So there I was, in Connecticut, gunning around the curves on the road, the cold wind throwing my busted passenger-side mirror against the side of the car with a repeated irregular smack. It was dark, but I could see ahead of me the hill I’d have to drive up to reach the mammoth Lakes estate at the top; It must have been a hundred feet high, at least. The road was well-lit and recently repaved. When I got there, a man in a small red vest took my car and put it somewhere out of sight. The wooden doors of the Lakes residence stood open before me like the lips of a yawning giant. Like any mouth, this one was full of amoebas and parasites; these ones happened to be wearing thousand-dollar cocktail dresses. I anxiously tried to brush some of the poor off my shoulders, but it didn’t help. In a place like this, you’re either money or you’re nothing. The weight of the camera against my chest was reassuring. A fancy-looking SLR is the ultimate press pass.
It was hard to adjust to the light inside; every surface in the place was reflective. I replayed the message in my head, over and over, trying to figure it out. I’d never heard her sound so scared, but it was a quiet desperation, like the British have. I’d made a point to stay out of Connecticut, but I threw on my best dress and drove out there. A woman’s pleading voice on my answering machine will drive me to do almost anything. It’s my main weakness. She couldn’t talk about it on the phone, she said. I’m the only one she could trust, she said. But I didn’t like the sound of it, not at all. Allison Manderay wants me at the Lakes’ soiree? What for? I don’t know what Old Man Lakes did to get this house, but I’ve never seen one without a whole barrel of blood mixed into the foundation. It’s a structural thing. She wants me to rub elbows with these leeches? I’d rather have teeth drilled.
Two years had passed since the last time I’d seen Allison eye-to-eye. I was fresh out of journalism school, she was picking through the produce at a Super Fresh in Baltimore. We were close, more than close really, back in the Maine Photographic Workshop days, but we’d drifted apart in the years since. I noticed a gold ring on her left hand as she squeezed a grapefruit. The rock was big enough to choke a guinea pig.
“Oh, this thing,” she said, and smiled. It was good to see her happy. The ring was, as I’d suspected, of the engagement kind, with the wedding planned for the next spring. We got to chatting about the elegant bachelor himself, one G. Bradford Lakes, a man in a collared shirt on his way to becoming a man in a suit. A Yalie, as a matter of fact. I sneered a bit, involuntarily, but she wasn’t offended. She had known me in my revolutionary heyday, before the war, and she knew how I felt about blood with even the slightest hint of blue in it. Still, I was happy for her. Love will do that to people. The wedding invitation never got to me, but it seems the whole thing went off hitchless; I can’t imagine any other way she wound up with guest-list privileges at his palatial estate. I scanned the room restlessly.
Finally I caught sight of her at the end of the hall. She was stunning, moreso than I remembered. Her dress was red and black, with swooped shoulders, elegant as a Mondrian. She’d traded up pretty well. Some blue-haired blueblood said something to her and she laughed. She almost looked like she belonged there, a far cry from the restless suburban girl I used to know. I snapped a picture from across the room, for posterity. This caught the attention of another blue-haired blueblood and darling I just had to take her picture next, and so on and so forth around the room. The rich love having their pictures taken. Cheeses were said and smiles were flashed, and it wasn’t long before Allison noticed my arrival.
“Thank Christ you’re here,” she whispered in my ear, “The bullshit in here is thick enough to clog a sewer.” I smiled. There’s the girl I knew. “Come on. There’s something here you need to see.” Off we went. There was a door behind the stairwell that led to another stairwell. A couple furtive glances to make sure we were unseen, and we descended. I was reminded of the musty basements where we snatched away moments back in Maine. We went down and down, one stairway after another, and soon I smelled a distinct chemical odor. At first I thought of the old darkroom, another site of carefree passionate embraces, but no, the smell was far more sinister, less sweat and developer and more blood and bile. I became uneasy.
“Allison, where are we going?” I asked.
“Shh, you’ll see,” she replied, but it was so dark down there that I barely could. At last we came to a large metal door, lit only by a tiny red LED light above a keypad. “This is it,” she said, and entered the code. There was a hiss, and the door cracked open. The fluorescent lights inside were nearly blinding, and when my eyes adjusted I saw a long hallway with white walls. There was a hospital quality to it, and the same sense of it not being quite clean enough for comfort. My trepidant heart trembled as I followed her in.
