“I would stick out my pinkie when I wrote and my father couldn’t stand it. He’d crack me over the head. My face swelled up. He’d start drinking at eleven in the morning and be sloshed by 3 P.M. He went off with an Aryan woman for five years.
“My father,” Montague continued, “liked Jews who looked like goyim. He’d say, ‘Be a Jew in the home and a man on the street.’ He was light and had red hair. He went hat in hand to the factories. The WASPs made fun of him. He was at their mercy. It was revolting. He bought golf clubs and had no interest in golf; he joined the Masons.
“I came down with rheumatism at an early age, and had to come home for a while. My father packed up and left the house. He held the purse strings. He thwarted me in every way.
“Even in the hospital when he was sick, he didn’t want the Yiddish newspaper on top of the file. He said, ‘Don’t you know the nurses are Polish?’ He had tubes in his mouth; he was choking and gasping for breath. He said to the nurse, ‘You dirty whore, can’t you see I’m dying?’”
Chaim, the thirty-five year old Chasid and head xeroxer, with his huge stomach rivaling Montague’s, stuck his head through the door. “How’s your mother, Montague?”
“Very well, thank you, Chaim,” Montague purred, folding his arms and smiling. When the door shut, he muttered, “Stick your Talmud up your ass. I can’t stand him. He’s a manipulative little worm. I don’t like the Jewish religion. It’s all a crock of shit. I hate ‘hat-wearers.’ I’m very intolerant, you know.
“Chaim had an operation last year for his impotence. He asked us to pray for him. His wife would call up and say, ‘After ten years, I’m still a virgin.’ She beat him up.”
Montague stripped a banana, looked at it and smiled, and took a bite. He and I glanced up as we heard Chaim cheering a baseball score outside the door. “Savage,” Montague said. “I’d rather kill a child than have him play baseball.”
On the way out that night, I saw Chaim, alone, in the office. He had plunged his face down against a table holding a hand mirror, and was snipping his hair with scissors and listening to wolf calls on his cassette.
V
Montague called Leo Starch “The Head Fascist.” Leo had a stern, sour and very critical look and a bald head, he held himself very straight, and he compiled dossiers on left-wing and right-wing groups whose innocent sounding names (“Pigeons for Democracy,” “Angels of World Unity”) endeared them to Montague. Leo was a former Socialist Party activist who had once been photographed by the New York Times being carried out by police when he staged a sit-down during a civil rights demonstration. He was one of the few at Jewish Punchers of intellectual weight, who had wound up there because their credentials were too spotty for establishment organizations. Jewish Punchers took almost anybody.
When Leo drank too much, he subjected Montague to interrogations, the point of which were how little Montague was supposed to know about the subject at hand.
Leo was eloquent in his awkwardness. At staff meetings, he would rise to make a point. Stumbling and stammering, even stuttering in his passion, blood rushing to his face, he looked like he would explode in a torrent of incoherence. Three-quarters of the way to the end, he would suddenly marshal his argument and his words came tumbling out in a froth, painful, trembling, sparkling, an effort of will, witty and funny and coherent. He gave birth each time. I began to root for him, that he would make it to the point when he began to sing, and I found his struggle a little thrilling.
Leo was one of the many lonely womanless men at Jewish Punchers. He invited me over to his bachelor pad and shared with me his nightly pre-dinner ritual: the sip of vodka from the freezer, the cold herring from the fridge: ah! he downed it. Once, at a staff weekend in the Catskills, I watched him dancing with a pretty woman. Leo was courtly and smiling and agile.
He had emphysema, and it was taking over his life. Each breath was a struggle and he carried the inhaler with him. He coughed and spat into a handkerchief, he gasped for breath, and struggled to keep going.
I had a dream about him. In the dream, Leo wasn’t sick or dying. He was living in a brownstone on Washington Square Park and the lights were twin kling there at sunset as the young lovers sat in the square. Leo was having a salon of the bright and beautiful at his home (or were they old Socialists with baseball caps and canes?) to discuss the social and political ideas and issues he loved.
