Witz

by Joshua Cohen

  PopPop takes out his teeth, spits on them, rubs them shined on a sleeve of his robe, shuffles to the kitchen then returns with an alternative, puddings, a delicacy of the Mixed Kitchen, the specialty of an alien house; a neutral foodstuff this linnerless or undunched option, the favorite dish of the Unaffiliated and those, too, with dentures of any persuasion: pareved without ethnicity as it’s become, institutionally, the chosen sustenance of the elderly, the geriatric without mind or the stomach with which to digest implications of nationality, race, or religion. PopPop favored pudding, the more jiggling the better, and concocted it well, its recipe no miraculous secret, you just have to ask, though its vital ingredient you wouldn’t expect.

  They’re Nest Eggs; white ellipticals washing up on the shoreline since last-last-Xmas—at least, that’s when they first were noticed, or initially reported, three years ago now—amazingly white rounds, almost geological, waved in to rest upon gently sloping, surely endangered dunes: seeming, too, like supersized disembodied teeth, artificially whitened, set in sunken gums of sand, for a while the phenomenon was suspected a savvy advertising scheme on the part of a statewide dentistry franchise, which suspicion has since been allayed as the owners of said franchise died, this Xmas Eve, and the ovoids kept washing up, apparently innocent of ploy; a handful of local Injuns had been spreading rumors of them as ominous if hackneyed omens, cryptoSeminoles casting them mailorder to the interior for an old doublesawbuck, shipping also overseas at a profit not insignificant; select restaurants and participating retail outlets throughout panhandle and Gulfside Florida had begun accepting them in lieu of cash, credit, paper, or plastic; and many began to worship these odd ova, which emanated a strangely cinematic, lowbudgeted luminescence under sufficient strength of overhead fluorescence: enough to tan, not enough to make accompanying toast; they became ensconced on dashboards, as hood ornaments; largebreasted, thicknecked women wore them in silver settings around their necks; the athletically inclined jogged with one in each hand to enhance the effects of their morning workouts; meanwhile, environmentalists were out scooping them up, gathering them in deep, widemeshed nets; every once in a while a volunteer occupied untangling seaweed from a net would break one underfoot, to a flow viscous, noisome—they seemed to be a species of allyolk egg, which subsequent laboratory tests inconclusively confirmed, identifying them as Nest Eggs, after some janitor in a hot labcoat came up with the name; and one, which as the circumferentially biggest yet found had been taken to University of Miami Medical for experimentation, after a period of tepid incubation hatched a previously unknown species of snowbird, which was immediately determined nonkosher, slaughtered then barbecued to refresh a faculty banquet. Three Nest Eggs, stacked in a glass, cracked on its rim, then poured out into another glass, the preferred nightcaps of PopPop Israelien: he drank them before bed, ate them in omelets in the morning—with diverse species of mushrooms, onions, peppers, as equal opportunity cheeses as his lower tract could allow—fried them for a snack, hardboiled them, sliced, diced, then mixed them into an undressed salad in the afternoon, poached them for a snack, scrambled, or sunnysided them up in the evening, used Nest Eggs in eggnog, too, this being the season, and of course in the omnicourse dessert he serves himself, the pudding. Monday through Saturday, this was his sustenance, but every Sunday since he and his wife had retired here, the days of her death and Benjamin’s arrival included, PopPop brunched in a buffet, alone, the Restaurant Under the Sign of the Imperfectly Toned Pectorals its name, liningup always at nine sharp and waving a vellum swath resplendent with Habsburgian seals, shrieking indignant theft at the expectant waitstaff.

  His weekly dispute, you understand, was over the sun, parching premeditated arson over the openair diningarea. PopPop Israelien owned the sun, if you’re following, he tells Benjamin between pudding mouthfuls, having purchased it from its former owner—a local greyhound breeder with whom he’d often shared a card of onehanded B – I – N – G – O—with goddamn near his entire savings, having signed the papers a day after his retirement (MomMom had almost died upon receiving the news: from that day, her cancer, Israel’d thought, the slow sunning to Malignantville, FL, Cemetery County, the dead’s exurbanized plot), the sun the only property in his portfolio, his sole investment, and due to the ever over and over again difficulties as explained to the manager—who was apparently not deaf, despite the impudent buzzing of his cochlear implant—the impractical exigencies of keeping track of just who exactly uses the sun, for what purpose, with what intensity, beginning when and for how long during what season because rates always change, PopPop explaining to Him now, he’d decided to extort payment from here and here only, having been successful only this past week, and what a stunner, though what with the late weather who knows how long it’ll last.

  I’m telling you for the last time, PopPop’s telling him the Manager for the last time that Sunday, you need to get out from under my sun; you’re stealing my light, my heat, and I’ve asked of you virtually nothing, zip, nada, I was willing to go as low as what, $10 a month, ten dollars, know what it set me back, much more than that, I’ll tell you, listen, my son…

  Please, Mister Israelien, the Manager’s shivering under the property in dispute, we all know your son’s a lawyer, we’ve discussed this matter with him on a number of occasions; now, allow me to apologize for any inconvenience.