“I’ve been exploring the basements since we moved in, and I found this place by accident last week. There’s almost as much below ground in this place as above it, if not more,” she said.
“Like an iceberg,” I helpfully chimed in.
“Yes, like an iceberg. Almost as cold, too.”
“How’d you figure out the code?” I asked.
“Oh, everything in this house has the same code. Brad’s father is a little forgetful,” she said.
“I see.” We continued walking. Finally we came to a sliding door, with portholes on each side. I tried to look through, but it was dark inside. She opened the door and turned on the lights.
“This is what you need to see,” she said. Inside the room was jar after jar of what appeared to be human organs, some I recognized and a few I didn’t. I’m no doctor, but I saw livers, kidneys, a lung or two, and I think some spleens, and that was just the first row.
“What…what is this?” I asked incredulously. “You could build a whole man with this stuff!”
“It’s an organ bank of some kind, I think. I think my father-in-law uses them to replace his own organs when they go bad…with enough money, you know, you can live forever. He told me that once. With enough money…”
“You can get away with anything,” I finished for her as I readied my camera.
“This isn’t right, right?” she said, “This shouldn’t be here. This isn’t right. You need to take pictures; you need to tell someone about this. I can’t trust anyone around here. I mean, who knows who’s in on it?”
“You were right to call me,” I said, “This could be huge.” My God, I thought, is that really a human heart? This party sure got weird in a hurry. I snapped all the pictures I needed, and turned to leave. That’s when I saw it: a tiny red light. On a tiny metal security camera. “We need to leave. Now.” I said. We made trails out of the basement. We made it back into the house proper with no trouble. The party was still going, empty tuxedos swilling champagne like there was a shortage. A heavy voice called Allison’s name, and we turned to face it. It was Old Man Lakes himself. He looked pretty healthy to me. A wiry, muscular hand attached to a bony wrist protruded out of each elegant sleeve of his tuxedo, which was crisp and sleek and very expensive-looking. His hair was tinfoil-gray, but full and vibrant and he stood with the confidence that only comes with boatloads of money. I hated him instantly.
“And you must be Allison’s photographer friend,” he said. My stomach sank: we’d been made. His eyes were such pale blue that they looked nearly white. If ever there was a man who pillaged and gutted his way up to the top, there he was. “I trust you haven’t found our gathering too…stressful?” he asked. I wanted to tell him that my eyes were about to fall out because I’d seen the fucking Mutter museum in his basement, but I kept my composure, for Allison’s sake.
“No, it’s lovely,” I replied, “In fact, I was just leaving.”
“Oh, no, no, that won’t do; that won’t do at all.” His cadaverous lips twisted up into a sinister grin. “I think you should stay.” I noticed some big suits circling round. It didn’t look good. Clearly, it was now or never.
“Come on!” I yelled and grabbed Allison by the hand. I bolted past the goons and made a beeline for the front door. A red-vested driver monkey was handing a BMW off to some diamond-studded country club couple. I barreled through them with every ounce of my wiry frame and dove into the car. Allison strapped herself in as I gunned the throttle. The engine roared as we hurtled down the lane.
“Jesus Christ! What do you think you’re doing?” she gasped.
“Sorry, A, I’m not ready to be a kidney in a jar. In case you didn’t know, human organs don’t grow on trees.”
“But…but… my house! My husband! My life!” she said. The woman was becoming hysterical.
“Hey, I just saved both our lives. Cut me some slack. This is all Bradley’s problem now.”
“Bradford.”
“Whatever,” I said, and we drove off into the night.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Flowers For Shiksa
To be honest, my family is boring. Conservative, both socially and politically, although charitable, their main life goal seems to be puttering along, making money and never doing anything creative or interesting. This has frustrated me to no end. “That’s because all of the interesting ones are dead,” my father once told me, somewhere between an explanation and a warning. The stories we tell are pretty dull as well – an aunt who liked to drink (gasp!), a lovely Bar Mitzvah, whose in-laws screwed over whose. The far better stories, I have found, are the ones we don’t tell about the relatives we don’t talk about. After several years and careful prodding of elderly relations, I have pieced together most of the story of my Uncle Robert. The Jewish religion is a funny thing; although Robert is, as far as anyone knows, still alive, he is officially dead to us. You see, Robert, alone amongst my extended family, has left the faith.
