December 23, 2006--Heshy's Second Complaint

“You sent me a copy of ‘Give Him A Treatment Boys!,’ which, though I liked some of the stories, is a shitty title.” It was Heshy Perlmutter returning my call.

I had hoped that he would simply say, “Yes, it’s OK to use my real name in it.”

“Well,” I retorted, “I kind of like it. I think it’s provocative and suggests what the book’s about—how in life we have to endure a variety of ‘treatments.’ Metaphorically, of course. And how, though the words from the title were actually spoken by my high school French teacher, in the book I tried to imbue them with much more than their literal meaning.”

But as I was speaking these words, I realized I was, like last time, setting myself up for another of Heshy’s lectures. Once again I couldn’t just keep my mouth shut!

And as if to prove my point, Heshy shot right back, “Like with the last book, the title is once more evidence of the failure of your imagination. This phony thing again about a ‘fictional memoir,’” I could hear him mocking me, “it still makes no sense. It’s simply pretentiousness and posturing.”

I was sorry my publisher told me I needed to run the manuscript by Heshy, for indemnification purposes, and either secure his written consent to use his name and the facts of his life or I needed to come up with a new name for him and fictionalize things more. The lawyers were skittish about the latest draft I had submitted to the publisher. So my plan was to shut up and let him have his say and maybe he’d agree to sign off. I had worked pretty hard on it and frankly didn’t have the energy for another major revision. He was the last person in the world I wanted to talk to about what I was attempting to do. I simple wanted him to sign the friggin paper. Maybe if I let him blow off some steam it would work out. Me and my big mouth!

I knew from my recent reconnection with Heshy, after more than forty years of no contact, and from some of the things I wrote about in “Dirty Jew Bastards!”—which by the way he signed off on—things that he found upsetting and untrue, that he was unlikely now to be so casual. The first time around I think he had simply enjoyed seeing his name in print; this time I suspected he would be a lot more cautious. The entire matter, I also felt, was made much more complicated by his recollection that it was I, and not just time and circumstances that had severed our friendship. He felt that I had wanted to distance myself from “the old neighborhood” and all that it stood for in my mind, he had emphasized that, and that he and his family had too much represented that reality for me to want to remain his close friend. I had opted to move on and wanted to cut my ties to what he thought I still considered a version of the shtetl. And though I conceded that I had been eager to make a different life for myself, hadn’t he as well; and wasn’t it therefore true that we both left, albeit in separate ways? And wasn’t what happened between us more the result of us moving on, along different paths, rather than my jettisoning him?

After all, he, not I, had had a nose job! And was that new nose, by the way, an act of fact or fiction?


But I needed to contain those thoughts since there was no winning this argument. I needed to just shut up and hear him out. And then depending on where this settled, I or the publisher would have to figure out what to do.

“Last time you went on and on about ‘what is truth after all—the literal truth versus the essential truth.’ Bullshit like that. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that you need to decide—is this a memoir or is it fiction. If it’s a memoir then you need to stick to the facts of what really happened in your life, and in mine, thank you very much. And if it’s fiction, which I think this volume mostly is, than at least have the courage to call it that. And if it is fiction, I hate to say this to you after you put such a good spin on the things you wrote about me, then I think you need to work a little harder to make this more interesting, more surprising, more, how else can I put this, imaginative. If you want people to read this, and I know you told me that all you care about is that people buy it, which frankly is more bullshit because didn’t you also talk about wanting to give your writing a ‘literary patina’? I got a good laugh out of that one and, you may recall, so did some of the critics!”

That stung, and in spite of my editor’s warning to me that I should keep my mouth shut and let him rant on if he wanted to, I said “Actually Harold, some of them thought it was pretty good and even quite well written.”

“OK, let’s forget about that and get back to what’s really at issue. Let me try to help you understand my point. Take the last story, ‘Bull Gang,’ that’s the one where I’m a central character. . . . “

Again, in spite of myself, I was unable to remain silent and said, with some frustration, “I told you the last time, Heshy, they’re ‘chapters,’ not ‘stories,’ and you are not a central ‘character,’ you ‘appear’ in this or that ‘chapter.’ I conceived and wrote this as a book, not a series of interconnected ‘stories.’”

“You’re making the point I was trying to illustrate by talking about the ‘Bull Gang’ story. But let me continue, please.” He was growing annoyed at me. “You may recall that though you did work on a bull gang one summer, and yes it was the Tishman Building, it was your college roommate, John Bell who worked with you. Not me.”

“But didn’t I make you the hero of the last chapter?”

“I don’t know about that. I think Eddie Ribori is the hero and he uses both of us, not just me, as surrogates for what had been snatched from his life. That is assuming there was in fact an ‘Eddie Ribori’ and the things you wrote about him did happen.”

“There was and they did.”

“Again, that’s my point—I know you’re not going to believe this but though I admit that I do enjoy seeing a version of myself represented in your work I am actually more interested in the truth. And please, no more lectures about ‘socially-constructed’ truth and ‘post-modern this and post-modern that.’ Though you have me reading Sartre in ‘Bull Gang,’ and in French, I never read much of him, certainly not his philosophical writing, more his political stuff and never in French. I didn’t know enough French to do that.”

