Wake Up, Sir!: A Novel

by Jonathan Ames

  “I should point out, sir, that gentiles also have many sexual problems.”

  “That's true, Jeeves. It seems that everyone has a problem with sex. Certainly the Muslims do, though the harem was a pretty good invention. The Asians have a nice attitude about it, except for footbinding, which looks very painful, but that's mostly gone out of style. I do think everyone would be a lot happier if we all laid eggs on our own and could just have friendships and didn't need to mount and penetrate one another.”

  Before Jeeves could respond to my egg idea, we passed several Hasidim, men and women, sitting in rocking chairs on the porch of another old wooden house. They looked wonderfully out of place here in the wilds of upstate New York. In the wilds of America. Everything beyond the reach of New York City—about seventy-five miles—feels to me like America, an exotic country I have rarely, in my life, visited. New Jersey, according to my personal sense of geography, is also not America.

  “Hasidic homesteaders,” I said, regarding them on their rocking chairs. “Probably getting ready for an orgy. You know, Jeeves, despite my understanding of the Jewish libido—my own libido!—I have in the past been guilty of prejudice directed at the Hasidim when it comes to their sexual problems. It's just that it's so easy, with their top hats and beards, to spot them in peep shows and strip clubs. It's hard for them to sin anonymously like the rest of us—and so I've tended to form an unfair and imbalanced impression of the Hasidim.”

  “Their costumes are distinctive, sir.”

  “But who am I to judge, Jeeves? If I wasn't in such establishments in the first place, I wouldn't be able to come up with these unsound opinions. I can't characterize a whole clan because of a few wayward fellows.”

  “The Hotel Adler, sir. I advise turning.”

  “Yes, Jeeves. Thank you for spotting it.”

  There it was—the magnificent Hotel Adler. It was on the righthand side of the road at the top of a steep, rising lawn, at a grade of almost sixty degrees. I floored the Caprice up the driveway.

  The Adler was glorious: white-painted, wooden, and three-tiered, like a cake, with red wainscoting playing the role of icing. There were large green doors and an enormous front patio. It was the kind of hotel you don't see anymore. I don't know when you did see such hotels, but you certainly don't see them now.

  It showed its age, though. The roof was sagging, the paint was chipping, the grounds were hoary, and the whole building seemed to be tilting forward, as if it were ready to topple over from exhaustion. It had been beautiful for too long. There was the unmistakable aura of lost grandeur to the place, but lost grandeur, I find, is always more grand than regular grandeur, if you know what I mean.

  I pulled into the gravel parking lot and made the acute observation that there were no other cars, which, naturally, was not a good sign, but—like the cashier's warning—I chose to ignore this. Jeeves stayed in the Caprice and I mounted the long concrete staircase, which led to the patio and front doors.

  With utter confidence, I pulled on one green door and then the other, and both were locked. My positive thinking, at this point, was nearly dried up. Still, I didn't quit. I saw a doorbell, rang it, and pretending that I wasn't on the verge of a crisis, I casually peered at myself in the glass of the window beside the front doors. I adjusted my tie, smoothed my thin but elegant hair, and stroked my fledgling orange mustache, and then I became an old woman with a kerchief on her head. It was a bit disarming to transform like that, to turn so rapidly, like Tiresias, into an aged representative of the opposite sex. I wondered if it was the d.t.'s—I hadn't taken a drink all day.

  Then the doors opened and my kerchiefed old-woman self addressed me. “What do you want?”

  Her accent was Yiddish and her figure was Russian, and I realized that an optical misunderstanding had occurred. This lady, heeding my ringing of the bell, had simply approached the window on her way to the door, just as I was looking at my reflection. It's always good when these phenomena can be explained by science and reason.

  “I very much want a room,” I said. “Are you open?”

  “No. We had a fire. We open again one week. You come back then.” Her face was round and fleshy, the skin yellow-brown from age. She was about five foot two and wore a faded blue housedress. Her slippers were ancient, flesh-colored, and may not have been removed in years. She was anywhere from sixty-five to ninety-five. Her eyes were older than that. They had seen Moses come down the hill and trip with the tablets, which is when the word klutz was invented. Her bosom was substantial. I felt a pang of desire for the young woman she had been in the nineteenth century.

