Fuck the yeshiva. And flick the Gurskys too. Some family. Lionel, that scum-bag, had never agreed to see him again. Mind you, he was only a cousin. Lucy, his aunt, his only aunt, had treated him even worse. Not to begin with. No sir. To begin with she had thought he was the cutest thing since sliced bread. He had first gone to visit Lucy in her apartment in the Dakota while he was still studying at the yeshiva. He rang the bell clutching a beribboned box of Magen David Glatt Kosher chocolates, unaware that he was intruding on a cocktail party. A little Filipino in a white jacket answered the door and then an out-of-breath lady wearing a tent-like kaftan chugged down the hall to greet him. She was immense, bloated, heavily made-up, her glittering black eyes outlined with something silvery, her chins jiggly. Lucy grasped a retreating Isaac and held him at arm’s length, bracelets of hammered gold jangling. Isaac, who still wore sidecurls, a wispy moustache and just a hint of beard, black hat, long black jacket, thick white woollen socks. “Oh my shattered nerves,” she called out in a voice loud enough to command attention. “Look, everybody, it’s my nephew. Isn’t he super!”
Then, taking Isaac by the hand, she fed him to one guest after another, singing out again and again, “This is the son of my brother, the early warning system.” Earning chuckles and going on to explain that her saintly brother lived in the Arctic, married to an Eskimo, waiting for the world to end. “Out there, he’ll be the first to know, wouldn’t you say?”
Finally Lucy abandoned Isaac to a group that included a couple of agents, a set designer, and the star of a long-running Broadway play. Isaac had seen the actor on the “Johnny Carson Show”. Determined to make a good impression, he asked, “So, tell me, do you find it like a drag to have to repeat the same lines night after night?”
The actor rolled his eyes and handed Isaac his empty glass. “There you go,” he said.
Backing away, Isaac collided with a pretty young girl wearing a miniskirt and a T-shirt with LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR emblazoned on it. He could make out her nipples. “Sorry, sorry,” he said.
“Hey, you look really neat in that. Did you come straight from the location?”
“What?” he asked, beginning to perspire.
“Didn’t you have time to change for the party?”
“These are my clothes.”
“Come off it,” she said. “I just happen to know Mazursky was shooting in the Village today.”
He saw Lucy once more before Henry’s death, this time in a building on Broadway, the young man who was her personal assistant ushering him into her office. Lucy, her kaftan hiked up to her applepie knees, her fat legs propped up on a hassock, was shouting into the phone. “Tell that no-talent cunt that the time is long past when she could play an ingénue and a year from now when her tits are hanging round her ankles she’ll be grateful for any crumb, not that she will ever work for Lucy Gursky again.” Then she hung up and shoved the huge platter of brownies on her desk toward him. “Oh, shit. Hold it. They’re not kosher.”
Though she had failed to return any of his phone calls, she seemed so pleased to see him that she cancelled her reservation for lunch at the Russian Tea Room and had her chauffeur take them to a kosher deli on W. 47th Street. Ordering a second mound of latkes—“I shouldn’t but this is an occasion, isn’t it?”—she regaled him with loving stories about Henry.
“You know, your father suffered from a bad stammer until he picked up with your lot, so the Rebbe can’t be all bad.”
Isaac, seizing his opportunity, his words spilling out at such a pace that she had difficulty following him, told her that he had an idea for a movie. It was about the Messiah. Locked in the Arctic ice for centuries, he explodes out of a pingo, his mission to waken the Jewish dead and lead them to Eretz Yisroel. He has a weakness, however. If he is fed non-kosher food he loses his magical powers, he goes berserk.
“I love it,” Lucy said, and grasping what a hoot it would be to read aloud at her next party, she added, “You must send me an outline.”
When he next got in touch with her, after he had been expelled from the yeshiva, she shrieked at him over the phone, “I’m surprised you even have the nerve to call me, you disgusting little cannibal,” and she hung up on him.
One night only a month later Lucy dismissed her chauffeur, pretending that she was staying home, and then took a taxi to Sammy’s Roumanian Paradise, a restaurant she frequented on rare nights when she was alone and so depressed there was nothing else for it, gorging herself on platters of unhatched chicken eggs, kishka, and flank steak, and then sliding into a troubled sleep on the drive home. Back at the Dakota, even as her taxi driver lifted her out of the back seat, she saw Isaac emerging from the shadows. “Go away,” she said.
Gone were the sidecurls and black hat. He wore a filthy T-shirt, jeans torn at the knees, and sneakers.
“You can’t come up with me. Bugger off. Animal.”
“I haven’t had a thing to eat in forty-eight hours.”
She seemed to wobble in place.
“You’re supposed to be my aunt,” he said, beginning to sniffle.
Her breath coming short, sweat trickling down her forehead and upper lip, she sighed and said, “I’ll give you five minutes.’’
But once in her apartment, she retired to her bedroom and didn’t come out again until she had changed into a fresh kaftan, promptly sinking into the sofa and lifting her swollen legs on to a hassock.
“Are you willing to listen to my side of the story?” Isaac asked.
“No. I am not. But you’ll find my handbag on the dresser in the bedroom,” she said, unwilling to get up again. “I’ll give you something this once. Wait. I know exactly how much money is in there.”
It was a mistake. He was gone too long. So she hoisted herself upright and followed him into the bedroom.
Isaac was staring at the large photograph on the wall of a slender lady in a sexy black cocktail dress, her bra stuffed with Kleenex.
“Who’s that?” he demanded, smirking, for he recognized her, even with her clothes on, and was only looking for a confirmation.
“Why that,” she said, curtsying, “is a photograph of your Aunt Lucy in her prime, taken by a rather naughty boy in London in 1972, if memory serves. Or did you think I was born looking like a hippo?”
“No.”
She fished a hundred and seventy dollars out of her handbag and handed it to him. “But, remember, you are not to come here again.”
“Sure thing.”
TO BE SO RICH and yet so broke. Denied by his own family. Maddening. Isaac wanted to scream, he longed to break things, it was so unjust.
His apartment stank. He opened the window, but there was no breeze. Not even the cockroaches stirred. In search of solace, he slapped another Captain A. tape into his Sony.
“Wrestled into submission by the rapacious Ravenmen, Captain Cohol has broken loose from the terrible table of death only to be cruelly clouted to the ice once more.”
Toologaq, malevolent master of the Ravensmen, laughed fiendishly. “Brace yourself, space snoop, because this electric current will teach you watt’s watt.”
Shit shit shit. Isaac kicked his Sony across the floor. Only fifteen years old, he would have to endure another six years before the money and shares would be his. Groping for his can of spray paint, he treated the Rebbe to a squirt in the nose. Wobbly on his feet, he whirled around and took aim at Marilyn Monroe’s coozy.