October 28, 2006--Saturday Story: Heshy's Complaint (First of Three)

After forty years I finally heard from Heshy (Big Dick) Perlmutter.

He said, “What’s all this shit you’re writing about me?”

I said, “After all these years, without even a hello, this is what you have to say to me?” To which he replied, “I’ve seen some of your stuff and none of it is true.” I asked, “Even your nickname, Big Dick? That’s what everyone called you because of . . . you know.” “Well yes, that is true; but the rest of it, as I said, is a bunch of shit.”

“Give me some examples, please, I want to be true to our lives at that time and I did the best I could to remember things accurately.” After some silence, which I assumed meant he was considering whether or not to hang up on me, he said, “Well, for one thing there were no Siegel twins. Yes, there were the Kershner twins, Irving and Bernie, but no Siegels.” “But,” I pressed him, “wasn’t there a pair of twin girls in sixth grade? I just named them ‘Siegel’ because I couldn’t remember their real names.” “There were twin girls, I agree, but they were the Schwartz twins and they were anything but attractive.” He raced on, “And while I’m on the subject of your so-called Siegel twins,” I could feel his contempt, “what’s all this business about me feeling them up in the coat closet? I never did that. You made that up, and frankly it’s defamatory.” Now I was the one to pause, thinking, am I in trouble with this? What happens if this book gets published? Will just changing everyone’s names be enough to pass the publisher’s lawyer’s scrutiny? How much will I have to fictionalize in order to stay out of court?

“But,” I said to Heshy, “even though they weren’t that attractive you still wanted to take them into the closet, didn’t you, and feel them up? They were by far the most developed girls in our class as you, for certain, were the most, how should I put it, well equipped.”

“You have me there, I did think all the time about what their tits would feel like and would have loved to go into the closet with them; but the truth is that I never did it—I just thought about it.”

“Well,” I said, groping toward an answer that would work for both Heshy and me, “that’s sort of the point and why if this thing ever does get published I want to subtitle it A Fictional Memoir. Not just to keep the legal folks out of my few remaining hairs but because it will maybe help anyone who picks it up understand what I am attempting to do.”

“But what does that have to do with me and the Schwartz, sorry, Siegel twins?”

His tone at least had softened and so I proceeded, “You know that after college, though I had been a pre-med like you, though you became a urologist . . . .”

“Hold on, hold on, that’s another thing--you know I’m an ophthalmologist so why do you keep referring to me in your writing as a urologist? That really pisses me off.”

I could hear that in his voice, so as gently as I could, said, “You’re not getting the point—shouldn’t Big Dick have become a urologist just as he should have been the one to feel up the Siegel twins.”

He felt calmed down again, so I continued, “As I was saying, I never went to medical school but rather went on to graduate school to study Literature and then ultimately became a professor. I always wanted to write fiction, not just teach it, and now that I am writing, I want to produce something ‘literary,’ not just tell humorous and sentimental stories from ‘the old days.’”

He had been listening, “And so what do you mean by ‘literary?’ You know that wasn’t much of an interest of mine.”

So I said, “At the time I was a graduate student many of my teachers and then my colleagues were interested in issues of reality and illusion. Actually, these ideas go back to the Greeks. And then later on, in post-modern times, that interest shifted to questions about the nature of reality itself—how even ’truth’ itself is socially constructed.”

I felt myself lecturing him and apparently so did he, “You mean like the Siegel twins?” I picked up his mocking tone, feeling I deserved it.

In truth, I need to confess, I hardly knew what I was talking about when throwing around post-modern this and socially-constructed that. I left the study of literature many years ago when I became a dean at New York University and then went on to work for the Ford Foundation as a senior director. I had in truth drifted away from literary and cultural-studies issues.

Since I caught myself trying to take advantage of Heshy here, being entirely too glib, I acknowledged, “You’re right to make fun of me, Hesh, because what I’ve been writing is not that literary. I’m no Proust, no Roth, Philip Roth. That should only be. I know what I am and especially what I’m not. But I do want my writing to have at least a literary patina. This is my first novel and at my age and in my state of health, who knows, it may be my last.”

