Contents
Part One
THE DOG, THE FAMILY: A HOUSEHOLD TALE.....................3
TOO BAD ABOUT MRS. FERRI..................................14
EAST/WEST VARIATIONS......................................22
Part Two
THE LOST EVENING..........................................53
THE BUS...................................................61
THE ZAM ZAM ROOM..........................................78
AN ENCYCLOPEDIC HISTORY OF THE WORLD......................92
Part Three
EROS & POETRY.............................................103
CUTTY, ONE ROCK...........................................120
Chapter One
THE DOG, THE FAMILY:
A HOUSEHOLD TALE
It was the dog who raised me. Oh, the others came and went
with their nurturing gestures and concerns, but it was the
dog on whose ear I teethed and who watched me through
countless hours with the sagacity and hearing of a Ugandan
tribal chief.
You can see him straining at the collar as my mother,
dressed to the nines, first introduced him to me, freshly
home from the hospital, lying across the nurse's lap, almost
afloat, like an early Renaissanee Christ child. You can see the
muscles in his shoulders and neck. Perhaps he would have
eaten me right then had I not been smelling of Mother, who
I must say looks very pretty there in profile, probably about
to head off to her Shakespeare club or into the city to see
Paul Scofield in Lear, or something along those lines. Mother
was very keen on Shakespeare, you see.
Going through the old photo albums you will find pictures of
me in various stages of growing up, surrounded by the family:
father, mother, sister, brother. But please notice, it is the
dog at my side, seated upright, proudly displaying the musculature
of his thick chest and the flame of white fur that ornamented
it. I am his charge, the rest of them bit players.
Not so much a Romulus-and-Remus situation as my having
a guardian, a sort of dog uncle, rearing me in lieu of parents.
Actually, the dog looked very human, rather more so than
one or two other members of the family. I had forgotten just
how extreme was his facial resemblance to a human being
until recently, when I showed my ladylove, Tarischa, an old
photograph of the dog and me on the front stoop. Her eyes
grew very large, then she began gagging.
We called him Granny or Grand, shortened from Twenty
Grand, the famous racehorse after whom he was named. Father
bought him on sale. He bought everything on sale.
Grand was a boxer, purebred, but one of his ears was wrong;
it didn't set up properly. And his right eye dripped. He also
had a skin condition, something like mange but untreatable.
Father got him for peanuts, really: a treasure, if you looked
past certain cosmetic flaws.
Granny was a killer, but only when off the leash out of
doors. He killed the chihuahua next door and Ernie Middelhauser's
dog, Jo-Jo. He seldom attacked humans, only dogs,
male dogs. Female dogs brought out his romantic side. You
see, if you weren't careful when you opened the front or back
door, he would shoot by you or between your legs and be
gone for days. Eventually, he'd turn up hungry, looking a bit
haggard. Father would kick him for a while until he tired of
the exercise, and Granny would take it stoically, without
growling or baring his teeth, only looking back at Father now
and then with an ugly sneer.
I did miss him when he was off on one of his adventures,
left alone with my toy soldiers and the cartoon shows of television's
infancy. I recall one where a clown-I seem to remember
his name was Cocoa-jumped out of an inkwell and
made some difficulty for his creator. Cocoa was animated,
the creator not: this provoked my imagination. After some
difficulty, the creator always succeeded in getting Cocoa
back in the bottle. There are certainly metaphors and allegories
aplenty here if you go in for such things. Regardless,
the dog would eventually return and we would pick up where
we left off, no questions asked, no pouting or recriminations.
It's not as if the rest of the family weren't around. Father
was at work, quite naturally, and Mother shopping, or perhaps
at her Shakespeare club, which met on alternate Tuesdays.
My brother would have been in the basement, at work
on a model airplane, getting himself stoned senseless on glue
fumes. Or if not in the basement, then in the apple tree, seeing
how far he could get out on a limb before it snapped.
My sister lived in the attic. It was not such a bad thing to
have her always up there, as she had Father's unpredictable
disposition. Well, not always: she would occasionally come
down to gnaw the meat off the steak bone we were ordered to
save for her. Oh, and there were the suitors. My sister had an
hourglass figure and a pixie hairdo. She favored very stupid
boys with dodgy backgrounds and convertibles.
