Son of a Dodger

“We’re not from Brooklyn!” This is what my mother would scream whenever she caught me doing something she considered crass, like talking to my friends on the sidewalk from my bedroom window or urinating with the bathroom door open. To my mother, Brooklyn was just a modern day Gomorrah where propriety and etiquette suffered treatment comparable to prisoners at Auschwitz. It was also where my father grew up.

I’m not so sure what is so funny about irritating my mother, but I became fixated on all the things in life that were “so Brooklyn.” We lived outside of the Lincoln Tunnel in Jersey, and I yearned to be a down-and-out, rugged Brooklyn Jew like my dad. Of course, I have a stylized version of the Brooklyn of my dad’s youth. I experienced the Cyclone in Coney Island and the seafood on Emmons Avenue with verbal footnotes about who used to live where and what they did way back when in the old neighborhood. I grew up in the 1980s, a time when the 1950s and 1960s were glorified by slick cinematic shots of urban streets adorned with long colorful cars, tough talk, and barbershop quartet influenced pop ballads. I thought my dad’s high school summers were exactly like Matt Dillon’s in the Flamingo Kid, and I hoped one day that I could park some rich guy’s car.

My mother, on the other hand, was from Albany. She was a Jewish girl growing up in a pristine community of New York statesman and Wasps. Their backgrounds were worlds apart. Her father developed large swaths of land and mingled with elites in the state’s capitol. My father’s father did something with quilts.

The Brooklyn shenanigans my father practiced were a wonderful blend of shlemiel and goomba. In the mornings my father would take our Bearded Collie Scarlett out for a walk. He never put on a shirt, though. He would always just throw on a jacket and zip it up. Then when he would come home and let the dog off the leash, he would unzip his jacket to reveal his hairy chest in front of the kitchen where my mother was pouring a cup of coffee. “Randy! Put on a shirt! We don’t live in Brooklyn!” Eighty percent of my mother’s sentences ended in exclamation marks.

Another trademark of the sordid boro that also made my mother’s blood boil involved the creative use of condiments. I remember the first time I saw him pour ketchup onto scrambled eggs. It totally blew my mind. I was five years old, and I had thought that this red mushy topping was exclusively for hamburgers and fries. Perhaps, that is what mainstream America thinks, but not Brooklyn. He’d squeeze a puddle of it on to the side of his plate and mix the eggs all around like he was creating some kind of breakfast palette. My mother would get up and leave the room. For me, there was no going back to plain eggs ever again.

My father didn’t stop with the eggs, though. He was a genuine innovator, forever coming up with new things to put ketchup on. To my mother’s dismay, he often conducted these experiments in restaurants. I miss watching my mother’s eyebrows raise above the frames of her glasses when my father would ask a Chinese waiter for a bottle of ketchup for his chicken fried rice.

In general, my mother has always been repulsed by ketchup, mayonnaise and mustard. She was even more repulsed by the ways my father used these condiments. She would often walk into the kitchen to find my father standing naked while dipping turkey leftovers into a container of Hellmann’s and washing it down with a swig from a milk container. She was not bulimic, but she did throw up a lot.

Finding clever ways of not paying for things was another favorite Brooklyn trick. I especially loved how he managed to get away with not paying for tickets to temple on the High Holy Holidays. Jews don’t ask for small donations during services. Instead, they come up with big religious events that you’d feel terrible about not going to, and then they charge a fortune to get into them. Of course, there isn’t exactly an entrance with a guy checking tickets. It’s somewhat of an honor system. My father honorably beat the system every time, having us all sit in the seats at the very back of the synagogue. It always amused me to watch my father act surprised when a family claimed that we were in their seats, especially when it was during Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

He would just turn his head in confusion and then ask my mom to get our tickets out of her purse. My mother didn’t say a word, but it took six months before her eyebrows resumed their normal position.

My Apology

Brian Goldman. About six months ago, this name began to haunt my existence. A ghost from my adolescence that suddenly began to occupy my thoughts, prey on my conscience and prompt a world of regret at every waking moment. But the worst of it came at night, when Brian Goldman’s face appeared in my dreams, full of sorrow and self-loathing.

