Bubbe was used to a less erudite clientele, comprising mostly drunken older men and a drunken old woman or two—all, of course, white. Leo Sheritude, a leathery-faced Basque gentleman whose bumpy, brown, freckled bald head topped off a huge belly and scrawny chicken legs, lived in the apartment above the one that was next to Bubbe’s apartment. There he sat, perched on a stinky pillow in his stinky boxer shorts and knee socks and T-shirt, with his cane tucked between his legs, chewing tobacco, drinking Greek wine, eating peanuts and Spanish olives and spitting the pits out onto the roof, and looking out the window, 24/7, 365 days a year, in protective watch of us little girls. Like our own guardian angel, he would croak out his warnings to us like a crow, “Stay away from him—that one is trash!” Or “Stay away from the little girlies!” he would warn the many deviants among Bubbe’s tenants. His voice had the quality of a running motor and a hammer hitting a steel anvil. Had Leo not been forced into the old folks’ home that same year, after breaking his hip, perhaps Anderson would never have grown so close to Bubbe or to Mama. Maybe then the end of Judaic patriarchy would never have come to my family, and I might by now have ended up some Midwestern rabbi’s fat and gregarious wife, who baked, solved the problems of other women in her community, and was able to talk about the Torah day and night, as per my girlhood fantasies. Damn!
Leo recuperated from his injury, and three months later came back with his walker, wearing his hospital accoutrements, begging Bubbe Mary to let him come back. It was very sad for us that she had to send him away again in an ambulance.
By then Bubbe was completely overcome with the charms of the gentleman of leisure who paid a handsome thirty dollars a month for room and board, each month promptly on time and with a good attitude, and a gift! Anderson knew about roses, which were her passion, and part of the reason that my English name is Roseanne. He could fix things, too, which blew my grandma’s mind, having lived around Jewish male “biblical scholars” (and gamblers) her whole life, who preferred arguing points of holy law, like whether a man actually lived inside a real whale or if that story was, perhaps, almost inconceivable as it may seem, only an allegory, to screwing on door handles and moving around hoses.
This Anderson guy was handsome, like my great-grandfather—chiseled cheekbones like Paul Newman with blue eyes like Newman’s own—although very short and slight. He could have played the role of Tom Cruise’s better-looking, equally short, older brother in some Hollywood movie. The poor man had no experience with women like the women I was raised by. He fell through a rabbit hole of sorts into a world under the visible one.
Bubbe was so enamored of this guy, she was beginning to assimilate. She told my sister that since she had gotten to know Anderson, her tenant, who was a very nice and handsome, educated man—though a goy—she felt that perhaps she had been wrong in her assessment of all goyim being worthless drunks and idiots, and now that she had met such a nice and handsome one, she figured the actual truth of things might just be that the goyim are very, very much like the Jews, surprising as that sounded. We never thought those words could ever come out of her mouth; we laughed, amazed. We used to get such a perverse-reverse thrill out of listening to Bubbe’s stories about her hatred of goyim. She would offer great little gems of wisdom, such as this one: “Dogs are actually smarter than goyim, as a dog will not lay in his own shit. He crawls away or at least turns his little head. But a drunk goy will just fall asleep with his face in dreck, vomit, or pee.” Sis asked her if maybe now she could understand how Bubbe Fanny might have fallen in love with one of them. Her wonderful, particular take on that was this: “Anderson ain’t no fisherman; he is all class, highly refined, and educated.”
I think she loved him because he talked to her like an intelligent and well-reasoned person who encouraged her to question her most basic assumptions. He showed her incredible kindness and generosity, too, which were new things to women like her, the plain-looking, workhorse type. My mother is and was a great beauty (which meant, culturally: a Jewish girl with a straight nose)—a charming woman who had big boobs and a small waist, a nice rear end, a lovely smile, a tinkling laugh, and an admiring glance for every handsome man she ever saw. Men loved my mother’s charisma. She would reel them in, and they would soon find themselves helplessly jerked around and fixing things in our house. She would charm them up and then turn them down right after they started to believe that she actually found them fascinating.
