Joshua Cohen - Witz

Emigrate, PopPop says, you emigrate if you love it Here.

Immigrate, he says again, you immigrate if you hate it There.

You have to admit, it’s not so bad.

PopPop asks, Who would rather go back? And then you realize, he’s talking about New York.

It’s this. PopPop’s the worst kind of retiree, without kindness: he was of the type who felt they’d earned their retirement, who didn’t have the respect to die just yet, with dignity, without; who didn’t understand that you worked your entire life for this death, not to do nothing, to retire, recede, give up, which you should’ve done to begin with; one of those who felt entitled to something, anything, though they weren’t quite sure what, the world owing him a living, him owing the world nothing much anymore; the author of interminable letters to the editors of major metropolitan newspapers, he’d labor meticulously over petitions, product failure screeds, signing everything Spinoza ; filled days in with the regions of service assessment surveys, answered any and all questions invariably nightly and in agonizing detail in telemarketing interviews — that, and Benjamin never knew what to believe: according to PopPop himself, an academic formerly associated with a halfway respectable (small, private, northeastern) university that should remain nameless if we don’t want to get sued, though later little more than an adjunct, a lowly untenured professor, the Administration even refusing him the sanctuary of a department — and that’s only what he told people, especially when they didn’t ask. A mensch of no degree save the Third, he’d purportedly taught a semester of Practical Eugenics (its prerequisite being Sterilization & You 101), and one elective (Antfarming for Fun & Profit), before the deans realized he wasn’t accredited for any of these responsibilities, summarily redirected him to the dept. of Nostalgia, or so one colleague had named the shadow faculty that nonetheless maintained offices on a bench way offcampus. Which was why he’d had to get the artificial toes he’d remove each night after pudding dessert, as one evening up north, locked out of a meeting, locked out of every university building, he’d slept on that bench, then contracted frostbite — that’s what you get for signing a pizza box, without showing it first to a lawyer — the next day his toes had to be amputated; still, he wore his sandals religiously, out of an abject phobia of having his shoelaces tied together: his toeplug of vulcanized rubber, fitted snugly to that pedestrian void, would lie each evening on the nightstand, alongside his dentures in their effervescence, to be scrubbed both immaculately by a spare toothbrush next morning and so, yes, hahafutzingha, and he finds it very funny himself, when he remembers, that he would often get mixed up, senior mistakes, the onset of dementia, mind mumblingly numb — he’d often put his foot in his mouth, but not as much as he’d put his mouth in his foot, chewing Benjamin’s tush for just about everything.

A pleasant disciplinarian, PopPop, disposed to random fits of overbearing affection verging on emotional abuse.

In your Majesty’s room, though, He’s safe: MomMom’s old preserve (her and PopPop’d slept separately ever since Arschstrong took the eastern corner of the floor just below), filled to its trim of oceana green with novelties exclusively MomMom, kitsch like thimbles hewn from pewter, porcelain owls with fake emeralds glittery for eyes, fortunes from Oriental restaurants tacked to emery in any order of desirability — a schedule for the fulfillment of dreams. This is home if only for a week, one rotation of the wheel PopPop’s nailed to the door to the room, which flimsy paper would rotate according to the day of the week to one of seven vectors of its circle, each adumbrating responsibilities expected fulfilled at His leisure, chores to complete: clear table, clean sink’s toilet, broom and mop the floors, your Majesty; declutter gutters and weed the mail; anytime prior to bed, which is now.

