Endless Blind Passions - Chapter 2
“Why aren’t you dead yet?”
The fat, balding pickle salesman in his early sixties shifts in his chair and snickers uncomfortably at the boy’s question. “Such a cute little boychick,” he says, patting the three-year-old’s platinum blond hair. But the boy pulls away.
“Come here,” Leo tells Monty sharply. “Sit by me.”
Monty ignores his father’s command and wanders around the room. He feels offended. It was a genuine question. He wants to know why this old man isn’t dead yet, like his Grandpa Shmuel. And besides, he resents the pickle man for occupying the ancient wooden rocking chair where until a few days ago his grandpa would sit and sing Yiddish nursery rhymes while Monty stood on his feet and held his hands, the two rocking together in time to the simple rhythms.
It’s a typical summer day in Los Angeles, 1950, hot and sultry, the Santa Monica Mountains barely visible as a pallid grayish outline two miles to the north. Heavy smog leaves a dry, bitter taste in the back of the mouth, tears burning in the eyes, and a muted acrid smell, like charred crust stuck inside a toaster. Not until a decade later will state officials first dare to propose measures regulating toxic automobile emissions.
Cars here reign supreme, the top of the food chain lorded over by grotesquely long Cadillac sedans with glossy two-tone bodies—black and violet, green and white, black and red—and with fins that will evolve increasingly pointed year by year, as if purposely designed to kill off pedestrians and any lesser vehicles encroaching on their space. Monty sees the Caddies lined up at Blum’s ice cream parlor in Beverly Hills.
“Too fancy for us,” Sarah proclaims, putting off her son’s plea to stop for one of those ice cream sundaes that ooze over the top of the tulip-shaped glass, sending chocolate syrup, nuts, and artificially colored candied fruit dripping down the side, turning into mush the fancy paper doily under the glass. Doilies like the larger versions of which rest over the top of his grandma’s sofa, preventing the oily residue of her guests’ heads from further soiling the worn-out nubbly purple upholstery.
Monty and his parents are visiting his grandmother Golde, the reigning Cadillac in her own eyes of a small circle of elderly eastern European Jewish immigrants who gather daily and gossip at the local park. She lives in a two-story complex she owns, a half block south of Beverly Hills. Monty is old enough to sense that life over that border—indistinguishable at first but for a sign—is utterly perfect, like Blum’s sundaes, but too young to understand that not all people in his grandmother’s age bracket abruptly drop dead from a heart attack, like his Grandpa Shmuel just did.
“Why aren’t you dead yet?” Monty asks the pickle man’s thin, sallow wife, and then each elder in turn until his father lightly cuffs him on the side of his head and pulls him away.
A tall man with rugged good looks and eastern European roots, Leo is muscular, lean, and tanned from decades of tennis and daily sunbaths, as he calls them. He’s cautious with his son. Once when Monty was a toddler and wouldn’t stop crying, Leo shook him so harshly it caused a cracking sound from the boy’s spine, like a Ritz cracker snapping in two. Shocked, in the future, Leo checked himself from striking out at his younger son.
The elders gathered in Golde’s living room, heavily scented with the rosewater ointment she lavishes on her body, are here to offer their condolences. They smile at the boy’s question, smiling in a way that conceals their discomfort and embarrassment. Why indeed aren’t we all dead? they might well ask themselves. What string of chance circumstances led us, like Shmuel and Golde, to get out of eastern Europe and emigrate to the New World in the years before and after 1900, missing out on the fate of countless relatives destined forty-some years later to be shot and dumped like discarded garbage into large open pits, or be gassed and incinerated?
In truth we could each ask ourselves, Why aren’t I dead yet? Between life and death, between the here and the not-here, with all the possible accidents, diseases, and organ breakdowns, there’s only a micron-thin “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini” divide. And like the shy girl wearing the tiny swimsuit in the “bubblegum pop” hit featuring that lyric refrain, we’re afraid to reveal our true selves in our skimpy costume called life.
If we stopped for an instant and peered down deep inside the Me, down into the black night of our being, down into our cells, and deeper yet, down into our subnuclear core, what is there there but emptiness? Somehow, through natural selection—or miraculously by the will of some god we concoct—the collectivity of our neural cells creates an illusion that all these microbits of stuff and primarily empty space coalesce and constitute a singular, indivisible permanent Me. An “I am,” as the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes put it: Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am.
It’s a mere conception, a conceit, the ultimate human vanity. But the ego serves a purpose. Evolutionary forces that made hominids increasingly self-conscious produced an individual and collective identity that enabled us to develop the minds, tools, and schemes to fight off predators with sharp horns, long teeth, and massive bodies. And to fear death to the point of denial. All these same evolutionary forces have come together to produce a Me called Monty, who at three years old first begins to fear the end of Me.
The foreboding first surfaced three days before the scene in Golde’s apartment when Monty ran to answer the family telephone where it sat on the yellow-tiled kitchen counter next to the breakfast nook in the cookie-cutter Spanish colonial revival tract home where he’s growing up.
“Hehwoe,” he said proudly into the heavy black Bakelite receiver, thrilled to answer any telephone call. “Whooz dis?”
“Grandpa Shmuel has the figs,” his grandmother shouted from the other end.
Sarah grabbed the phone from her son, and seconds later she slumped onto the faded blue-and-yellow linoleum floor, sobbing hysterically and howling, “Leo, Leo, Leo.”
Whenever Sarah panics, she cries out for her husband: during LA’s sporadic earthquakes, each time Red-baiting Joe McCarthy appears on TV, during the polio outbreak when Monty’s brother, Dave, five years older, is away at camp. Sarah’s nearly a foot shorter than Leo and petite like her mother, clearly Jewish, with an added touch of exotic Asiatic features. She’s feisty if challenged by authority, but when faced with affliction, real or imagined, turns nervous and apprehensive. She finds in her husband not only comfort but confidence that she is actually alive. Her marriage provides a core meaning, a sense of identity, an unconscious pretense of immortality.
Except that everything out there is a threat. Only recently subdued and barely so, Nazis may return at any time, she’ll tell Monty, and this time on American soil, led by Joe McCarthy, white racist mobs, and capitalist plutocrats.
Heaven knows what Grandma Golde actually said on the other end of the phone. Certainly not “figs.” Probably some Yiddish expression for “dropped dead.” And while Monty didn’t understand the words, his mother’s hysterical reaction left him with an undying message of horror and annihilation.
A few months later he absorbs a similar stamp on his heart from his father’s stoic yet palpably distraught reaction to his own mother’s death. “Don’t bother your dad,” Sarah tells Monty after he’s pestered his father to help him fix a broken toy. “He’s not feeling so good. Better to leave him alone.”
A quick temper and a stone face can shake a child’s fragile sense of security no less than hysteria. And though too young to grasp the biological meaning of mortality, Monty absorbs its absolute finality. Thoughts of death begin to penetrate his mental amniotic sac, the layer of consciousness that nurtures and cushions his certainty. The protective buffer against truth and the dangerous outside world has burst a leak. Life doesn’t seem so safe anymore. Menace lurks in every dark corner of his home, behind the clothes in his closet, under the coffee table in the living room, in the two desks where Mommy and Daddy hide away their secret things. What I see, what I feel, everything I am, in death there is no more. No more Me.But perhaps in Beverly Hills there is no death. Barely a half block away from his grandma’s apartment, where towering palm trees gradually begin to dominate the landscape, everything one cherishes in life, including Blum’s ice cream sundaes, seems perfect and everlasting.