  We’ve just recently agreed with him to rent your sun for the sum of $8/month, we think this fair, overcast or not, eclipses we’ll deal, and we hope you’ll agree; we’re prepared to pay today for January, and will pay for every month within a week of its first. In return, we’ll have unlimited usage; no rays attached, if you will; you’ll not hassle us anymore, do we have an understanding? and PopPop adds up the figures tattooed on the mensch’s arm, asks him let’s shake.

  I’ll need a month’s security deposit, and two months up front…

  The manager shuts eyes, grinds lids, says, you’re very fair, Mister Israelien, then shakes his cuff as PopPop’s a bissel too afraid of the germs, and this with a Health Inspection last Monday, then leaves him for the kitchen to telephone the son, Israel, to finalize the terms of his payment, to be remitted in full to the restaurant midmonth ($18), payment—eight dollars, ten to the restaurant for its trouble—to be transferred to the account of the son’s estranged father a week later; please, the manager’s asking the lawyer who just last year cleared himself a competent million, I’d prefer a bank check, you understand. And though Israel’d thought about taking a percentage for himself, Hanna she, forget it.

  Limply limbed through the buffetline, PopPop rests his tray at his regular table, outside though shaded and even in this winter they’re having, to partake with a slow deliberation that would be laudable if it wasn’t excruciating, not manners but their vigilant, overdone caricature: he remains erect, firm, silent, disciplined. He esses like the Kaiser must’ve, perfectly, a fressing annoying in the extremity of its decorum, its stateliness and the force of its grace, his posture as if he isn’t indulging with a spoon but is rather sitting on one, and deep, jutting up his gape and into him to scoop out all the inside nervousness, impatience, Weltschmerz and its American stress, the disapproving pain of its stick and the bowl of his bowel perhaps actually enabling the outer serenity, the set face under which his napkin remains immaculate throughout, unto even the postprandial, tucked meticulously under chin and over collar, further protected by the fork and knife he’s using and though recently unmatched plastic at this establishment he’s so enthused with his rental he almost doesn’t notice, just remembers to tip less, and ignores, too, the interior decorating just beyond, the chintz on the cheap with the mirrors, the lights and the Polynesian thatch, the tiki torches and hula luau lei, preferring instead the gustatory setting of his own increasingly senile mind: stags’ heads, alpine appointments, huntinglodge surroundings, fluted stemware, bone china. Wrapped in reverie as if for mental takeout, he’s handling his whitely tined pretensions to silver, slicing and scooping
away as if to pristinate plate, as pure as his conscience and cold, a disc plastic itself, and probably inadequately washed, then attempting in the interest of kinder starving in nations darker, unsunned, even the garnishes slit into flowers that bloom like malicious vaginas, magically metamorphosed sexbidextrous swans, prior to reclining—though only after a final faint swipe of his lips—then lighting up an imported cigar banded in gold to lip rings of smoke to the least heaven of umbrella, whose shadow has been sponsored, apparently, by a maker of popular water.

  PopPop’s Pop had inadvertently immigrated Here while on a research trip organized at the request of an Archduke Tungteufel, to study the skulls of famed jazz musicians up in Harlem, New York, to determine the phrenological similarities amongst shvartzes of various nationalities, to account for any effect on interpretation, and swing: I spent all my time up there on 125th Straße, hanging around the Apollonian Temple, he’d reminisce to no one, handing nothing down from Pop to PopPop, God! you wouldn’t believe how they bopped! Alternative sexuality seemingly in the family, PopPop the Elder, PopPop’s Pop, would become infatuated with a saxophonist with a pate as smooth as his altissimo: one verse/two choruses later, instead of following him west for three onenighters and a recording date, he had an epiphany of guilt as PopPop describes it, left the shvartze at the train station, went back to his own ghetto that was Manhattan’s Downtown and began to court an Affiliatedess, the daughter of an innovative insurance salesmensch who kept office on the first floor of the tenement in which he would room.

