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Text copyright © 2004 by Daniel Ehrenhaft
Jacket photograph 2004 © by Getty Images
Author photograph courtesy of Caroline Wallace
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For Jessica
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Wendy Loggia, Jennifer Unter, Ezra Fitz, and, of course,the greatest in-house editor on the planet: my wife, Jessica.
I would also like to thank my parents, my siblings and their families,the Wollmans, and the Charaps for endless inspiration, love, and places to crash.
Finally, I would like to thank the complete discographies of Led Zeppelin, the Butthole Surfers, and Digital Underground.
Time: 2:23 pm
Subject: fat for halloween
dear naomi,
okay now I’m seriously pissed off and I’m not joking around anymore. my boyfriend is acting even more HEINOUS THAN USUAL. my parents are letting me throw this halloween party tonight, and he says he just knows that I’m going to buy tons of candy for it, like this is WRONG. i mean, it’s f***ing halloween. (I put in the asterisks because I know you say not to swear in the letters. ) anyway he told me that if I stuff myself with chocolate bars and gummy worms, which i have no intention of doing, my butt will get bigger. he actually SAID this to me. can you believe it? i’m tempted to hook up an i.v. of chocolate directly to my butt right now, just to make him mad. it’s MY BUTT. i have the right to make it as fat as I want, right? meanwhile, he wants to sneak in beer so we can all get “wasted.” HELLO?? beer has like 5 billion times more calories than candy. what do I do? did YOU ever have to deal with a loser like this when you were my age? do I finally dump him? arrrrgh! this may be it. i hate beer.
eagerly awaiting your reply,
s.o.m.b.
That was the last e-mail I got before I quit and told everyone the truth.
“S.O.M.B.” was one of my regulars. She wrote to me maybe three times a week. The initials stood for “Sick of My Boyfriend.” She relied on my help to deal with him. I was her advice columnist, after all. But I was more than that. I was her friend, her confidant—someone she could turn to in secret when she couldn’t go to anyone else. I owed her my help.
I owed lots of girls my help.
There was only one problem. (Actually, there were about a zillion problems, but they were all related to one big problem.)
I wasn’t Naomi.
Naomi was my glamorous, raven-haired twenty—two-year-old sister.
I was Dave Rosen—her gangly, unglamorous fifteen-year-old brother—and S.O.M.B. didn’t know it.
Nobody did.
The whole sordid fiasco began when I saw Celeste Fanucci for the first time—in the hall at Roosevelt High, the second day of school my Sophomore year.
I recognized her right away. I’d heard people whispering about her the day before, so I knew what to look for. Not that I had any hope of talking to her, of course. No, that would have required major outside help: a sudden celebrity appearance, skeletons rising from their graves, that sort of thing. Only then could I have come up with a good opening line—like, “Hey, it’s the guy from that movie!” or, “Watch out: the undead!”
Celeste Fanucci was beautiful. She was mysterious: a new senior, a transfer. She wore a flowery dress and Birkenstocks. Her blond hair tumbled in curly waves down her back.
She had a nose ring. She was cool. She was bohemian. She was a woman.
I was a boy.
I was nothing.
You can’t exaggerate the chasm that exists between sophomore boys and senior girls. You really can’t. It’s unbridgeable. Sophomore boys and senior girls aren’t even members of the same species. Our species is puny, skinny, and awkward. It’s basically designed to be avoided or ignored. Theirs is ideal. Theirs appears in commercials. As such, they can do whatever they want. The future stretches at their feet like a red carpet, plush and well vacuumed, leading them straight into a glamorous VIP event—and, farther down the line, into a backstage area patrolled by beefy security guards whose sole job is to keep us sophomore boys away from it.
Okay, I know. Not every senior girl is an unattainable beauty— especially not at Roosevelt High. I mean, if you went to my school, you’d probably say: What about Olga Romanoff, the president of the literary club? She’s a senior, right? Doesn’t she remind you of those Russian dolls, the squat little wooden ones that come packed one inside the other?
And on the flip side, you might say that not all sophomore boys are little wieners, either. There are guys like Jed Beck: swarthy, dark—the J. Crew model type. Last year he grew a beard just to show off. He was barely fourteen. The hair came in pretty full, too. Rumor has it that he even bridged the unbridgeable chasm. (With whom, I don’t know. Olga Romanoff, I hope.)
But trust me, by the age of twenty-seven Jed Beck will be fat, bald, and miserable—a divorced gas station attendant—whereas I will be the next Jimi Hendrix. Well, except that I won’t be black. But I will be cool. And I will drive women crazy. I have Faith in this. I really do, as surely as rabbis and priests have Faith in the God they never see in person. I must have Faith. Without it I would lose Hope. And that would just be too depressing to think about.
* * *
Before I go any further, there’s something you should know about me: certain people rag on the way I talk.
According to the Jed Becks of the world, I don’t talk the way most “normal” guys do. Whatever. Maybe it’s true, but it’s not my fault. I’ve never lived with a guy. I’ve always lived in a Lower East Side apartment full of insane females—Naomi, my mom, and my mom’s twin sister, Ruth. My dad died when I was three. He was a schmuck. He split right after I was born, gallivanting across the country and drinking Jack Daniel’s until his liver exploded. In the words of “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” by the Temptations: When he died, all he left us was alone.
