by Robert Klein
Yet after my vicarious gloating, it occurred to me that the emotional implications were stark. How much satisfaction could Moish derive from a little humiliation of these “pieces of shit,” as he called them. They had slaughtered his family, for God’s sake. He told about playing cards with his comrades while hungry young German women under the table sucked chocolate off the men’s penises for money. As he told it through his smile, and the kaleidoscope of time, he shook his head, seemingly as regretful of that war memory as he was of the others. It was probably true that in his past, both the triumphs and the tragedies were tinged with shame. But as a holocaust survivor who had seen and suffered the ultimate in terror and degradation, there was a mystical aura about him. He had not been just a passive victim of the Nazis; he had fought back, and bravely, so the aura earned him respect and a little distance, and maybe just a bit of fear. Though all in all, if you got your butter and cream off your table in a timely fashion, cleared the dishes promptly, and gave good service, Moish was not hard to deal with in the dining room.
To our surprise, he said nothing after the breakfast-knife fiasco. The dispirited busboys worked the meal with glum faces and no snap in their step, too disgusted and embarrassed to talk about it. Reporting for lunch, we were instructed to gather in the corner of the dining room nearest the kitchen doors. Moish entered from the kitchen with Mr. Grunwald behind him. As headwaiter, he wore a waist-length white jacket with epaulets on the shoulder suggesting rank. He paced back and forth with his hands behind his back and delivered a talk. His subject was the failed insurrection against the Panamanian. He delivered a quick admonition about not disturbing the kitchen, but it seemed halfhearted, reluctant. It seemed that Henry the chef and his gang had threatened to walk out over the knife–tray fiasco.
Grunwald stepped forward, looking calm, even smiling. “Look, fellas, here’s the thing. If my kitchen staff leaves, nobody eats, and the hotel closes down. What am I gonna do, send out for three hundred corned-beef sandwiches?” There was some nervous laughter from the boys. “To replace a whole kitchen staff is impossible.” Then his tone got ugly and foreboding. “On the other hand, I can call Harold’s Agency in Monticello and replace every fucking one of you with some other nice college boys in forty-five minutes. Every fucking one of you. Capeesh?”
The Communist muttered something about union busting. Grunwald continued, “I’ll give you union busting, you little pinko snot nose. Mind your own business. You could have gotten knifed in there, I’d have a big lawsuit on my hands, and what would I tell your parents? Now, get back to work or pack your bags and get the hell out of here.”
There was a long, still pause. We took it like sheep. Apparently, management had taken the side of the felonious scumbag dishwasher for strategic reasons, never mind right and wrong. So the issue of the boots was put to rest for the moment, though we were reminded of it on every trip to the kitchen, where the amiable pot washer struggled uncomfortably to stand in ill-fitting shoes while the smirking shit who had cheated him displayed the goods.
A few nights after Mr. Grunwald’s speech, some of the guys were playing cards and preparing for bed at the Waldorf. A massive mambo lesson was happening above us, sounding like a stampede of buffalo. Suddenly, Guy walked in on the way to his shack, and he was wearing his boots and was happy as a ten-year-old at Christmas. “Hey, fellas, look what I got,” he said proudly.
“How did you get them back?” someone asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I woke up from a nap, and the dishwasher was putting on his shoes, and my boots was under my bed. He didn’t fuss none when I put on the boots. He even give me a Life Saver.”
“Holy shit!” said Mickey Newman, the English major from Queens College, “this is fucking unbelievable! The dishwasher must have had a revelation like Scrooge had—a dream, a vision, that made him atone for his wicked deed!”
“Bullshit,” I said. “Like that dishwasher would atone for anything in ten lifetimes without a thirty-eight pointed at his head.”
A lively speculative discussion ensued about the turn of events, with some of the boys assuming that Mr. Grunwald had made things right by giving the Panamanian money or threatening to fire him. Some of us didn’t think so. Grunwald wouldn’t bother to open another can of worms, and neither would Henry, who didn’t care in the first place. It had to be Moish. He became the prime suspect, though he had never shown the slightest interest in the case and always made it a point to mind his own business. Some of us could not wait until morning for an answer, so we went upstairs to the casino bar, where the headwaiter had his nightly drinks. Unfortunately, Grunwald’s sister-in-law was there and cajoled a few of the boys into dancing with some single female guests, a few of whom were widows, while others were unmarried daughters looking to hook on to a dentist or lawyer in the hope of someday becoming widows.