Anyway, Mom saw that Anderson could fix things, so she flirted with him to get him to come over and help out around the house. I, her ugly, fat daughter, watched her never-ending, romantic sagas, which she continued to rewrite and live throughout all seventy-seven of her years, unfold with amazement. Daddy had no problem with Anderson being in our house at all hours, either. He was just glad that he didn’t have to do anything that took away from the hours he spent chewing on his cuticles and saltwater taffy, or scratching his balls, eating éclairs, and palling around with his beloved little dog, Ervin, who chewed taffy, too, and who later, like Daddy, developed diabetes and was put on a special low-carb diabetic diet.
I was unaware of there being any problem with any of this at first, though I noticed that something changed one day, as I eavesdropped on Mama and Bubbe’s conversation. They knew I was there, and they knew I was listening, but Bubbe would say, “Shana Rifka, don’t listen to what we say now.” And usually I wouldn’t, but sometimes I would, especially if they were talking about the handsome, mysterious man who could have afforded to live better than he did. I heard Bubbe tell Mama that Anderson had told her once, after he had been drinking a lot, that he was running away from some legal trouble he had back in Florida. Bubbe used the word fugitive, which was the name of her second favorite TV show, next to Perry Mason.
Anderson went from handsome handyman to handsome indebted servant very quickly after sharing that secret. He mistakenly imagined my grandmother to be a compassionate Jewish woman who could offer safe haven and comfort in some small measure, if only a teaspoon of the milk of human kindness, and not a fascist-leaning rogue capitalist—that was his first terrible mistake. Perhaps he hoped that she would offer him some of the Magic Jewish Woman Chicken Soup that all men would kill and die for.
The Magic Jewish Woman Chicken Soup would indeed work its will and become his restorative medicine. He had never before in his life experienced anything quite so delightful as Bubbe’s chicken fat and kosher salt, with globules of provocative noodles and succulently, seductively rounded, juicy, sumptuous matzoh balls, mixed with chicken necks, and four hundred cloves of garlic. He had no idea what it can do for a man. He was nursed back to health after being worked nearly to death as there was much remodeling to be done in our house and Bubbe’s fifteen apartments. His workload was comparable to the workload of a typical Egyptian slave building a typical pyramid or two.
In other words, a bit of the handsome bloom was off the rose now, so he had to be initiated into the Mama-Bubbe Drama a tad further, as there was no other living man available or left alive who would allow himself to be taken down that dark path.
To my mother, nothing on earth mattered unless there was a man there to witness it. Her entire generation is like that, and who’s to say they were less smart than my generation, who always went out of our way to show men that we could do without them, pick up a tab, and work right alongside them. We, in fact, got stuck with the final payments on everything we had bought together before the divorce, and were foolish enough to demand to be put in our own names, sealing the rotten deal that made us have to pay it all off alone after the divorce! NOT TOO SMART, GIRLS! Goin’ backward a little there. (However, if you continue to read this book and listen to what I say, then there is still a slight chance that we can turn everything around, reverse this backward slide, and begin to live up to our potential as the world’s saviors, and be rewarded with delicious cakes everywhere we ever go around the world!)
Around the same time, above and beyond the manual labor, Anderson’s tasks
were increased to include making my father jealous of his admiration for my mother. That was a game that Mama loved to play often with my dad. At first, he couldn’t be bothered and pretended not to even care that there was another man at the dinner table with his family, sitting next to his wife, in between himself and Mama, who complimented his wife on the way she looked and the way she cooked, all through the meal, night after night. Daddy, Mom, and Anderson ate steak and potatoes, and we kids ate Franco-American spaghetti straight out of the can with a fork, all together, like one big, happy, freako, pre–Jerry Springer family.
Mom loved having a guy mooning over her, whom she could follow around and say, “My, you just put that screwdriver into that little screw and screw it around and around? Wow! Jerry, you need to get a screwdriver!” and then she would giggle. The guy would slobber, Daddy would take his dog out for a walk to buy éclairs, and I would get a migraine headache and dissociate.
