How to Spell Chanukah...And Other Holiday Dilemmas (2 page)

JOSHUA NEUMAN

Creature Comfies

I
HAVE A VERY INTERESTING BUSINESS PROPOSITION THAT
I
THINK WOULD BE PERFECT FOR YOU,” MY FATHER TOLD ME OVER THE PHONE.
I
RECOGNIZED THE TONE IN HIS VOICE FROM TWO YEARS EARLIER, WHEN HE'D SUGGESTED THAT
I
“START A GAME SHOW”—LIKE
N
AME
T
HAT
T
UNE,
BUT WITH VIDEOS. “
F
OR THE
MTV
GENERATION,” HE SAID.
A
S HE IMAGINED IT,
I
WOULD BE THE PERFECT HOST.

Before we got off the phone, my father told me that a new product had found its way to him from China and that I might be able to help him with it.

A week or so later, we sat down at the Forum Diner in Paramus, New Jersey, to discuss the new product. I had just finished my master's degree in the philosophy of religion at the Harvard Divinity School and was teaching after-school Hebrew school at Central Synagogue in Manhattan. The other teachers were a mix of rabbinical students and singer-songwriters. I took the F train back and forth from Brooklyn, where I lived, rereading my tattered copies of Kierkegaard's
Sickness unto Death
and Rosenzweig's
Star of Redemption
. I was miserable.

My father opened a large shopping bag and pulled out what appeared to be a small, furry teddy bear.

“I call it the Creature Comfy,” he said.

I took a closer look. It was a twelve-inch-long band of mohair with small Velcro squares at each end and a stuffed animal fastened to it. Synthetic swatches of white fabric were sewn onto its paws and feet; black plastic eyes and nose were glued to its face.

“I don't get it. It's a scarf attached to a teddy bear?”

“Not a scarf. A muffler.” My dad demonstrated by wrapping the Creature Comfy around his own neck. “Scarves are for Eugenes. This makes it cool to keep warm.”

Six years of higher education: six years of office hours and highlighters and trying to track down additional readings left on reserve; six years of eight
A.M
. language labs and sharing a bathroom with the date-raping fraternity on the other side of the hall; six years of teaching fellows who can't read their own writing in the margins of blue books, of attempting to shed my ethnocentric bias, of making quote signs with my fingers, of quote unquote optional review sessions, of selling $45 textbooks back to the college bookstore for $1.50, of girls with Robert Doisneau prints on their walls, of guys who wear Malcolm X hats and whose last names are also the names of campus dorms, of carrying floppy disks to the computer center to print out two-page reaction papers on what Foucault meant by “power.”

It had all come to this.

“Are you guys ready to order?” the waitress asked us.

“I'll have the Greek omelet with whole wheat toast.”

She turned to my father and waited. And waited. She knew he wasn't dead because his eyes were open and he was sitting in a chair holding a menu.

“The pancakes with fresh banana, blueberries, and raspberries,” he read. “How's that served?”

Luckily our waitress was more patient than me.

“The pancakes come with bananas, blueberries, and raspberries on top. It's really good.”

“I see.” He nodded. “I'll have the pancakes, then.”

My father took out a few more Creature Comfies: a monkey that vaguely resembled Curious George, an alligator with a bow tie, and a slanty-eyed Santa Claus. “One of my suppliers in China sent these samples to me. I think they have very interesting possibilities. I mean, couldn't you see these becoming a trend?”

“Sure, I mean, I guess,” I said. “I mean . . . it seems like a good idea. But what does this have to do with me, Dad?”

“Well, if I'm going to get these into the big department stores, you know, like Nordstrom, Bloomingdale's, and Lord & Taylor, then I'm going to need a salesman. We only have a couple of people working for us and I barely have enough time as it is. . . . I know you want to be a writer, but in the meantime, for money—you need something to support you while you're pursuing your writing, no?”