Robert Merenstein, my father’s brother’s wife’s brother, was born in 1954 in Merrick, Long Island, two years before my aunt Estelle. In early pictures of my aunt’s family, Robert seems like a typical happy-go-lucky child, although he does have the strange tendency to not quite look directly at the camera, as if there is something perennially interesting just over there. Robert’s mother, my great-aunt Julia, was raised Orthodox, but was not nearly as strict with her children as her own parents. My aunt was, for example, allowed to leave the house on Friday nights and rip her own toilet paper during the Sabbath.
In the summer of 1971 Robert got a job working in an ice cream truck. The truck was old and hadn’t been properly serviced in years. Heat was a major trouble because, although the ice cream was kept cold, the exhaust from the refrigerator blew not out of the truck but into the cabin. Combine that with a typical 80 degree Merrick summer, and you have an extremely sweaty situation. Robert often drove with no pants on and a battery-powered fan between his legs to help him stay cool. In a picture from that summer, my aunt and her parents stand in front of the truck eating ice cream, and Robert is sticking his head out the window. Out of all the admittedly few pictures that remain, he looks the happiest in this one. Perhaps, being a bit of a prankster, he thought that secretly not wearing pants in a family portrait was funny, and he was right. But I have a hunch that there is another reason.
Robert’s ice cream route took him nearly halfway across Long Island, from the Jewish neighborhood of East Merrick out to the gentile-filled West Merrick and beyond. This is roughly equivalent to having a paper route that takes you from Rome to Gaul, or Malibu to Compton. It was along this route that Robert met Irene. Not much is known about Irene Campbell, or at least not much is remembered. When I asked Julia, she told me never to speak that name in her house again; I would ask my great-uncle Oscar, but he can barely remember to button his pants. That fall Irene had been the year ahead of my aunt at Mepham High School. As she remembers it, Irene was “nice enough,” although “not the prettiest girl in school,” but she did have a “developed figure,” so, uh, way to go Uncle Rob.
That fateful meeting went a little bit like this: Irene Campbell, in a fit of heat-induced ice cream craving, ordered a double chocolate ice cream cone from Uncle Robert. But the overheated truck took its toll, and the chocolate that day was a little bit too soft for its own good. The glob of dairy soon tumbled onto the lovely dress of its owner, and then straight onto the sizzling pavement, leaving behind a messy brown spot. “Oh no! My dress!” Irene said, “What am I going to do now? You don’t have any stain remover back there, do you?”
“No, ma’am, we don’t, I’m sorry,” said my Robert with the reflexive formality that had been bred into him. “I feel awful about ruining your dress, though. Here, let me give you a ride home,” he said, perhaps forgetting that the inside of the truck was hotter than the street, and he was in his underpants.
“I don’t know, it looks pretty hot in that truck. Besides, I don’t think I should be accepting rides from strange ice cream boys.” A long second passed as Robert desperately searched his brain, looking for a way to persuade her into his truck. It was not a skill that came easy.
“Say, don’t you go to my high school? You aren’t one of those ‘pirate pride’ girls, are you?”
“Ugh, I hate sports. They’re so pointless. And we can’t even win.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t be all that upset if their bus had an accident either, but I think they might expel us if we don’t cry at the funeral.” She smiled against her will. “Come on. Aren’t you curious about the inside of an ice cream truck? I’ll show you where we keep the scoops.”
“Scoops, huh? Throw in a Klondike and you’ve got a deal.”
Despite the awkward beginning, it must have been one hell of a ride; the two hit it off instantly. She became a regular customer, and then she started seeing my uncle outside of an ice cream truck. It wasn’t long until word reached Robert’s family that he was running around with an outsider. A Merenstein boy chasing some shiksa, the women murmered, unspeakable, unthinkable, disgrace upon the father and the father’s father, a black spot on the tallis. It was simple enough: Oscar forbade his son from seeing her and from leaving West Merrick unsupervised. Stripped of both girlfriend and car, Robert became despondent, but there was nothing he could do. He waited and as soon as he got his car back he drove straight to the Campbell house. This lead to stricter punishments, which Robert snuck around whenever he could. Things continued this way for two years; Robert was essentially a prisoner in his own home. Tensions grew, and in June of 1973, they reached a breaking point.
