Shalom

"Really," I've said to my wife on numerous occasions, "we don't need to encumber the twinners with names dripping with Judaism because, coming from us-- they'll have the map of Israel tattooed on their faces anyway. No one will ever mistake them for anything other than Jewish. Trust me."

Honestly? We could name them (both boys) Brentwyck and Victoria, or (1 boy, 1 girl) Ghyll and Emmaline, or (2 girls), Brittania and Glucerna and still nobody would think that they are descended from anything other than the purest of Semitic bloodline. If you've ever seen pictures of my wife and I, or, better yet, the real deal in person: you know.

The elderly, toothless man yesterday knew.

My mother-in-law, my wife and I had just sat ourselves down in a booth at a greasy spoon diner for brunch on Tuesday. After the entire staff (admittedly, it was the waitress and her mom, the short order cook) were informed by my mother-in-law that we were expecting twins and I already wanted to crawl under the table and die, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, an elderly, bent-over man with trousers that might have fit him thirty years ago shuffled over to us.

"I just want to ask you," he said, looking directly into my eyes in an unsettling way, "are you a veteran?"

I stared at him. You didn't need to work in the mental health field or have your Cra-Zee-Meter set to "Sensitive" to know that something was... sensitive here.

"Um, no, I am not," I replied, hoping this encounter would be brief and painless. It was neither.

"Well, I'm glad to hear that," the old man said, and I don't mind admitting that I was briefly offended. Like, what-- I couldn't fight in a war? But, then, after a moment's reflection I thought two things: 1.) this guy is crazy and, 2.) frankly, I would imagine that, were I not me, I would be relieved finding out that our nation's safety wasn't entrusted to somebody like me, too.

"I'm a veteran," he contined, "I'm eighty-nine. I was at the Battle of Iwo Jima. Have you ever heard of that?"

"Um, yes, I have heard of that."

"I was hit three times," he said, "twice, in my equipment" (I assume he meant his military equipment, not his male... equipment) "and once in my head," he said, tapping his left temple.

I wish I could say that this was the first time in my life I had ever conducted a conversation with somebody who had been shot in the head, but it wasn't. I try not to make a habit out of it, as it can be unpredictable, but these things have a way of happening to me.

"All I want to say to you is 'Shalom'-- do you know what that means?"

I nodded my head, half in despair.

"You must be Jewish," he said definitively, then, he perhaps thought it would be polite to ask, "you're Jewish, aren't you?"

If I were at work at the psych hospital, I would have responded with my pat rhetorical game that I use whenever I am asked this question by a psych patient-- which I am asked with frequency. I usually come back with, "Why is that important to you?" or "I don't really think that's relevant to your treatment here." Unfortunately, I didn't think I could get away with that, in this little diner. So I told him that, yes, I was. Because, you know, he knew anyway.

"Well, I just want to say that I thank God for the Jewish people, and a lot of gentiles won't say that, but I really do thank God for the Jewish people. And, really, we're all the same. We all come from each other-- there is so much hate. But Shalom to you. I am thankful to God for the Jews."

I thought I would return the compliment, from someone who, had circumstances been very different, might not be alive were it not for soldiers who fought in World War II to say,

"Well, I am thankful for you."

And I thought we could shake hands in mutual... thankfulness and be done with it. But it didn't quite work out like that.

I mean, I did say that, and we did shake hands, but we would shake hands seven times before he finally walked out of the diner.

He asked me if I read the Bible. I said, "Not recently" and I was going to add, "why, has it changed much?" but I didn't think that would have been appreciated, or noticed by our uninvited guest. My wife repeated my response when asked. And my mother-in-law, ever the independent spirit, said, "Yes, I do."

It wouldn't have mattered much what she said, because his eyes were locked on mine.

"You should really read the Bible," he said. He wasn't exactly toothless, I noticed at this point, he had maybe three or four in there-- well, one full tooth, but the shatterings of several others, jagged and rough-- looking like mini polar icecaps. He recommended some passage, but I don't remember which book it was from. The number he cited was "53" and the only reason I remember that is because, of course, that's Herbie's racing number.

