Crackpot, page 39
“A kid like you should go to college,” said Hoda. Well, why not? He was a smart boy, that much she could tell. The things he had told her about, that he’d built, she’d never heard his buddy Ralphie talk about figuring out complicated things like that, though he was always boasting how smart he was. “If you want, maybe I could try to help you go to university,” she suggested, tentatively, off-hand like. “Only you’d have to help by saving your money and giving up screwing around, with professionals, anyway,” she added.
“Okay,” said David cheerfully, relieved, and having got used, by now, to her zany suggestions. “When I’m through high school in a couple of years, if I get that far, we’ll draw up a contract. Let’s not talk now, hey?”
“No, I’m serious,” said Hoda, shoving his hand away. “I really think you’re wasting your time. What do you mean ‘if I get that far?’ You’ve got to get that far. You’re not going to get anywhere without an education, you can take it from me.”
“Look, remember what you said that time, when I came with the guys the first time, and we were kibitzing around and you said ‘To err is human, to recline divine?’ So how about it now, divine? Recline!”
Just her luck he had a sense of humour, too. It ran in the family. Hoda had more than once these days to groan inwardly over the little homilies with which she had been wont to put new customers in the mood.
Well, what should she have done? What think? What feel? Should she have quit working? Closed shop? Turned away her customers? Crossed her legs and looked virtuous? And sent her Daddy after all this time to the Old Folks’ Home, maybe, and stood in line for relief tickets like everyone else, and not done anything for the boy at all? Hell with all that. In the end she didn’t even turn away his friends or the other young kids who came, though she had lost her taste for young boys. It revolted her, in fact, to lie with them now. But revulsion is not a valid economic consideration. And besides, when David began to turn up less frequently because he was running out of money, and he had to begin to space his treats, she could keep in touch through the other kids, by introducing him as it were casually into her conversations with them.
Too soon it happened, actually, that his money began to run out, when she had not even had a chance properly to begin to do him any good, in any of the other ways, the real ways that counted, that is. Already he was drifting beyond her reach. What of her long-range plan to get him and Daddy to know each other eventually, a knowing which would lead perhaps to a loving, three-way friendship? It became something of an obsession with her, this vision of a healing, three-way friendship, and perhaps she behaved rather foolishly as a result, in trying to maintain a contact with him through his friends. The boys couldn’t fail to notice her interest. She tried to control herself, and not ask the same boy too often, or seem too interested in the reply. And yet when his pals didn’t turn up for awhile she couldn’t seem to prevent herself from asking even stranger kids, and when she got any little scrap of information, she forgot her determination not to seem too interested, and pressed eagerly for more, so that inevitably the word got around among the boys that the fat old chippy had the hots for the royal orphan. The guys razzed the pants off David. Ralphie insisted that the reason Hoda was so nuts about the Prince was that he had something special in those pants of his, something he took such good care of, he’d never even let anyone get a look at it. Why else, come to think of it, had he always refused to take a shower with the other guys? Obviously he was shy of revealing to them some exceptional endowment, and that what other than a princely weapon, an instrument so magnificent, so superbly potent that it had aroused even in the redoubtable Hoda some special responsive fire? They even coined a new nickname for him, Super-Crotch. And Ralphie introduced him to some of the older girls he knew as “My famous young Chinese friend, the Mandarin Won Lon Kok.”
It was embarrassing and silly but not ultimately unpleasant, for it gradually filtered through to David that the nice girls weren’t shunning him because of those stories. Quite adequately furnished by nature, he had never aspired to the stunning measurements which rumour bestowed upon him, but he was canny enough henceforth to keep his privates, which now proved the unexpected beneficiaries of his lifelong embarrassment over his belly button, even more carefully private. Cocky young lover that he had become under Hoda’s reluctant tutelage, and always willing to be put to the test of performance, he was nevertheless, like any young prince, not beyond the temptation to pretend as well to some more special attributes of the divine. Though it bothered him.
All right, if that’s what they wanted. But why did there have to be so much bullshit? Often he had the feeling that he was somebody temporary, an all made up kind of guy, and other people were doing the making up most of the time. People were always hanging things on you. It was as if they really wanted and needed somebody to hang all kinds of scraps of thoughts and ideas and hopes onto, things they wanted for themselves, and sometimes things they didn’t want for themselves, their nightmares, so they hung you with them, like when those dumb yoks had got hold of him that time and nearly beat the shit out of him, for nothing, like, just because he was a Jew and the guys called him Prince and King David sometimes. So they cornered him and tried to get him to say there was only one Prince of the Jews, and that was King Jesus, and when he told them that was a matter of opinion, like you’re supposed to when it’s no use arguing, they tried to force him, all of them against one, and guys having to push each other aside to get a poke at him. To hell with them. If it was his last chance in the world, and they were nailing him to one of their bloody crosses, he wouldn’t say it. Maybe he didn’t know who he was but he knew he didn’t want to be one of them, picking on someone who couldn’t lick all of them at once, though he’d offered to take them on, even two at a time, and afterwards when he was crying with rage and frustration because they were holding his arms, and they grabbed even the leg he was trying to kick out with, they called him a crybaby and a chicken Jew who couldn’t take his punishment. There was something phoney about those goyem. He hoped he didn’t have any of their lousiness in him, prince or no. That was where Ralphie was smart. He said he’d have said right away there was only one king of the Jews, like they wanted him to. Why should he let the dumb yoks beat him up for nothing? What the hell, there were at least two Jews who’d know the truth, himself and Jesus Christ. Well, maybe Ralphie was right; maybe he would have got a few less lumps that way, but David was not so sure. He had the feeling that when they wanted to give you lumps they’d give you lumps no matter what, because wanting to give the lumps was the real thing, and the rest was all made up stuff anyway.
