by Howard Bloom
So my granddad learned to make heels and toes, became capable of chatting with customers in six languages, left Russia in the 1890s, and landed at Ellis Island where they couldn’t spell his moniker, Wechelefsky. They looked at his rosy complexion and wrote on his passport “Bloom.” He left the island trying to remember his new name and looking for work making leather encasements for feet. (The concrete foot-encasement concession was strictly Italian.)
Turned out, there was a naval base where they were fiddling with real high-tech stuff—lighter-than-air machines, blimps and dirigibles—in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The idea of being lighter than air appealed to my grandfather. I mean, us Jews like to rise in the world. What’s more, a military installation had officers, and as any Russian kid knows, officers wear boots. If they didn’t, their subordinates would have nothing to lick.
So my noble ancestor set himself up sheathing the legs of naval brass in the finest leather, then took his earnings and started a general store in Asbury Park, New Jersey. And somewhere along the line he got married.
I sent my father a letter asking what his parents’ relationship was like. I got back…nothing. So when my dad came to visit, I hit my alleged parental sperm donor with the question again. His answer was simple. “In those days,” he said, “husbands and wives didn’t have relationships.”
Meanwhile, the family patriarch with the struggling general store and the nearly-invisible wife had a whole bunch of daughters—five, to be more precise. My grandfather read to his girls every night, sometimes in Yiddish, and more often in English, which he had persuaded a teacher to pound into his tongue the instant he hit North American soil. But he was desperate for a son, some sprig of manliness sufficiently broad-shouldered to carry the family name. Despite the fact that that name, Bloom, was ridiculous for humans. Good for flowers, but not so good for Homo sapiens. So desperate was my grandfather that he offered a deal to God, the Almighty, Lord of the Universe, creator of the ten plagues. Yes, he made an offer to Jehovah, who, according to the scientific literature, had given up on mankind and was perfecting eight million species of beetles. The offer? If God gave him a son, his faithful servant, my grandfather, would build the first synagogue in Asbury Park, New Jersey.
Occasionally, the poor male-offspring-deprived man would stop his prayers for a few minutes, and, despite his lack of a relationship with his wife, would roll on top of her in the feather bed. Honoring the code of silence that apparently existed between the pair, he pretended it was an accident. Eventually his accidents paid off. One of his wife’s semi-annual discharges was a male.
The old man rejoiced, built the promised house of worship, and was so elated that he added a bonus: in gratitude he would close his store on the Sabbath, on Saturdays, which meant that to feed his hatchlings, he was going to have to start retail hours on Sunday, a violation of the town’s Blue Laws. My grandfather battled the bureaucracy for his right to adhere to the dictates of his religion. And he stomped the legal system into the ground. All in honor of his one and only son—Isidor.
Then he discovered in his newly rearranged spare time that he had a nose for real estate. In fact, if it was anything like my nose, it was a very large one. As a result of his success in sniffing out winning properties, neighbors who hoped that he would share the wealth called him the King of Springfield Avenue. It worked. He rewarded his flatterers with royal gifts whenever they tumbled into trouble.
Meanwhile, my father surreptitiously switched his name from Isidor to Irving. He was afraid of being confused with Isadora Duncan. Though I think his dancing would have given him away.
Meanwhile, the King of Springfield Avenue could be seen each morning walking the future champion of the family name—my father—to school. He would lovingly watch as his son strode into the institution’s front entrance, then march off to buy up more of Asbury Park as his offspring slipped out the school’s back door and headed for the train station, where he watched the locomotives and dreamed of adventures in distant lands, mythic Shangri-Las like…New York. All of this would have an impact on my later escapades.
This series of events spat out a problem. Because of God’s tardiness in providing a male heir, his Yiddisha majesty, my grandfather, died when his son was a teenager. The old man’s wife had already preceded him on the thorny path to heaven. Her internal organs could no longer take being accidentally squashed and poked by a man she scarcely knew.