There was Moish, sitting at the bar with his usual smile that really wasn’t a smile. When the “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” cha-cha was over, we approached him. He seemed disinterested in the news of Guy’s good fortune and denied having had any part in it. Maybe I was imagining things, but the tension of his facial muscles seemed to suggest that he knew something. Anyone who could kill a Nazi face-to-face could convince a small-time diminutive thief to give back what he had stolen, I reasoned; that is, if he cared to.
“Moish, did you get him good? That slimy thief. You showed him, didn’t you?” I said.
“Enough already with these noodnik questions. The boy got his shoes back, so that’s that. Go to sleep, and don’t be late for breakfast.”
The next morning everyone pumped Davy for information, but he seemed reluctant to talk about it, which only made us more suspicious. Later, he told Kendall Haynes that he had seen Moish talking to the Panamanian on a wooded path behind the kitchen. The Panamanian was not at his station for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. His silent partner washed the dishes alone. This piqued our curiosity all the more. Johnny the cook said that the dishwasher had a sore throat and needed to take the day off. When he returned to work the next breakfast, he seemed like a different man, remarkably not the least bit hostile to the busboys who had threatened him and now dumped hundreds of dirty dishes at his stand. Nor was he unfriendly toward Guy, who was scrubbing burned eggs and onions out of huge frying pans. Guy was at full speed once again and whistling “Get Me to the Church on Time” from My Fair Lady, which was played endlessly on the hotel public address system.
Everyone noticed the source of the “sore throat” on the dishwasher, who wore a three-inch-square bandage on his throat, just above the collarbone. Some blood had seeped through the bandage. One of the boys asked him what the bandage was for, and he said he had cut himself shaving. Nobody grows hair that far down their throat short of a gorilla, so we knew he was full of shit, though none of us dared pursue the subject further.
We could only imagine what Moish might have done to the dishwasher. Tuli, an Israeli business major from City College, suggested that Moish had bitten the guy’s neck like a vampire. I thought he had grabbed the son of a bitch by the throat and dug his nails in. Most figured it was a knife, his purported weapon of choice in killing German soldiers. Throughout the entire meal, all of us kept glancing over at the headwaiter, though he revealed nothing, carrying twelve main dishes with aluminum covers on one tray, like a circus juggler. He yelled at Steven Stern for dropping two plates of sour cream and bananas on the dining room floor, but other than that, he seemed on an even keel.
Nobody ever asked him about the incident again. Not knowing exactly what had happened, I filled in the blanks and probably romanticized the issue. I hoped that Moish had seen the injustice done to a poor, helpless retarded man, and that it had affected him, and that this caring had cut through the thick callus of cynicism. That this was a small part of his healing the unhealable, a sign that Morris Landsman could feel again, hope again; so much so that he would intercede like a hero to right a wrong.
Between
breakfast and dinner, the European and Israeli soccer boys played harder than usual, far less casually. Moish spun and faked better than I’d ever seen him; he was tireless. Then there was Klaus Von Cherbourg a hundred feet across the green, beckoning for the ball. Moish stopped and looked at him. “You want the ball? You want it?”
“Ya, ya, Morris, kick it to me,” he yelled.
Moish muttered in Yiddish, “Eh chubisen drerd” (go to hell). “I’ll make you run like you made me run for four years,” and he kicked the ball way over the head of the huffing and puffing German. Moish seemed to experience some release from his long kick and began to laugh. None of us had ever seen him laugh so long and hard. The German smiled, waved, kicked the ball back to Morris Landsman, and proceeded to check out of the hotel.
