The Fiddler in the Subway

by Gene Weingarten

  She was appalled.

  Not at the story. She liked that. But she hadn’t known about my crush, or even suspected it, and was dismayed that she could have possibly created an atmosphere, back there in Miss Endler’s class, in which she had seemed aloof or unapproachable.

  I tried to explain why she was blameless. You know: Darwin, human biology, pumps, water, etc.

  Shari would have none of it. She was really beating herself up. “It’s hard to believe anyone would find me intimidating. I consider myself approachable. I wonder if it was something I was projecting…”

  The woman’s professional career has involved teaching people how to relate to other people in a straightforward manner; how to share feelings; she has advised organizations how to repair breakdowns in communication.

  Burps and gurgles: the ultimate nightmare.

  When we’d spoken on the phone, Clayton Landey and I had reminisced about growing up in the South Bronx in the late 1950s, a place in restive ethnic transition. We Jewish kids had been picked on by what seemed to us to be larger and angrier Irish kids. “To get to school,” Clayton said, chortling, “you had to fight your way through the freckles.”

  Shari remembered it, too.

  “In winter, we had to walk to school in a convoy. They would nail us with ice balls.”

  I nodded and laughed.

  She looked at me quizzically.

  “It hurt.”

  Well, yes. It did hurt. I had forgotten that.

  I had forgotten a lot of things. She’d forgotten nothing. She remembered the smell of P.S. 26, how the old building had been an architectural delight, with gargoyles, columns shaped like minarets, ornate Gothic and Moorish details.

  Clayton’s memory had been even shabbier than mine. He had recalled being a bit of a hellion in P.S. 26. What he had not recalled was that, after fourth grade, he and I had hung out together some. We were real smartasses. I was carefully crafting my new iconoclasm: All of human behavior was fodder for deconstruction and ridicule, in a sort of primitive, snotty, nine-year-old, polite-to-adults, slicked-down-hair-with-cowlick fashion. Part Bart Simpson, part Eddie Haskell.

  Clayton told me that in his teens, he finally changed who he was: “I realized there was only so much the world was gonna put up with and let me keep breathing.”

  And that’s when he started taking life seriously, learning to emote, beginning an acting career in earnest.

  “And you?” he asked.

  “I’m still a smartass,” I said. “I do it for a living now.”

  For most of my adult life, I have been involved in the writing or editing of humor. Humor is designed to deliver joy to others, but there is something about it that permits—even demands—an emotional distance from your subject. Part of it is that humor often requires a bloodless hostility; laughs usually come at the expense of something or someone. And part of it involves the nature of humor itself—it exists, on the deepest level, as a perverse denial of pain and fear. No one has ever explained this more succinctly or ingeniously than Dave Barry did in a tiny essay he wrote for a newspaper magazine I edited in the 1980s. I had asked him to create a definition of “sense of humor.” He took three days. This is what he wrote: “A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which you realize that you are trapped in a world almost entirely devoid of reason. Laughter is how you release the anxiety you feel at this knowledge.”

  Sometime afterward, Dave’s mother died suddenly. I was making plans to replace his column that week with something we had on file, for emergencies. But before I could, he delivered a column. It was about his son’s pet gerbil. It was really funny. I asked him how he could possibly have written that under the circumstances, and he said, “Writing humor is the greatest possible escape from emotional pain.”

  Shari hustled her way through school, as I did. She even skipped eighth grade (the school system had, finally, flatly refused to let me do that) and so, like me, she wound up entering college at sixteen. Like me, she wound up doubting the wisdom of it: “Intellectually, it was liberating. But socially, it was a disaster. I often thought, why was I running so fast? What was the point?”

  Shari tried the sorority route for a short time, and found it empty. As the Vietnam War escalated, she was drawn into the antiwar movement at Queens College. Meanwhile, I was at NYU, drawn into the drug, uh, movement. It was a time of robust experimentation, and I was right in the middle of it. You may remember the time: People were getting in touch with their inner selves. They were tripping on LSD and smoking weed and learning to commune with nature and each other in a slap-happy commingling of souls and tongues and flowers and incense. Happy, daffy, people-grooving-on-people stuff.