I was going to tell him that "53" was my favorite number, but, again, I don't think he would have cared. Nor noticed. Or heard.

I kept trying to end the conversation, using pragmatically-appropriate language and socially-acceptable and universally-recognized lingo and isms, but our elderly warrior was impervious to all of these shrewd techniques, just like, apparently, he could not be felled by Japanese mortars and bullets.

There were more shaloms and thank-yous and handshakes. Paper-thin handshakes.

He left. And, five minutes later, while we were eating-- while this Jew was consuming bacon, sausage, ham, pork-roll, and scrapple, all on one plate-- he placed two pamphlets about the Messiah on our table, thanked us again, and walked out.

The waitress apologized and confiscated the pamphlets.

"I keep those so that, when he comes back, I can give them back to him and say, 'Do you see this? You think people want to talk to you, but they don't.' and I give him the pamphlets back so he understands that you're just being polite, because nobody's going to tell him to go away. Nobody."

And, of course, she's right. And, also of course, she's doing a far better thing for him by serving him up a plate-full of reality rather than suffering through his diatribe with forced grins and false handshakes.

We do what we do because it makes us feel better, not him.

"Look," I said to my mother-in-law and my wife as we were driving home, "for a guy who's been shot in the head, he's not doing so bad."

Shalom, indeed.

Painful

It was painful.

It's like, when a song ends on the radio, and there's way too much silence because the D.J. is taking but hasn't pushed the "Hot" button to make his microphone live and the radio audience hears absolutely nothing-- I can't stand it, I change to another station, because the silence is unbelievably embarrassing to me.

Why?

I don't know. It has nothing, really, to do with me-- I didn't do anything. I'm not the one fucking up in the booth, and yet, I cringe. Likewise, on a radio program, when a guest is talking for far too long and the interviewer keeps trying to politely cut in and the interviewee just doesn't get it, even though it's shockingly obvious to us that the reply has more than run its course-- I can't fucking stand that. And I change the station. This usually happens on BBC Newshour. It's the fault, I think, of the way the show is structured. Oftentimes, in the remaining three minutes of the program(me) they will feature an interview, and there isn't nearly enough time to actually do the interview justice, but they do it anyway. So this poor bastard professor from Leeds or wherever will be talking about the Chinese economy or the price of bananas in Ecuador, and he'll be droning on and on the way professors do, and Robin Lustig or whomever is running the show will keep trying to shut the fucker up, and finally he'll say, in that abrupt, curt, British way,

"RIGHT! Well, somuchforthatthankyouverymuch,forBBCNewshour,I'mRobinLustig,bye-bye."

Bye-bye.

For some strange reason, modern British culture has its middle-aged men end conversations/interactions with "Bye-Bye!" like they're seven year-olds, ending interviews with their mothers.

Anyway, yesterday, I got embarrassed for somebody else, and they weren't even on the radio. They were two tables away from me. A gawky, pale-faced guy of maybe seventeen was sitting at an outside table in the late afternoon with a woman who was quite obviously his grandmother. They even shared a hairline. He was wearing standard upper-class-twit garb: madras shorts, Tevas, some ironically screen-printed t-shirt, and a pair of inexplicable Ray-Bans. His two front teeth even protruded, which is mandatory upper-class-twit dentition, the world over. His gran was dressed in charcoal-gray wool slacks, black leather shoes with gold doo-daddery on them, and a black sweater, perfect for the 92-degree heat of yesterday afternoon. Her sunglasses were more fashionable than her grandson's.

As I sat two tables away from them, anxiously sipping lemonade-- which is the only way I sip-- waiting for my wife to arrive, I caught wind of their conversation.

Gran: What is "Vanty?"

Twit: Venti-- it's the size of the drink she gave us.

Gran: But it looks so big.

Twit: Yeah, because that's not what we ordered.

Gran: So why did she give it to us?

