Manhattan Loverboy (2 page)

I knew a lot of baggage came with being a Jew, but I was good at carrying bags. I kept my Mitzvah name, Levi. I let my sideburns grow long and began to train myself. With most of my core courses complete, I switched my minor from philosophy to Hebrew and began studying the ancient laws and customs.

In the student dining room, there was a row of tables where Israeli exchange students sat. Without their permission, and although I didn’t live on campus, I joined my happy friends. I tried to speak about historical and political matters with them. They were polite, but they seemed a little bewildered by me. They seemed suspicious.

I got a job that January at a kosher pizza place. It was my last semester before graduation, and I wanted to make enough money to visit the Holy Land. I wrote the parents that the two hundred fifty-eight steps of the stairway studio was too much of a test. I couldn’t hack it. From New York, I made preparations to join a kibbutz. After getting my BA, but just before departing, I sent out applications to several elite and exciting graduate programs. No sooner were they mailed, though, then I realized that my life was on a new and different course—Israel.

As I stepped off the plane, I felt it. As sure as Little Joe was from the Ponderosa, I was a citizen here. The kibbutz was fun. I was brought into the fold. With my fellow man and woman, I planted seeds and harvested the crops. Afterwards, I sat around overly-laden tables until late at night, exchanging tales, folk dancing, or weeping to sad, quickly translated songs of the motherland. I was one of them, only perhaps I did behave a little differently, a little strangely. For some reason, as if I had an acute case of Tourette’s Syndrome, I couldn’t stop ending every sentence with verbal ejaculations like: “And may I die killing the vile invader of our blessed soil!” Perhaps I was a little over-zealous, trying to compensate for being a convert. (But I’m not sure that merited the nickname “Goy Boy.”)

Despite that, though, I was having a good time, really enjoying myself. The problem was that this wasn’t the way it was supposed to be—it wasn’t supposed to be fun. I was expecting a more spiritual thing.

I left the kibbutz after a month and moved to the Holy City, Jerusalem. There, I devoted myself to the reading of holy books and religious training. I got heavily into chanting and wailing. Whatever it was I was expecting, I was certain it was close at hand.

One day, while davening at the base of the Wailing Wall, I smote myself on the chest. It made a hollow sound. I did it again, and then again and again, harder each time, until everyone around me quit wailing and moved away. I didn’t pay attention to them—I was on to something.

What was that sound? It was something important, I knew that. But what? Then it all became clear. It was an absence of identity. It was the great gap in my soul that could never be filled.

I wrote a letter to the Bundles O’Joy adoption agency demanding the name of my true parents. A month later, I received three letters. One was from the adoption agency saying that it was protected information and referring me to the legal department of some large company. Another letter was from my adoptive parents. The last letter informed me that I had been accepted into a strange and wonderful graduate program. The fact that all of these letters arrived at once struck me as a divine sign.

The Ngms informed me that they were worried about my aberrant behavior and, if I chose to return immediately, I wouldn’t have to live in a stairwell. An uncle whom I had never even known had just died, and I was eligible to take over the title of his huge, inexpensive Manhattan apartment in the Silk Stocking district of the Upper East Side. It seemed as good a time to leave as any. So I returned to Gotham City. At a corner diner in Gramercy Park, I met Mrs. Ngm. Or at least she said she was Mrs. Ngm.

“Mrs. Ngm, you look quite different from how I remember you.”

“This is what a lifetime of housework does to a woman’s body.”

“But you look younger, better than I remember.”

“Housework is a good thing,” she replied. I was given a form to sign, a set of door keys, the address to the new place, and the blessings of Mr. Ngm. She informed me that some of his brother’s personal effects still littered the place. If I wanted to, I could throw them out.

“Where is Mr. Ngm?” I asked adoptive Mama.

“The business is going under,” she nodded sadly. Adoptive Dad, who was almost always at work, made a career of trying to save his dying Bonsai plant business.

“Say hi to him for me.”

She bowed low, smiled brightly, turned to go, but stopped suddenly and added, “Mr. Ngm asked me to inform you that you are the trustee of his heart.” If only I had an organ donor card.

I thanked her and headed to my new homeland. The apartment was a pin cushion to my needling spiritual disappointment. It was cheap, and I was assured it was spacious. But I expected little as I dragged my bags up the stairs of the large tenement. When I threw open the door I gasped a bit. It was the only time in my life that something had surpassed my expectations in a positive way.

The apartment was huge and wide-open like a great indoor meadow, an entire floor with a cathedral-high, pressed-copper ceiling. A small bathroom and kitchen were partitioned off to the rear. Windows in the front lined the avenue. In the back, however, the windows were built on a courtyard that was so narrow I’d have to go on a diet if I ever contemplated suicide by jumping through them. They looked out to windows of a new condominium that was built just inches away. I kept the window shades pulled for privacy, but no matter what time it was, day or night, I’d always hear a party through those windows.

My dead uncle had lived in one quarter of the huge hall, away from the street. The other three-quarters of the place were empty and thick with dust. That lived-in quarter of the apartment was cluttered with old, broken furniture and strange, classical garbage that he had accumulated over the years. Statues, friezes, birdbaths, archways, and an apparent sarcophagus, among other things, cluttered the rear quarter of the place. There were also boxes of yellowing pop psychology books and science fiction novels.