In case you were wondering how I know the lyrics to a Temptations song that came out almost twenty years before I was born, I have a good excuse: my mom and Aunt Ruth inhabit a bizarre parallel universe where a woman can be both celibate Jewish ogre and funky, aging hippie—and there is no contradiction. This duality somehow makes sense.
As far as I know, no such universe exists outside the confines of 433 East Ninth Street, apartment 4R. I pray it doesn’t, anyway. I pray for the rest of humanity’s sake.
But back to the second day of school.
Celeste Fanucci must have caught me staring. She flashed me a quick smile and waved.
I bolted.
In my defense, I was already a little late for Algebra II. (Mr. Cooper likes to “make examples of the tardy”) But to tell you the truth, I was heartbroken. She’d just quashed any far-fetched hope I might have had about her, about us. Because with that one breezy gesture, she’d said, “You can talk to me—in a little-brotherly way, of course—and I might take you under my wing for five minutes and maybe muss your hair once or twice,
like a dog. But don’t even think about anything else.”
I shouldn’t have stared at her for so long, I guess. I should have just gone up and said hi.
* * *
One more thing you should know about me, and this is very important: my family has always had a problem with secrets.
By problem I mean that our secrets invariably go public—in large part because Naomi always blabs—and when they do, they never fail to disgrace us.
I cite my grandpa Meyer’s secret as an example.
Grandpa Meyer was Mom and Aunt Ruth’s father. For as long as I knew him, he lived in a retirement home in Brooklyn. He wore a greasy silver toupee. He talked out of the left side of his mouth, like a gangster. He sunned himself whenever possible, too, so his skin had the look and feel of an old baseball mitt.
People say that he was a lot like me.
I don’t really see how. I hate the sun. I can go whole summers without swimming or taking off my shirt once, and I’ll still be perfectly happy. My skin is superpale. My hair is brown. (Plus it’s real.) And I talk fairly normally, if not like other guys. To look at Grandpa Meyer and me—if he were still alive, that is—you probably, hopefully, wouldn’t even think that we were part of the same family.
The only real similarity I can think of is that he was one of two children, and his older sister was also named Naomi.
In my experience, people tend to see the smaller picture when it comes to relatives. They’ll say that one relative is like the other for a few stupid reasons while ignoring all the many reasons they’re not alike. People are funny that way
Anyway, Grandpa Meyer was famous for two things: sneezing and discussing his memoirs. Often they went hand in hand. He would be sitting on the back patio at the retirement home sunning himself and talking out of the side of his mouth. Suddenly he would freeze up. He would stare at a fixed point in space. Then his eyes would narrow … and that’s when the leathery nose would explode with the force of cannon fire: Ah-choo! Ah-choo! Ah-choo!—always three violent bursts in rapid succession, usually followed by several more.
“Bless you!” one of us would shout.
Grandpa Meyer sneered at this.
“Bless you?” he scoffed. “You act as if I did something wrong. Sneezing is a thing of majesty. A sneeze never stands alone. It comes in waves, in chains … like the tide, or the Himalayas. I’m going to address this very misconception about sneezing in my memoirs. Then you’ll see. You’ll all see the truth.”
He said this last part with great foreboding.
Needless to say, the four of us were very curious to read these memoirs. After hearing about them for so long, we’d begun to think that maybe Grandpa Meyer was some kind of closet genius or closet madman. (Or closet idiot, I suppose.) But he kept them locked away in a chest in his room. He guarded them jealously until the day he died—of a heart attack while playing blackjack on a seniors-only gambling boat named Luck Be My lady.
I was eight years old; Naomi was fifteen.
At the funeral one of Grandpa Meyer’s friends mentioned that he had been holding an ace and a queen when he collapsed. Sadly, he never got to play his hand. “Luck was his lady that day,” the friend said. “But like all good things, even luck must come to an end.” The rest of Grandpa Meyer’s cronies nodded in somber agreement. Many of them wore toupees, too.
After Grandpa Meyer was buried, we all scurried back to the retirement home to sit shivah. As harsh as this may sound, though, we weren’t really there to mourn. We kept exchanging glances. The air was thick with the unspoken question: When are we going to get our hands on those memoirs? Finally Aunt Ruth couldn’t take it anymore. She pulled my mother, Naomi, and me aside and whisked us up to his room.
The chest was under his bed. It was padlocked. Aunt Ruth dragged it out and took a hairpin to it.
“Your grandpa wouldn’t mind,” Mom said.
Neither Naomi nor I disagreed.
When Aunt Ruth finally managed to jimmy the lock and pry open the creaky wooden lid, my heart was pounding—as if we were the original Israelites standing before the Ark of the Covenant.
A great cloud of dust billowed from inside the chest.
Aunt Ruth pulled out a yellowed stack of papers. She straightened quickly and held them up to her glasses. Mom and Naomi huddled on either side of her, blocking my view.
I kept trying to get a look. I couldn’t. I was too short.