Twit: Because we ordered a Grande, but they didn't have Grande cups, so she put it in a Venti cup and charged us the Grande price.

(At this point, after all this information, I fully expected gran's hairline to explode. But it didn't.)

Gran: What?

Twit: They charged us for the drink that we ordered, but they gave it to us in a bigger cup.

(Pause.)

Gran: So they overcharged us.

Twit: No, they charged us the same, they just gave it to us in a bigger cup.

Gran: What's 'Grand-aye'?

Twit: They're just the names of the drinks. They all mean "big", really.

Gran: What did you get?

Twit: This is a White Mocha Frappuccino.

(Long pause, during which I briefly consider killing myself.)

Twit: Do you want to go home?

Gran: Yeah, it's too hot out here.



And.... scene.

You Have Been Warned

There aren't a lot of things I miss about working the streets as an EMT. There are a few, though.

I miss my old partner. Sure, he had psoriasis all over the back of his neck and on his arms and knuckles and, when his flare-ups were really bad it kind of turned my stomach, and he was cheating on his wife with another employee of our company, and that kind of turned my stomach, too, but he was exceedingly nice to me. And, really, when you're in an ambulance with someone for forty hours a week, that's pretty much what counts.

I miss wearing a uniform and a badge. I remember the first time I ever walked into a Krispy Kreme establishment, ordered a coffee, and had my money refused with a smile and a wave-off from the clerk. "Holy shit," I thought, "now I see how the badge'd class can abuse their power-- it's so damn easy. And sometimes power tastes like coffee with cream and six sugars." I enjoyed the authority and the gravitas that a clean, pressed, professional-looking set of blues with a couple shoulder-patches and a badge can carry. It felt good walking around like you owned a hospital-- who was going to stop you from going anywhere you wanted?

And I'd be peeing on your face and calling it a sex-act if I told you that I didn't miss those red lights and that fucking siren. The first time I ever ran hot I thought I was going to get washed away from the massive swamp-ass I was incurring, and the black, plastic steering wheel was positively soaked with palm sweat by the time we reached the E.R., but, after a while, even I learned to relax a little bit during emergency runs and just... enjoy the ride.

The siren is a powerful tool inside an emergency vehicle. It has the power to instantly turn the brains of motorists in front of you into absolute clam chowder. They mean well, but they don't do the right thing. They slam on their brakes. They veer off to the left. They speed up. They turn in front of you. They freak. And I get it. I've done it. You panic and you want desperately to do the procedurally correct thing, the thing that you learned by reading your Driver's Ed manual on the toilet when you were fifteen years and eleven months old, and you inevitably end up fucking up. The siren warns you that something big and potentially dangerous is happening, right behind you, and you'd better get the hell out of the way.

My wife and I were fortunate enough to be in the car to hear another warning intonation yesterday. We were at the bank, about to deposit a check to stimulate our horny bank account, and a very leathery gentleman entered his Mercedes and put it in reverse. A back-up alarm, sounding very much like a child's bicycle horn, or the horn on Harpo's walking stick, sounded. And what warning did it send out to the masses? That an octogenarian was reversing in a 2009 Mercedes E-Class Sedan, thus creating a threatening situation in which a 3,740 pound mass of German engineering may very well injure you, cripple you, and/or terminate your existence had you the misfortune of perambulating across the Bank of America parking lot at that very moment.

And then it occurred to us: cars piloted by old fuckers ought to have alarms that sound, not just when they're backing up, but all the time.

I mean, sure, you can pretty much bet good cash money on the fact that a 1998 Toyota Camry (gray with gray interior) is being driven by someone whose varicose veins resemble the Tigris and Euphrates rivers on a full-zoom image from Google Earth, but why not just cut through the guess-work, save seconds and potentially save human life by forcing elderly drivers to drive cars that produce a high-pitched wail of warning as they barrel down the boulevard or meander across the double yellow line at seven miles-per-hour. That way, you wouldn't have to waste time looking for the pork pie hat or the teased-up blue hair peeking out from behind the driver's side headrest. You'd just know, because of the OFS (Old Fuck Siren).