Otherwise, she read her Latin in the attic or, when saturated
with Ovid, would play her rock-and-roll seventy-eights
on her portable. She played "The Naughty Lady of
Shady Lane" repeatedly, hundreds of times, for months on
end. She would dance to this and other tunes: thump, thump,
thump. No one in the family was particularly graceful, accepting
the dog and, to a certain extent, me, having modeled
my own movements on the dog's. My brother was not graceful
but had a primitive athleticism, as I imagine the young
Tecumseh or Cochise must have had, an athleticism given almost
wholly over to mayhem. My brother was not unlike the
dog in the behavior he evinced out of the house. Nor did Father
receive my brother much differently from the dog when
he'd stagger home at last with his assorted wounds and bills
incurred.
My sister spent so much time in the attic with her Latin
that she broke the record for A pluses at the local high school
and went off to Smith College after her junior year to study
Latin in the Big Leagues of American Higher Education.
Such intellectual prowess was unheard of at this particular
high school and my sister became a legend there, her name
synonymous with braininess. The only other equivalent
celebrity from that high school during that time was the fellow
who wrote the hit song "Flying Purple People Eater,"
and there might even have been some challenge as to the
song's real authorship.
Mother didn't like children, least of all her own, and me least
among them. I was unplanned, an accident, a misfortune.
You see, Mother and Father had taken the Fishblatts, their
friends from around the corner, out to dinner, and everybody
got quite drunk. That had been my parents' plan: to
get the Fishblatts drunk. It seems the Fishblatts were making
ready for a divorce, which signaled no more impromptu
get-togethers only a hop, skip, and jump away. I suppose the
plan was that when the appropriate level of drunkenness
was achieved, there would be a series of ribald and stoical
jokes about the imperfect union of marriage, boots of exasperation,
and unbridled guffaws, and the Fishblatts would
stagger home, enjoy an amorous reconciliation of robust
proportion, and resign themselves to being stuck with one
another for the duration, a circumstance relieved from time
to time by visits with my parents.
Well, now, it didn't turn out like that at all. The Fishblatts
sobered up straightaway and got divorced. Mother became
pregnant with me, years after she'd convinced herself she'd
beaten that particular rap.
My appearance on the scene was unwelcome enough, but it
turned out that I looked like the dog. I am not suggesting
that Mother had been impregnated by Granny, not at all.
You see, if Mother had only listened to her own mother and
averted her eyes from the dog during the term of her pregnancy,
it was said, this unhappy result might have been
avoided. Nanny Farbisseneh, a tiny, dour creature originally
from a bog outside of Kiev, who, when she spoke at all, issued
terse commands in a broken English that drifted erratically
into a goulash of Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish,
held powerful, almost frightening influence over her three
daughters, of whom Mother was the youngest. In the presence
of Nanny, Mother and my two aunts were like zombified
servant girls, oblivious of their own wants and those of their
respective families.
Nanny Farbisseneh disapproved of dogs, and held a dim
view of males of any species, so you see, a male dog, especially
one with Granny's imperfections, could succeed only
in eliciting her unalloyed revulsion. But despite Nanny Far's
injunctions, Mother not only continued to look at the dog but
gazed lovingly into his eyes (the right one caked with discharge)
for hours on end. Mother, it turns out, loved four-legged
creatures, both cloven and hoofed, and, without
exception, even the most vicious and recalcitrant, they
adored her, not least of all Grand. True, Mother fed the dog
and saw to the removal of his feces, but Granny's love for
Mother went far beyond this natural bond: the dog was in love
with Mother, a situation that did not go unnoticed by Father,
who routinely attacked the dog, either with his right foot or
a rolled-up copy of The Atlantic Monthly brought down
sharply on the dog's black, concertinaed snout.
So Mother, who seldom, if ever, disobeyed Nanny Far, in
this instance made an egregious exception, one that she
would rue and suffer to be daily reminded of for years and
years. In fact, so considerable was her distress at having been
delivered of this curious whelp that not a week after my birth
both my parents disappeared to Guatemala for a fortnight,
presumably to console one another, divert themselves with
Mayan figurines, rain forests, cloudy fermented beverages
made from tubers-whatever one does in such places. But in
truth, knowing Father, Guatemala was probably that season's
cheapest ticket. And Mother really, really wanted to get
the hell out of Dodge.
My resemblance to the dog was not my only embarrassment
to the family. I had a thick Czech accent as well, at least until
the age of seven or so, when Father let our housekeeper,
Christine, go. If memory serves, because she asked for a small
raise after many years of devoted service.
