never account for anything?”
In a four-and-a half-room apartment it is rarely possible to be alone. Not when the living room opens to the kitchen, your parents are sitting on the convertible couch that serves as your bed, one brother is asleep in the boys’ room, the other in your parents’ bed. The bathroom, however, at one-thirty in the morning, was mercifully unoccupied and sitting on the toilet seat with my father’s newspaper, turning up the volume on his transistor radio and lighting a cigarette from the open pack next to the sink, I was enabled one deliciously private moment to ponder the roots of my problem while holding a cold wet wash cloth to my sore and swelling eye.
THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING
My father had two major passions. The first was eating. The second was Lipsky.
On any honest list of the obsessions that occupied his waking mind, food would incontestably precede money, work, wife, or children. He could never remember the date of his wedding anniversary or any of our birthdays but he could tell you the restaurant in which each was celebrated and what every person at the table ordered for an appetizer. Despite his doctor’s warnings and my mother’s reproach, he blew up to two hundred twenty pounds on a five-foot-six-inch frame. After his third heart attack, he was wheeled into the hospital hallucinating. “The hamburgers! They’re dancing.” In the intensive care unit my mother told him the doctors had given him a death sentence. My father gasped, “Then bring me a pint of Haagen Daaz. Rum raisin.”
Sanford Lipsky was our across-the-street neighbor and my father’s closest friend, his rival, his antagonist, his measure of himself. Lipsky was in medical equipment sales and although it would be decades before the Diffusion of Innovations became a popular sociological theory, he was the consummate early adopter. He bought every appliance known to post-war America the day it hit the showroom. A Tappan electric range. A Lady Kenmore washer-dryer. A Coldpoint refrigerator freezer. A Philco transistor radio. An Emerson Quiet Cool air conditioner. He had the first color television in our entire town. Lipsky was a swaggering Dean Martin in a middle-income suburb, Kennedy-era man-crush material. Broad-shouldered and suntanned with loose black curls and Ray-ban sunglasses, he wore sharkskin suits over thin V-neck sweaters and a diamond studded Star of David on a gold chain. He spent summer Saturdays at Yankee games and Saturday nights at the Copacabana, drove a Thunderbird convertible to my father’s Ford sedan. At the time we lived in a modest cookie-cutter ranch. The Lipskys had a split level with a basement play room, a pool table and two-and-a-half baths. In my father’s life Lipsky was the ne plus ultra, that which is ever to be strived for and never attained.
Sometimes I would overhear my father talking to himself, asking how Lipsky paid for it all. Where did he get the money for that? Do you know how much something like that costs? How does he do it? But in the end there was simply nothing to do but swallow hard and admit that Lipsky couldn’t be touched. Nor could we touch the Lipsky children. Markie Lipsky took tennis lessons and karate lessons and played the guitar. His sister Michelle went to horseback riding camp and had her own pony. In an effort to find something, anything, to distinguish our family, my father took up bowling. Which Lipsky thought a great idea; he challenged my father to join a Sunday morning father-son bowling league. The pending competition gave me regular Saturday night panic attacks but the two of them managed to ratchet the stakes even further by placing bets on the side. During the semi-finals I faced a 1-2-4-10 split, commonly known as the “washout,” with two fifty-dollar bills on the scorer’s table, my father’s and Lipsky’s. With all the compulsive behaviors that would emerge in my later life, I can confidently say that any enthusiasm I might ever have developed for gambling was quashed on the day I pissed myself in front of a hundred spectators in a public bowling alley.
Although each night at the dinner table my father asked de rigueur questions about our day at school, he only picked at his food while warming up for the big one, “Anything new across the street today?” at which he seemed to draw his breath, to brace for the answer like it was a damage report. If there was no Lipsky news he lost interest. He was gone to us for the night.
The winter before I left for college my father salvaged an old speedboat, a fifteen-foot Century Palomino, in its prime a glamorous mahogany runabout. When he bought it, it was a barnacle-encrusted waterlogged wreck. He spent every weekend in the garage sanding and varnishing the deck, grinding rust from the hardware, laying a new all-fiberglass hull. With the purchase of a used Johnson 35 horsepower outboard motor we launched it on the first day of July. On the evening of the Fourth, as we were sitting down to a backyard barbecue, Lipsky backed his new boat down the street on a trailer, a twenty-three-foot Chris Craft Catalina with a 270 horse power inboard-outboard motor. What we took at that moment for a piece of charbroiled Keilbasa going down the wrong pipe was my father’s first heart attack.