It was a Saturday, the day of Mepham’s graduation ceremony. Estelle caught Rob picking a handful of daisies out of the garden. “Hey, what are you doing?” she said, “Those aren’t for who I think they’re for, are they? They better not be, Dad’ll kill you.”
“No, they’re not for her,” her brother said. She iced him. “They’re not! Don’t look at me like that. Now get out of here, it’s none of your business.” She stared him down. She had grown just as tired of Irene as her parents; it was nothing personal, she just wanted to end all the fighting. So she started the biggest fight they would ever have. “MOM!” she cried with a calm, strong voice. “Robby’s messing up the garden!” Julia demanded to know why he felt the need to rip up and ruin her garden like he was 8 years old again. Robert’s formidable skill at lying to his mother fell through that afternoon, and he confessed that the flowers were for Irene. Robert’s father was called, and an all-out screaming match ensued in the garden.
“Where do you think you’re going with those flowers, son? The goyeh’s place? You can forget about it!” he roared, frightening away a few mid-afternoon clouds. “Give me those flowers, right now!”
“No, Dad. I’m taking them. And that’s not all I’m taking.” That’s when he pulled a diamond ring out of his pocket. Oscar was astonished; how could his boy possibly have enough money for a diamond ring? Robert had been saving up for over two years. He was going to propose to Irene and that was that. The price for his betrayal was excommunication. Robert was to be cut off: no money for college, no money for an apartment, no money for anything.
Oscar thought his son wouldn’t last a week. In fact, he lasted six months. Finally, though, he came back to his parents with his pride in his throat and asked them to take him back. He told them he had broken up with Irene, that it hadn’t worked out. They believed him and welcomed him back with open arms, because they were his parents. They never saw Irene again. But, the truth is, Robert continued to see Irene behind his parents’ backs, going so far as to bring home other girls for the holidays to throw them off the scent.
Three weeks after Robert’s graduation, his family received a letter. It was a wedding invitation. The wedding was to be Protestant. Not a single person Robert invited even showed up; Estelle wanted to but her parents wouldn’t allow it. And from that day to this, no one in my family has spoken to or about Robert Merenstein.
Robert Merenstein, my father’s brother’s wife’s brother, was born in 1954 in Merrick, Long Island, two years before my aunt Estelle. In early pictures of my aunt’s family, Robert seems like a typical happy-go-lucky child, although he does have the strange tendency to not quite look directly at the camera, as if there is something perennially interesting just over there. Robert’s mother, my great-aunt Julia, was raised Orthodox, but was not nearly as strict with her children as her own parents. My aunt was, for example, allowed to leave the house on Friday nights and rip her own toilet paper during the Sabbath.
In the summer of 1971 Robert got a job working in an ice cream truck. The truck was old and hadn’t been properly serviced in years. Heat was a major trouble because, although the ice cream was kept cold, the exhaust from the refrigerator blew not out of the truck but into the cabin. Combine that with a typical 80 degree Merrick summer, and you have an extremely sweaty situation. Robert often drove with no pants on and a battery-powered fan between his legs to help him stay cool. In a picture from that summer, my aunt and her parents stand in front of the truck eating ice cream, and Robert is sticking his head out the window. Out of all the admittedly few pictures that remain, he looks the happiest in this one. Perhaps, being a bit of a prankster, he thought that secretly not wearing pants in a family portrait was funny, and he was right. But I have a hunch that there is another reason.
Robert’s ice cream route took him nearly halfway across Long Island, from the Jewish neighborhood of East Merrick out to the gentile-filled West Merrick and beyond. This is roughly equivalent to having a paper route that takes you from Rome to Gaul, or Malibu to Compton. It was along this route that Robert met Irene. Not much is known about Irene Campbell, or at least not much is remembered. When I asked Julia, she told me never to speak that name in her house again; I would ask my great-uncle Oscar, but he can barely remember to button his pants. That fall Irene had been the year ahead of my aunt at Mepham High School. As she remembers it, Irene was “nice enough,” although “not the prettiest girl in school,” but she did have a “developed figure,” so, uh, way to go Uncle Rob.
That fateful meeting went a little bit like this: Irene Campbell, in a fit of heat-induced ice cream craving, ordered a double chocolate ice cream cone from Uncle Robert. But the overheated truck took its toll, and the chocolate that day was a little bit too soft for its own good. The glob of dairy soon tumbled onto the lovely dress of its owner, and then straight onto the sizzling pavement, leaving behind a messy brown spot. “Oh no! My dress!” Irene said, “What am I going to do now? You don’t have any stain remover back there, do you?”