  “I can't come back in one week,” I said, pleading. “I need a room now. I've been traveling for hours. To send me back out there might kill me. I would really like a room. Money is not a problem.”

  I removed my wallet from my sport coat pocket to emphasize this salient point.

  “We had a fire,” she said.

  “But do you have any rooms that weren't burned? Please?”

  “Yes. We have rooms. But closed one more week. Come back one week.”

  “Nu,” I said, hoping to charm her with my Yiddish, “can't you make an exception?” I smiled at her and held my wallet as if it were quite heavy, thinking this might be a winning combination—a smile from a nice Jewish boy who knew a word or two of Yiddish and who had a thick billfold.

  The nu melted her. She let me into the Adler and to the front desk. “My son out shopping. I take care of you.”

  I gathered from this communication that her son was the owner or the manager. Behind the front desk was an open door which led to an apartment, her lair; perhaps she shared it with her son. She was charging me $40 a night, which was more than equitable. I paid for two nights, and then she started rummaging through a box of keys, making a good deal of clanging sounds. The keys were thick and old.

  “Do you want me to fill out a registration form?”

  She didn't answer me. I took this to mean no. I tried another question. “Does the room have two beds?” I asked. “My valet is with me.” I didn't want to push things and ask for two rooms. Jeeves and I would have to rough it and be unconscious together in close proximity. But we could handle it; our relationship was unusually warm, I felt, and, too, it never hurts to save money.

  “Two beds,” she said. She was still making loud music with the keys. I waited patiently and looked about me. The lobby had a few sagging couches and chairs. The ceiling was very high and there was a large center staircase which led to the upper floors. The lost grandeur, except for the high ceilings, was less apparent on the inside—the interior was merely shabby.

  From the fire, the place smelled of smoke, but I also detected that distinct bouquet one associates with the homes of old Jews. What is the source of this odor? I happen to like it. It smells like family and love to me—like the homes of my grandparents and my other old relatives, all of them gone now, though. But what are the ingredients of this smell? Mothballs? Matzo balls? Chicken broth? Chopped liver? Jewish anxiety? Yahrzeit lamps? Is it the smell of the past? Does the present have a new scent?

  The Russian woman located the appropriate key. “Two oh four,” she said. She was a woman of few words. Conserving her energy, I imagined. She handed me the key.

  “Where was the fire?” I asked, since there were no signs of it in the lobby, except for the burnt odor.

  “Third floor,” she said.

  “What caused it? Someone misbehaving and smoking in bed?”

  “Vas?” I think she was a little hard of hearing, and though her English was clear, I didn't sense a profound grasp of the language.

  “Someone was smoking in bed and set the third floor on fire?”

  “Shabbas candles.”

  “Smoking Shabbas candles in bed!”

  The woman didn't laugh. I pressed on. “Thank you very much for bending the rules.”

  “In morning you want bath?”

  “A bath?”

  “Shvitz bath.” />
  “Oh yes. Here in the hotel?”

  “Yes, in the basement.”

  “You'll run a bath for me even though you're closed?”

  “You don't want a bath?”

  “Yes … Yes, I do. What time in the morning?”

  “Morning.”

  I liked the Old World feeling of that. Morning. No precise schedules. No anxiety of keeping a set appointment. “That's fine,” I said. “I'll take my bath in the morning. Thank you so much for everything.”

  “Two oh four,” she repeated, and pointed to the wide staircase. Then, done with me, she shuffled back toward her apartment.

  “Zei gazint,” I said to her retreating form, hoping to charm her with more Yiddish, but she didn't take notice.

  Jeeves and I climbed the staircase. He carried our two bags. There was a mezuzah on the door to our room—they were on the doors to all the rooms. I found this to be comforting: it was nice to be somewhere so Jewish. When one is a minority, it's always pleasant, if not surprising, to be in an environment where one's practices are the rule rather than the exception.