In Anglo-Saxon society, the family possessions go straight to the eldest son, and everyone else in the brood sponges off of him for the next fifty or sixty years, living in his country pile. In Jewish families, royalty descends through the princesses. So my Aunt Beck, a boulder of strength, took over the palatial family abode, the real estate treasures, the bank account, and the responsibility for raising my father. She also handled the budding young flapper who was the family’s youngest sister, and the many children of the two oldest Bloom girls, who both died of pneumonia at the tender age of thirty-nine. My aunt Beck’s imprint on my psyche would later haunt my sex life. Viciously.
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Eventually, for reasons lost in the ashcans of history, my dad went off to make his fortune in the land of opportunity—Buffalo, New York. How he picked this god-forsaken town I’ll never know. He met Buffalo Bob Smith (I kid you not), who had a great idea about a puppet, but my dad wasn’t into pulling strings, and television hadn’t happened yet, so he missed his big chance to wear a clown suit and become famous as the sidekick on the first really big children’s television show in history—Howdy Doody. Yes, had fate been celebrating Practical Joke Day, my dad could have been Clarabell the Clown, a superstar of the Fifties. A man every five-year-old laughed at. Ah, the bitterness of fate.
As a result, when the Depression came my dad was poor like everyone else. He ate a can of beans a day and saved the labels for a late-night snack—but at least he was eating, which is more than some people could say.
Then he collided with my mother. One of the most unfortunate accidents that could have befallen him.
You’ve met my father’s folks, the ones descended from a courier for the tsar in White Russia, a nation known to its intimate friends as Belarus. My grandmother on my mother’s side was a tough young socialist, freethinking (e.g. atheistic) teenager from Riga, Latvia, a city suffering from a seven-hundred-year-old subcultural split. A split that would later splash its way into, of all things, the very same spot my aunt Beck would come to haunt, my sex life. But that’s a tale for later.
The allegedly gorgeous young red head, my maternal grandmother, decided to make a break for it and go to the land where the streets were paved with gold and ended up married to a tailor in Buffalo and the Depression came and they were poor, too.
But my mother was extremely articulate, had a vocabulary that would have turned Noah Webster green, and possessed intellectual aspirations. Or was she possessed by them? What’s more, her fingers were Olympian in their capabilities. She could play Beethoven’s greatest finger-tanglers on the piano, and could type ninety-five words per minute. So she got a job as the secretary to the head of the New York State Liquor Authority. Which, she once implied, meant that she kept the whole statewide secret sauce (or is it secret souse?) authority operating while her boss went out with the boys for their daily eighteen-course, sixteen-cocktail, expense-account lunches.
My mom met my father, wasn’t very impressed with him, married him, still wasn’t impressed, and helped him get a liquor license using the contacts from her state job. He started, surprise, a liquor store. Then my dad was yanked into World War II. Uncle Sam wanted him. Considering the questionable taste of a man who wears a white beard, a red bow tie, and a top hat with a blue band dotted with great big white stars, it’s hard to tell if that was a compliment. My pop’s three-year disappearance would prove crucial. But how and why is a story for later.
When Irving Bloom returned three years later to the city that Lake Erie forgot
, he discovered that his store was still a hole in the wall and that he and my mother were still as poor as they’d ever been, so he worked thirteen hours a day, seven days a week, until he built the thing into the biggest retail alcohol supply center in Western New York State. As for my mother, she still wasn’t impressed.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. That’s the story of the family’s roots. Now let’s look at the family’s leaves. Or maybe that should be the leftovers. Which is where I come in.
AND UNTO THEM A CHILD WAS BORN
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Bloom,
This is Ed McMahon, and on behalf of the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes I’d like to congratulate you as winners of our super-duper, once-(or maybe twice at most)-in-a-lifetime Grand Prize. As you know, the lucky folks who respond to the megatons of junk mail with which we generously dole out curvature of the spine to the postal workers of America have a chance to win fabulous fortunes—millions and millions of dollars, 400-foot yachts (courtesy of Donald Trump, who failed to sell his little beauty to the Japanese in 1990 and finally let us have it if we agreed to accept his vintage collection of docking bills and parking tickets), trips to the fabulous Roach Motel in beautiful Desert Gulch, Nevada, just 150 miles outside of exciting downtown Las Vegas, and a host of other prizes too delectable to mention. And every time hell freezes over, we faithfully hand out one of these prizes to some family who will agree to drool with gratitude on television.