The best part about the O.F.S. is that it does so much more than just warn you, the unsuspecting, fully-functional public, that some sag-ass named Milton is headed your way in a 1987 Lincoln Continental, its continual whine would actually remind the elderly sonofabitch that s/he is actually driving. You know how old people are-- they forget things, even whilst they're doing them. Sure, one moment they could be cognizant that they're driving a car, but the very next moment they could be convinced that they're on safari or at a burlesque show. The mind wanders. They get CVAs. The O.F.S. would pierce through their consciousness at all times with the unmistakable message: YOU ARE DRIVING A CAR. FO-CUS.

Because, let's face it: this is America. You can't take away a toothless hick's right to own a gun, you can't make nicotine-addicted blowhole necks stop smoking cigarettes, and you sure as shit can't stop guys from Altoona from fornicating with their sisters, so, in spite of all the research about brain atrophy and delayed motor responses, you're not going to take the keys to the Oldsmobile away from Cloris or Gaylord, so we might as well do all we can do to throw the rest of us a fucking bone, so we don't end up as the hood ornament on some old daddy Caddy.

Who's with me?

Around the Block

World: meet my mistress.

She's not what most men would choose. She's kind of homely-looking, maybe some might say dowdy. One thing you can definitely say about her that I couldn't argue with: she's slow.

Very slow.

She's not sophisticated or refined and, at forty-seven years of age, she's kind of a strange choice for a thirty-year-old man already married to a twenty-eight-year-old. You could say that she's "been around the block" more than a few times. I mean, you could say that-- and I'd punch you in the face. Stop insulting my mistress, you jealous prickball.

Being in love isn't easy, and it's far more complicated when you're already married. Fortunately, my wife knows about my long, lusty, torrid and tempestuous infatuation with the Volkswagen Beetle. It began way, way, way before I ever met Mrs. Apron and, even though she knew my heart belonged to another, she married me anyway. So obsessed was I that I even tried to allow a 1966 Volkswagen Beetle to insinuate itself into our very marriage ceremony. But it broke down on the way to our rehearsal dinner.

Twice.

At fourteen, I had successfully convinced my father that purchasing me a 1966 Volkswagen Beetle was a wise idea. This is no easy feat for a fourteen-year-old boy to pull off and, even today, I am stunned that it worked. It was Bahama Blue, with a slight dent on the driver's side front fender. No surface rust. 1300cc engine. Black vinyl interior. And, God, when you opened the door and took a whiff, oh-- how you were instantly teleported back in time. It was, simply, amazing.

My mother was not amazed. Or amused. I am more than a little surprised that divorce proceedings were not initiated. There were bigger fuck-ups in store and still, she stayed put. Gotta love inertia, or lack thereof. We owned that car for a year-and-a-half but, as the day for my driver's license test got closer and closer, I got more and more scared of the prospect of being behind the wheel of this car, facing modern, heavy, threatening machines. The idea of tooling around in a car that would most definitely crumple up like a boil-in-a-bag in the event of an accident held little thrill for me, even as a moronic 15-and-a-half-year-old. We sold it. In the height of all coincidences, it went to the daughter of a Philadelphia police detective, who had been shot and killed in a narcotics raid. Throughout the entire transaction, she spoke not one single word-- her mother and uncle handled the transaction. She stared at the pavement. I hoped the car would bring her some happiness, if that were possible. If ever there was a car made on this earth capable of making that girl smile, I thought, this is it.

Ever since we sold that car, I've wanted another one. I guess I faced my fears about the unsafe nature of the antique Beetle when I borrowed the 1966 Bug from a local dealership for use as the "getaway" car for our wedding. Before it broke down (twice) I was speeding along a 3-lane freeway inside of it. No seatbelts. No working odometer. No working speedometer. No working gas gauge. Just the seat, the wheel, the tires, and me.

And, as the impossibly loud racket of the engine behind me clattering and burbling away, I thought to myself, "Oh my God-- I am in love."