  I unlocked the door, but before crossing the threshold, I kissed my fingers in a sloppy, smacking way, and then put my wet fingers to the mezuzah, which is how my father used to do it. To mimic the dead is a good way to remember the dead. It's like when I do my yoga, I think of my mother and her earnest attempts at it when she was first sick. She was trying to save her life and someone had recommended yoga. My father died when I was seventeen of a heart attack, and my mother, perhaps poisoned by grief, died three years later of cancer.

  So when I do these things—kiss mezuzahs, my morning sun salutations—it's my way of honoring my parents and also getting them back for these brief moments, though it's only like catching a glimpse of them out of the corner of my eye.

  If I try to see more of them in my mind, a fuller picture, it's quite painful. It hits me that I can't ever again have just one day with them, and the pain of this thought actually becomes physical. It's like a knife is being drawn across the inside of my belly, though I don't feel the sting of the blade, just the sensation of being sawed in half. I collapse inward, a weird mixing of the physical and the emotional. I get sucked down by this terrible grief and then I start hating myself, because I can't really recall their faces. I was too horribly selfish. It's that wretched human problem of spending a lifetime with someone and never looking at them. So if I want to see them, I have to resort to the envelope of photographs I've held on to, but the pictures feel too thin in my hands, too pathetic, and anyway I don't want to see them in the past, I want to see them now. I want them to be alive. I'd like the chance to know them this time. But if I can't have that, more than going to any beautiful place in the world, I'd love to see my father and mother one more time, just for a day or an hour, and then maybe after that I could die or if need be continue to live.

  Jeeves put our bags down. I sat on the bed that was closer to the door. I told Jeeves that I needed to take a nap.

  “Very good, sir.”

  “I'm so tired, Jeeves. All that driving. And the good news about the Rose Colony. Good news can be tiring, you know.”

  “It's been a strenuous day, sir.”

  “A very strenuous day, Jeeves. Do you think I should just sleep through to morning?”

  “I don't recommend it, sir. It's not even six o'clock. If you went to bed now, I fear that you would wake at two A.M. and be very unhappy. I would suggest, sir, a one-hour nap now, and then a simple meal at the restaurant we saw in town. The one across from the gas station. Its sign indicated that it is called the Hen's Roost. I can wake you in one hour.”

  “You think that's the best plan, Jeeves?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I smiled to indicate my grateful compliance. It was soothing to have Jeeves do the thinking. It's not easy taking care of one's self, determining nap lengths and all that, but with two people it's a manageable job. So Jeeves looked after me, but that didn't mean I couldn't look after Jeeves, to make sure he wasn't suffering in silence. I inquired, “Are these close quarters all right with you, Jeeves? It's a bland little room, I know. But the beds seem to be of quality. I hope you find this setup adequate.”

  “The accommodations are fine, sir. You should lie down now and I'll wake you in an hour.”

  “Why don't we just set the alarm and you take the night off, Jeeves. We can just leave the room unlocked. Come and go as you please. See what Sharon Springs has to offer. Take the car, if you like. You worked very hard with that map today. Very good folding and unfolding.”

  “Thank you, sir,” he said, and he accepted my offer of a free evening. Then he opened a window—the room was a little stuffy—and set my little travel clock for me before leaving to explore Sharon Springs.

  “Stay out of trouble, Jeeves,” I said.

  “Yes, sir.” He closed the door.

  I undressed and lay on top of the bed, too lazy to pull back the thin blanket. I thought momentarily of the two bottles of wine undrunk from the night before and hidden in my bag, but I pushed those wine bottles out of my mind. “No drinking!” I said to myself. I wanted to show Aunt Florence and Uncle Irwin, even if they weren't around to witness it, that I could stay sober if I wanted.