  Me, I liked heroin.

  On May 4, 1970, when federal troops opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators at Kent State University, killing four, Shari’s sense of security about the world was shattered. There was no sane way to react, so she did the insane.

  “What do you do, how do you make your voice heard when you are at a suburban college where everyone goes home at the end of the day to Mom and Dad?”

  Here’s what: With a handful of other students, she walked out onto the busy Long Island Expressway and put her body in front of the cars. When they screeched to a stop, she told the drivers, “You have to do something about the war.”

  “I was so filled with despair,” she says, “that it didn’t matter what happened to me. I was well past the point of thinking about my own safety.” She was nineteen.

  At nineteen I was writing about Vietnam protests for the newspaper at NYU. It was a way of being involved intensely, but at a distance, as an objective observer.

  I remember distinctly the day I first saw the wrenching photograph of that nine-year-old Vietnamese girl, racing naked in terror down Trang Bang highway, her clothes incinerated by a napalm attack. Trapped in a world almost entirely devoid of reason. It was an image of transcendent horror. I found a way not to feel it. The caption reported that the little girl’s name was Kim Phuc. I looked at this picture and… laughed.

  Shari’s husband is a philosophy professor who now works in computer technology. Most of Shari’s professional life—in communication, human resources, and adult education—has been tailored to follow his two-and three-year posts at various universities; she’s taught in some of the same schools, including Cornell and the University of Wisconsin. Now she works as an education and training coordinator at a health-care facility.

  Two health crises have shaped her identity: The first was when her mother died after a long and difficult illness that required Shari to abandon plans for a doctorate. The second occurred with the birth of her second daughter, Jenny. Jenny was dauntingly premature—arriving at the twenty-sixth week of pregnancy, at 1 pound 10 ounces. Nothing looks as vulnerable as a baby that small. Nothing alive looks as close to death.

  “It was shattering, the most painful thing I ever experienced. I found myself praying for the first time in my life.”

  She took a swallow of wine.

  “It’s an example of moving from macrocosm to microcosm. It’s one thing to protest mass loss of life. It’s another to face the loss of a single life. A sense of randomness overwhelms you. I have always prided myself on being someone who could do things, who could find a way, if I tried hard enough. But here was a total lack of control. There was nothing I could do.”

  Jenny survived. She is seventeen, and healthy. Shari wiped a tear.

  “I can’t imagine life without her.”

  Two health matters helped shape my identity, too. For years I was a silent hypochondriac—comically enslaved by fear of illness, inclined to diagnose any minor symptom as the onset of a fatal disease. I wrote a book about it, a funny book in which I gleefully provided the amateur hypochondriac all the medical information necessary to turn pro. (Yes, hiccups can mean cancer.)

  One of the few serious moments in the book comes when I try to explain why someone who is relatively fearless in the conduct of h
is life—a natural risk-taker—can wind up being such a baby about his health. Hypochondria, I said, suggests a morbid fear of losing control of one’s emotions in front of the world: If you’re prepared for death—if you’re braced for the Bad News because you have seen it coming—you won’t get caught crying.

  In this book I also revealed the surefire cure for hypochondria: Get really sick. This was the second health matter that shaped my life: In 1991, I was diagnosed with a potentially fatal liver disease.

  I recovered. But when I wrote the book, it looked as though I had about five years to live. The final chapter was titled: “Is Death a Laughing Matter? Of Corpse Not.”

  One of Shari’s great regrets is that the South Bronx she knew—a comfortable place with a strong sense of community—seems forever gone; it disappeared in an ugly ethnic upheaval in the early 1960s that transformed it into a sullen moonscape of gutted buildings, drug supermarkets, and cringing, three-legged dogs.

