The Right Thing to Do at the Time
CONTENTS
Quotes
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Note on Hebrew and Yiddish
Untitled Document
Smooches and Zing
Lights, Camera, Action
Bagels or Love
Two Thousand Year Old Can
S’more Wisdom
Reasons for Romance
Noodle Soup
Definitely Maybe
Nipple Sermons
Bubbies on Speed
Shoeless Summer
An Unsimple Kiss
Tramsexuals and Trampires
Milk to a Kitten
Holy Unitard
The Tender Violence of Trousers
Zombie Knitting Circle
Duck Soup for the Soul
Go
Tainted Relish
Love or Werewolves
Local Honey
A Plop and a Fizz
Rules of Time Travel
Idiot’s Guide to Facial Acrobatics
A-M-O-R-O-U-S
Nobody Said Grinch
Forks Down
Nothing About Love
Let Go or Be Dragged
Oracle Shmoracle
Instincts vs. Buttons
A Big Step Back
Loveladies
Lions and Loins
Something in the Mustard
Do You Like My Hat?
Book Group Questions
Acknowledgments
A Note From the Author
About the Author
Stay in Touch!
Rubes
Notes
“If Ari were a noodle, what kind would he be? I think a very sensitive noodle without maybe enough egg. But if I had to pick a noodle out of a line-up, I’d pick Ari.”—Hector Kimmelman
“I can’t help but love a book in which I get to call Arnold by his chosen name (the one I’ve chosen for him). And Itche, well, I love him like a grandson. But unlike my rash, he doesn’t come see me enough.” —Bubbie Pearl
“How could this not be my favorite book? Ari is my best friend, for one thing, and the book is also about me, which makes it a very interesting book. And Rubes is in it and Rubes is sooooooo cute. Actually, I think the book should have been called All About Rubes—only maybe she could be a tiny bit less barky, and couldsomebody please brush her teeth?”—Itche
“What kind of book is this? Oy my kishkes!”—Mr. Wexler
“I’d like it better if Adorno and Horkheimer were in it.”—Mrs. Wexler
“I mean, when you think about it, all marriages happen for some kind of convenience.”—Jeremy Hertzberg
“If it were more like Twelfth Night, I could be Cesario and Itche could be Orsino.”—Talia
“And I could play Lady Olivia, only really I’m a talking butter dish?” —Helen
“Hark, I sense some milchig sarcasm and it dost not pleaseth me.” —The butter dish
Published 2018 by Tiny Golem Press
www.tinygolempress.com
Distributed by Everything Goes Media, LLC
www.everythinggoesmedia.com
Copyright © 2018 by Dov Zeller
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
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Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Zeller, Dov, author.
Title: The Right thing to do at the time / Dov Zeller.
Description: Northampton, MA: Tiny Golem Press, 2017.
Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-945816-02-4 | 978-1-893121-56-0
Subjects: LCSH Friendship—Fiction. | Transgender people—Fiction. | Homosexuality—Fiction. | Musicians—Fiction. | Love stories. | Jewish fiction. | BISAC FICTION / Humorous / General | FICTION / Gay |FICTION / Jewish.
Classification: LCC PS3626.E35643 R54 2017 | DDC 813.6—dc23
978-1-945816-02-4|paper, Tiny Golem Press|
978-1-893121-56-0|paper, Everything Goes Media|
978-1-945816-03-1|ebook, Tiny Golem Press|
978-1-893121-42-3|ebook, Everything Goes Media|
Printed in the United States of America.
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Cover design by Dov Zeller, Ruxandra Șerbănoiu. Interior art by Ruxandra Șerbănoiu.
To the orchestra, the big band, and every string quartet. To each instrument with its individual soul, and to the small and quiet voice of time (a melody almost lost).
Note on Hebrew and Yiddish
Note: In the first few pages of the paperback form of this book there is a glossary. I will skip that here in the ebook, but I wanted to say a few words on the topic of transliteration and pronunciation of Hebrew and Yiddish words.
First of all, the name Itche is pronounced like the English word itchy (as in, poison ivy is itchy.) It is a diminutive of the name Itzik, the Yiddish Isaac.
That said, Hebrew and Yiddish words transliterated with a ch usually have the ch sound of Chanukka or (JS) Bach as opposed to the ch in cheddar cheese. The exception usually comes when words have Slavic or English origins. Unless it is otherwise noted, Hebrew and Yiddish words in here with a ch, have the Chanukka ch sound.
Neither transliteration nor pronunciation is an exact science. I made choices based on my preferences and experience and did my best in the glossary to define and explain terms and provide some help with pronunciation for those who are interested.
