January 25, 2013--Prologue to Part 3--Heshy's Final Complaint

“If I were your wife, your current wife, I’d be pissed off.”  

It was Heshy.  I had avoided contact with him on the advice of my publisher’s lawyers.  I had sent him a copy of the second part of my novel, Give Him a Treatment Boys! because, as in the first, Safe In America, he had been prominently mentioned. I had needed his approval to use his real name.  Though he did not like either part very much, I suppose he had allowed me to do so due to his considerable ego.   

Now that the book was completed, he had gotten his hands on a prepublication copy at the Strand Bookstore and 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 well.” 

“With a story like “Crazy Rona”?  You call that coming off ‘pretty well’?”  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 the 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 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, I think you would see that the ‘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 stories in the first two parts.”  Here we go again, I thought, about him calling the “chapters” “stories”; but I ignored that and, after pausing. I’m sure, to bait me into an argument, 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 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 IV lines and wearing an oxygen mask.  When would he get over those imagined slights?  Hadn’t I made amends enough in the book by representing him in such a positive light?  Better than he deserved, to tell the truth. 

But since 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 what I’ve written 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 medical 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 in the hospital as 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, 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 of part three, ‘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 from inquiring.  “Frankly,” he continued after what sounded like wheezing, “reading the entire book made me realize that 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 presented in black and white, and I am not just talking about ‘color,’ and the narrative, such as it is, reminds me more like the serial dramas they used to play 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 he first part. 

“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 then 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 . . .” 

“Lydia, 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 joke.”  

Undeterred, I pressed on, “I use my imagination to get to that truth and want you, I mean readers, to use theirs as well.  We’ve been over all 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 the book is a little 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 was all that crap about associating yourself with Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation writers?” 

“Well, with that,” this zinger landed—in truth I had been self-conscious about much of what I wrote about and set in the West End bar—and wounded by it, I defensively said, “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 to try to get ‘the reader’ to ‘locate’ you within the great tradition of American writing, to me much of your so-called self-deprecating humor was a turn off. All that feigned innocence.  What baloney.” 

With that it sounded as if he was chocking and spitting into a cup.  If I was hearing correctly, from what was going on at his end, it did appear he was on his last legs. 

“Well, you got me there.  Guilty as charged.  I was rereading Mark Twain while working on this last part of the book.  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 during so many of our early years together.  

And while again attempting to stifle his fluid coughing he once more changed directions, “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 ICU.?”  

I was relieved to learn that he wasn’t the patient and immediately felt better that his last conversation on earth would not be this one.  “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 you’re finally done with your furshlugginer book.”  

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

Heshy had stayed on the line; and, as if he had heard my tired thoughts, intentionally again, for the final time, ignored me and 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 raucously to laugh—it was a sound also very familiar from our past—and asked, “So how about yours?  Your equipment. Still working?” 

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