That was one thing about someone like Hoda; at least with her there was no pretence. But was that entirely true? Didn’t he feel even with Hoda sometimes, that she too was in some way making him up, that there was something disproportionate and unreal in her interest in him? Was he really that good? Was he really that interesting? Or was it all that made-up stuff about him that she was really interested in, all that maybe and mystery that would attract an ignorant whore who probably read love books? Made-up stuff attracted more made-up stuff, and he began to wonder whether it would matter to anybody if the real person disappeared altogether, for all they knew him, or cared, or for that matter if he never even emerged, but remained smothered under everybody’s make-believe, including his own. They seemed to like the idea that he was some kind of super-crotch a lot better than they would ever like knowing that he was a real guy dying to please them.
Maybe out in the world it was different. Sometimes he could hardly wait to shake this town. There were advantages to being an orphan, advantages Ralphie didn’t have. You might be alone but you were free. And he intended to stay that way. Hoda would get over him if he simply stayed away. He didn’t like to hurt anybody; he couldn’t help it if she was nuts about him, but he wished she’d stop sending those crazy messages the guys kept passing on to him. He had always dreamed that somebody would be crazy about him someday, but not someone like her, for crying out loud, not that way, not in clean love, though he had a good feeling for her still, remembering how relaxed and open he had felt when he used to lie so close up against her on the narrow mattress, and talk. She’d given him his money’s worth, and a lot more. It wasn’t his fault if he didn’t want all the rest she offered. Why should he want to come and have supper with her and her dad, like she was always asking him to do? He didn’t want to hurt her feelings but there were at least a hundred and one other things he could think of he’d rather do in his spare time. It disturbed him, though, to realize that she kept asking because she must like him a lot, and he couldn’t feel the same kind of liking for her. Why couldn’t there be an open-feeling leak between people, so that when you liked someone a lot your feeling would be caught by them, like a germ, and they would have to feel it back? And the same if they liked you, though he couldn’t make himself feel enthusiastic about catching Hoda’s love germ, no matter how fair an exchange it might be. They’d look so silly, the two of them together the way she seemed to want it, like maybe even going to the movies together and being seen by someone he knew, and maybe she would even insist on clinging to his arm! Not that he cared; he could go around with anyone he damn well pleased. What did they know about her anyway, or the things she had told him about her family? Crazy things, some of them, all about graveyards and stuff, but they hadn’t seen her cry as he had that time when she told him about how her mother died; it was embarrassing, she had looked like such a great big fat little girl all of a sudden and Pipick had felt pain in his chest just looking at her face gone young and hearing her voice cracking its knuckles painfully. He had been so strongly tempted then to tell her what he’d never told anyone before, how the one he had loved as his mother had died too, so horribly, and left him alone. But he hadn’t said it. He was afraid he might cry too, and he didn’t want her to see how hard it could make him want to cry, still.
But it would look silly if he started going around with her; it would, that’s all. The guys would really enjoy it. It griped them that he held out for the privacy of the occasional solo trip nowadays and bowed out of the gang banging, even that time Gordie offered to stand treat. Stripped of the showing off and pretence that was mandatory in front of the other boys, the truth was that he liked paying court to girls, and it didn’t matter that his reputed score far outstripped his actual success, just as his reputed size outstripped what was necessary for efficiency and possibly even comfort. He just liked fooling around with girls, that’s all.
The boys were not slow to pass on to Hoda the stories of David’s feats as a young gallant. When she heard of her favourite’s success, and the alacrity with which he took advantage of whatever opportunities presented themselves to him, for the boys found it paid to please her, and often brought highly embellished accounts, Hoda was inclined to suspect that he must be the true son of her old friend Hymie the millionaire after all, who had also known how to befriend opportunity. She could not refrain from passing back, through his friends, snippets of good advice to her son, like that for heaven’s sake he should always test his safes, and not get any poor kid into trouble, and that the minute he noticed anything funny he should go to the Outpatients and Venereal at the City Hall and have himself seen to for free, and be sure to tell the girl to do so too, if he knew which one it was, and stay away from her till she did.
She found out other things about him from the boys too, tag ends of information that she cherished and spent hours speculating over, his aristocratic habits for instance, delicacies of behaviour that she could not credit to Hymie, say, or Morgan, whom she had also suspected of being the boy’s father, after David confessed to her how he had stolen his own money in order to be able to come to her. Hadn’t Morgan stolen from his father too? Was stealing from your guardian something a kid inherited? But no, it seemed to her that Morgan had disappeared much too long before the child was born. From whom had he inherited those really nice impulses? She was inclined to credit her own side of the family with these fastidious traits, particularly Daddy, and Mamma had been very gentle and refined too, even though she had had to climb on walls to earn a living. Yes, the boy was decidedly like her family. He had a nice nature, that was for sure, though her own effective contact with it turned out to be all too brief.