SMOOCHES AND ZING
IN THE SYNAGOGUE library of Congregation B’nei Tikvah,1 a small crowd gathers to mark the beginning of the Hebrew month of tevet.2 This little gathering is where our story begins, early one winter morning, with two youngish, shortish, single-ish, heterosexual-ish, hopeful-ish-ish-ish men, both barreling gingerly through their twenty-seventh year. The library is half-bathed in light, and comfortably shadowed. There is the sound of the previous night’s sleep still falling away from the voices that first hum, and now sing. And there is Itche3 and there is Ari and they stand side by side, wrapped in their prayer shawls, chanting Hallel.4 Itche is at times more mumbling than singing, but Ari puts his heart into it. He’s really belting it out. This singing brings him a lot of pleasure. It makes him feel full in his heart and quiet in his mind, a tenuous feeling, one that comes and goes even when he’s praying and singing, but one that breaks the pressure of days that stack up and up and up, a bunch of half-cooked pancakes with no syrup, not even the fake kind, or a deck of cards made up of only one card that repeats and repeats, a two of clubs, say, or a three of hearts, one on top of the next, the whole thing getting so high it might reach the moon until it starts to lean. Look out below! (No one wants to be crushed by a lifetime of lackluster days. Kafka may have invented the hard hat, but he has not yet invented the body suit that will protect a man from one of the worst forms of injury: the treachery of his own collapsing deck.)
All in all, this is not the liveliest bunch of singers to be heard on a Rosh Chodesh5 morning, but who am I to say? If I am an omniscient narrator, I didn’t get the memo. I am a small-time salesman. A teller of not-so-tall tales (due mainly to the hunching over of shoulders). I am of little consequence, as you can see.
Our
heroes, on the other hand, they have their whole lives ahead of them, days to be added one on top of the next, years to be lived, and they worry, will they be single all this time?
Where is he? This dreadful storybook villain, pale-white, with a sleek and greasy mustache curled up at each end, tying people to train tracks who can’t pay the rent? Let’s find him and make him eat chopped liver until he cries uncle. Love is too many things, and yet it gets reduced to the murky idea of romance, all because of him! Smooches and zing. That’s all anyone ever wants. And I’ve got some for you. Smooches and zing smooches and zing smooches and zing. See? There it is.
Let’s take a moment to consider the many faces of this funny thing called love. Is it a noun or is it a verb? Is it a drug or a weather pattern? Does it inspire great monuments, great art, or greater procrastination? We all know it can shake people up and make them look at themselves in the mirror. Turn them into shadows of themselves, or legends in their time. It invents complainers and explainers, do-ers and don’t-ers. Vampires, trampires and werewolves.
Whatever love is, it’s no joke. But then, why do I hear God laughing?
As I mentioned earlier, I’m just some idiot who overheard a story on a train. I don’t have the answers. I only come with questions. Questions are my métier. I sell them, in fact. I write them on scraps of paper and some of them are so good they go for a million. A million of what? It’s really none of your business. Answers expire before you can put your fingers on them, but questions never do.
We’re always reaching out for something, trying to catch it in our hands, love or happiness, those bright little fireflies in the starless night of our minds. Some of us clap our hands together and a firefly so dead loses most of its charm, though a little shmear of bioluminescence on the palm isn’t nothing. It’s like a forgiving wink. Tinker-bell shit.
What if we’re barking on the wrong hydrant? Pissing up the wrong tree? Maybe we don’t need to worry about two more souls wrestling with a question of love, even if I did sell it to them for a price. It’s a good question after all. Not only that, it’s many questions in one. The most expensive bargain you’ll ever get.
Here are some related questions that are still for sale.
1) What is the distance between friendship and romantic love? (Wait, wait, don’t move, I’m trying to measure here.)
2) How many millimeters between the sacred and the mundane? The holy and the profane?
3) Is the distance between friendship and romance on one hand and the sacred and the mundane on the other about the same?
These are some of the questions I clasp to my own breast. Because sometimes I stand facing the Grand Canyon and it looks like a dime-a-dozen photograph I saw in a magazine somewhere. And sometimes a piece of pumpernickel toast makes me cry. There are oceans! There are mountains! There are lush valleys! There are icebergs and waterfalls with little rainbows clinging to their mist! And there are loaves of crusty bread to be shared and buttered, sculpted and baked, crumbed and salted over a good conversation. You put the little uncooked loaves in a bowl, cover them, and they rise, they rise, just like Mount Everest! (And just like Mount Everest, in a few days they may break your teeth.)
But here you are, giving me that look. What? What? I’m getting to the point. It’s not that sharp, mind you. Nevertheless, make yourself comfortable. Start settling in. Wipe those cloudy glasses, for God’s sake, and make sure your feet aren’t cold. Now look. Look closer. See the people singing in the synagogue library? It’s only a little crowd so it won’t be hard to spot Itche and Ari. Itche’s hair is dark and short. Ari’s a little lighter, a little longer but not much. They’re about the same height, give or take an inch or two. They stand close and sing Mekimi,6 Itche not quite as loud as Ari. Itche has the five o’clock shadow times two and his dark brown eyes brood a little, his eyebrows furrow. Ari’s eyes light up as he sings. He is happy. He loves to sing with a crowd of shul-7goers. Itche isn’t as happy as his dear friend in this moment. He wants to know what will happen next. “What will happen next?” he wonders. In a cosmic sense, it’s an easy question to answer. So easy, I won’t even sell it. It wouldn’t be fair. What will happen next? Today, tomorrow, and for the rest of eternity? Who the hell knows. That’s what.
