David Grossman: A Horse Walks Into a Bar

“Now about my mother.” His face turns grave. “I ask for your attention, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is a matter of grave consequence. Rumor has it, and this is only hearsay, that when they handed me to her right after the birth, she was seen to smile, and perhaps even smile with joy. No waaaaay, I’m telling you! Nothing but slander!” The audience laughs. The man suddenly drops to his knees at the edge of the stage and bows his head. “Forgive me, Mom, for I have screwed up, I have betrayed, I have sold you down the river for a laugh again. I’m a whore for laughs, I can’t quit it…” He leaps to his feet, which seems to make him dizzy because he staggers. “Now seriously, no kidding around, she was the most beautiful mother in the world, I swear to God, they don’t make ’em like that anymore. Huge blue eyes”—he spreads the fingers of both hands wide and I remember the bright, piercing blue of his own eyes as a boy—“and she was the most unhinged thing in the world, and the saddest.” He traces a tear under his eye and his mouth rounds into a smile. “That’s how she came out, that’s the straw we drew, I’m not complaining, and Dad was okay, too, really he was.” He stops and scratches furiously at the tufts of hair on the sides of his head. “Um…Give me a sec and I’ll find something for you…Yes! He was a fantastic barber, and when he did my hair he didn’t even charge me, even though that was against his principles.”

He glances at me again, to see if I’m laughing. But I don’t even try to pretend. I order a beer and a vodka chaser. What was it he said? You need some numbing to get through this.

Numbing? A general anesthetic is what I need.

He resumes his frantic darting around. Like he’s prodding himself onward. A single spotlight illuminates him from above, and vibrant shadows accompany his body. His motion is reflected, with a strange delay, on the curves of a large copper urn positioned by the wall behind him, perhaps a remnant from some play that was once produced here.

“Talking about my birth, Netanya, let’s dedicate a moment to that cosmic event. Because me—and I’m not talking about now, when I’m at the pinnacle of the entertainment business, a wildly popular sex symbol…” He lingers, nodding with his mouth wide open, allowing them to finish up their laughter. “No, I mean back-in-the-day me, at the dawn of my history, when I was a kid. Back then, I was super screwed up. They put all the wires together in my head the wrong way, you cannot believe what a weirdo I was. No, really”—he smiles—“want some laughs, Netanya? Do you really want to laugh?” Then he scolds himself: “What a stupid-ass question! He lloooo ! It’s a stand-up show! Do you still not get that? Putz! ” He gives his forehead a loud, unfathomably powerful smack. “That’s what they’re here for! They’re here to laugh at you! Not so, my friends?”

It was an awful blow, that slap. An outburst of unexpected violence, a leakage of murky information that belonged somewhere completely different. The room is silent. Someone crushes a hard candy between his teeth and the sound reverberates through the club. Why did he insist that I come? What does he need a hired gun for, I wonder, when he’s doing such an excellent job himself?

“I got a story for you,” he calls out as if that slap never happened. As if there were no white splotch on his forehead turning red, as if his glasses were not bent. “Once, when I was maybe twelve, I decided I was going to find out what happened nine months before I was born that turned my dad on so much that he jumped my mom like that. And just so you understand, other than me there was no evidence of any volcanic activity in his pants. Not that he didn’t love her. Let me tell you, all that man did in his life from the second he opened his eyes in the morning till he went to bed, all his futzing around with the warehouses and the mopeds and the spare parts and the rags and the zippers and the thingamajigs—just pretend you know what I’m talking about, okay? Nice city, Netanya, nice city—all that crap, for him, more than making a living, more than anything, was to impress her. He just wanted to make her smile at him and stroke his head: Good doggy, good doggy. Some men write poetry to their beloveds, right?” “Right,” a few people answer, still startled. “And some guys serenade them, right?” “Right!” a few more feeble voices chime in. “And some guys, I don’t know…they buy them diamonds, or a penthouse, an SUV, designer enemas, right?” “Right!” several voices shout, eager to please now. “And then there are the ones like Daddy-o, who buy two hundred pairs of fake jeans from an old Romanian woman on Allenby Street and sell them from the back room of the barbershop as original Levi’s, and all for what? So he can show her in his little notebook that night how many pennies he made off—”

He stops, his eyes wander around the room, and for a moment, inexplicably, the audience holds its breath as if having seen something along with him.

“But really touch her, the way a man touches a woman, even a little pat on the ass in the hallway, just a schmeer— that, I never saw him do. So you tell me, my friends. After all, you’re smart people, you chose to live in Netanya. Explain to me, then, why he never touched her. Hey? God only fucking knows. Wait, what—?” He perches on his tiptoes and flutters his eyelids at the audience with an emotional, grateful look. “You really want to hear about this? You’re really in the mood for a bunch of shaggy-dog stories about my royal family?” Here the audience is divided: some cheer encouragingly, others yell at him to start telling jokes already. The two pale bikers in black leather drum their hands on the table and make their beer glasses jump around. It’s hard to know which side they’re on; perhaps they just enjoy fanning the flames. I still can’t tell if they’re two boys, or a boy and a girl, or two girls.

“Not true! Really? You’re really and truly up for Days of Our Lives: The Greenstein Saga ? No, no, let me get this straight, Netanya, is this some kind of attempt to crack the riddle of my magnetic personality?” He flashes me an amused, teasing look. “You really think you can succeed where every researcher and biographer has crapped out?” Virtually the whole audience applauds. “Then you really are my friends! We’re BFFs, Netanya! Sister cities!” He melts and opens his eyes wide in a look of boundless innocence. The crowd rolls around laughing. People grin at one another. A few stray smiles even make their way to me.

He stands downstage, the sharp points of his boots protruding over the edge, and counts the hypotheses on his fingers: “Number one: Maybe he worshipped her so much, my dad, that he was afraid to touch her? Number two: Maybe she was grossed out by him walking around the house with a black hairnet on after he washed his hair? Number three: Maybe it was because of her Holocaust, and the fact that he wasn’t in it, not even as an extra? I mean, the guy not only did not get murdered, he wasn’t even injured in the Holocaust! Number four: Maybe you and I are not quite ready for our parents to meet yet?” Laughter in the audience, and he—the comic, the clown—darts around the stage again. The knees of his jeans are ripped, but he boasts a pair of red suspenders with gold clips, and his cowboy boots are adorned with silver sheriff stars. Now I notice a sparse little braid dangling on the back of his neck.

“Long story short, just to finish this up so we can get the show on the road, yours truly opened up a calendar, flipped back exactly nine months from his birth, found the date, and quickly ran off to the pile of Revisionist newsletters my dad collected—took up half a room in our house, that Revisionism; the other half was for the rags and the jeans and the Hula-Hoops and the ultraviolet cockroach killers. Just pretend—”