Perhaps there is something about getting older that makes us take stock in our lives and think about how our actions have affected other people. I don’t know what spurs these feelings to surface, but suddenly I could not help but face the dark past that linked Brian Goldman and myself together. Brian and I went to high school together, and he was the unfortunate victim of my immature, obnoxious insults for many years.

Brian was the type of guy that I verbally harassed for no reason other than he was an easy target. He was the tall, muscular type who looked like he walked off the pages of a fashion magazine. Even worse, he was the high school quarterback, homecoming king, and notorious for dating a different girl every month. The jokes were practically typed, bound and handed to me by a tasteless book publishing firm.

And me? It’s hard for me to describe myself without sounding like a show-off. But the facts are the facts. I was the treasurer of our school chapter of Amnesty International, an honors student and the second favorite student amongst three of the five librarians. Of course, the clincher being that I was president of the debate team. If I wanted to get verbally caustic, someone was going to get hurt.

When you’re a kid, you don’t think about the consequences of what you say. It never dawned on me how Brian felt. I just enjoyed watching the Math Club crack up when I did my impression of Brian sharpening a pencil. “Why is this pencil made of rubber,” I’d say as I pulled it out of the sharpener.

“Uh, that’s the eraser Brian,” Todd Hanowitz would reply before passing out the bonus word problems for the week. I’ve never seen a group of people laugh so hard.

A friend of mine said that the story got back to him one day and he replied with a deadpan, “Oh.” I can only imagine that an interjection was never muttered with such sadness in the history of mankind like it was the day Brian said, “Oh.” Maybe it was damn funny to us, but – in hindsight – I see these laughs planting the seeds of sorrow inside Brian’s heart for years to come.

One time I saw Brian walking down a corridor from a distance and I immediately yelled “Hut-Hut-Hike!” in a voice that resembled a Neanderthal. My friend Ted nearly fell down on the floor crying with laughter.

Brian was talking to Stephanie Carter, captain of the cheerleading squad at the time. He just walked past us without uttering a word. He didn’t even make eye contact. I could just imagine the emotional torture he was feeling inside as I continued to shout, “33! 42! 8 squared! Hut-Hut-Hike!”

Stephanie rolled her eyes as if to say, “Poor, poor Brian.”

I had grown up since then, though, and I was compelled to make amends for my behavior. Unable to keep this guilt inside of me any longer, I went to his office in downtown Manhattan.

I entered the lobby of the skyscraper and told the security guard I was there to see Mr. Goldman. “Tell him it’s an old acquaintance from Memorial,” I said, worried that my name would cause him to avoid me in fear.

He didn’t recognize me for the first 15 minutes. Obviously the pain I caused must have hurt him so badly that he psychologically blocked out my existence. But after discussing some different teachers, classes and the year he led the team to the state championship (it was hard, but I refrained from making a flippant comment), he said he thought he remembered me. I felt terrible. What I had done to this man who stood before me in an Armani suit, staring at the city from his window view? Had he truly lived a life of agony for so long?

Even now I felt embarrassed at the difference between our lives. He was part of the financial district, spending his days in a corner office, working long hours and dealing with rush-hour traffic in the backseat of a livery car service for a few hours every day. As he looked at the cars 40 stories below him, I got a horrible image of him wanting to jump.

After all, I was living it up, so to speak. I had just gotten laid off and was fortunate enough to be collecting unemployment. I didn’t have to do a thing for nearly six months and the government would send me a check every week! What can I say? Some guys just have all the luck. I didn’t ask for this carefree everything-come-my-way lifestyle. I just sort of fell into it.

“Listen,” I said. “This is hard for me to do, but I came here today to tell you something.”

“What?” he asked, shedding a suspicious glance across his desk. Poor guy, probably expected some kind of cruel practical joke to suddenly take place at his expense.

“I wanted to say I’m sorry for the things I said about you during high school.” I could feel my face turning red. How inhumane I had been for all those years! But the fruits of humility are only attained at the cost of shame.

“Oh,” he said.

It would have been wrong of me to expect some kind of pat on the back for what should have been done a long time ago. I stood up, held my hands in front of me and simply said, “I don’t expect you to forgive me. But I wanted you to know that I’m truly sorry.”

