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.