November 10, 2007--Saturday Story: Heshy's Final Complaint

On September 24, 2005 I posted the first of the Saturday Stories--The Tongue Factory. Since then I have written and posted 41 others. In truth, in the aggregate, in somewhat different order than you may have found them here, they form something I am thinking of as a fictional memoir. If you dig out from the blog archives and read Heshy's three complaints (the final one is below; the first one was posted October 28, 2006; the second on December 23, 2006) you should get a pretty good idea of what I mean by "fictional memoir." Maybe some day these will appear between hard covers and you will be able to say, I knew him when . . .


Thanks for travelling along.

Heshy's Final Complaint

“If I were your wife, your current wife, I’d be insulted.” It was Heshy yet again. I had studiously avoided any contact with him on the advice of my publisher’s lawyers. I had sent him a copy of the second volume of my fictional memoir, “Give Him A Treatment Boys!” since, as in the first, he had been prominently mentioned (in fact he had been more the hero than I, and I had thus dedicated it to him), I needed his approval to use his real name. Though he did not like volume two any more than the first one, “Dirty Jew Bastards!” I suppose out of considerable ego he had allowed me to do so. Perhaps in the spirit that “As long as you spell my name correctly, it’s all right to write about me.”

This time around he had gotten his hands on a prepublication copy of the final volume at the Strand Bookstore, “What Does Happiness Have to Do With Anything?” and on his own momentum called me. I should have hung up on him or made some excuse that I needed to meet Rona at the doctor’s; but I didn’t and, as previously, I turned out to be sorry I hadn’t. “Why should she be insulted?” in spite of myself I asked, “I think she comes off pretty good.”

“With a story with a title like "Crazy Rona"? You call that coming off ‘pretty good’?” I heard him sneer even though he was calling from his cell phone and the connection was intermittent.

I chose not to enter into another debate with him about stories and chapters—we had been through that too many times already, and instead asked, “Where are you anyway, I can hardly hear you?”

“To tell you truth, I’m in the hospital. In the intensive care unit.”

I was careful not to follow that up, preferring to think that since he was still a doctor, a urologist, a self-described Dick Doctor, that he might have been with a patient rather than, considering his advancing years, being one.

I decided, thus, not to inquire and to engage him just about what I had written. The last thing I wanted was to learn that he might be seriously ill or even, God forbid, dying. “Did you read the whole thing or just the title? If you had, especially the last chapter, I think you would see that that ‘crazy’ part is used ironically.”

“Again with the irony. Of course I read the whole thing. Even though, as you know, I didn’t think much of the first two books of stories,” here we go again, I thought, about him calling the “chapters” “stories”; but I ignored that and, after pausing to, I’m sure, bait me into an argument about that, he continued, “You know that though I thought both of them were poorly developed and the stories didn’t knit together as well as you claimed, I still have good memories of our growing up together in the same part of Brooklyn and even of our childhood friendship; and so I like to keep track of what you’re up to.”

“I do know that and appreciate it.” I tried to sound sincere.

“Frankly, your appreciation doesn’t mean that much to me after all the years of your ignoring me and pretending to be such a fancy person, too full of yourself to want to be associated with any of us from the old neighborhood.”

I had hoped he had gotten over that resentment. After all we were nearly seventy and there he was maybe connected to intravenous lines and wearing an oxygen mask. When would he get over those imagined slights? Hadn’t I made amends enough in the first two volumes by representing him so positively? More than he deserved, to tell the truth. That was one of the reasons for fictionalizing my memoirs, another thing he had mocked me for doing.

But since, who knows, maybe he was dying, I let it slide and said, “I understand. You’re right. I could have been a much better person. I should not have done so much pretending and posturing. In some ways, I’ve been seeing these books as a way of making amends.”

“Well, you could have done a much better job of that too.” His voice came across with its old strength in spite of the clicking on the phone and what sounded like the beep of monitoring equipment in the background.

From all of these still strong feelings, whatever his condition--I was sensing that he was more likely a patient than a physician--I decided to stop pandering to him and said, “Forget the Rona part for a moment, OK, and tell me what else is wrong with the book?”

“Plenty,” he shot back. “Among other things, what was true previously is true here as well—there’s no sense of color whatsoever in any of your books, no clear or noteworthy descriptions of any of your so-called ‘characters,’ and no sense whatsoever of place.” I didn’t say a word, letting him rant on. “I’ll give you an example from the first story, ‘I Married Lydia,’ who is quite two-dimensional by the way since I know who she is derived from or, as you would say, from whom she was ‘fictionalized.’ I have no idea what she looks like except that she wears black clothes all the time; and I have no sense of how any of the settings look, other than the frankly unbelievable description of that mad psychiatrist’s leather-covered office, ridiculous; much less any sense of coloration—what does the light streaming into your room from the Hudson look like? I ask because that light seems to me to be important to you, to represent something significant since you make such a big thing of it? No novelist, if that’s what you insist on calling yourself, could get away with any of this.”