But you, Mr. and Mrs. Bloom, are special. You have ignored every one of our marvelous offers of fantastic magazines—like the Lint Collectors Weekly—at only twice their normal newsstand prices. So for you, we have a prize so super, so special, so unbelievable that we will have you shot by our security service if you ever reveal that it came from us. Yes, in honor of your years of faithfully ignoring every sweepstakes we’ve waved under your nose, we have given you what every red-blooded American man and woman fears more than anything else in the world—a completely maladjusted, pathological, baffling, prematurely eccentric infant. And here’s the best part—he’s all yours, complete with a personalized collection of your very own genes (which have been only slightly scrambled by our massive research and development staff, who was distracted by his janitorial duties).
So, Mr. and Mrs. Bloom, be proud that you are citizens of the USA. For only in America could you get a child with allergies, illnesses, and an entire encyclopedia of psychological abnormalities from a mail-order scam operation. This is Ed McMahon, wishing you luck with your spectacular bonus award. May it bring you many years of happily gnashed teeth and joyfully rewarding tsouris. (Hey, Frank, what’s a tsouris? If it’s over ninety proof, I could use one.)
Congratulations again,
Ed McMahon
My memory of entering this world is a little fuzzy, possibly because the Martian egg story is true, but here’s the best data I can dredge up. I emerged from the womb in Buffalo, New York, at the famous Somebody-Or-Other Memorial Hospital on June 25, 1943, at either 6:00 a.m. or 6:00 p.m., but I think it was p.m. The doctors were anxious to have dinner, and were highly annoyed to discover that my mother was hemorrhaging, I was drowning in blood, they were going to have to open her up, and someone was going to have to plunge in and save me before I went down for the third time. Why they call this form of can-opening a Caesarian I’ll never know, because I hadn’t come, I hadn’t seen, and I certainly hadn’t conquered.
At any rate, they managed to get me out, much to my mother’s chagrin (she had wanted a girl and I didn’t turn out to be one, nor did I show much interest in even trying out the role). I imagine the spectacle spoiled the appetites of a good many medical rescuers laboring at the scene.
Those of you with an astrological bent will want to know the precise geographical coordinates of my birthplace. But Buffalo, New York, is a town which, as Rodney Dangerfield would say, don’t get no respect, so I think its latitude and longitude have been revoked. Alas, not only was the location peculiar, but my timing was a tad off. You recall that my mom helped shoehorn my dad into the dusty box that the pair called a liquor store. Then a nasty little German with a Charlie Chaplin mustache and his allies—inventors of the California tuna roll, the Japanese—threatened to wipe America off the map and replace it with Argentina. Or with sushi, depending on which would cover more territory. By 1943, when my mom was pregnant with, of all the unlikely people, me, the situation was so desperate that the government began to draft men over thirty who wore eyeglasses, had pregnant wives, and who had been obsessed with methods of transportation in their childhoods. My dad fit the description perfectly. Remember how he slipped out of the back door of his school to go to the train station?
The Navy tossed my dad into a satchel, sent him to Philadelphia, and stuffed him into Wharton for something that should have fit a railroad-obsessed man perfectly—training. At this astonishingly high class business school, my dad was taught…to type. A skill that didn’t stick. Hopefully they did better at educating him in the art of filing 3x5 cards.