Against the disappointment of her hopes of a healing, three-way friendship, she allowed herself to set at least the relief from her physical ordeal, when he stopped coming. She contented herself with fishing for news of him, and trimming each item to fit her growing catalogue of his virtues. See, he had worked the whole summer as a Newsie’s helper on the moonlight train to the beach. That showed he wasn’t lazy. Generous he definitely was, even according to Ralphie, and quick to squander his money on chips and hot dogs and ice cream cones for his girl friends, of whom he had an enviable number, enough, at any rate, to have dulled his taste for professionals, one of whom, and Ralphie was not above teasing her rather maliciously, had managed to scare him off by going serious on him and nearly ruining his reputation.
Hoda accepted the rebuke with unwonted docility, and determined to withdraw even further into the shadows. Ralphie too came much less frequently now that he had entered the University, and had begun to devote himself to emancipating the college girls from the miserable restrictions of their bourgeois backgrounds. Ralphie described his educational campaigns, and the gratitude of his converts, with characteristic fervour. He also let her know that he had introduced their mutual old friend, young master Mandarin Won Lon Kok to some of his college girl friends, and the young prince had proved himself as fascinating to older women as ever. Though she listened to Ralphie’s boasts with the qualifying ear of long experience, she was secretly delighted to hear that her son was moving in educated circles. She was not foolish enough to imagine that educated women were magically different from any other; yet she began to cherish the hope that contact with women of parts, whether carnal or otherwise, might stimulate in him the desire for higher education. It was pleasant to dream along these lines, and to plot how she might manage, unknown to himself, to help further his long and expensive course of studies, in medicine perhaps. It would be ideal for David to become a doctor because then Daddy could become his patient, and he could take care of Daddy’s bronchial attacks, and they could get to know each other, and he would become fond of Daddy, and eventually they would all three become good friends, though she wouldn’t even expect to mix in the kind of circles where he would spend most of his time. Perhaps she might even manage to steer him on to becoming Uncle’s doctor, and taking care of his strokes, if Uncle could hold out long enough. For not long after Auntie Gusia had dropped dead suddenly, Uncle had begun to have those strokes that people said came from trying to hold in his temper now that she wasn’t there to yell at any more. Hoda and Daddy went regularly to the nursing home where Uncle’s kids had finally sent him, an elegant institution on the other side of town. Here Uncle was a pioneer, the first and thus far only Jew enrolled in the home for rich, elderly and decrepit gentiles. Uncle’s kids were much too high-class to send their father to the Jewish Home for the Aged. Unfortunately, Uncle’s strokes had completely wiped out the English language from his mind, with the exception of a few coarse expressions, which he used freely and indiscriminately during his better moments now, to express to all about him his loneliness and his rage. But more often, when Hoda and Danile were there, he wept, and once or twice he begged them pathetically to take him home.
Though Hoda was spoiling to give her rich cousins a piece of her mind, she never managed to encounter any of them during her visits to the nursing home. She thought of phoning them up, but she was afraid, the way she felt, she’d antagonize them so much, they’d end up telling the gentiles not to let her and Daddy visit any more. The rich can do such things. So she and Daddy came as often as they could and Daddy sat and held Uncle’s hand, and Hoda dreamed of a son who would pass a healing hand over Uncle’s fuddled brain and bring him back at least to die where he belonged.
For quite a time now she had been putting aside every cent she could in a yellow cocoa tin on which she had printed the label “Medicine” and which she kept on top of her dresser. When the box was filled she took a walk to the bank and had the coins changed for paper money, and tucked the bills away at the back of the middle drawer of her dresser, in an old chocolate box with a picture of a gypsy with a rose hanging from her mouth on its cover, souvenir of a gift that a customer had brought her once, in a fit of drunken gallantry. On the white inner floor of the box she had printed large, “BIG MEDICINE,” a designation which elicited anew a chuckle every time she opened the box to tuck in another bill and glanced underneath the little pile. It was summer again, and though she knew she had a long way still to save, the little pile had already thickened comfortingly, when she heard of the big blow-up which abruptly ended her dream career as a fairy godmother. And even then she heard only by accident, so determined had she become not to make a nuisance of herself by pursuing her enquiries into David’s daily life and annoying him as she had done previously.
This summer, once Daddy had managed to catch his breath at last, Hoda insisted on a new regime. Every afternoon she took him to the park to sit in the sun and dry out his lungs in preparation for the winter to come. She had of late become very interested in medical things and had realized for the first time that if you really thought about it, a lot of medicine was just sheer common sense. She brought along a huge picnic lunch, and she and Daddy sat and sunned themselves, and then Hoda searched among the trash bins and the bushes and usually found enough empty soft drink bottles to take across to the grocery and cash them in and get a couple of fresh cold drinks to help the food go down.