All at once their jaws dropped.
“My God,” Aunt Ruth whispered.
“I don’t believe it,” Mom said.
Naomi clapped her hand over her mouth. Then she burst out laughing. “Grandpa Meyer!” she shrieked with delight. “You freak!”
“What?” I asked desperately I stood on tiptoe and craned my neck. “What?”
Aunt Ruth didn’t answer. She tossed the stack of papers back into the chest and slammed the lid shut. Smack! Another cloud of dust arose.
“Whats going on?” I demanded. “What’s the problem?”
“Nothing,” Mom said. She looked pale. “It’s just that … well, your grandpa Meyer’s memoirs aren’t appropriate for children.”
I shook my head, baffled. “Why not? I thought they were about sneezing.”
“Your grandpa used sneezing as a metaphor for … something else,” she muttered.
Meh-tah-four? I’d heard this word once or twice before, but it was meaningless, a riddle. “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why can’t I see what he wrote? Naomi did.”
“Your grandpa’s memoirs are somewhat erotic.” Aunt Ruth explained.
Mom gave her a disapproving look.
Nobody was making any sense. I wasn’t just frustrated anymore; I was starting to get angry “What does erotic mean?”
“It means porn,” Naomi said. She was still laughing.
“Naomi!” Mom and Aunt Ruth barked in unison.
“What?” Naomi said defensively. “It does.” She pursed her lips. “You know, I don’t understand you two. You always insist on using a big word when a four-letter word will do. Posterior instead of butt. Children instead of kids. Erotic instead of porn. There’s no point in trying to be polite about what Grandpa Meyer was doing. I know you’ll probably say that it was eccentric.” She made little quotation marks in the dusty retirement home air to emphasize her disgust. “But it wasn’t. It was sick. S-I-C-K. Not to mention funny as hell. And personally, I can’t wait to tell everyone.”
Mom and Aunt Ruth buried their faces in their hands.
Naomi laughed again.
Even then I knew that my sister was too smart for her own good.
“So I hear you want to bang some hot new senior chick.”
That was how Naomi greeted me when I got home from school the second day of sophomore year. Luckily, Mom and Aunt Ruth weren’t back from work yet. I was still a little out of breath. I’d just climbed four flights of stairs with my book bag. (A sad fact: though our apartment is spacious for a Lower East Side three-bedroom, our building has no elevator.) Naomi was in the kitchen, picking at a jar of olives. She spat the pits into the sink. Her dyed-black hair was a mess. She looked as if she’d rolled right out of bed.
I frowned at her. “How do you know?”
She smiled. “Remember my friend Joel Newbury? He just started teaching at Roosevelt. He designed his own literature and creative writing course.”
A vague memory drifted through my mind … Joel: a pretentious, goateed ex-boyfriend of Naomi’s who’d enjoyed fondling her butt in public. I shrugged.
“Well, Joel remembers you. And he says he caught you checking out this chick on three separate occasions.”
“What was he doing, stalking me?”
“Ha! You should talk.”
I slung my book bag onto the kitchen table and marched over to the refrigerator. “Why are you even home right now?” I grumbled, surveying a plastic container full of leftover veggie lasagna. “Shouldn’t you be out looking For a job?”
Naomi spat an oliv
e pit at me.
She had a right to do so, I admit. The question had been a cheap shot. In truth, my sister had been looking for a job all summer—nine hours a day, six days a week, pretty much. But there were no jobs to be had. No good ones, anyway.
Naomi wanted to be a journalist. As Far as Mom or Aunt Ruth or I could tell, she should have already been famous. Naomi Rosen wasn’t just anyone. In June she’d graduated near the top of her class from the Columbia School of Journalism. This was after having been awarded a partial scholarship. Before that, she’d graduated cum laude from NYU after a scholarship there. But for some reason—because of the lousy economy, Naomi said—the only newspapers and magazines that were offering jobs were tabloids. She wanted to work for the New Yorker. She was even willing to start on a freelance basis, one story at a time.
So she was holding out.
And we supported her, of course. But after almost five months we were beginning to get nervous. Our eyes were already on the future. True, we’d always managed to survive on what Mom and Aunt Ruth make (they’re both bookkeepers at Weber’s: Mom is in charge of the apparel division; Aunt Ruth tallies up the home appliances sales), but all summer long we’d been counting on Naomi’s dazzling new career to take off. I guess it was kind of like how some people count on winning the lotto, but with less risk. Once Naomi got a job, she would get her own place, and the rest of us would move uptown to a fabulous new apartment in a doorman/elevator building—because Naomi would be making so much money that she wouldn’t know what to do with it all.
That was the plan, anyway
“So what’s this hot new senior chick’s name?” Naomi asked.
I closed the refrigerator. “Olga Romanoff,” I said.
She laughed.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing.” She placed the jar of olives on the counter. Suddenly she smacked her forehead and closed her eyes. “Wait! Wait a second. I’m having a psychic experience. A revelation! Yes! An Italian name: Ravioli. No, Fettuccini. No … it’s Fanucci. Celeste Fanucci.”
Tell It to Naomi Page 1