Joshua Cohen - Witz

I’m telling you for the last time, PopPop’s telling him the Manager for the last time that Sunday, you need to get out from under my sun; you’re stealing my light, my heat, and I’ve asked of you virtually nothing, zip, nada, I was willing to go as low as what, $10 a month, ten dollars, know what it set me back, much more than that, I’ll tell you, listen, my son…

Please, Mister Israelien, the Manager’s shivering under the property in dispute, we all know your son’s a lawyer, we’ve discussed this matter with him on a number of occasions; now, allow me to apologize for any inconvenience.

We’ve just recently agreed with him to rent your sun for the sum of $8/month, we think this fair, overcast or not, eclipses we’ll deal, and we hope you’ll agree; we’re prepared to pay today for January, and will pay for every month within a week of its first. In return, we’ll have unlimited usage; no rays attached, if you will; you’ll not hassle us anymore, do we have an understanding? and PopPop adds up the figures tattooed on the mensch’s arm, asks him let’s shake.

I’ll need a month’s security deposit, and two months up front…

The manager shuts eyes, grinds lids, says, you’re very fair, Mister Israelien, then shakes his cuff as PopPop’s a bissel too afraid of the germs, and this with a Health Inspection last Monday, then leaves him for the kitchen to telephone the son, Israel, to finalize the terms of his payment, to be remitted in full to the restaurant midmonth ($18), payment — eight dollars, ten to the restaurant for its trouble — to be transferred to the account of the son’s estranged father a week later; please, the manager’s asking the lawyer who just last year cleared himself a competent million, I’d prefer a bank check, you understand. And though Israel’d thought about taking a percentage for himself, Hanna she, forget it.

Limply limbed through the buffetline, PopPop rests his tray at his regular table, outside though shaded and even in this winter they’re having, to partake with a slow deliberation that would be laudable if it wasn’t excruciating, not manners but their vigilant, overdone caricature: he remains erect, firm, silent, disciplined. He esses like the Kaiser must’ve, perfectly, a fressing annoying in the extremity of its decorum, its stateliness and the force of its grace, his posture as if he isn’t indulging with a spoon but is rather sitting on one, and deep, jutting up his gape and into him to scoop out all the inside nervousness, impatience, Weltschmerz and its American stress, the disapproving pain of its stick and the bowl of his bowel perhaps actually enabling the outer serenity, the set face under which his napkin remains immaculate throughout, unto even the postprandial, tucked meticulously under chin and over collar, further protected by the fork and knife he’s using and though recently unmatched plastic at this establishment he’s so enthused with his rental he almost doesn’t notice, just remembers to tip less, and ignores, too, the interior decorating just beyond, the chintz on the cheap with the mirrors, the lights and the Polynesian thatch, the tiki torches and hula luau lei, preferring instead the gustatory setting of his own increasingly senile mind: stags’ heads, alpine appointments, huntinglodge surroundings, fluted stemware, bone china. Wrapped in reverie as if for mental takeout, he’s handling his whitely tined pretensions to silver, slicing and scooping away as if to pristinate plate, as pure as his conscience and cold, a disc plastic itself, and probably inadequately washed, then attempting in the interest of kinder starving in nations darker, unsunned, even the garnishes slit into flowers that bloom like malicious vaginas, magically metamorphosed sexbidextrous swans, prior to reclining — though only after a final faint swipe of his lips — then lighting up an imported cigar banded in gold to lip rings of smoke to the least heaven of umbrella, whose shadow has been sponsored, apparently, by a maker of popular water.

PopPop’s Pop had inadvertently immigrated Here while on a research trip organized at the request of an Archduke Tungteufel, to study the skulls of famed jazz musicians up in Harlem, New York, to determine the phrenological similarities amongst shvartzes of various nationalities, to account for any effect on interpretation, and swing: I spent all my time up there on 125th Straße, hanging around the Apollonian Temple, he’d reminisce to no one, handing nothing down from Pop to PopPop, God! you wouldn’t believe how they bopped! Alternative sexuality seemingly in the family, PopPop the Elder, PopPop’s Pop, would become infatuated with a saxophonist with a pate as smooth as his altissimo: one verse/two choruses later, instead of following him west for three onenighters and a recording date, he had an epiphany of guilt as PopPop describes it, left the shvartze at the train station, went back to his own ghetto that was Manhattan’s Downtown and began to court an Affiliatedess, the daughter of an innovative insurance salesmensch who kept office on the first floor of the tenement in which he would room.

Long story short is that this here insurance salesmensch, PopPop’s Pop’s possible, potential father-inlaw, was “one of those people”—Affiliated; one of their prototypical genii as stereotyped in a variety of media you’ll one day become beholden to, PopPop says to Benjamin, such typecast perpetuated through the ever efficient agencies of history, most notable of which a lasting disposition toward oppression of the race, or religion, which has proved to seed only greater generations, and yadda. According to PopPop talking over His head to the wall hung with samplers and framed photographs of himself and his wife with his face scissored out and hers facialhaired with marker, this mensch sold insurance of all kinds: conception insurance, circumcision insurance, spiltmilk insurance, walking insurance, talking insurance, O how that mensch could talk! untied shoelace insurance, cowlick insurance, friendlessness insurance, virginity insurance, spousal insurance, anticonception insurance, mortgage insurance, unemployment insurance, alcohol insurance, sobriety insurance, child insurance, second child insurance, loss of faith in major religion insurance, undercooked linner/dunch insurance, breastcancer insurance, breastcancer remission insurance, secondmortgage insurance, impotence insurance, migraine insurance, ingrowntoenail insurance, grandson insurance, second grandson insurance, forgotten anniversary insurance, un-flattering shade of hairdye insurance (if purchased at selected retailers, as it’s disclaimed), weightgain insurance, weight then heightloss insurance, hairloss insurance, livercancer insurance, kidneyfailure insurance, rabbi’s (inappropriate) eulogy insurance, inexistent afterlife insurance, and don’t forget his most popular — insurance against insurance; making himself a sizable fortune off the weekend Apocalyptics, hypochondriacs, obsessive/compulsives, neurotics, and undifferentiated spastics known even then to inhabit the New York metropolitan area.

But getting back to what I was getting at earlier: PopPop says his Pop had been this insurance salesmensch’s first customer — I’m not just a prospective inlaw, I’m a client…though as such a trifle of the failure, too, as it wasn’t originally for any coverage he’d come. He’d flopped in fishily wet from the peddling, cartconcerned street in the first minute of the first hour of their third grand opening — an easy occasion for bunting, a common scheme of the desperate proprietor — and asked the insurance salesmensch’s wife mensching the register (her husband out selling marital insurance to his sister-in-law ), maybe you have a room available, upstairs…to that effect and then, recognizing what he thought was a fellow grant whether immi or emi, asked along the lines of, how long have you been here for, you, I mean, Here? a question that could only perplex PopPop’s Pop’s maybe, could’ve been, mother-inlaw, as the Affiliated of her line had been Here for so very long that they weren’t able to recollect when, exactly, they’d first arrived on these shores, from where and how, forget why: were they Mayflower stowaways? a cabin of Columbus’ Marranos? and how he then, blah blah blah asked her daughter whichever one of them to marry him and they both asked him what did he do, translation: how much money he made, then spit in his eye — she, the first Affiliated he’d tried to be with, the last; he went and bought sexual orientation insurance off the obliging father returned, then a week later met an orphaned I think Sicilian with a suggestive gap in his teeth, he wasn’t so into resistance…