“And by the way,” he continued, “who is this ‘Sigrid’ character? You never told me about her. She sounds very hot.”

At least about that I was able to restrain myself and not respond to the old Big Dick!

“Actually, when I think about your Sigrid,” I knew he wouldn’t be able to get her out of his mind, “it only reinforces my contention that the structure of your so-called book is confusing and ultimately doesn’t work. This whole business about ‘chapters’ versus ‘stories’ is a case in point—you have Sigrid appearing in, what two stories, or OK, chapters, ‘The West End,’ which by the way I think works pretty well, though I don’t for a minute believe you ever met Alan Ginsberg, and then she appears again in ‘Bull Gang.’ Right?”

“Yes Heshy.” I assumed he was aware of my exasperation.

“So what happens to her? She just disappears, no? If as you contend this is a book and not a bunch of stories bundled together you need to resolve things. You can’t have someone as important as a Sigrid just evaporate. You can’t do that in a novel, if that’s what this is. In a fully realized work of fiction, frankly, you couldn’t get away with this kind of laziness.”

I managed to calm down so as not to incite him further, for the sake of my editor and publisher; but still I said, “I am working this way quite intentionally because I want whoever picks this up to do some resolving on their own. For example, I think I tell enough about Sigrid and Lloyd’s relationship with her for readers to participate in the fictionalizing, to on their own, without me telling them, think about what might have happened to her. Which I think is quite appropriate because, one, I did not have an affair with Sigrid, though she is a version of someone I knew about since one on my classmates did spend a year with a girl like her, and I observed that from a distance with curiosity and envy; and, two, since as I am arguing this book is in part about the fictionalizing process I want you and others to engage in it too.”

To which Heshy snickered, “More bullshit.”

I felt I had been making a strong case for myself and thus added, “I wrote about all of this is the Prologue to 'Dirty Jew Bastards!'”

“Not to my satisfaction,” he shot back. “You still have that tendency to feel that whatever you say is the final word. Maybe back then it was because of your special status on our block, coming from such a fancy family,” he was dripping irony, “but which as it turns out,” he snorted, “was, by your own admission, ‘fiction.’ But that was then and this is now; and the truth, not you, has the final say.”

I should have just let him rant but again said more than was wise, “If you really believe that why then have you been sending me emails, addressed by the way to ‘Lloyd,’ which isn’t my name, and not to ‘Steven’? Emails in which you too make stuff up about our earlier lives.”

“I’m not following you here.” It felt good that I had managed to befuddle him.

“Well, you just sent me one of these emails the other day in which you make things up. Let me quote yourself to you, I have it here. I printed it. You wrote:

Hi, Steve Do you remember Lloyd being locked in his bathroom accidentally, crying hysterically until Mr. Perly released him, by taking the door off its hinges? This happened at least twice! Regards, Hesh

“That did happen,” he spat back at me, “I remember it distinctly—how stupid and inept you were at times and how your family, with all its airs, when the shit hit the fan who did they turn to—to the Perlmutters who knew a thing or two about how the world worked and how to fix things.” He paused, “And by that I mean more than bathroom doors.”

“Well I have a pretty good memory too and would swear in court that that never happened. You want to know what I really think? I’ll tell you anyway,” he hadn’t indicated any interest in my views about this, “I think you’re playing with me. You too want to get in the act of fictionalizing our lives. You give me grief for doing that but now that I’m writing about that time, and it’s getting published, you either want to tear me down to get even for whatever it is that you are still pissed about, from all those years ago, or you’ve stumbled onto a different strategy to make me crazy, also as an aggression, by playing with my mind.”

He was silent for a moment: but then in a barely audible whisper, pronouncing each word carefully and separately, he said, “It’s you, not me, who’s doing the playing.”

That shut me up and I needed to confess that he had me there. After a moment I said, “Let me then try a different tack: Both books are about fictions, about how our families and neighbors, everyone together created a fictional world for us to grow up in. To protect us from the world they left and in which they had suffered. To create a fictional space where we for a while could remain innocent and protected. To not have to experience what they had gone through, what they had suffered. Knowing what was awaiting us in adulthood. That we deserved that. That’s what America and they could provide. Remember, this was right after World War II. I have been trying to write about that fictionalizing through my own version of it—to talk about that gift they provided for us and the darkness that lurked behind it.”

For a minute there was only static on the line. Then Heshy said, “That I get. I may even agree with you about that, though my childhood was a lot less innocent than yours, and I don’t just mean the Big Dick part. ”

“But” he continued, “I think you make things too unnecessarily complicated, to quote your Bull Gang chief Eddie Ribori, by writing fiction and calling it a memoir.”

This time I didn’t have anything to shoot right back at him, and after a moment finally said, “You make some good points so let me think about this some more and call you back in a few days.”

He was right—this was getting too complicated.

* * *

After I recounted this conversation to my editor and the publisher they decided it was all right to continue to call this a “fictional memoir,” but that I needed to find a new title, a different name for “Heshy,” and do a lot more fictionalizing.

What a pain!