When I moved away I was determined never to repeat my father’s mistakes. There were new worlds open to me, the most compelling the movement to end the Vietnam War, a milieu in which there was no role to play that remotely resembled my businessman father. I wasn’t going have children or live in the suburbs. I didn’t take the train to work, or have a regular job, or bowl. I didn’t own a car. I lived in a house with six other people and three dogs, two of them named Che. The women in the house announced that it was sexist for the men to go shirtless during a June heat wave but totalitarian to administer a dress code, so they too walked around naked from the waist up. God bless the New Left. We started a food coop. We lived on brown rice flavored with nưó’c mắm, fermented fish sauce highly regarded in the anti-war community because it was a staple of the Vietnamese peasant diet, but mostly used in the States as a liquid supplement for house plants. We offered shelter to the oppressed: homeless ex-convicts who helped themselves to our food and regularly robbed our neighbors—I once found a pair of skis in the hall closet engraved with the name of a U.S. senator whose son rented an apartment on the first floor; and pimped prostitutes who serviced their johns in our bedrooms while we were out. We wore used Hawaiian shirts and Harris Tweed jackets from Keezer’s, hocked by Harvard students for drinking money. We lived in an enormous floor-through apartment in a triple-decker let by absentee owners who wanted no more to do with tenants than we did with landlords. Country clubs were unthinkable when you could spend sweltering summer afternoons in the park, smoking pot and tossing Frisbees to stray dogs. No one owned anything; the idea of envying my neighbor was absurd.
Yet as political discussions persisted into the night, fueled by hashish and jug wine, dominated by men who quoted Hegel, who not only won the crowd over to their arguments but disappeared afterward into the bedrooms of the women in the house, I burned. I was nothing like my father. I had no desire for cars or money or boats. But enduring the applause due some Marxist intellectual after a fiery political speech or blindly following a long-haired danger junkie with washboard abs into a phalanx of cops could trigger an irrational wave of envy that would launch m
e on an agonizing thrice daily regimen of stomach crunches and a hopeless attempt to understand nineteenth-century German philosophy.
Most writers I know are painfully aware of other writers’ success. If you are anything like me, simply reading the New York Times Book Review can hasten the onset of gastro-esophageal reflux. If you follow the book pages you risk seeing praise for someone you’ve met at a party or a workshop; other clients of your agent or the newest darlings of your own publishing house. The movie pages are minefields of novel adaptations. Awards season, when Pulitzers and the like are announced, can send you into therapy. You can console yourself with the fact that the pleasure of writing is its own reward, and other such self-medicating horse shit or, as my wife likes to suggest, that someone who reads a glowing review of a well-known writer’s book and enjoys it is likely to want to buy another book, thus expanding the potential market for your own. I can almost buy into this until I remember that this is the same woman who follows me around the kitchen trying to get me to eat fruit and insists that petting a cat for ten minutes a day will lower my blood pressure.
But I am convinced that these successful writers for whom my unachievable goals are within certain reach serve a purpose for people like me. They are not normal neurotics. When they write a sentence they do not stare at it for half an hour and then check their e-mail. They are not maladaptive perfectionists. They can read their own writing without experiencing stomach cramps. Their novels appear in bookstores every two years while I labor for nineteen months on a short story finally accepted by the literary magazine of South-east Idaho Community College. Call them naturals. Call them Lipskys. They set the standards we labor to achieve. They make us all work harder.
In the last years of my father’s life my parents had moved down South and my father was more or less confined to their high-rise apartment. He had few friends, no relatives with whom he still made contact, and as a result of his three heart attacks lacked the stamina to walk even short distances.
Up on the eleventh floor he spent much of the day staring out the window. I had the sense that we didn’t have long together and on one of my last visits, attempting to gain perspective on my own problems with envy, I asked him how he felt, over forty years later, about Sanford Lipsky.
“Lipsky?” At first he had to search his memory. “Haven’t thought about him since he was sent off to Wallkill.”
“Wallkill?”
“I think he was out in six months.”
“Wallkill is a state prison.” I knew nothing about this. “Lipsky went to prison?”
“He would have done five-to-ten years if his wife hadn’t been such a good lawyer.”
“Ruth Lipsky wasn’t a lawyer.”
“Ruth died from cancer right after he left her. His second wife.”
“Lipsky left the mother of his children while she was dying of cancer?”
“He ran away with Ruth’s best friend. He married her just before his arrest.”
“Arrest? For what?”
“Who remembers these things? Grand larceny or something. He worked for an importer. He was stealing from the warehouse.”
“Sanford Lipsky?”
“He was reselling it all to some guys in Newark.”
“That’s where all the money was coming from? That’s what you were competing against?” I could remember my father’s young face as he hid behind the living room drapes and stared across the street, hair black, cheeks on fire, teeth locked in fury. All those years he thought himself a failure. All those years he judged himself against Lipsky’s impossible collection of toys he was competing with a thief, a pathological narcissist who walked out on his dying wife.
I demanded to know, “Don’t you feel vindicated? You lived an honest life, you stuck by your wife and children. You saved, you went into debt to put us all through college.” But my father’s attention had shifted. Now a doughy man with thin white hair whose once strong hands were as soft as old gloves, he was staring out the window, following the route of a minivan slowly rounding the rotary in front of his building. “Tell me,” I insisted. “Doesn’t it make a difference to know that Lipsky was never better than you? That the deck was always stacked?”