But something will happen soon that will shake up their worlds. Before long a certain someone will come to town, and the lives of Itche and Ari will not be the same. These two youngisheh men will have to take a good look in the mirror. They will become shadows of themselves, or legends in their time. Their question about love will come in handy, but none of the answers they’ve come to thus far will do them a stitch of good.
LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION
TO BE FAIR, in talking about friendship or love, one has to think of the history of the earth and how it has changed over time. As with any geographical formation, there comes a moment of contact, tectonic plates, the meeting of the minds. For Itche and Ari it happened at Camp Tabatchnik,8 a summer camp they both attended as kids, though Itche went because he was fascinated by the idea of summer camp, and Ari for reasons that were mysterious to him. I won’t say it was a sublime encounter, but as you will see, in its way, it was. Or at least mythic. That’s what really hit me. When I heard the story of Itche and Ari I saw that the grandness of time had not only to do with mountain ranges, but also with the strange and subtle moments that make up memory and the even stranger way we turn these memories into stories, and these stories go on to shape our memories, and time goes on, and we go on, and our stories go on, and our memories go on, until eventually we walk right off the edge of the page.
Itche and Ari have a lot in common. They met at Camp Tabatchnik, though they each went for their own reasons. They both grew up in the greater New York area, though not in the same town. They both like to daven9 at shul, though each has his own purpose and approach. They’ve both spent their twenties on the lookout for a romantic companion, though most of the time one or the other believes love is nothing but a cruel myth concocted to torment. And they were both born on days that were above the freezing line, but not so good for swimming out of doors, though they were not born on the same day or even in the same month.
Ari squawked his first squawk in Brooklyn in October in the year of nineteen hundred and … and was set before the blood-shot eyes of Eileen Wexler (Abe Wexler was at home in his pajamas nursing Alka-Seltzer, complaining that all this labor was more than he could handle.) Ari is the oldest of two boys, though on his birth certificate there was a different name, and a little box checked indicating he was a female variety of person. But he never in his life understood how such a mistake could have been made. He didn’t feel himself to be female in any way. At a certain point, he began taking steps to make sure other people understood he was who he was, Ari Wexler, trans-10tastic son, grandson, brother, nephew… He went by a few other names in his earlier days, all to avoid the initial first name given (known formally as the first first name), but by the age of twenty-three he had legally changed his name to Ari and soon after he started with testosterone, celebratory occasions for him, and for Itche too, who was right there by his side.
Ari started playing the violin early on and music has always been his sukkat shalom, his peaceful shelter, a place where he feels the presence of God, the divine, the divinely comforting. Music has been a shelter, a friend, and at times a wrenching anxiety.
Itche was born with the whole cock and balls, as they say, in Yonkers, on a day in late September, to a single mother who these days spends most of her time out of the country on archeological digs and so forth. It’s not that she doesn’t love her only offspring, but more that she has a certain philosophy about parenting that is very, let’s say, hands off. Itche never knew his father, and has no living grandparents that he is aware of. He grew up a bit of a solo flyer, with his mother nearby, but very absorbed in other things. Itche was considered in school “The Most Likely to Succeed in Worrying” and he was the first in his class to get the five o’clock shadow
. His artistic temperament was evident from the start. Who taught him to knit his eyebrows? It must have been God, who else could it be to make the eyebrows screw up like that the minute he came out of the womb? (It wasn’t the doctor. A doctor doesn’t have enough to do?)
Itche started sketching at the age of four, and by five and six and seven he was drawing all the time, copying comic strips and making his own, getting yelled at by his teachers and ignored by his fellow students. He also took up painting and spent much of his time at home reading comics, studying art and working on his own projects. Loneliness took up much of his life until he met Ari, and his loneliness subsided and his life began to feel full.
He has hopes of writing comics, but so far as a working adult he has found himself in set-design for theater and TV. The stand-up comic Steven Wright says, “the world is small, but I wouldn’t want to paint it.” Itche says, “This set is big, but as far as painting jobs go, it isn’t bad.”
Itche and Ari have always shared a certain flavor of masculinity. Perhaps it is part of their mutual attraction. What shall we call it? Nuanced? Angsty? Doubtful? Overthinky? As they stand together celebrating and welcoming in the new month of tevet at B’Nai Tikvah, in a neighborhood they each had to travel to by train, Ari happily sings Mekimi, but Itche can’t stay focused. His eyebrows knit. He wants to know what will happen next. “What?” he wonders. “Will happen next?” In order to get to the bottom of this greatest of all questions, he leans closer to Ari and asks, “What are you doing after this?”
“Shhh!” Ari says. “I’m trying to sing.”
“Right. I figured that much out. Keep trying. But what are you doing after?”