I thought I heard him sucking in a stream of oxygen but still I restrained myself, saying nothing back to him. “Frankly,” he continued after what sounded like wheezing, “reading this latest book made me realize that in the three of them all you did was string together descriptions of only loosely-related incidents. Place, time, setting, reflective insights are in all cases absent. It’s as if everything is represented in black and white, and I am not just talking about ‘color,’ and the narrative, such as it is, reminds me more of the dramas that they used to present on the radio than any novels with which I am familiar.”

“Well,” I was happy to be able to say, “maybe we are on more common ground than you might imagine. Because much of your criticism of my method and the structure of the books in fact reflect exactly what I am attempting to achieve.” I was certain that I heard him snort. Maybe he was also flooded with mucus.

“I am working in this colorless, locationless way quite intentionally--not, if I may say so, out of failure of imagination or lack of skill. Though you may of course disagree about the quality of my vision and technique. That’s your privilege.”

“Stop patronizing me, will you. I think by now you know that I’m not exactly illiterate.” True, I remembered he had made some intelligent references to other novelists back when I had sent him a copy of “Dirty Jew Bastards!”

“Sorry, again,” I said, “You seem so touchy. I have a lot of respect for your opinions otherwise I would already have made an excuse and hung up.”

“Be my guest,” he said testily and added, “And I’m far from touchy.”

“Well if you would stop choking for a minute,” I was instantly sorry to have blurted this out but pressed on anyway, “I have a few things to say—first of all, though Lydia is of course derived from a real person . . .”

“Your first wife, no?”

“Yes, her. But the things I wrote about her are mostly made up. If you remember one of our earlier conversations about my writing, I told you that I try to find the essential as opposed to the literal truth and so . . .”

“That again,” he muttered, exasperated and seemingly gasping for air.

So I spoke faster, thinking not much more time might be remaining, “Yes that again because it’s critical to my methodology.”

There were more choking sounds; and I also thought I heard him say derisively under his breath, “Methodology? That’s a laugh.”

Undeterred, I said, “I use my imagination to get to that truth and want you, readers to use theirs as well. We’ve been over all of this before. That’s why I deliberately bleach out all color and choose not to over-describe things.”

He chortled at that and said, “That’s an understatement”.

But I continued, “So, yes, you’re right to compare what I do to old-time radio scripts. In fact, I hope it is like the experience of listening in the dark to just the bare bones of dialogue and a few primitive sound effects--where intentionally presenting so little forces you to fill in the visual and imaginative blanks.”

I hadn’t heard any sounds from him for a while so I paused in the hope that he was still there—literally. Then there were the sounds of someone stirring about so I continued, again unable to control my tendency to lecture, “Is this helpful?”

Nothing. But then he came back to life and took off in an entirely different direction, “And by the way, as if things weren’t bad enough, what’s all this crap about associating yourself with Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation writers?”

“Well with that, didn’t you notice, I was being ironic and self-deprecating. Didn’t I acknowledge my various humiliations with this, public and private? And by the way most of that is not made up—it’s was all too literal.”

“I saw that, but even worse was your attempt to manipulate, how did you put this just now, ‘the reader’ to ‘locate’ you within the great tradition of American humorists, even if in your case, to me, much of the so-called humor was unintentional. Did I remember your even alluding to Mark Twain? And by association try to sneak yourself into his company? All that feigned innocence. What a turn off.” I think with that I heard him spit into a cup. He did sound as if he was on his last legs.

“Well, you got me there. Guilty as charged. I was rereading Twain while working on this volume. I especially liked the European sections of Innocents Abroad.” I couldn’t believe myself—here he was dying and I’m telling him about what I had been reading. I couldn’t blame him that he had had it with me.

“You’re killing me,” he retorted, clearly pleased that he caught me talking down to him again as I had done through so many of our early years together.

And while again attempting to stifle his fluid coughing he changed direction again, “I read somewhere, probably just some of your publisher’s PR bullshit, that this book is supposed to be about happiness.”

“Well, sort of. It’s really more about . . .”

“I know a thing or two about that. Let me tell you about happiness . . . .”

“Dr. Perlmutter, pick up on line three. Dr. P, line three please.”

“What’s going on?” I at last asked, “Where are you?”

“Finishing with a patient. What the hell else would I be doing in the I.C.U.?” I was relieved to learn that he wasn’t the patient and immediately felt better that his last conversation on earth, whenever that will be, would not be this one about my book. “It’s an emergency and I’ll have to call, you back.”

“So you’re . . . ?”

“I need to go. Someone may be dying.” But, from all of his wheezing and coughing, he still sounded to the old pre-med in me as if he could benefit by climbing into one of those hospital beds and hooking himself up to a drip.

“All I can say to you,” Heshy sneezed, “is thank God this is the last of these.”

About that, we did agree. With this book I had said all I wanted about myself and him and everyone else from the blurry past—both the literal and the essential.

He had stayed on the line; and as if he had heard my tired thoughts, and intentionally again, for a final time, ignored them and said, “By the way, in case you’re curious—my equipment, as you so like to refer to it, is still working very well. If you don’t believe me just ask my new wife!”

He began to laugh raucously—it was a sound also very much from the past. Then asked, “So how about yours? Still working?”

And with that, to gales of his own laughter, he hung up.