He had a point. A graduate degree in the philosophy of religion might've opened some doors in ancient Greece, but in New York in 1997, it was an albatross. After a while I had deleted it from my résumé and started telling potential employers that I had spent the past two years bumming around Europe. Other than chasing fourth graders singing songs from
South Park,
I wasn't qualified to do just about anything. In fact, the night before, I'd been bemoaning the fact with my friend Joe Braverman, who lived on the top floor of his parents' brownstone on Seventh Street, around the corner. We were listening to Cypress Hill and he was trying to convince me to apply to dental school with him. Joe had studied philosophy as an undergraduate and was now beginning his second year of a postbac at Columbia.

“Look, just 'cause you've given up on everything you've ever wanted to do with your life, don't drag me down with you,” I protested.

“What are you talking about?” Joe asked as he snorted a line of heroin from the cover of a chemistry textbook, with B-Real boasting, “I ain't goin' out like that” from Joe's childhood cassette player.

“Dreams,” I answered. “I'm not ready to give up on all of my dreams at age twenty-five.”

“Do you
really
believe the horseshit that comes out of your mouth?” Joe replied. “You don't actually want to be a writer. That just became part of your shtick along the way. To help you get girls or something. What you really want are the things that everybody wants: money, a hot wife, a family. . . . Now pardon me, I have to go vomit.”

I wasn't ready to apply to dental school, but Joe's advice was fresh in my mind as I sat before my father at the Forum Diner. I needed to start thinking about my future. Up to that point, I had prided myself on not making sacrifices, not giving a second thought to what was practical. During “shopping week” of every semester of college, I would visit classes like Basic Finance or Intro to Programming, only to opt out at the last second for yet another seminar on Lacan or the Seminole Indians. Over a hundred thousand dollars had gone into my education. What skills did I have to show for it?

“Would I have to come into the office?” I asked my father.

“Not necessarily. Basically, you would be in charge of making relationships with the buyers at the big department stores. You're good at making relationships. You have so many friends. It's not an easy thing. I could never have as many friends as you do. It's a skill you have, really.”

“I'm sure it's a lot harder than just making friends. I mean, these are big corporations.”

“Look, when my parents got to the United States in 1940, before they started the zipper business, they used to sell sweaters. Papa was in sportswear in Vienna, and when they got to New York he and his brother bought an old machine that would knit sweaters. Then he brought the sweaters to Macy's. I'm sure you're right. I'm sure it's not that simple, but if it was that simple, I wouldn't need you.”

Our food arrived. My father frowned.

“What's this?” my father asked the waitress.

“You ordered the pancakes.”

“But there's only one pancake here. I ordered pan
cakes
.”

“Do you want something else, sir?”

“No, that's all right. I'll make do.”

O
VER THE NEXT
two weeks I tried to turn myself into a salesman. It felt like that ridiculous Eddie Murphy skit where he turns himself into a white guy and applies for a loan and the guy at the bank just hands him bags and bags of cash for free. I mean, how the hell was I going to fool anybody into thinking that I was a salesman?

I took out my earrings and had some business cards printed up at Kinko's. I tried on the suit I got for my first college interview, eight years earlier.

I called Bloomingdale's, Lord & Taylor, Macy's, and Nordstrom to find out who did the buying for their children's apparel and accessories departments. I collected names and numbers. I left messages with assistants. I said I was “Joshua Neuman of Royal Slides, Sales Co.” and that I was calling “Re: the Creature Comfy.” I left my number in Brooklyn and warned my roommate, Ari, that I might be getting some business calls.

I left message after message. The calls never came. “Are you sure you gave her the message? . . . I have a very exciting product that would be a perfect gift for Christmas or Chanukah.” I imagined Kierkegaard and Rosenzweig frowning at my crass commodification of Christianity and Judaism.

Screw Kierkegaard and Rosenzweig. How would they support themselves as writers today? Believe it or not, the demand for critics of Hegel's phenomenology has subsided in the last hundred years. If Kierkegaard were alive today he'd be hocking Legos in Copenhagen. Rosenzweig would be in med school.

I called my father. It was already October. Neither of us seemed to have any idea that the buying for the coming holiday season would have been done by the prior January.