After six months in Philadelphia, the military cognoscenti packed him into the vehicle of his dreams, a railroad car, and schlepped him to a newly opened naval base in San Francisco, Treasure Island, the home of the machines for whose officers his father had made boots: blimps. There, the Naval brass forced him to risk his life and save America by doing highly perilous clerical work—those paper cuts could kill you. To demonstrate how crucial his job was to the war effort, they gave him a title: chief petty officer. I kid you not. You may recognize this position from its equivalent in the Army—Army Specialist First Class Of It-Really-Doesn’t-Matter. Apparently, someone has to be an expert in the infinite piles of trivia that will never amount to a thing.
This means that my mom was left to run the store and to abandon the new baby (me) with, well, that was the problem. Terminology. Words matter. The phrase au pair did not exist in English. The term babysitter did. But my mom, who was normally as quick as a roomful of nuclear physicists chasing a neutrino, did something strange. To watch over me, she hired what were called in those early days of American history “cleaning women.” Now look, when you hire a babysitter it means you want someone to watch over your baby. Possibly even to coo to it and to catch its eye with a shake of a rattle once or twice a day. Heck, on rare occasion a babysitter might actually get carried away and indulge in a hug and a rocking session. But when you hire a cleaning woman, you imply a radically different priority. Yes, a lot of hugging and cooing may occur. But it’s all directed at a precious object that isn’t your baby. It’s focused on your vacuum cleaner. With a little spare attention reserved for another piece of electronica, your toaster-sized radio, which is playing the latest episode of a hot soap opera. Helen Trent was very big with the women my mother hired. The name of the sudsy radio saga I remember. But the cleaning lady’s names I don’t. They never introduced themselves. And they were too busy with their treasured pair of household appliances to get close enough for me to see their faces. In fact, I don’t even remember whether they had faces.
Which means that the Second World War created a monstrous problem for many of us who were infants at the time: it got us ignored. The apartment my family lived in should have been easy to clean. We lived on the second floor of a house my father, mother, and grandmother had chipped in to buy. But, remember, they were poor. So the expansive domicile that fell within their price range was just a squoomph bigger than a Velveeta cheese box. Which means that our apartment was roughly the size of a postage stamp from Baffin Island. Not more than three particles of grit could crowd into the place at a time. If there had been a bouncer at the door, he could have had specks of grunge anxious to dance in the place lined up around the block.
Despite the lightness of the chores, it appears that none of the ladies keeping my mother’s slightly-smaller-than-a-face-towel-sized carpet from accumulating unsightly particulates could stand the sight of my blond curls and handsome little face (
yes, in those days I was good-looking; it wasn’t until puberty that my mug began to resemble an elongated eggplant).
How do we know that the cleaning ladies regarded me as an obstacle to the Electrolux? The underworked specialists in spotless flooring put up a wooden baby gate and locked me in the narrow corridor that went from the living room in the front of the apartment to the two tiny bedrooms in the back. This was a dark, windowless hallway where the sun never shone and where there were no nice warm rugs to cover the cold hardwood floors on which my crawling palms were planted.
I sat on the frigid planks remembering what it had been like one Sunday when my mom was home and I had been allowed to sit in the bay window. For some strange reason, I could see the motes of dust that had managed to squeeze into the place drifting in the rays of the sun, rays that saturated me with warmth. I say for some strange reason because that ability to see nearly invisible threads of dust do a slow waltz in the light has utterly disappeared now that I’m an adult. Could that be because I’ve spent my grownup years in places so dirt-free that the dust no longer celebrates its ability to outfox the cleaning lady?
Sitting in the sun had felt wonderful. But now, locked behind the baby barrier, I saw the bay window from a distance so great that it was smaller than my fingernails. I sat in darkness longing for the light. Awful as this was, it would later squeeze forth an advantage. It would turn me into a perpetual outsider, a non-stop outcast. It would amplify my role as a visitor from outer space.
What’s the bonus produced by this perpetual exile? What’s the prize at the bottom of the alien Rice Krispy box? Sometimes those who are frozen out of the social circle can see more clearly than those who are locked in. Sometimes rejects can even see something that most of us miss: how flotsam and jetsam from seemingly random corners of the cosmos fit into a big picture.