Collected Fictions (29 page)

ON THE BUSINESS OF GENERATING TRANSFORMS

I have, for example,
heard such sentences
as "They didn't know
what each other should do" . . .

—
NOAM CHOMSKY

HE DID NOT MEAN IN
Ahnenerbe, in Ahmecetka, in Ananiev, in Apion, Arad, Armyansk, Artemovsk, Aumeier, Auschwitz, Baden, Bad Tölz, Baetz, Ballensiefen, Balti, Belzec, Beresovka, Bergen-Belsen, Bessarabia, Birkenau, Blizyn, Bobruisk, Bolzano, Borisov, Borispol, Brabag, Bratislava, Breendonck, Breslau, Brest Litovsk, Buchenwald, Budzyn, Bukovina, Chelmno, Chisinau, Chmiolnik, Chortkov, Cservenka, Czestochowa, Dachau, Dorohoi, Dorohucza, Dubno, Flir, Florstedt, Flossenbürg, Gomel, Gorlitz, Grodno, Hilversum, Kamenka, Karlovac, Karsava, Kaunas, Kharkov, Kirovograd, Kislovodsk, Kistarcsa, Klimovichni, Koblenz, Kobryn, Kodyma, Kopkow, Kowel, Krakow-Placzow, Krzemienec, Kulmhof, Kummer, Kurhessen, Kursk, Kysak, Kyustendil, Langleist, Larissa, Lida, Liscka, Litzenberg, Ljubljana, Lodz, Lom, Lublin, Lvov, Majdanek, Malkinia, Mariupol, Mielec, Mitrovica, Mogilev, Moldavia, Monowitz, Nasielek, Neu-Sandez, Nevel, Novo Moskovsk, Novo Ukrainka, Olshanka, Opitz, Oppeln, Oswiecim, Pionki, Plovdiv, Poltava, Poniatowa, Poznan, Pristina, Pskov, Raschwitz, Ravensbrück, Rawa-Ruska, Regensburg, Rovno, Saarbrucken, Saarpflaz, Salonika, Sambor, Sdolbunov, Silesia, Simferopol, Skopje, Slavyansk, Slivina, Slovakia, Slovenia, Slutsk, Sluzk, Smolensk, Snigerevka, Snovsk, Sobibor, Sonsken, Struma, Staden, Stammlager, Stettin, Szarva, Szeged, Szolnok-Doboka, Taganrog, Tallin, Târgu-Mures, Tarnopol, Tartu, Theresienstadt, Tighina, Timisoara, Tiraspol, Tizabogdany, Tomaschow, Transnistria, Trawniki, Treblinka, Trikkala, Trzynietz, Turck, Turda, Uzhorod, Vapniarka, Varna, Vijnita, Vilna, Vinnitsa, Vitebsk, Vitezka, Volhynia-Podolia, or in Vyazma, or in Zakopane, or in Zangen, or in Zupp.

But, yes, certainly it is probably true they did not know what each other should do. They probably did not know what even they themselves should.

FISH STORY

AS FAR AS I WAS ALWAYS CONCERNED
, the outdoors was where you maybe went when it wasn't raining and only when you had to. I wasn't the only indoorsy type in my parish to cherish this unhealthy opinion. One thing was, you couldn't hear
Jack Armstrong
under some spreading chestnut tree—because Jewish boys did not have spreading chestnut trees and, anyway, back in those backward burnished days, portable radios went about three pounds shy of the total tonnage of the
Normandie,
crew and cargo loaded. Or maybe they hadn't even invented them yet—portable radios, I mean, not Jewish boys. But the days were indeed backward, all right, aglow with the feeble light those ancient flame-shaped amber bulbs struggled to give off. Everybody's mother thought they were the cat's pajamas, those cunning bulbs, just the thing for the fake-Tudor houses everybody lived in. Oh, we were all as happy as clams in those glowy places the mothers tried to pry us from into the bright outdoorsy day calling all unwholesome boys. All you wanted weekdays was a box of Uneeda Biscuits and a row of Walnettos, to sustain you from
Jack Armstrong
through
Lorenzo Jones.
Saturdays,
Let's Pretend
and
Grand Central Station
so filled the inner kid and stilled the organs of ingestion, you went serenely, the whole day, without. Sundays we won't even talk about, so you and your loved ones will not have to hear what it sounds like when a grown man sobs. Oh, I suppose I can risk a little bit, mention just
The Shadow, The Adventures of Nick Carter—Master Detective,
and
Quick as a Flash,
leaving it, I think, impressively, unbeatably, oh so longingly at that.