“No, ma’am, we don’t, I’m sorry,” said my Robert with the reflexive formality that had been bred into him. “I feel awful about ruining your dress, though. Here, let me give you a ride home,” he said, perhaps forgetting that the inside of the truck was hotter than the street, and he was in his underpants.
“I don’t know, it looks pretty hot in that truck. Besides, I don’t think I should be accepting rides from strange ice cream boys.” A long second passed as Robert desperately searched his brain, looking for a way to persuade her into his truck. It was not a skill that came easy.
“Say, don’t you go to my high school? You aren’t one of those ‘pirate pride’ girls, are you?”
“Ugh, I hate sports. They’re so pointless. And we can’t even win.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t be all that upset if their bus had an accident either, but I think they might expel us if we don’t cry at the funeral.” She smiled against her will. “Come on. Aren’t you curious about the inside of an ice cream truck? I’ll show you where we keep the scoops.”
“Scoops, huh? Throw in a Klondike and you’ve got a deal.”
Despite the awkward beginning, it must have been one hell of a ride; the two hit it off instantly. She became a regular customer, and then she started seeing my uncle outside of an ice cream truck. It wasn’t long until word reached Robert’s family that he was running around with an outsider. A Merenstein boy chasing some shiksa, the women murmered, unspeakable, unthinkable, disgrace upon the father and the father’s father, a black spot on the tallis. It was simple enough: Oscar forbade his son from seeing her and from leaving West Merrick unsupervised. Stripped of both girlfriend and car, Robert became despondent, but there was nothing he could do. He waited and as soon as he got his car back he drove straight to the Campbell house. This lead to stricter punishments, which Robert snuck around whenever he could. Things continued this way for two years; Robert was essentially a prisoner in his own home. Tensions grew, and in June of 1973, they reached a breaking point.
It was a Saturday, the day of Mepham’s graduation ceremony. Estelle caught Rob picking a handful of daisies out of the garden. “Hey, what are you doing?” she said, “Those aren’t for who I think they’re for, are they? They better not be, Dad’ll kill you.”
“No, they’re not for her,” her brother said. She iced him. “They’re not! Don’t look at me like that. Now get out of here, it’s none of your business.” She stared him down. She had grown just as tired of Irene as her parents; it was nothing personal, she just wanted to end all the fighting. So she started the biggest fight they would ever have. “MOM!” she cried with a calm, strong voice. “Robby’s messing up the garden!” Julia demanded to know why he felt the need to rip up and ruin her garden like he was 8 years old again. Robert’s formidable skill at lying to his mother fell through that afternoon, and he confessed that the flowers were for Irene. Robert’s father was called, and an all-out screaming match ensued in the garden.
“Where do you think you’re going with those flowers, son? The goyeh’s place? You can forget about it!” he roared, frightening away a few mid-afternoon clouds. “Give me those flowers, right now!”
“No, Dad. I’m taking them. And that’s not all I’m taking.” That’s when he pulled a diamond ring out of his pocket. Oscar was astonished; how could his boy possibly have enough money for a diamond ring? Robert had been saving up for over two years. He was going to propose to Irene and that was that. The price for his betrayal was excommunication. Robert was to be cut off: no money for college, no money for an apartment, no money for anything.
Oscar thought his son wouldn’t last a week. In fact, he lasted six months. Finally, though, he came back to his parents with his pride in his throat and asked them to take him back. He told them he had broken up with Irene, that it hadn’t worked out. They believed him and welcomed him back with open arms, because they were his parents. They never saw Irene again. But, the truth is, Robert continued to see Irene behind his parents’ backs, going so far as to bring home other girls for the holidays to throw them off the scent.
Three weeks after Robert’s graduation, his family received a letter. It was a wedding invitation. The wedding was to be Protestant. Not a single person Robert invited even showed up; Estelle wanted to but her parents wouldn’t allow it. And from that day to this, no one in my family has spoken to or about Robert Merenstein.
Just a brief introduction
Hi everybody. This blog is where things I write go. I have a couple stories saved up, so those will be posted first and then some new stuff. Also, the story I named the blog after. Enjoy!
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