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By Root 3851 0

them—because I have this life instead. With me it all happens in broad daylight! The disproportionate and the melodramatic, this is my daily bread! The coincidences of dreams, the symbols, the terrifyingly laughable situations, the oddly ominous banalities, the accidents and humiliations, the bizarrely appropriate strokes of luck or misfortune that other people experience with their eyes shut, I get with mine open! Who else do you know whose mother actually threatened him with the dreaded knife? Who else was so lucky as to have the threat of castration so straight-forwardly put by his momma? Who else, on top of this mother, had a testicle that wouldn’t descend? A nut that had to be coaxed and coddled, persuaded, drugged! to get it to come down and live in the scrotum like a man! Who else do you know broke a leg chasing shikses? Or came in his eye first time out? Or found a real live monkey right in the streets of New York, a girl with a passion for The Banana? Doctor, maybe other patients dream—with me, everything happens. I have a life without latent content. The dream thing happens! Doctor : I couldn’t get it up in the State of Israel! How’s that for symbolism, bubi? Let’s see somebody beat that, for acting-out! Could not maintain an erection in The Promised Land! At least not when I needed it, not when I wanted it, not when there was something more desirable than my own hand to stick it into. But, as it turns out, you can’t stick tapioca pudding into anything. Tapioca pudding I am offering this girl. Wet sponge cake! A thimbleful of something melted. And all the while that self-assured little lieutenant, so proudly flying those Israeli tits, prepared to be mounted by some tank commander!

And then again, only worse. My final downfall and humiliation—Naomi, The Jewish Pumpkin, The Heroine, that hardy, red-headed, freckled, ideological hunk of a girl! I picked her up hitchhiking down to Haifa from a kibbutz near the Lebanese border, where she had been visiting her parents. She was twenty-one years old, nearly six feet tall, and gave the impression that she was still growing. Her parents were Zionists from Philadelphia who had come to Palestine just before the outbreak of World War Two. After completing her Army service, Naomi had decided not to return to the kibbutz where she had been born and raised, but instead to join a commune of young native-born Israelis clearing boulders of black volcanic rock from a barren settlement in the mountains overlooking the boundary with Syria. The work was rugged, the living conditions were primitive, and there was always the danger of Syrian infiltrators slipping into the encampment at night, with hand grenades and land mines. And she loved it. An admirable and brave girl! Yes, a Jewish Pumpkin! I am being given a second chance.

Interesting. I associate her instantly with my lost Pumpkin, when in physical type she is, of course, my mother. Coloring, size, even temperament, it turned out—a real fault-finder, a professional critic of me. Must have perfection in her men. But all this I am blind to: the resemblance between this girl and the picture of my mother in her high school yearbook is something I do not even see.

Here’s how unhinged and hysterical I was in Israel. Within minutes of picking her up on the road, I was seriously asking myself, “Why don’t I marry her and stay? Why don’t I go up to that mountain and start a new life?”

Right off we began making serious talk about mankind. Her conversation was replete with passionate slogans not unlike those of my adolescence. A just society. The common struggle. Individual freedom. A socially productive life. But how naturally she wore her idealism, I thought. Yes, this was my kind of girl, all right—innocent, good-hearted, zaftig, unsophisticated and unfucked-up. Of course! I don’t want movie stars and mannequins and whores, or any combination thereof. I don’t want a sexual extravaganza for a life, or a continuation of this masochistic extravaganza I’ve been living, either. No, I want simplicity, I want health, I want her!

She spoke