  Long story short is that this here insurance salesmensch, PopPop’s Pop’s possible, potential father-inlaw, was “one of those people”—Affiliated; one of their prototypical genii as stereotyped in a variety of media you’ll one day become beholden to, PopPop says to Benjamin, such typecast perpetuated through the ever efficient agencies of history, most notable of which a lasting disposition toward oppression of the race, or religion, which has proved to seed only greater generations, and yadda. According to PopPop talking over His head to the wall hung with samplers and framed photographs of himself and his wife with his face scissored out and hers facialhaired with marker, this mensch sold insurance of all kinds: conception insurance, circumcision insurance, spiltmilk insurance, walking insurance, talking insurance, O how that mensch could talk! untied shoelace insurance, cowlick insurance, friendlessness insurance, virginity insurance, spousal insurance, anticonception insurance, mortgage insurance, unemployment insurance, alcohol insurance, sobriety insurance, child insurance, second child insurance, loss of faith in major religion insurance, undercooked linner/dunch insurance, breastcancer insurance, breastcancer remission insurance, secondmortgage insurance, impotence insurance, migraine insurance, ingrowntoenail insurance, grandson insurance, second grandson insurance, forgotten anniversary insurance, un-flattering shade of hairdye insurance (if purchased at selected retailers, as it’s disclaimed), weightgain insurance, weight then heightloss insurance, hairloss insurance, livercancer insurance, kidneyfailure insurance, rabbi’s (inappropriate) eulogy insurance, inexistent afterlife insurance, and don’t forget his most popular—insurance against insurance; making himself a sizable fortune off the weekend Apocalyptics, hypochondriacs, obsessive/compulsives, neurotics, and undifferentiated spastics known even then to inhabit the New York metropolitan area.

  But getting back to what I was getting at earlier: PopPop says his Pop had been this insurance salesmensch’s first customer—I’m not just a prospective inlaw, I’m a client…though as such a trifle of the failure, too, as it wasn’t originally for any coverage he’d come. He’d flopped in fishily wet from the peddling, cartconcerned street in the first minute of the first hour of their third grand opening—an easy occasion for bunting, a common scheme of the desperate proprietor—and asked the insurance salesmensch’s wife mensching the register (her husband out selling marital insurance to his sister-in-law), maybe you have a room available, upstairs…to that effect and then, recognizing what he thought was a fellow grant whether immi or emi, asked along the lines of, how long have you been here for, you, I mean, Here? a question that could only perplex PopPop’s Pop’s maybe, could’ve been, mother-inlaw, as the Affiliated of her line had been Here for so very long that they weren’t able to recollect when, exactly, they’d first arrived on these shores, from where and how, forget why: were they Mayflower stowaways? a cabin of Columbus’ Marranos? and how he then, blah blah blah asked her daughter whichever one of them to marry him and they both asked him what did he do, translation: how much money he made, then spit in his eye—she, the first Affiliated he’d tried to be with, the last; he went and bought sexual orientation insurance off the obliging father returned, then a week later met an orphaned I think Sicilian with a suggestive gap in his teeth, he wasn’t so into resistance…

  Emigrate, PopPop says, you emigrate if you love it Here.

  Immigrate, he says again, you immigrate if you hate it There.

  You have to admit, it’s not so bad.

  PopPop asks, Who would rather go back? And then you realize, he’s talking about New York.

  It’s this. PopPop’s the worst kind of retiree, without kindness: he was of the type who felt they’d earned their retirement, who didn’t have the respect to die just yet, with dignity, without; who didn’t understand that you worked your entire life for this death, not to do nothing, to retire, recede, give up, which you should’ve done to begin with; one of those who felt entitled to something, anything, though they weren’t quite sure what, the world owing him a living, him owing the world nothing much anymore; the author of interminable letters to the editors of major metropolitan newspapers, he’d labor meticulously over petitions, product failure screeds, signing everything Spinoza; filled days in with the regions of service assessment surveys, answered any and all questions invariably nightly and in agonizing detail in telemarketing interviews—that, and Benjamin never knew what to believe: according to PopPop himself, an academic formerly associated with a halfway respectable (small, private, northeastern) university that should remain nameless if we don’t want to get sued, though later little more than an adjunct, a lowly untenured professor, the Administration even refusing him the sanctuary of a department—and that’s only what he told people, especially when they didn’t ask. A mensch of no degree save the Third, he’d purportedly taught a semester of Practical Eugenics (its prerequisite being Sterilization & You 101), and one elective (Antfarming for Fun & Profit), before the deans realized he wasn’t accredited for any of these responsibilities, summarily redirected him to the dept. of Nostalgia, or so one colleague had named the shadow faculty that nonetheless maintained offices on a bench way offcampus. Which was why he’d had to get the artificial toes he’d remove each night after pudding dessert, as one evening up north, locked out of a meeting, locked out of every university building, he’d slept on that bench, then contracted frostbite—that’s what you get for signing a pizza box, without showing it first to a lawyer—the next day his toes had to be amputated; still, he wore his sandals religiously, out of an abject phobia of having his shoelaces tied together: his toeplug of vulcanized rubber, fitted snugly to that pedestrian void, would lie each evening on the nightstand, alongside his dentures in their effervescence, to be scrubbed both immaculately by a spare toothbrush next morning and so, yes, hahafutzingha, and he finds it very funny himself, when he remembers, that he would often get mixed up, senior mistakes, the onset of dementia, mind mumblingly numb—he’d often put his foot in his mouth, but not as much as he’d put his mouth in his foot, chewing Benjamin’s tush for just about everything.