  Then my prenap thoughts went from wine to love, a logical progression since the quadrant of the brain that craves alcohol is probably deeply aligned with the quadrant that craves love, and so I thought of that blonde girl I had dreamt about. I was hoping I would see her again. It was like when I would spot someone in a café in New York and we'd have eye contact but I'd lack the nerve to say anything and then the girl would leave, and so I'd vow to return to that café at the exact same time for days on end until I saw her again, but it was always an empty vow. I never would do such a thing. I feared the humiliating folly of it—either the girl would never return or if she did, she'd reject me since I had misread her the first time. But now my own subconscious was like a café, one I could easily return to, in fact could not avoid, and so maybe that girl would come to me again in my dreams, and this time if she said, “I love you,” I'd say it back and we'd see what would happen.

  Well, these thoughts, like a light, began to dim, and then I fell asleep and the day's struggle was temporarily—but only temporarily, I'm afraid—over.

  CHAPTER 8

  The ruined bathhousePeer pressureThe mostly sad history of Sharon SpringsI come up with how Sharon Springs will be saved, as well as an idea for a screenplayI eat my dinner and read some Dashiell HammettI join the fray and hold forth on the nature of professional wrestling, while momentarily contemplating the Homosexual Question and the Jewish QuestionA rash phone callTwo intuitive, internal voices, one forceful, one a milquetoast, wrest for control of me

  Napped, showered, and refreshed, I took it upon myself to walk up the long hill, roughly two miles, to the Hen's Roost. Jeeves hadn't taken the Caprice—who knows what he was up to—but I had done enough driving for the day. Also, some exercise, walking, would be good for me. I hadn't dreamt of the girl during my nap, but I was in good spirits. After months in Montclair, I was on an adventure!

  About half a mile from the hotel, on the opposite side of the road, I came upon the ruins of an old wooden bathhouse, which I hadn't noticed on our way to the Adler. The outer shell of the long, narrow building was intact, but its roof was only beams. Drawn to ruins, I snuck inside. Who doesn't enjoy ruins? It's like getting to read a person's diary, albeit that of a dead person.

  But what had happened to Sharon Springs? It was getting an A+ in the Lost Grandeur department, but I should mention that the beauty of Lost Grandeur is a sad beauty, mournful, the beauty of a graveyard, and the cause of the Sharon Springs' sadness was a mystery to me.

  Inside, the bathhouse was gutted—the floor had dissolved. I walked on dirt strewn with sections of pipe. The place reeked of sulfur. There were still rows of old rusted tubs, like rows of coffins. It was spooky imagining that people had once bathed in these tubs,
healing themselves. The division of rooms was still visible: there were door frames and walls, and on one wall there were hooks for towels, and built into another wall were cubbyholes with faded metal name tags. This bathhouse had once been a destination, a place you went often enough, over the course of years, over the course of a life, to have a name tag in metal. On one door frame was the ubiquitous mezuzah.

  I walked out what was once a back door and immediately there was a steep, forested hill, almost right up against the building. Some large rocks were at the bottom of the tree line, and running between them was a steady current of water, making the narrow strip of land in the back a muddy stream.

  I crossed the stream and cupped my hands to the pouring water coming through the rocks and took a drink. It was salty and sulfurous, like rotten eggs, and I loved it. Made me feel good. I swallowed as many mouthfuls as I could. This was the spring that had fed the baths. It was a happy moment in nature for me, but then I destroyed it by wondering if deer urine could seep through the earth and pollute the spring with microbes. Hadn't I read something alarming in the Science section of The New York Times about deer urine?

  Well, it had been a nice moment while it lasted; one can't ask for more. I did think it unlikely that deer microbes could travel through rock, but still my Thoreauish enchantment with nature had passed.

  I returned to the road, and on some of the porches of the old white houses there were more Hasidim now, men and women sitting in straight-backed chairs or rocking chairs, and in the driveways a few children rode bicycles. It was summer twilight, always the most beautiful time of day—so beautiful that man can't seem to mar it, and the world, sensing this, seems remarkably and momentarily untroubled.

  The children looked happy on their bicycles; they had sweet smiles, and I liked the boys' odd wispy curls dangling in front of their ears. It made me feel good to see the children being gleeful, especially in contrast to their somewhat unhealthy pallor and formal clothing.