VI
Montague spoke Hebrew, Yiddish, Greek, Italian and Russian in that soft, syrupy, mellifluous voice of his that was almost a whisper. After World War Two, I was astonished to learn, he had served in the Haganah, the Jewish underground, in Rome in 1946. He had navigated ships.
On his first trip to Israel by boat, Montague said, “If you can imagine a boatload of passengers crying … Haifa was all white. I couldn’t eat. People just stared and cried. There was pandemonium when we got off the boat. When we reached our kibbutz, I didn’t want anyone to speak to me. I just wanted to look. My old friends who’d come before me greeted me. We sat by the fire and sang. I stayed up all night.”
Now Montague was a member of the Harry Reems Defense Committee, helping out on weekends at the porn star’s office on Charles Street. Montague hated Israel now and loved all Palestinians. In all of New York, Montague seemed to encounter kindness and sweetness mainly among the Palestinian grocers and restaurant owners he patronized. “I hand them knives,” he told me, “and tell them: ‘Please. Please cut me. I deserve it, for all that the Jews have done to you.’ And do you know—” Montague asked this question in wonderment—“They hand me back the knives without a word?”
After a pause, Montague said, “What hurt me was that my father tried to be an American. I brought him the Yiddish Forward and he hid it in the New York Times. A Jew is always a special individual. We lived through a Holocaust and one out of three of us was killed. I believe the New Testament and the Koran are responsible for Mein Kampf.”
The phone rang. Montague whispered into it at his daintiest: “I want you to sit on my right hand. Is that the kind of thing you kiss me? A little sick kiss?”
The next morning, Montague looked at me and said, “My grandmother was a soothsayer. She was known as the witch. She told fortunes, and was a midwife. She delivered many children. She kept a sharp carrot in holy water for the Christians. And I’m the product of incest. My parents were first cousins. That’s why I’m a little weird.
“I wore knickers and high argyle stockings as a boy. I was the only one with stockings. I felt so ashamed. I gave most away to the other boys. My mother saw they were gone and she pinched me. A few days later, on my eighth birthday, I wandered into a Father Divine church. There were tambourines and I started dancing. I forgot about my birthday. I put on a button that said, ‘Father Divine is God.’ My mother found me and made me give back the button. I thought it was chic.”
Chaim came in with some papers for Montague. “You’re very kind to think of me, Chaim,” Montague said. When Chaim left, Montague said, “Animal. Filthy fascist dog. He pisses and shits with God. I wish he would choke himself on his tallus.”
I placed my hands against the side of the desk to keep from falling over the precipice, pushed over the precipice of Montague’s rage. When would that rage turn on me?
Montague’s fury at the new file baskets mounted each day. He threatened to urinate on them.
He went to the movies almost every day. “Matador is my current favorite,” he said. “It’s about a young man in Spain who’s very religious. He wears a metal brace against his penis to keep it down. He goes crazy over the pretty girl next door. He can’t stand it; he follows her down the street. He throws her against a car, takes out his penis and fucks her. There’s a trial. The girl testifies, ‘He didn’t fuck me. He came between my legs.’” Montague’s face was dark red with laughter; his chins were shaking. “Her mother got upset.” Now Montague was hysterical, heaving; he struggled to get the words out, his face was a beet. “The mother says, ‘You shouldn’t say �
��come.’ You should say ‘ejaculate.’”
On Friday morning, there was a knock at the door. “It’s only me,” Montague said as usual, entering. He put his overcoat on the rack and sat down.
Leo Starch walked in and smiled. Suddenly, inexplicably, he and Montague were friends. They seemed to like each other’s hostility. They were exchanging stories. “When I was a kid in Brownsville, which we pronounced Brunsville,” Leo began, addressing Montague, “my brother Steve had eczema. My mother had taken him to several clinics. No one could help us. But one afternoon the seltzer man came. He’d bring a case of six bottles, like the milkman. Once a week. You’d keep the bottles on the fire escape to keep them cold. He came and saw my brother with the eczema and said, ‘I have a cure for that.’ My mother said, ‘So what’s the cure?’ The seltzer man said, ‘I’ll bring you a bottle of stuff’—that’s the word he used, ‘stuff’—‘the next time I come. It’ll cost you a dollar.’ So my mother took a chance. He came, he brought a bottle of some kind of stuff, liquid stuff. It worked like a charm.”