While taking a dump one morning, I noticed that the toilet wasn’t fastened to the floor—it could be lifted up and swung sideways. With a little maneuvering, I discovered a hiding place had been created by my adoptive father’s furtive brother. Inside the lost lacunae was an old New York City Subway map.

Israel had been good to me, but it didn’t bring resolution. After returning to New York, I realized late one night what I had to do. I had my name legally changed to cold vowels. Not since Travolta donned a three-piece polyester had there been such a significant statement. It’s bad enough that most given names are silly clichés decided by giddy, post-adolescent parents flipping through baby-naming books, but a surname should be more than a bland, culturally assimilating moniker. A name should be a unique definition of the man himself. In New York, I found myself: I was a man without a consonant—Joey A-e-i-o-u.

The B. Whitlock Memorial Fellowship for Academic Achievement in History had a ring to it. Even though it was offered at Columbia, I’d never heard of it. In fact, I never found out how I got this covert, coveted Fellowship. I’d never recalled applying for it. In my registration packet, I was informed that it was automatically bestowed on the undergraduate who showed the highest distinction in history. The year before, the preceding Whitlock scholar had dropped out, and I could find out nothing about him. So I was the only student in the program. The prerequisites were equally mind-boggling. It required course work that jumped departments and even campuses. The best description I had of it was given to me by its director, Professor Flesh: “This program qualifies you to lead a once prosperous nation in economic decline back into its glorious, halcyon days.” It was better than working in an office.

With my apartment taken care of, and tuition covered, I only needed pocket money, so I went out and got a part-time job where every intelligent, self-hating person works—a bookstore, in particular the Strand Bookstore.

On weekends, I’d putz around doing shit work. By weekdays, I played the role of the esteemed Whitlock scholar. Much of that role consisted of evening tête-à-têtes with teetotaling professors who assigned difficult-to-find books, often lent to me off their own shelves. Exams were oral. Papers were only accepted if they were published in one of sixteen academic publications in fields related to the course. It was a challenge at first. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I still had faith that through knowledge all answers could be reached. I would learn or stumble upon some clue of nothing short of my very identity. But after an adolescence of reading histories, and then another year of this program, moving minutely across the same old ground, I started losing it. I wanted to join the ranks of the petite bourgeoisie. A thankless, hands-on job, like firefighting was just the thing. By the final semester of the program, I actually considered dropping out and taking the civil service test. But before my decision was solidified, something odious happened.

On an overcast day, more than a million years ago, at the start of my ice age—it was the final term in the program—I was called into Professor Flesh’s office. He said, “Reaganomics are still the gladiator games of our age.”

“Huh?”

“That’s how historians will see this.”

“What?”

“The rich have made a contest out of cuts; the lower tiers are again in the cold. I’m sorry, young Josef, call it Reagamortis.”

He informed me that my award, the Whitlock Memorial Fellowship, which had sustained me through a year and a half in the costly program, had, without rhyme or reason, been rescinded. Unless I could find some other way of financing myself, I was out of the ball game.

“This is my last term!” I appealed. “All I have to do is hand in my thesis, and then I’ll get a quick appointment in some Catholic girls college in some economically depressed area, and I’m set for life.”

“Sorry, Joey, but it’s out of my hands.”

“Who cancelled my award? Why? I was good.”

“Only the Lord and perhaps Dean Sovereign can say.”

“Dean Sovereign? Where is he?”

“In Butler.” Butler, the building behind the seated statuess, has the biggest front stoop anywhere. Up I went and in through the halls that Mark Rudd, student activist and campus leader of the S.D.S., had seized over twenty years ago.

“Halt!” groaned a security guard. I explained that I was trying to find out who had left me out in the cold, and that I was hoping Sovereign could assist. The security guard asked to see my ID. I showed it to him. He asked if I had an appointment. No. He pointed toward the door and said, “Out.”

I asked to see his superior. A button-bursting, seam-stressing sergeant informed me that Sovereign only saw celebrities, the filthy rich, or, at the very least, people with appointments. Proper channels had to be observed. As he walked me out past the Alma Mater statue, he said, “Try calling first.”

I raced to the nearest pay phone and called. A secretary answered, “Dean’s office. Can I help you?”

“May I ask your name, dear?”

“Veronica,” she replied, “Why?”

“Hi, Veronica,” I started, and then, releasing the hostility slated for the security guard: “I’m trying to find out what motherfucking organization is behind the severing of my fellowship. Now you could tell me, Veronica, or I could go through the Freedom of Information Act and sue the shit out of this cocksucking university,
capisce
?”

After a gasp, she laughed.

“Oh, you think this is funny?”

“What is your fellowship?”

“What are you going to do? Tell me that I can only find out that sort of information through the mail? Fuck that! I have my rights! What’s your nationality?”

“Calm down,” she replied, “What program are you in?”

“Fine, we’ll go through this little farce, this charade. My name is Joseph Aeiou and I’m…

“Aeillo…”

“No, Aeiou, and I’m in the contemporary…”

“How-’r-ya?”

“No, Joseph Aeiou, in the masters program in hist…”

“Yagoda??” she asked.