Christine was a round, bosomy, gray-haired Czech woman,
grandmotherly, if you will, but in the nice movie-and-storybook
way as opposed to the Nanny Far way. Christine
smelled of dough and fresh laundry. She loved me and had
me entirely convinced I was the singular joy in her life, although
I knew she had a son of her own. In the evenings,
Christine would cook deep-fried potatoes, the smell of which
was an enchantment. The memory of those potatoes stirs me
to this day. It was an aroma of such pleasurable intensity
that it seemed of another world and time, perhaps a subterranean
wood-paneled beer hall-cum-restaurant somewhere
in Bratislava, where officers, business leaders, and
ladies of fashion would congregate a century earlier, taking
refuge from the harsh elements and sustenance in the
hearty, blissfully aromatic fare.
Then, after Christine had cleaned up, she would go home
to her no-good, delinquent son, her three-room, cabbagey
shithole, and watch The Joe Franklin Show, or some trash
of that sort, like the ignorant bohunk she was. But to me,
Christine was maternal beneficence, pleasure and abundance,
my anti-Mother. Years later, as an adult, I would live
with a young Czech woman, Canadian-Czech, and suck my
thumb till it was raw as I watched her cook pierogi, chicken
paprikash, her special Bohemian cookies. Then, when we
were done eating, I'd lick her breasts while we copulated for
hours, all the time thinking of Christine's tattersall apron
and the smell of her fried potatoes from across the years.
When Christine had left, Mother took it into her head to take
a more active role in the rearing of her youngest child, me.
The dog was sent whimpering to the den. It was just Mother
and me at the kitchen table. I remember the moment very
well, to this day. She clearly had plans for me, and her appraising,
contemptuous look augured nothing good, at least
insofar as I was concerned.
"It's back to the good ol' U. S. of A. for you, babykins," she
said to me. "Let's lose the Kafka accent. It's giving your father
and me the creeps, and your brother and sister are too
embarrassed to bring home any of their friends. You're going
to speak like an American child and act like an American
child. And while you're at it, wipe the schmutz off your chin."
Had I forgotten what I told Mother at that particular
point, her tittering rendition of it over the years would have
been more than adequate in refreshing my memory: "I vont
you should take a valk in dee voods and a beeg, bad volf eat
you all whup!" That one really cracked her pits. "You really
are the limit," she said mirthlessly, shaking her head in dismay.
I could hear the dog whining piteously from behind the
closed parlor doors.
Mother explained to me that if I didn't come around, and
in a hurry, she'd make me take a job in Uncle Ja-Ja's factory,
blocking hats. Uncle Ja-Ja was Nanny Far's little brother,
although he, too, was ancient. He resembled an engorged
frog with thick, black-rimmed glasses, and smelled of gherkins
Ja-Ja was always looking for cheap labor-child, adult,
no matter-and surely would have jumped at the idea, but
it was Great-Aunt Duhnny, the final authority among the
Kiev bog contingent, who put her foot down. "Dog-boy go to
school like ordinary child," she said, and that was that.
Father worked and read the paper. Children and child rearing,
in his view, belonged to the realm of the female, and in
my case the dog. The children were Mother's bailiwick. His
job was to make money, then lose it, make it again, and so on,
except when he was reading the paper, which was filled with
information on how to make money, along with insights into
the perils of how it might be lost.
Money and the record of its activity was not Father's only
interest. He had a fascination with what he called "antiquities,"
or at least what they cost. In particular, he liked bodhisattvas,
religious statuary from the Orient of sacred
figures like Avalokitesvara, Manjusri, Kshitigarbha. Why
a man of almost no formal education (having been repeatedly
thrown out of school for antisocial behavior) should
cotton to these small sculptures of holy beings who seek
Buddhahood through the practice of perfect virtues, well ...
Regardless, the house looked like a Chinese souvenir shop,
which was a terrible cross for Mother to bear. A frightful snob
about such things, Mother, who cherished a Todd Haynes
look in domestic interiors, would sit there on the living-room
sofa, smoking her Salems, and, regarding the clutter of sacred
figures, say, "Just look at all that shit," shaking her head
disconsolately.
Fortunately or unfortunately, for Mother, Father, like
those primeval forests that spontaneously autocombust
every century or two to get rid of old growth and make room
for new, every few months would go berserk and destroy
everything in the house, invariably heading first for the bodhisattvas.
I can only speculate in hindsight how many
dozens of Avalokitesvaras (the bodhisattva of compassion.
known as Kuan-yin in China) Father cracked over the mantelpiece.
As for the rest of us during these episodes, led by Mother,
and with the dog bringing up the rear, we would retreat to
the upstairs bathroom and lock ourselves in until it was evident
the storm had blown itself out.
Continues...
Excerpted from Cutty, One Rock
by AUGUST KLEINZAHLER
Copyright © 2004 by August Kleinzahler.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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Cutty, One Rock