“Are you OK?” I could hear his concern, thinking, from what I remembered about him, he must be a wonderful doctor with exceptional bed-side manner, assuming he ever sees a patient in a bed—he is after all an ophthalmologist.

“I’m fine. Really fine. I did have some colon surgery a couple of years back; and though I did have to wear a bag for a while, they removed it and I’m feeling better than ever.”

“Oh my, glad to hear that.”

“But I do know from that,” I went on, “and from having so many people my age already having died, that I can’t assume anything. So I want this to be as good as I can make it. Which means that it has to be interesting on a number of levels, including the reality-illusion level."

He remained silent so I continued in this vein, "We’ve been talking about the twins. Let me stay with that. I want to tell the truth about them. This at times means the literal truth, as best I can recall it, but also the essential truth. For me to get to that kind of truth I often have to make things up. Embellish some, elaborate others, and at times invent things entirely. With the Siegel twins I not only changed or forgot their actual names but I in effect made them up as well as your encounters with them. I knew that there should have been twins like the Siegel twins at P.S. 244 (that’s not made up—that’s really where we went to school) and I knew that if there had been such a couple of twelve-year-old bombshells there they would have wanted you to go into the coat closet with them and feel them up. But since this is not about you (though you, Heshy, are both a major character and my muse), it’s about a version of me—thus a memoir—and, since it is a version of me, not totally, literally, really me, it is also a fictional memoir. I needed the Siegel twins to exist, as I have imagined them here, and for you, as my alter ego, representing things I wanted for myself, equipment front and center, you needed to exist as I imagined you.”

“I understand now what you’re trying to do, but still have to think about it because I’m not sure I like what you’re up to with this. I’m still feeling uncomfortable."

"And by the way,” he added without missing a beat, “the candy store on the corner wasn’t ‘Bob’s’ but ‘Krinsky’s.’ Why did you imagine it as ‘Bob’s,’ or did you forget that too? Like the Schwartz twins.” Was he mocking me again? “I mean,” he continued, “what’s wrong with ‘Krinsky’s? Isn’t that actually a better name?” I could feel him getting excited, sensing blood in the water, “If the store had really been called ‘Bob’s’ wouldn’t you have been getting closer to your essential truth by imagining it to be ‘Krinsky’s’ and naming it that? That is if you are really interested in the truth about our neighborhood.” I caught that emphasis on our, “Or for that matter the truth about your life,” I noted that emphasis as well, “and whatever meaning anyone else might take from this Dirty Jew Bastards!"

I could hear him chuckling, thinking he had gotten me there. And in truth he was right about that. Thus, if you read on through this, when you get to the chapter “Mr. Perly’s World of Mirrors,” about Heshy’s father, where at least half is imagined, fictionalized, made up, you will see that the candy store is in fact called by its real name, ‘Krinsky’s.’

* * *

We rang off, promising to stay in touch, maybe even getting together for a real catch up so, among other things, our wives could meet us and each other--they both had heard so much, too much, about Heshy and me and East Flatbush in Brooklyn.

But I was reluctant to do so too soon. I still needed my distance if I was to get this right—I didn’t want too much truth to get in the way of my recollections and imaginings. I also didn’t want to see Heshy without his full shock of electrified black hair and the bulge in his pants, more afraid in truth of what he would not be seeing in me.

Then three days later a large brown envelop arrived with a six-page handwritten letter from Dr. Harold S. Perlmutter, M.D. in which he offered news of Donny Harris, Mel Leshowitz, and Carol Shtupstein, saying that if this gets published he’d like me to use his real name and nickname.

And about Carol he wrote, “Shtupstein not only lives, she just remarried--to Stevie "Bummy" Glockman, the boxer, who killed an opponent in the ring! I saw her at the P.S. 244 reunion a few years ago & would you believe, she looks EXACTLY the same.”

Four days after that, a similar envelop appeared, also containing a long handwritten note, this time Heshy enclosed a photo from the New York City Archives of “Perly Glass Work” (sic) in case I wanted to describe his room and needed to be reminded about how it looked.

It’s a murky photo to be sure, but if you put it under a good light and peer at it the right way, you can see the Venetian blinds lifting just enough so you can look into that bedroom where we . . . .

Two more Complaints to follow during 2007 . . . .