I used to wish I were a boy. I would swear that I never wanted to be a woman like my mother. I would fantasize a lot about being a sailor on a boat in Greece. I would also sneak out to the corner store and steal baby food—I liked the Gerber banana pudding and would steal jars of it and run out and eat them real fast, and then throw the empty jars up on the roof of the store and run home. (Yes, I was weird.)
I was jealous of my mother’s beauty and her charisma, and thought that she felt embarrassed that I, her oldest daughter, was not a pretty girl at all, but a fat, loudmouthed, nail-biting, decidedly unpretty girl, who picked holes in her skin, and reflected badly on Mama’s pretty image of herself and the world of prettiness in which pretty girls like her lived their lives, honing their powers of glamour and enchanting men, casting spells and manipulating their tiny pea-size brains for their own profit and amusement.
Back then, as a kid, I felt sort of sorry for the men who always fell into the pretty trap. Men like pretty women, not fat ones, old ones, smart or funny ones—after a lifetime of trying to deny and disprove those tiring tidbits of truth, I must admit that now. Women have better sexual imaginations than men do, and therefore they can let themselves do things like fall in love with and have sex with a Woody Allen or a Roman Polanski.
Men’s imaginations are never quite as broad or juicy as it seems they should be. I have thought of opening a whorehouse for women my age, where you can have a talk with a pirate type who can discuss poetry and economics, and then actually enjoy you sexually, or meet a statesman with whom you can discuss interesting political issues that would lead to some debauchment later, in an undisclosed location. But in reality, not many of those kinds of exciting and stimulating men exist at all. Most likely only actors would be available for hire in my man-bordello and actors are notorious for having no real ideas of their own, sexual or otherwise.
One night at dinner, Mama started in on one of her “special performances.” She stood up at the table, directing her words to Daddy, and said, “What is the matter with you? Do you not see this man here, who is in love with me, and thinks I am beautiful and a good cook and a loving homemaker, sitting right here in front of your stupid, fat face?”
My father, with his devastating blackest humor, pushed himself away from the table, and with a laugh, said, “Yes, I see him. I don’t care what he thinks or what he does as long as he fixes the shit around here, for free, and I don’t have to do it.”
I choked down the laughter, as I always did—by thinking about morbid things and feeling humiliated for and by my mother, in front of a handsome, humiliated man.
Some time after that, Anderson removed himself from the table, and from Park Street. Maybe it’s because she loved Anderson still, after he was gone, and she thought about the things he had said, that bubbe—sadder, wiser, older, sicker—decided that the old way of the old patriarchs should be replaced, and a new way of thinking was due not only her daughter but also her granddaughter, me. Around that time, she took me aside and told me that she did not believe any part of Judaism, and only “kept up with it to honor the dead who had believed it.” Wounded, somewhat, that the superstition and the magical thinking that had gotten me through my life was being dishonored by bubbe, I asked her, “But how can you say you don’t believe that the Torah is the actual Word of God, that every sacred letter is also a number and a code and a musical note, as well? You taught it to me, and you have discussed it with me daily every day of my life with you! You spent your life lying to me about who you are, about who I am, and about how I am to act in this world? How could you have done that?” For another honest moment in her life, she looked hard into my eyes, and said, “We are the Torah. We women are commanded by Hashem to change the story when it is time for the story to change.”
Bubbe Mary had become an agnostic and a truthseeker, and Bubbe Fanny had thrown the Jewish matriarchal burka to the ground and run a camper truck over it. Mama proudly keeps up the renovated “Mary’s Manor,” which has become her life. She has made it into small condos, rented by many of the gays, whom my mother loves, because they will let her stick her big nose into all of their business. My mother, who still reads the Torah every day of her life, and has a very nice Mormon gentleman as a boyfriend, turned bubbe’s old apartment into a hospice to shelter someone undergoing chemotherapy at the University of Utah, for free, in honor of her mother. Jewish women are big on the honoring the dead thing. It’s a sweet way to wrap up a life; between honoring the dead and giving the evil eye to other living women, another bipolar reality can be lived out in a Jewish way.