* * *
Labor Day weekend was just around the corner, and I had accumulated around four hundred dollars. The affair of the purloined boots and the kitchen insurrection were over. The kitchen staff had become a little nicer, probably because they would soon miss not having some jerky college boys to scream at. Financially, my summer had been nothing to write home about. Socially, it was a disaster, without even a hint of sex, not to mention my brief attack of gerontophilia. There were some flirtatious fifteen-year-old girls running around the hotel, but no serious prospects.
Then, in the casino on the next-to-last night of the summer, there was Sheila of the infamous “You know, it’s kind of chilly out here, why don’t we go into the car.” She was wearing a red cocktail dress and dancing every dance with men who could have been her father, while totally ignoring Herbert, who hadn’t called her since their encounter in the Chrysler. I assumed that she didn’t know that we knew about her and Herbert and was therefore spared any humiliation. She certainly didn’t look humiliated on the dance floor, throwing her ample body around like a whirling dervish. I worked up the courage to ask her to dance. When Herbert and the boys broke into Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock,” I pushed my way through a horde of suntanned elders and took Sheila’s hand for a spirited Lindy. But she paid no attention to me and danced off in a frenzy by herself, leaving me embarrassed, with my hand extended in midair. The event did not go unnoticed by the drummer and Shelly the trumpet player, who was laughing so hard that he couldn’t play. Thanks. Like it’s not difficult enough having a confidence level of zero. Shelly had been a bit of a summer mentor in social matters, and I guess I expected more from him than ridicule.
The next tune was a slow fox-trot, “My Funny Valentine.” Shelly had a fancy solo at the top of the tune. He held the trumpet with his right hand, while gesturing with his left for me to ask Sheila to dance. I ambled over and presented myself to Sheila for a take two, and this time she smiled, displaying a hideous set of crooked teeth that the dental student had oddly failed to mention. To my surprise, she followed my lead excellently, dancing close to me. I mean bone-close. I thought of Groucho Marx’s line when the woman says “Hold me closer, closer”: “If I was any closer, I’d be in back of you.” Sheila’s dress had a luxurious silky texture that was unfamiliar to my hands, and the fabric fit her loosely, which made it slide against her skin. She kept looking at me, as if to gauge my reaction to her teasing. I could feel her large breasts as she rubbed against me, not accidentally. She smelled of the mildest perfume, more like soap, and her skin was the pristine pale white of someone who kept out of the sun. I kept remembering her in Herbert’s story, though once again I tried like hell to blot out the image of the accordion player with his pants down in the backseat of a car.
With the band’s eyes on me, I would have a new problem when the dance was over: how to hide a rather obvious erection that you could hang a suit of clothes on. At the end of the tune, instead of applauding, I pretended to be warm and took off my jacket, carrying it in front of me, but I don’t think I fooled Shelly, and Sheila had to know. In fact, she seemed quite pleased.
We sat at the bar with her back toward the bandstand and me facing it. As she talked about the brilliance of James Joyce and Ulysses, the band made an assortment of obscene gestures behind her back for my benefit. I could feel Sheila’s knee inching toward me. I had never read any James Joyce, which I wisely admitted, so I went to my strengths. I declared that John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle was a better book than people thought, and that it had been overshadowed by The Grapes of Wrath. She agreed that might be true as her knee kept progressing closer. I told her how I cried reading Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and she said she had cried, too, as her knee made contact. I instinctively looked around to see if anyone was watching, but the casino had emptied considerably, and our little corner was not well lit. I was beginning to like my chances in the world of romance when Sheila popped off the stool and said, “Well, it was nice talking to you, you certainly are a smart boy.” She shook my hand and walked out the door, leaving me sitting there like the world’s biggest schmuck.
The trumpet player gestured for me to go after her, but I was numb and so let down that I just stood there. Fuck it, I thought, the summer’s over already, and this is my last chance.
I trotted out the door after her. “You want me to walk you home?” I asked.
She continued walking. “No thanks, it isn’t far.”
“I don’t mind,” I said.
“Look, you’re a nice boy, but you’re too young for me, you understand? I know what you’re after, but you’re not going to get it.”