Like Buddy Hackett's character in the original "Love Bug" says, grinning from ear-to-ear while listening to Herbie's engine humming away, "Like the song of a blue-boid."

The song of a blue-boid indeed.

At a car show and classic car museum this weekend in Hershey, my wife and I encountered many classic car owners and aficionados with their Studebakers and their Crosleys and their Packards, and the thing that unified most of these people was not just their eccentric facial hair and beer guts, but their *ahem* advanced age. And I looked at them, doddering around, futzing under the hoods of their V-8s and such, sipping water from 1970s-era coolers and vinyl-covered, obscene-colored Thermos products. And I looked inside the cars they brought to display, and I saw old-man back-support seat products and Doo-Wop tapes spread across the bench seats.

And I thought to myself, "This is all wrong."

Why is owning a collector's car an old fart's game? You spend your whole young and middle-aged life working, no-- slaving away. You put money aside and, finally, when you're 70, you buy a classic car that you can no longer sit in comfortably or spend any time driving. Take it out for twenty minutes and you're practically incapacitated by sciatica, lumbago, shingles or whatever other ailment that old crusties get. Stamp-collecting, I get that. That should be what old men do. The classic car thing should be for the young, too. While we can still enjoy it. While we can do more than drag it to a car show, let it sit there in the sun for 6 hours, answer the same six or seven stupid questions about it all day, eat some chicken wings and hamburgers slathered in Whiz, and leave-- covering it with a tarp for nine months out of the year.

I mean, really-- is that any way to treat a respectable little mistress?

More Mercury, Please

You might not have guessed it from the foul-mouthed, simmering tomfoolery exhibited on this blog, but I am, in the real, three-dimensional world, a very meek, mild-mannered person.

Those few of you who actually know me personally know what I mean. The thought of me confronting someone or having a public outburst of any consequence is admittedly funny, even to me.

Being meek and mild-mannered, I tend to wait in lines a lot. Impatient people don't wait in lines. They have ways of circumventing lines. They'll either slam their item down and leave the store in a disgusted huff-- a duff, as it were-- or they'll find some other way to achieve their all-important goal of not waiting anymore. Maybe they'll shout at the flustered checkout girl, "Common, will ya?!" as their bluetooth headset flashes with equal impatience and insistence. Sometimes, they'll even budge. I mean, eeep! Don't these guys remember the cardinal rules of the 8th grade cafeteria lunch line? There were pearls of widsom hidden deep within the anonymous brown gorp on those pale pink and green melamine trays.

Today, I went to the pharmacy to pick up my asthma medication and nasal spray, items that all Jewish males are required by law to take. Because these are chronic medications that I will be no doubt shackled to for life (I'm your boy, Glaxo bitches!) the pharmacy tech knows which bag to grab the moment I walk in the door. Most people are on first-name terms with their baristas or their bartenders. Me? I'm tight with the drug lady. I forked over my overzealous co-pay and, as I was shoving my debit card into my wallet, I suddenly remembered that I hadn't yet procured a wedding card for my good buddy who's getting hitched in Vermont this weekend (we're leaving soon).

"Do you carry greeting cards here?" I asked the pharmacy tech. She actually laughed at me.

"Yeah," she said, between guffaws, "right where you walked in."

I turned and stared at a huge display of greeting cards, just where she said they were. I guess I couldn't blame her for laughing at my total lack of observational prowess-- my family has been coming to this pharmacy since the 1970s, and nothing has changed there since then, except that the soda fountains are no longer operational. In fact, I read my first Playboy there. And was caught by the pharmacist, an elderly man who threatened to call my mom. I mean-- who told him to put the nudie mags where eight-year-olds could reach them?

"Oh," I said, sheepishly retreating behind the greeting card rack to find an inoffensive and ungloppy wedding card. I picked a blank one pretty quickly, but it wasn't quick enough, for, when I came back to the counter, I found that I was forced to wait in line. Only behind one person, though. It will be fine.