Here only long enough for this barely to’ve become ritual: Benjamin tucked in with PopPop sitting at bed’s edge for their dedicated hour of skullshaping (His uppermost still as soft as PopPop’s own low head is hard) — an ordeal erotic, leaving Him distraught, dizzied audience for the story PopPop would tell, followed by the silence of the nightly Shema, noticeably unwhispered. Then, PopPop to retire a limp off to his room, offlimits, to pack his dead wife’s personals; only now, a year later, moved out from her room to make room for Him: girlishly untouched saddleshoes, bobbysocks, poodling skirts, even her weddingdress that she’d sewn herself from a magazined pattern, then mothballed and tied in necklaces faux pearl and gold, lying all the other jewelry fake out atop pillows, a flaky substance passing for diamond, costumed cubic zirconia, moissanite, not so sterling silver, pseudoSwarowski and Tiffany imitations, being charitable donations, and verily, PopPop understands, elated further, it’s all taxdeductible.

A longing twilight, with relations sundered, together only in that they’re alone — after the tempered happiness, the disapproval of day, an unblinking moon, arched eyebrows of cloud…this, a memory of that ceremonial strangeness, the ritual off, which would almost ruin such promise, their vows, put a damper on incipient bliss, its bounty eternal: the bride carried in, the door shut after its holding uniform’s tipped in splurging style, lavishly absurd in its shame; this tasteless as tastefully underlit room as expensive as happiness always is, this milk and honeymooning who could afford, and who couldn’t? Benjamin had had enough of this side of the family, Israel’s people and their Affiliated menschs, their slumming marriages, their goyishe lusts, His PopPop having married out of the tribe, His MomMom’s mother and her mothers, their mothers before them and blah, all having married an alien kind: how they loved stuff like this, they lived for it, demanded to be spent on, and their menschs were spent, paying topdollar for luxury, bankrupting themselves to be pampered, degraded by class.

His mother’s people, Hanna’s, they were that whole different story, the dialectical spiel; He never knew them, they died too long ago before they would’ve died for all time; it was cancer, too, of the wallet, of the pocket, it had to’ve been, whichever was cheaper to die of…

It’d been a mania for intermarriage that’d afflicted untold generations of Benjamin’s family: Benjamin on His mother’s side simply the product of untold generations of Affiliated women who without fail had married the Unaffiliated, and had verily reproduced with them, and so, in terms of the Law, their offspring would be Affiliated, would’ve been, though not many households were as monogamously observant — religionwise, and especially leaning to the wife’s Affiliation — as was Benjamin’s and would be still, only if. All these goyim, these goyishe monsters of prick and pride attracted to Affiliated women, gonifs with their loves and lust for darkhaired darkheiresses, breastcrowned lusciously, princesses if not queens. Benjamin’s father, Unaffiliated — born, later converted, the first — Benjamin’s mother’s father, Hanna’s, Unaffiliated, check, check, probably sundering unto the first Unaffiliated, Adam, whose second wife seems to’ve been the first Affiliated Mother herself, and how to explain, calling her Cain inside for a piece fruit, very funny. Darkeyed, darker skin, or maybe just maybe degree of endogamy dependant so pale, demure, modest modestum in their natural habitat — in winter the mall, in summer the stripmall — often to be found in their long sleeves and skirts, a secret fetish this ritualwear, dressed down to their white sneaks shomering home on the Shabbos from shul: these women, these girls, daughters ghettowilling, shtupshy. And the goyim they end up with, even worse, dripping smegma from their every pore sebaceous, obsessed with fantasies of the right shoppingbags for breasts, a thickening neck hung with heavy amber jewelry, of women thicklipped, too, frizzyheaded, between their thighs egregriously burning Flatbushes to consume, consume, consume without ever consuming…O these dyed-in-the-lamb’s-wool-maydels — preferring the savor of unkosher salami, treyf schlong, endless unskinned lengths forced through golden doors, a Chosen Peephole through which to taste, sniff, or ogle: the throb of shaigetzes, each to their own specialized lusts, unholy desires but out also to ascend angelic ladders, social and business both; and so union after separation, love sacrificed to lust, new Unaffiliateds kept on being introduced into the line, water to wine, water to wine, and still any offspring, abracadabra, would be Affiliated, thanks Mom, as long as you’re holding the — lessening — line, how’s dad?