That old refrain once again. She had busted me, all right, and I was embarrassed. I kept walking alongside her. “All right, walk me home, but that’s all, okay?” At this, she nudged me under the chin like a kid brother, and she took my arm. I wanted to bring up the subject of her grinding her body into mine, but she began talking about her impending senior year at City College. I had mixed feelings about entering my sophomore year at Alfred, and I mumbled a few words about changing my major, though it was the last fucking subject in the world I wanted to talk about. She advised against changing my major and gave me an earful of reasons why. I was sorry I had even brought it up, as I had unwittingly turned the woman I wanted to have sex with into a guidance counselor.
The whole thing was becoming a fiasco of meaningless conversation. I got the feeling I was being played with, perhaps mocked. She was older and, Lord knows, more experienced. Then the thought occurred to me: What if she really didn’t want to have sex with me? Just because Herbert had scored didn’t mean I would. She had wanted to walk home alone, hadn’t she? I could be the tagalong jerk I appeared to be, though she did seem to enjoy the conversation. Maybe she really did think I was too young. Maybe the accordion player had broken her heart.
In any case, it seemed that the sexual highlight of my summer was going to be a knee-in-the-groin bar-stool quickie interruptus. I could feel in my pants that there was nothing to hide anymore, and I became petulant, sorry I had volunteered to escort her home. I couldn’t wait until we got to her house so I could turn around and go back to the Waldorf. What would I tell my curious colleagues, many of whom knew that I had left with Sheila? None of their collective business.
The more she talked, the more annoying the whole thing became. On that unpaved country path, it was dark between the occasional porch lights of homes, and practically moonless, so she was unable to see my expression. I began making outrageous juvenile faces, mimicking her silently, amused that I could get away with it. I was only seventeen and pissed off.
“This is it,” she said, “good night.”
Sure enough, there was the dimly lit little cottage and the famous ’56 Chrysler. Too bad I would never see the inside of it. I felt thoroughly crushed and ineffectual, like a little boy. We turned in opposite directions, and I had begun to walk back when I heard: “You want to talk a little more? You can’t come in the house, ’cause my parents are sleeping.”
Slowly I turned, step by step. “What did you say?”
There was a slight pause. “I said if you want, we can talk a little more, bu
t you can’t come in the house, ’cause my parents are sleeping.” I began to tremble, and it wasn’t that cold. “You know, it’s kind of chilly out here,” she said, “why don’t we go into the car.”
My slumbering penis shot up like a railroad semaphore. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She opened the car door and guided me into the generous backseat of the big Chrysler, where we slumped in ardent glory.
I won’t go into details. I can say only that it was worth every humiliating minute of the roller-coaster evening, the first of many such evenings in the course of my youth. She was not the best nor the worst lover I can remember, and I suppose in retrospect she was a homely girl. But why is it that I can still remember the thrill of it? She was lusty and passionate and uninhibited, and she gave to me, the neophyte, an experience I had never had before. She happened to be also highly intelligent, which I could not fully appreciate at seventeen and in heat. In all honesty, had she been the lowliest of dunces, my quest would have been just as vigorous. Considering my sexual scorecard at the time, I was too much of a beggar to be a chooser.
I was still in a trance on the walk home, thinking that sex was the greatest thing in the world. Yet I was so thoroughly sated that I believed I’d never want it again. This belief was short-lived, and in about five minutes I began to feel like I could have another go at it. Was this really ever possible? Sex, I came to discover, is a lot like eating, in that after a full meal, one feels, fallaciously, that he may never need to eat again.
My clothing was rumpled and sweaty as I walked in the darkness. I kept lifting my upper lip to my nose to smell Sheila’s smell, to remind myself that it had all been real. Some dogs barked and howled, and tiny animals rustled the bushes in the increasing distance behind me. I found myself smiling, fulfilled, amid the cacophonous crickets rubbing their legs together, and the noisy August cicadas, all of whom were celebrating with me. I could swear I saw not one but two shooting stars as I strolled in a contented daze down the country road to the end of summer and back to school. I was smoking a cigarette and coughing, exhausted, drained, hungry as hell, ebullient and yet a little bit ashamed. Then again . . .