The one person I was behind, however, was not just a person. She was the person. She was the epitome, the very living essence of the person, the singular person you never, ever, ever, ever want to be behind in line. She didn't have Hershey stains on the seat of her trousers, or an oozing, infected hole in the back of her neck with a couple of hatchlings inside waiting for the return of their mother with dinner, but she was, well, a cheapskate who was there to complain.

"Is that young kid working tonight?" she said. This was the foreplay leading up to the main event.

"Uh, no, he's back in school now," the pharmacy tech said.

"Oh. Well. Here's the thing...."

Oh, Jesus, I thought. I wondered briefly what "the thing" could be, coming from "the person." Could it be that they mixed up her Lopressor with crystal meth? Did they sell her super-absorbent Depends when she only needed "regular moisture control?" Were her PVD medical stockings the wrong shade of "Flesh?"

"I specifically asked him to sell me a traditional mercury thermometer, and he sold me a mercury-free thermometer. For $12.00. Now, I didn't realize that it was mercury-free at the time, but I took that thermometer home and I used it over and over and over again and that thing won't go above 98 degrees."

Well, maybe you don't have a fucking fever, my little cupcake.

"Now, I only use mercury thermometers, because they're the best. And I don't know what kind of item that kid sold me. I mean, maybe it was packaged a very long time ago, and it had just been sitting here....."

The pharmacy tech inspected the box.

"No, it says here "December, 2008."

"Oh, well, I don't know... the thermometer says 'Made in Germany' so, you know..."

No, I don't know. What is that supposed to mean? Is that somehow evidence supporting her contention that the product is defective? Are Germans somehow notorious for manufacturing faulty no-mercury thermometers? I should ask my sister-- she knows about every product that's ever been recalled since the 1984 Ron Popeil Flavor Injector, Pencil Sharpener and Enema Kit.

"Oh, well actually the box says "Grand Rapids, Michigan," she said after more closely inspecting the box. I was in awe of this woman. All she wanted was her goddamn $12.00 back, and yet she somehow felt it necessary to conduct this elaborate and ridiculous song and dance. I couldn't help admiring her, though, for being who she was. She was someone who appreciated the minutae of life, this sweatsuit and windbreaker wearing, bespectacled, frizzy-haired seventy-year-old customer standing in front of me, making my life miserable because her thermometer didn't have enough poison in it.

"Well, all I know is that it won't go about 98 degrees. It won't budge. It absolutely doesn't move." She shoved it in the pharmacy tech's face. "Here! You try it."

"Um, I'm not putting that in my mouth. That's okay."

"All I'm saying is that I have checked this thermometer against my mercury thermometer and this one is definitely off!"

Wait a minute, Mrs. Mercury-- you already have a goddamn thermometer with mercury in it? Then why were you trying to buy another one? Do you have a collection of them? I pictured her house briefly in my mind, and then I quickly shrugged off the mental images. I pictured a cocktail party, with dozens of cats everywhere, jumping on all the guests and shitting in their coat pockets and I pictured her behind the basement wet bar, in her sweatsuit and pink windbreaker, mixing all the drinks with mercury thermometers as cocktail stirrers. And now you know why I avoid parties.

Finally, the pharmacy tech looked over this woman's shoulder at my pathetic corpse standing behind her, immobile, clutching my measly wedding card.

"I can just ring that up for you," she said, barely hiding a smirk. "Do you need a bag for this?"

I caught that evil glint in her eye and I broke out into a smile. Barely able to suppress my laughter as I snatched my receipt I choked, "Nope!"

Waiting in line, an interminable line, sucks. It just feels like your life is draining out your shoes. But I realized this evening that some things are worth waiting for. I knew I had to get out of there soon or I was going to crack up right there in front of this poor, disheveled lunatic, and I just had to fight to control myself. I turned around to leave as the old crone shook the thermometer vigorously and reported,

"Well, it's moving now, but I'll bet it won't go up!"

And as I threw the store's door open, I heard the pharmacy tech laugh, right out loud.