Montague smiled. “He didn’t say what it was, where he got it?”
“No, it was a secret. Secret formula.”
Montague felt this was a sufficient answer. “Arnold Wolin is the most masculine person in this office,” he said suddenly. Arnold was twenty-eight, paper thin, a stooped cutter and paster with a thin beard and an intelligence deficit. He shuffled around the office in his slippers. “He won’t live long,” Montague said. “He had a colostomy. I admire him. A lot of people I know in that position would give up. Before he goes to the toilet he has to loosen his shoes. I don’t know why.
“By 3 P.M. Arnold finishes cutting and pasting, and gives me the articles to categorize. He can’t think. He has no curiosity. He doesn’t know where countries are. He stands on the subway all the way back to Brooklyn. He lives near me. He paints. He writes music. He plays instruments. He’s still paying off his wedding from three years ago. He’s sexy; he and his wife talk on the phone and it’s very romantic. He’s very appreciative of women.
“Before he married, he went to massage parlors. He’s very heterosexual in his way. I have a high regard for him. He faced the reality; he’ll die young. His wife is so dumb—but she’s a woman. She lived upstairs in his apartment house and he courted her on the fire escape. On Fridays, she lights the Sabbath candles in her office and walks across the Brooklyn Bridge toward home with them lit.”
After Leo left, Montague scooped up a pile of papers off his desk and shoved them in the bottom drawer. “As a child,” he said, “I would listen to the Hearn’s Children’s Hour on the radio. They had tap dancers. My mother would listen to the tap dancing and say, ‘That was so nice.’ Then, in 1945, I listened to the Hit Parade every Saturday night at nine. Bea Wayne and Andre Baruch. He conducted the orchestra. I detested it.” Montague stuck out his tongue and said, “Aaaaaaagh.”
The phone rang. Montague’s mood changed abruptly. The call was from a pretty housewife who called him frequently and seemed to somehow have a crush on him. “Oh my dear,” Montague cooed, “it’s lovely to have your input.” He smashed the phone down. “I hate having to serve these suburban pigs. Jew-girl. She grew up in the co-ops, and now she’s a member of Hadassah and belongs to a temple.” Montague made a face and made vomiting sounds again. I began to feel dizzy.
“She took me to lunch on Columbus Avenue. I can’t stand walking there any more. Those yuppies, I want to machine gun all of them.”
I stood up, afraid I would faint, and started to open the door. Would it open? Would I ever get out of Montague’s target range? This was my fate, to have Montague’s bountiful hatred turned on me at last, to be killed by a crazy Jew. Jewish Punchers had the most elaborate security system to protect itself against anti-Semites, and I would die right here in the dust and files and paper clips. “Report me!” Montague shouted at me. “Report me to Leo, that Nazi bastard.”
Montague would become agreeable again after each explosion. “My Aunt Ida,” he said the next morning, “went to live with Indians in Arizona. She was addicted to coffee beans. She smelled of coffee.
“She decided she wanted to live on an Indian reservation. She was about sixty then and she had rheumatism. Then she moved to Glendale, California. There she found Catholicism. She became a Catholic of the Byzantine rite.
“My aunt was a very big woman: six feet tall. Big, red-headed, buxom. Big behind and big breasts. And she sewed for petite Cuban ladies. They would wear a lot of color, because they were dark and petite. She wore the same styles. Net stockings: this was in the 1930s. A flower on the side of her skirt. Spangles. A beauty mark on her face. Her lips like Betty Boop. She had four husbands. She ran off from one of them with her violin teacher. She refused to become an American citizen. She said, ‘I belong to the woild.’
“People like this don’t exist anymore. Now you have things that are stamped, that come out of a machine. She had a lot of hostility. The family rejected her, to say the least, and she was not a happy person. My mother says I’m a carbon copy of her. She was very impractical. And she was a very kind-hearted person. She thought to look light was very nice. She was light to begin with; she had red freckles. So she put flour on her face. She’d eat butter and sour cream together, to lighten up.