He seemed completely baffled. I could picture a lifetime of misery unexpectedly being lifted from his shoulders. There was nothing more to say, so I simply bowed my head with a friendly smile and exited the office with a warm feeling in my heart. I wish him the best. And now, I can move on.

Hero Story

In an effort to retain the adjective "uncharacteristic" as a companion to all of my actions, I am forever engaged in displays of atypical behavior. In the past hour alone, I have parted my hair in the middle, spit on a desk lamp, and made myself a cup of coffee with artificial sweetener -- all things that are profoundly different from the way I have handled myself in the past 30 years. There are many reasons for abiding by an erratic routine, but it would be too typical of myself if I actually listed them.

So with this in mind, I present to you an anecdote several years old in which I practiced the art of deviation. It was July 2004 and I was a hero. Now, I admit that there have been times past in which I experienced a partial euphoria from self-sacrifice that one might equate with heroism, but in light of this recent adventure, I can honestly look back on those halo-worthy moments as frivolous kindness. To name one, I can never forget the time that I patiently walked behind a 75-year-old man in a narrow stretch of hallway. Mind you, my car was double parked outside of a downtown residential high rise, and all I needed to do was use the bathroom in my apartment and run back downstairs. But that was seemingly impossible, as this gray-haired man perambulated like a human spider, using spatially inefficient metal crutches attached to his arms rather than ones that rested under his armpits. It would have been possible to walk around him, but I worried that in doing so, I would inadvertently make him aware that he should be editing his will. On the contrary, I held my bladder and waited until he reached the elevator. I can only hope that some young man will one day treat me with the same belittling civility. But that is not the stuff that makes up a hero. I know that now.

I didn't wake up that Tuesday morning intending to save a baby. I had intended to get Swedish pancakes without going to IHOP, a herculean task to be sure if not heroic in itself. In this quest for sweet bread, I found myself driving down a residential street in the fairyland suburb of Evanston, Illinois. Clearly I had some kind of acute hearing that day, for not only did I hear the screams of a pregnant woman in distress but I was miraculously able to distinguish them from Sheryl Crow's All I Wanna Do that had been blasting out of my speakers.

Normally, I'm not into pregnant women. Talk about "baggage." But I have to admit that I have sore spot for ladies in distress who are flailing their arms in front of my moving car. In this circumstance, I had no choice, morally and legally, other than to stop.

"My baby! My baby!" she wailed, as though she was a woman who was having an issue with her baby. Without hesitating for more than a minute, I kind-of quickly pulled over and got out of the car upon hearing the denouement lyric until the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard.

What I soon learned was that this woman had locked her keys in her car along with a two-year-old baby boy.

“Please sir. Help me get my baby out!”

It was abundantly clear that this baby would have starved to death in a Lexus if nothing was done in the next 48 hours (he had some crackers).

“I will do everything I can,” I replied and just stared at the baby from the sidewalk while nodding my head for 30 seconds before saying, “Which window do you want me to break?”

Incidentally, she did not want me to break a window, but, instead, wanted me to pry open the gas cap. There was a spare key inside.

“I’ve been trying to open it, but my I can’t seem to do it,” she said. Indeed, her hands were shaking more than Amy Winehouse on an international flight. Granted, this happened many years prior to Amy Winehouse’s success, and it is feasible that she was simply a recreational user at the time who might have fared well on a long flight without a puff from the proverbial pipe. But perhaps she is really, really afraid of flying and quivered regardless of any chemical co-dependency.

I approached the gas cap like a lumberjack approaches plaid – ready to own it. The desperate mother stood behind me with her hands joined in a sign of supplication. The wind died down, birds silenced their chirps, and the sun retreated back a few degrees to get a better look. Or maybe Earth rotated back as a favor for the sun. Yeah, that makes more sense.

I’ve always wanted to do something physically important while listening to the 70’s action-show sound effect of the Bionic Woman or the Incredible Hulk in the background. While I can’t say that the sound actually occurs in life, I can say having that sound in one’s head enhances one’s strength threefold. I can also say that gas caps are not secured too tightly on Lexuses.

You should have seen the face of the baby when his mother opened the car door with the key I wrenched from the gas cap. It was exactly the same face he had when he was locked in the car – but a little freer.