Are you kidding me—the outdoors? The outdoors was for droolers and for nose-pickers, for kids called Buster and Butch and the one, I swear, called Bix. The outdoors was for the kid we called "Wedge" because, you know, because someone had told us your wedge was your simplest tool.

But sometimes God was merciless and it did not rain.

It was then that the mothers came armed with reminders of Green Harvey, to breach the ramparts and storm the trenches of Bad Hygiene.

But first they'd move into action with rickets.

You'll get rickets!

(Aw, Ma, what's rickets?)

Rickets
is
from not playing outdoors and from eating meat from a can! Do I ever give you meat from
a
can?

(Aw, Ma, I've got to stay tuned for a coded message.)

Tell me something, Mr. Young-Man-Who-Is-Willing-To-Break-A-Mother's-Blood-Vessel, have you lately taken a good look at Harvey Joel Rosensweig?

Visions of Green Harvey an uncomfortable number of houses away always did the ruthless trick. Because you did not want to look like Harvey Joel Rosensweig anymore than Harvey Joel Rosensweig did. And if you were the sort of chicken-hearted impressionable I was, the mother in question did not have to break a blood vessel. You want to divide a believer from the family Emerson, you will never get a better crowbar than Visions of Green Harvey. But this, of course, was back when liddlies were backward and just little.

Which reminds me of another thing which they had not invented yet—which was smart kids. Not only that, but they also hadn't
un
invented parents who never heard of traumatizing the crap out of a ten-year-old radio fan.

Green Harvey!

Jeepers, you never saw a kid quicker when it came to buckling on his swashes.

SO THERE YOU WERE
, on the lawn, just crazy to participate in the American Way of Life. You had the Wheaties box to guide you in the modalities of how your American boy is supposed to play, but what you did not have was anybody to do it with—because this was the day it was your mother who was the only mother home to hound her issue into the streets, all of the other mothers being at the neighborhood rummy game, which is where it is mothers and fathers in a perfect world were perfectly meant to be.

I'd sit on the curb for a time and stare at some glinty thing in the gutter. I don't know what it was with me, but in those backward burnished days, whenever I sat on a curb, this is what I would do, cut my eyes sideways from side to side until I had spotted some glittery thing, a bonanza in the gutter. Then I'd sit there, at whatever distance, trying to guess what it was. Not guess, really, but just declare aloud with mad conviction—alone like this, you being Renfrew of the Royal Mounties or Sergeant Preston of the Yukon—the startling powers in you something scary in your solitude. Hey, whatever it was, off there in the gutter, who even needed a second glint?

Gum wrapper!

And then you'd get up and go look.

The time's too backward and burnished for me to remember if I ever did guess right. But I remember one day what it was when the guess I'd guessed was nowhere near to close, which—okay, okay, you got me, okay?—which incident is what accounts for my getting into this whole outdoorsy business with you in the first place.

Because one day it was a fishhook!

NOW
A
FISHHOOK
IN
THE
GUTTER
was not a discovery you routinely made in the gutters of the streets where I come from. I'm talking about a place called the Five Towns, a sort of way-station along the ongoing Diaspora about twenty miles out on Long Island, counting from the center of familial concern—which was where all of the fathers bravely went each day with their brown suits and their gray fedora hats.

I wasn't all that dumb about fishing, mind you. Not only did I know it was a thing the Wheaties box okayed, but I knew almost all the grammar-school readers had Skippy always doing it with his pop, or had Bucky always wanting to do it with his pa, or had Franklin Delano Roosevelt telling a story about it to his dog.

I knew they all did it with an animal they called a worm and that they did it with a stick they called a pole. I knew they got a
worm
and a
line
and a
pole,
and that where they went with them to do it was to a
crick.

I wasn't too sure we had anything around there where we lived which would qualify as a crick, but the first three items I figured for a cinch. Hook in hand—you know,
holding
it—my mother's shrieked philosophy conjuring in my mind's ear the shout of calamity (
You will put an eye out with that thing!
), I headed for the garage, happy to be in darkness for the time it would take for me to get the pole (a piece of picket fence, an upright left over because the lawn we had did not go that far) and the line (a bunch of Venetian-blind cord the vermin had set up for themselves as a haven in a heartless world).

