Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

“I get along with everybody,” he said, “which is why I’ve done well as a dentist, and when I lost my license, selling textiles. Be like me, smart and not a wiseguy, and you’ll get somewhere. Go on like you’re doing — a cynical sour-puss — and you’ll end up a flop no matter what field you go in.”

The whole world’s trying to steal from you — remember that,” he said. “But what most of them don’t have is our Yiddische kop , so take advantage of what God and we gave you. You don’t, that just shows what a schmo and easy mark you are.”

Some nights after dinner he’d say “Get me one of my cigars out of the humidor.” He’d give me the cigar band, sometimes slip it on my finger, and a matchbook for me to light the cigar. Then he’d sit back in his easy chair, content in smoke. “Boy, does that feel good after a long day. And better when you have such a terrific kid lighting it. Thanks.”

“Where’ll all your writing get you?” he’d say. “To the nearest soup kitchen if you’re lucky. Give it up before you really start suffering because of all the disappointments you’re bound to face.”

“You drink too much and you got a filthy mouth,” he’d tell me when I was in my twenties. “You’ll just make enemies and never get a good-looking levelheaded wife. She’ll think: ‘That’s gonna be the father of my children when there are so many more refined sober guys out there who have a steady income? Not on your life.’“

Most of my teeth he worked on he ruined for me. He didn’t take x-rays when I had a cavity, saying he didn’t need to: when he was drilling he could see with his own eyes where the decay ended, which meant that a year or so later the tooth usually started aching again. He did give me Novocain, but the minimal amount, so it always hurt when he used the drill on me. When I was sixteen I paid for two root canals with another dentist with money I was making as a delivery boy after school and Saturdays. My father never asked me about my teeth after that and I never told him about the other dentist, but he knew. Otherwise he would have said, as he used to, “You haven’t had a checkup in a while. Let’s set up a time next week.” Before he got his license back he worked on our teeth and several of his old patients’ in a friend’s office, always at night after the other dentist had left.

Walked out on some of his dinner checks, half to save money and half as a game. “I love putting something innocent over on people,” he said. “What about the waiter or waitress?” I said, and he said “Oh, don’t worry your head; I always leave a tip.”

When I got in front of the TV set, he’d say “What’s your father, a glazier? Get out of the way.”

His family was very poor and he worked every day after school and all day Sunday starting when he was eight. “Saturdays, because we were Orthodox, I rested like the rest of the neighborhood, though if my folks had let me I would’ve worked that day too after attending shul .

“Went straight from high school to dental school — that’s the way it was then; it wasn’t that I was especially good in the sciences. But I applied myself, burned those candles — and lots of those nights they were candles, which were cheaper than gas, or electricity, when our building finally got it. If I could do it, you can too, if you changed your major again and went back to being pre-dental. Of course, I could’ve spent four years in college and then gone to dental school, but who had that kind of time to waste? I wanted to start making some real money and move my folks to a better apartment and buy my mother a fur stole, and things like that.”

Had the largest dental practice and the first purple opentop car on the Lower Eastside. “I saw that car as an advertisement for my practice,” he said. “All the girls were after your father,” my mother said. “Not only did he have a good income but he also had hair then, so was quite the catch.”

Also said about his time in prison “I did it dancing, something I always felt good about, that I didn’t whine or act like a fruitcake while I was there.”

My younger sister and I were told he was a major in the army dental corps in San Diego — my mother even got out the atlas to show us where San Diego was — taking care of the teeth of soldiers who were about to be shipped across the Pacific to fight the Japanese.

“After his release,” my mother said, “with his license taken away and all our savings gone and the war still on, so no opportunity for him to make a pile of money — that time was the hardest for your father, I think worse than being in prison. It was also the bitterest period of our marriage, and we’ve had some beauties.”

Worked in a war factory in Brooklyn when he got out. After the war, he sold shoes and then paints and then textiles and quickly did so well at it that in a few years we were able to keep a maid.

Forced to give up dentistry for good because of his worsening Parkinson’s disease and diabetes. For a couple of years he was falling down on subway platforms and streets after work, and strangers had to help him home. Thank you,” I’d say at our front door or in the building’s vestibule when I’d see them through the peephole, “I’ll take him from here.”

The last few years of his life I’d shave him and clean his dentures and give him his shots and exercise him and clean him up after he went to the toilet and come in every night around twelve — I’d rented an apartment on their block to help out my mother with him — to give him his pills and turn him over so he wouldn’t get bedsores and to make him comfortable for the rest of the night. Sometimes I got mad at him while he was lying in bed — that he’d just pissed or shit right after I’d changed his diapers — and would turn him over too hard or curse him under my breath or curse my own fate out loud that I had to be coming here every night to take care of him. “You want to do the right thing,” he said a few of those times, “but it’s just not in you, so you shouldn’t even try. Don’t help me from now on. I’ll live longer without it. Anything’s better than you acting like an animal to me.”

When my parents were first introduced, he was a handsome dentist with a thriving practice and she worked as a receptionist in a doctor’s office during the day and at night and Saturday matinees danced in a West 42 ndStreet musical review. He used to meet her at the stage door two to three nights a week and give her flowers and boxes of candy. “You laugh,” he said to me, “because you can’t see anyone your age doing that today. But then, if you wanted to win a beautiful girl nine years younger than yourself, that’s what you were expected to do.”

“I couldn’t get her to bed so I had to marry her,” he said. “But I already knew that bad girls you sleep with and nice ones you marry. Look at your mother. It’s obvious she doesn’t like me talking about it, but I think it’s an important lesson all my sons have to learn.”

“Hook up with a shiksa ,” he used to say, “and she’ll wake you up in the middle of one night and start shouting into your ear how much she hates Jews. It’s bound to happen eventually, so stick with Jewish girls. Much less confusion with your kids later on, and they’re prettier than shiksas and make the best wives.”

“When we were kids we went barefoot in the summer to save on the shoe leather,” he’d say.

“We had so many relatives and landsleit living with us in our small apartment on Ludlow Street that we had to sleep in shifts, sometimes two to three to a single bed.”

“It was two for five to go to the movies then — two people for five cents. So I’d stand out front of a movie theater and say ‘I got two, who’s got three?’ and always got someone to go in with.”