“A priest wrote to an uncle of mine that she had died. Among her effects was a prayer book, a machzor, for Rosh Hashonah and Yom Kippur.”
“What was her name?” I asked Montague.
“Ida Levinsky. We called her by her family name. Hashke. Ida was her slave name. Most Jews have them: the names families give to children that appeal to the goyim.”
VII
As the seasons turned, Montague and I continued to talk each day as we sat at our desks in the windowless room. At night, his ravings continued in my head.
But Montague never did turn on me. Nor did he turn toward me. There was no real movement. It was static; like petrified rock. I sensed that sometimes Montague cared about me and liked me; sometimes there was even something remotely paternal in Montague. But in the same minute, or hour, or the next day, Montague was caught up in his own hatreds. There was an impersonality to that hatred; it did not really center on me. Sometimes I thought Montague was sparing me. Montague moved neither forward nor back; he was caught in the utter conviction of his own inconsequentiality. And he wanted to stamp himself out.
In the evenings now, we sat in the back row of Dapper Dan’s: me, Leo, Montague, and Robb Bernstein, his white linen suit draped carefully on his lap. There was the smell of disinfectant and urine and Lysol everywhere. A man with a pail of soapy water loudly mopped up. Flies hovered over the free hoagies in the corner. On a Friday night, we sat on the broken seats, the flashing lights, the booming percussion of the tapes.
Kitty Hawk spotted us and said, “I wish I was a Jew!”
Leo, curious and grateful for the interaction, called out, “Why, Kitty Hawk?”
“Because then I’d be rich.”
This remark did not constitute anti-Semitism so vicious as to qualify for Leo’s files. As Kitty began to remove her spangles, Montague turned to us and said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here. It’s Shabbos. Where can we get some candles?”
We stood by the bridge and struck matches. Montague led the way, the four of us holding our candles, as we walked slowly across the bridge, past the glittering city, looking down into the harbor and the National Cold Storage Company, and toward Brooklyn.
The Great Kisser
I
I was known as the Jewish writer who hated his mother more than any other Jewish writer. My best known story was “My Mother Is Not Living.”
At 21 I had returned from Israel, tanned and happy, with a girl on my arm. I had worked on the kibbutz for a summer picking cherries. My mother was waiting at the airport. “God, you’re ugly,” she said to me, smiling. Her eyes were flashing. This was better than sex for her.
“Michael Goldberg, your mother is downstairs.
Michael Goldberg, your mother is waiting,” Lily the telephone operator at Jewish Punchers announced over the loudspeaker. I heard it in my office.
My mother stood in front of the building, breathing heavily. I hadn’t seen her more than three times in fifteen years. I’d fled to colleges in Vancouver and Boston, dodging the draft with deferments and dodging her. Now I was back in Manhattan. She handed me my presents, the first in fifteen years: a black raincoat that she knew I wanted, and a heavy wooden box with six bottles of Southern Comfort, which I’d never tasted. “For your new apartment,” she explained.
As women passed by, my mother scrutinized them as she always did, her eyes crinkling, watching the competition. But now she was old.
“How do I look?” she said, smiling. I saw the gold in her teeth. “Beautiful,” I said.
“I didn’t say I wasn’t beautiful.”
She looked at me. “Is your apartment nice?” She turned her face sharply to the right.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?”
“You’ll see it soon.”
“I will?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. But you don’t have a cat anymore, right?”
“I have a great cat.”
“You know I hate cats!” she shouted. “Get rid of it. It’s me or the cat.”
That was a major mistake on her part. There would be no visit.
II
Two years later, a distant relative called me and and told me that my mother was in the hospital. We argued over the phone. “It’s heart surgery, a bypass. She may die, Michael.”
I banged my fist down on the desk angrily.
After work, I set out for the hospital. Instead of taking the subway, I began to walk the five miles, stretching out the time until I had to see my mother. I was furious. At least I would get some exercise.
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