  “I feel like a displaced person,” she said, “like someone who grew up in Sarajevo. Someone who can never go home. It was like an epidemic had hit. I can’t help but think that if it hadn’t happened so swiftly, maybe the chasm would not have been there. Maybe people of goodwill could have stepped into the void—shopkeepers, educators, they could have drawn people together to work for a common good.”

  Maybe. Shari’s a problem-solver. To me, the ruined Bronx had been a gold mine: My first big break as a journalist came when I infiltrated the teenage street gangs there and wrote about it for a national magazine.

  It was time for coffee. Shari had to put on glasses to read the fine print on the menu. I had to take mine off. I am forty-nine. Shari turned fifty the day before our date.

  Man, that one year seemed huge in second grade.

  When it was time to go, Shari asked me what the theme of my story would be, and I told her that I did not know for sure. Definitely about the search powers of the Internet, and juvenile romance.

  “Also, maybe the pull of history,” she said.

  Yes, I said. That, too.

  “You know, I am not sure I would have agreed to do this with anyone else,” she said. “When you called, it brought back a flood of memories. There was something there. For what it is worth.”

  It occurred to me, for what it is worth, that Shari is probably really good at what she does: team building, consensus forming. Feelings. You know, that sort of crap.

  We hugged and said goodbye.

  As I drove away, I noticed there was a cassette in the tape player and punched it up. Turned out to be a collection of tunes Buddy Holly recorded in 1958 and 1959. His songs are musically brilliant and, like much early rock, lyrically infantile. No depth at all. Just naive, explosive expressions of excitement and wonder at the visceral power of young love.

  Heartbeat,

  why do you skip

  when my baby’s lips

  meet mine?

  Buddy never had to learn that things get more complicated. He was twenty-two when he stepped onto that plane, in the middle of my second-grade year.

  I drove home to his music. And I can report that, still, no one ever sees me cry.

  Fear Itself

  This is the only assignment I ever had that I thought might get me killed. Before I flew to Jerusalem, where I would ride a public bus during the intifada to see what pure terror felt like, I left a love note for my wife and children buried deep in my sock drawer.

  I discovered it four months after my return and threw it away, unread. Why? Because the idea of opening all that up again, of revisiting my worried state of mind, unnerved me. Better not to think about it.

  And that, in a way, is the point of this story.

  The meaning of life is that it ends.

  —Franz Kafka

  August 22, 2004

  YOU ARE NOT afraid of terrorism, really. You have weighed the facts and have concluded, rationally, that even if terrorists strike again in this country, the chances are negligible that you or anyone you know will be killed or injured. You feel no special tension when you place your seat tray in the upright position. You are old enough to have lived through other supposedly apocalyptic times, or you’ve surely heard about them—most famously, the silly spectacle of 1950s-era schoolkids giggling under their desks in anticipation of the Big One.

  The recent warnings about terrorism during the election campaign have ratcheted up your concerns a little, but so what? You are going on with your life not as an act of defiance so much as a celebration of rationality. You will be fine.

  So here’s a question: Would you ride a bus in Jerusalem? Right now? Here’s your 5½ shekels, go take a bus to market, buy some figs. Pick a bad day, after the Israelis have assassinated some terrorist leaders and everyone is waiting for the second sandal to drop. There are lots of buses in Jerusalem—the odds are still long in your favor. Do you take that dare?

  A few weeks ago, I did just that: boarded a bus on just such a day and rode for nearly an hour. I did it because I wanted to better understand the psychology of terror. Not the psychology of the terrorist—the psychology of the terrorized.

  After 9/11, Americans are concerned enough by terror to be waging a costly war against it. But, by and large, the fear of terrorism has not seeped into our bones. We are new to this thing. The Israelis are not. Terrorism creates a hierarchy of fear; theirs is greater than ours.

  Hence, this trip. Call it a scouting report.