But my father was absorbed in the scene below: some frail old neighbor being helped out of the van by an elderly lady, probably his wife, and maneuvered into a motorized wheel chair. It was the sight of the wheel chair that brought my father unsteadily to his feet. “Son of a gun!” He pressed his face to the window glass. “He has a Hoveround now? That’s the Hoveround GT Power Chair. That thing can go seven miles an hour.” He gripped my wrist with surprising strength. The muscles in his neck began to twitch. “Where did he get the money for that? Do you know how much something like that costs? How does he do it?”
The heat in his cheeks was back. His pallid eyes flamed bright blue. His jaw was clenched with the same indignation he had felt toward Lipsky. My father was young again and for the first time I understood how the man drew his strength, the pernicious life force that propelled him and that he had bequeathed to me. Call it my inheritance, the obsession that incited the father and, in his absence, would never fail to goad the son. Call it his legacy. The motivation that would always drive me in the face of overwhelming odds, the internal fire that no amount of personal failure, or success, would put out; as powerful as the force of life itself, my father’s everlasting gift to me: the burning envy of other people’s lives.
SATYRICON
1.
Everyone over eighteen thinks they can write a great book and judging from the number of manuscripts that used to arrive in the mailbox of my little publishing company every day, I assumed everyone had tried. Mostly people want to write about themselves, I think for two reasons. First, as with our fascination with the odors of our own bodies, we believe that the stories of our lives are intriguing and complex. But on an even more practical level, because almost every one of us has mastered writing in grade school, as opposed to learning to play the oboe or paint with oils or weave a rug, we believe we possess the necessary tools to express ourselves. I have often wondered, if we mastered ballet in the third grade instead of penmanship and were encouraged to communicate through movement, if the hallways of dance companies, like the mailboxes of publishers, would be crammed, as most are with manuscripts, with people of all sizes wearing legwarmers and spandex leotards, certain that no matter what their body type or formal training, be they hammer toed or victims of chronic inner ear infection, they had the tools to dance professionally. Nevertheless many people at one time or another in their lives try to write. I was encouraged to do so by a well-known writer who had read a play I had written and mistook raw energy for raw talent. I was flattered and arranged my life to have maximum time to devote to the story of a young man much like myself. He was sensitive. He was overweight. He had suffered. His struggles were intriguing and complex. I lived in a studio apartment near the heart of Harvard Square. It recently sold as a condo for $600,000 but at the time the rent was $80 a month. I believe that included utilities. I drove a school bus for a few hours in the morning and again in the afternoon, which allowed me the better part of the day to write. In short I had a situation that was perfect for a young writer. It gets better.
The writer I spoke of was also my lover. She was married but involved in what was called at the time an open relationship. She lived about a hundred miles away and would visit me in Cambridge two days a week and, because she lived in a rural area, we spent our time sampling the city’s small ethnic restaurants and going to a lot of movies. Her visits were a holiday for both of us. It gets better.
This woman, this would be Marge, insisted that I was not writing drivel, that I had real talent and that I should continue working. On a typical day I would drive the school bus from 6 A.M. to 9 A.M. and from 2 P.M. to 5 P.M. and return to my apartment in between to write. On Wednesday afternoons Marge would arrive from Cape Cod and while I was driving the school bus she would read what I had written t
he previous week. When I got home we would make out furiously, critique the work, and go out to dinner, say, to a little Hungarian place in Coolidge Corner for Chicken Pa-prikash with poppy seed spaetzle and a bottle of blood dark Egri Bikaver. When we returned home we would fuck. Can it get any better for a young writer?
Marge’s arrangement with her husband, although unusual by current standards, was considered commonplace in the seventies and merely kinky in the eighties. While the sexual freedom they allowed each other generated gossip, it was also the stuff of envy. When I told my friend Katie I was traveling down to Cape Cod to visit Marge, she told me: Marge Piercy lives with three men and every night she chooses which one she’ll go to bed with. I distinctly remember Katie licking her lips as she spoke. Marge’s life was an x-rated urban folk tale circulating around the remnants of the anti-war community at the time, but it did sprout from a kernel of truth. Marge and her husband not only encouraged each other to take sexual partners but made an effort to invite their various lovers into their home and treat them as family.
The experience that this arrangement afforded a shy young man, no less a would-be writer, was too good to imagine, even for someone who lived it. Although I had made love with a number of women, most had been as callow as I was and, like me, too embarrassed and unimaginative to instruct someone how to please them. My first live-in girlfriend, a whip-smart, fast-talking engineering student who was as close as a sister, nonetheless had an insurmountable fear of getting pregnant coupled with a gagging response to oral sex. A really hot date meant licking her nipples while she masturbated. My next true love, blonde and leggy, the daughter of a Lutheran minister from Kansas City, rarely spoke, barely reacted to stimuli; trying to please her was like flailing around a dark room, touching everything to locate the light switch. Granted I had more hormones than experience but I was desperately willing to please. Enter Marge who was hardly shy about what turned her on, who handled me like a sled dog, pure energy happy to be harnessed.