“You need to meet with them face-to-face. Make a visual impression.”

“Do I just show up at their office?”

“Listen, there is no simple answer,” he replied. “I wish I could tell you the
abc
's, but they don't exist. This opportunity isn't going to be there forever. I remember the time I was about to seal that nylon-zipper deal with Pillowtex and YKK beat me to the punch.”

I thought of my grandfather as a refugee in 1940, with a wife, three children, little money, barely speaking English, heading to Macy's with his sweaters. I thought of the fresh memories of the war that must have been in his mind. I couldn't just give up. If the buyers weren't going to come to me, I was going to have to go to them.

I started with Macy's, which was, I learned, along with Bloom­ingdale's, part of a larger company called “Federated.” I carried the Creature Comfies in an old suitcase I had used throughout my childhood when my family went on summer vacations. I took the F train to Thirty-fourth Street and then the elevator to the fourth floor, where the Children's Apparel Division was headquartered.

“I'm here to see Katherine Akers,” I informed the receptionist. The name was easy to remember because it was so close to Kathy Acker, the sex-positive feminist writer.

“Do you have an appointment?”

What would my grandfather have done?

I pried open my suitcase, reached in, and handed an Asiatic Curious George to the receptionist.

“This is the Creature Comfy.”

She undid the Velcro and somewhat miraculously knew to wrap it around her neck.

“It's a scarf?”

“It's a muffler. . . . I was hoping for just five minutes with Ms. Acker.”

Fuck, I said “Acker.”

“Ms. Akers is in a meeting, but if you want to leave a sample, I can give it to her along with your contact information.”

“Wow, that'd be great.” I handed her my business card.

I
NEVER DID HEAR
back from the buyer of children's apparel and accessories at Macy's. I left two messages, once with Ari letting out a loud burp in the background. Neither Bloomingdale's nor Bergdorf returned any of my messages. Short of standing on Canal Street alongside pirated videotapes and fake Fendi bags, all I could do was try to contact Beverly Shore at Lord & Taylor.

Unlike Macy's, Bloomingdale's, and Bergdorf, the corporate headquarters of Lord & Taylor is in the same building as its store. So I went to scout out the children's apparel and accessories before making my unsolicited sales pitch to Beverly Shore. While rummaging through some Powerpuff Girls backpacks I noticed two swinging doors below an
EMPLOYEES ONLY
sign. Wait, I thought, this could be too good to be true: Suppose those doors led to the innermost sanctum? Suppose they led straight to Beverly Shore?

I realize now that spotting the
EMPLOYEES ONLY
sign at Lord & Taylor was a turning point in my efforts to transform myself into a salesman. Sure, I had tried to pass myself off as someone I was not, but never had I trespassed or broken any other law in the process. Nevertheless, the thought of
not
sneaking through the swinging doors below the
EMPLOYEES ONLY
sign did not occur to me.

I imagined clinking glasses of champagne with my father and late grandfather, my grandfather making a toast, in his German accent, to our new Creature Comfy empire, my father complaining that his glass wasn't clean. I imagined myself, twenty-five years older, presiding over that empire: the Creature Comfy Saturday morning cartoon, the Creature Comfy breakfast cereal, the Creature Comfy skyscraper in Times Square with a retractable Velcro roof—and it all would begin at this one moment in the children's apparel and accessories department of Lord & Taylor in Manhattan in November 1997.

To be honest, the next couple of minutes are kind of a blur: I walk through the swinging doors. I notice that everyone on this side of the doors has identification badges. I find a staircase. I find an employee directory. I find Beverly Shore's name. I find another set of elevators. I assume that “419” means she is on the fourth floor. I press “4.” I get out of the elevator.

I didn't expect that when the doors of the elevator opened I would actually be
inside
Beverly Shore's office. But I was. Sort of.

I was inside lots of offices—at least fifty or sixty cubicles crowded together in a labyrinth-like configuration, probably a hundred Lord & Taylor employees, plus me in the suit from my college interview with the suitcase and a dozen stuffed animals, each attached to a twelve-inch band of mohair.