  The bus I chose was the No. 18. Its route is a vital artery, traveling down Jaffa Road through the heart of Jerusalem. Twice in the last decade, someone boarded a bus on this route, reached into his pocket, thumbed a button and detonated. As is dictated by the grisly kinetics of suicide bombing, the bombers’ heads remained intact, shooting skyward with the roof of the bus. But their bodies were frothed into pulp. Forty-six other people died. Some of those were torn apart; some looked almost unscathed, but their organs had been jellied by the shock wave, a medical syndrome common to bus bombings and almost nothing else. Dozens of other people survived, but were crippled or disfigured by shrapnel: Customarily, suicide bombs are jacketed by nails, nuts, screws, and ball bearings, for maximum damage.

  Like everyone else, I waited in line, deposited my fare, and stepped aboard the bus. Early afternoon. Sixty-odd people seated and standing, some with shopping bags, some without. Eyes forward, no one saying much to anyone else. It was hot.

  TEN TIMES IN the last three years our leaders have told us that something was up. They didn’t say what exactly: ominous “chatter” of an undisclosed nature in unspecified channels of communication among unidentified individuals planning an unnamed atrocity of uncertain dimensions in an unknown location at an indeterminate time. So what should we do about it? Unclear.

  When there was finally an intelligence breakthrough early this month—a named source, a likely weapon (truck bomb) and five specific targets in three specific cities (New York, Washington, and Newark)—it was followed by the sheepish disclosure that the information was mostly four years old, which was followed by charges of political fearmongering, which was followed by indignant denials, and at the end of it all none of us had any idea whether anything important had just happened.

  The day after the initial alert, I walked into one of the target buildings, the World Bank on Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue. At the front desk, I asked a question about security. An important-looking man came striding up. He was the building’s security manager. “How did you get in here?” he asked. “I walked in the door,” I said. He escorted me out and began berating a subordinate.

  Our preparedness, at least those measures we can see, sometimes seems almost comical—from our primary-color danger alert codes to those video displays on the Beltway urging us to report anything suspicious. (What is one likely to see on the Beltway to arouse suspicion? I ♥ BIN LADEN?) At the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, visitors are wanded, their backpacks fed through metal detectors. A sign stipulates what size and shape of pocketknife is perm
itted inside. A visitor from Washington takes this in, thinking: Someone is going to hijack the Arch?

  Hierarchies of fear. Ours is worse than yours.

  Interesting fact: In the year after 9/11, many people stopped flying. Road deaths spiked.

  There has been terrorism in the world, more or less nonstop, since twelfth-century Syria, when a persecuted Persian religious sect called the Assassins knifed people to death in crowds. Terrorism has persisted because terrorism works. It makes people crazy. It is a cost-effective method of waging psychological war by those who see themselves outnumbered or disenfranchised.

  A disenfranchised minority cannot sack Rome, rape Nanking, burn Atlanta, or firebomb Dresden. Those things are terror attacks by nation-states, military sieges with the primary goal of sowing despair among the enemy and weakening their will to resist. A disenfranchised people—whether Palestinians in the Middle East, or Tamils in Sri Lanka, or Islamic zealots who see the spread of Western culture as an assault on their religion—will use the means at their disposal. Amoral though it may be, terrorism succeeds in focusing attention on whatever cause its practitioners espouse. It does this in a particularly insidious way.

  A quarter-century ago, a cultural anthropologist named Ernest Becker wrote a Pulitzer Prize–winning book called The Denial of Death. For a time, during the primacy of Freud, it was huge. It’s not about terrorism, it’s about the psyche, and its central thesis is one of the most disturbing analyses of human behavior ever set in print.

  Everything we are, Becker argued—our personalities, our attitudes, our very being—is an elaborate lie, a carefully crafted self-delusion constructed to avoid having to face a fact so terrifying it would drive us mad: Not only are we certain to die, but death could come at any moment, followed by an eternity of nothingness. Lower animals, blessedly unaware of their mortality, plod thoughtlessly through their lives on instinct alone.