Worm.

Worm?

I'd seen a few in my time—but not really where they had come from. I mean, a worm was something Green Harvey would come running at you with—until you had had the luck to see him coming and the good sense for you to take off a safe distance the other way, far enough for his fat to make Green Harvey quit coming and eat it—the worm. But it never crossed my mind to wonder where Harvey Joel Rosensweig got his worm from. I suppose I just leaped to the conclusion you had to be a Harvey Joel Rosensweig to know where worms were.

Worm! Worm! Worm!

I think I remember scuffing up the pebbles in our driveway for a trice or two, giving many maddening seconds to my idea of how a real American boy breasts all hardship to quest the Great Quest. What I mean is I was by this time back in those backward burnished days pretty damn wised-up as to a pessimist's construction of everything in sight—meaning: if I did not catch a fish, I would be the last one to be surprised. Listen, it was a boyhood perpendicular to the kind you read about in the readers in school. It was a boyhood where the community never rested in its preparations for disaster and was amazed, seemed disappointed, when it did not strike. It was a boyhood where standards were sky-high but where expectation had been leached out of them to make for you a non-annihilating semi-null class. Come on, I'm not whining—I am just giving you, straight from the shoulder, the whole heart-rending tragic picture.

SO HERE WE ARE
, nostalgia fans, back behind the family garage with a piece of picket fence, about nine feet of chewed-up Venetian-blind cord, and a hook Satan had set out to do temptation's work there in a gutter-looker's gutter. But you're thinking crick, you're thinking where does the kid get a crick from? Well, it takes the kid about a half hour to walk it to the crick, an inlet (let in by the Atlantic Ocean) spanned by a little bridge you crossed to get to the beach clubs. We called this inlet The Inlet, and we called the bridge The Bridge—not unmindful of how Skippy and Bucky were always coming up with these really great names for things—it dawning on me that if you got yourself out there on a little poke of dock up on out there on the landward side (hello, Skippy! hello, Bucky!), you could drop a line down into something maybe liquid and deep enough.

Look, I can appreciate how knot-tying is probably a pretty big deal to most people, but for me there's never been much in it for me after the shoelace stage. So if you are wondering how I got the Venetian-blind cord stuck onto the piece of picket fence, do me a favor and save your worry for the hook.

Because the hook, jeez, the hook truly was a bitch. I mean, I tried a lot of very fancy thinking, but my brain could only handle in my mind the mental thought it definitely, the hook, could not be hooked to anything I had in my hands.

So I just dropped the line in, tossed the Venetian-blind cord in, hookless and wormless but serious-looking if you went by the principle of its having lifted up its share of slats.

YOU READY
?

You're ready!

Because how else could this all come out but as a good and countervailing lesson for a boy who always waited for the worst?

I am not saying what happened converted an indoors type to an outdoors one. Please, I still get closest to God somewhere where you can control the light. All I am saying is I went ahead and pulled up no fewer than a dozen lunatic fish with that stick of picket fence—fish which just bit anywhere all at once on that Venetian-blind cord and which looked like they were not going to let go of it wherever they'd bit on a bet.

I did not take even one of them home to prove it, though. As a matter of fact, I did not try to yank even one of them off the line. I just dropped the stick and ran like hell, all twelve or so of those infectious things on there fastened to it for good.

You know who would have stuck around?

I bet you Green Harvey would have stuck around—the loon probably harvesting those evil-minded monstrosities just to pitch one through the window of every mother's son who ever had believed himself to be altogether more than far enough away from any undoing indoors.

But me, I had had my fair warning of what is sometimes under outdoor things.

Knew I'd never need to have another warning again.

IT WAS BETTER THAN THIRTY YEARS LATER
, when I was turning the pages of a Ladybird Book for an indoorsy type of my own (a kid whose peaceable opinion of nature continues to treacherously thrive on an abundance of urban ignorance), that I found out what it was the Wheaties box had got me into back in the backward burnished days when my heart was brave and true—namely, the worst scare ever to chase me through all of the backward burnish of my youth.

It was just a blowfish.

They were just blowfish.

Every last one of them a blown-up certitude in and of itself.

Oh, it will bite on any fool thing, your natural blowfish will. But so, for that matter—hook, line, and sinker—will your friendly reader. I mean, since it is all the same in the end, and if it is all the same to you, give me human nature every time—and the equally metaphoric, equally dubious, equally muddled angling of men.