At Bubbe Mary’s funeral, my sisters and brother and I thought about how to honor her, in a new American way. When Geraldine and I told the rabbi that we, along with our cousin Cindy and our brothers, were going to be our grandmother’s pallbearers, he nearly choked on a hairball from his beard, which he damned near swallowed. Bubbe Mary was the first Orthodox Jewish woman to be carried to her grave by her granddaughters, who broke all patriarchal tradition and created a more matriarchal one.
At Bubbe Fanny’s funeral we said nothing about religion.
Both were each a new kind of Jewish woman—a Western American Jewish Woman. They gave birth to those of us who created the sixties. And according to our own daughters, we, the daughters of that American Gender Revolution, ruined the entire world.
Chapter 6
Eat, Pray, Love, Conjure Satan
Let me take you back, dear reader, to the exact moment in time that I went from a chubby twelve-year-old girl to a calculating rising star. At that point in my life, like any twelve-year-old, I was fed up with the unfairness of the world. My anger and bitterness had been seething inside me for a good six years by then, ever since I went from being a cute and cuddly little toddler, at the center of attention, to a fat older sister on the periphery. To top it off, my cousin Debbie, who was a year younger than I and so incredibly average and thin and gorgeous and underwhelming in every way, was cast in a television commercial, my life’s goal and dream. Yes, she and not I, the true heir to Shirley Temple–dom.
It was during Passover, of course, when Debbie and David had found the matzoh again, and received the fifty cents for it again, that our Aunt Blanche, ever the rebel, said we could turn on the TV set, let it warm up for five minutes, and watch the commercial that Debbie and David starred in, which would be coming on at five thirty. My heart fell to my feet as I watched them in black-and-white on the screen, musing about Dr. Ross dog food. I asked Debbie how she got the job, as I knew I was the one made to star in commercials, not her, and was told that her aunt on her mother’s side had cast her in it. I became jealous and irate, and I said, “I want to be in a commercial!” I was told that I was too fat, too dark, and not pretty enough to star in Utah’s commercials by another of my fat and mustached aunts, Yetta, may the bitch rest in peace.
That became the genesis of my one-woman crusade against everything that sucks. I swore that one day I would undo the patriarchal system of “pretty means skinny!” Debbie, her aunt, Yetta, and all the other forces of evil wou
ld not get away with what they had done to me and all the other fat girls in this godforsaken world. I would make “Fat and loud” my war cry, and soon my enemies would be vanquished in the wake of my tidal power.
One day, as I sat in my room crying and snapping the heads off my Barbie dolls with my chocolate-soaked sausage fingers, and perusing a copy of my dad’s National Enquirer, I saw in the back pages therein an ad for information about acquiring occult powers. I decided that I wasn’t going to feel sorry for myself anymore. I was determined not to accept the status quo, and I would do anything, and I mean anything, to alter the world to the way I wanted it to be.
I decided to do something that would have a profound impact on my life, something that I would eventually be very ashamed of as an adult. Everything that follows is all true, every single word of it . . .
When you find yourself upset and jealous and bitter, do not, I repeat, do not call on the power of Satan. Once you do a deal with the devil, you will burn in hell with shame and regret. When I was twelve, I summoned Satan and signed my name in blood. I had learned how to do this from the Mormon contingent in my home-town. These people keep records on everything, and the satanic worship sections of their libraries are some of the best. I had done my homework, and decided it was time to make my move.
I would love to explain just how I conjured up Satan and what the books I got from the Mormons taught me, but for obvious reasons I will not publish them here so that other lost and lonely souls don’t repeat my mistakes. Obviously, it’s easy enough to enter into a binding satanic contract, as every lawyer, politician, and Hollywood star can attest. Backstage at the Oscars is a veritable blood-letting of virgins and goat fucking. I am the first celebrity to admit it, and I believe it is time that all of you knew our dirty little secret.
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