This wheezing heckle, this spluttering raspberry, this vile string of punchlines life. Funny? Sure. But also cruel. “Cruel,” you might retort, if you ever said anything, whoever you are, “but funny, too.” And I’d tell you the half-full/half-empty line doesn’t change the fact of the binary—that you either laugh a lot and feel a little bad, or laugh a little and feel a lot bad. What I ask is, where’s the solace? All I’ve got left is this pool and its sundeck and that gaggle of knucklehead schmendricks over there to hone my timing to a sharper brutality against the shrinking, alter-cocker bones of. Our wives are all dead and we sit around warping. We can’t remember what made them laugh. As know-nothing boys, we wooed them like naturals; as men, we killed them with… what? Not killed them. Failed to save them. They died of neglect and the world was destroyed and we stayed in Florida to learn irreverence. That’s the whole story, a long dirty joke.
It was time to play cards, so I went to our usual table by the deep end. Everyone appeared to be suffering from mouth pains. After we’d exchanged all our how’s your digestions, my friend Heimie Schwartz asked my friend Bill the Goy, “How often did you go the extra mile for your wife?””
“All the time,” Bill the Goy said. “Every single time.”
I pulled the deck from the box by the ashtray and dealt out a hand of rummy four ways. I neglected to shuffle first. I was in no mood to shuffle.
Our fourth, Clyde the Schlub, who, truth be known, is more of an acquaintance than he is a friend, was stirring Splenda into his mug of iced tea when Heimie put the question to him.
“Clyde,” Heimie said, “how often would you say you went the extra mile for your Christina?”
“Always,” said the Schlub. “Whenever I got the chance.”
We all knew I was next and that I would answer the same way as the Schlub and the Goy. We all knew Heimie had a different answer to the question than the rest of us and that he would offer up his different answer as soon as I gave mine. That is Heimie’s rhetorical method. That is how he stirs up a controversy under the umbrella by the pool on an otherwise uneventful afternoon of rummy or canasta, even sometimes cribbage: he creates the promise of consensus, then undermines all hope of consensus with his wild assertions. I do not resent Heimie’s thirst for controversy, and in fact think the day tends to get better when it’s quenched. However, to my taste, his method lasts a few beats too long. I think: Why redundancy? Why first ask all of us a question we have the same answer to when all you and we really want is for you to get to your wild and controversial assertion already?
I’d had enough of this method, so before he had the chance to ask me his question, I said, “What about you, Heimie? How often did you go the extra mile for Esther?”
At my interruption of the routine, the Goy placed his startled hand on the shoulder of the Schlub and the Schlub spilled a little tea on his cards and his shirt, but Heimie didn’t even flinch. He said, “That’s just what I wanted to ask you, Arthur.”
“I asked you first, though, Heimie,” I said. “So you answer first.”
“Well,” he said, “I’m afraid that before I can answer your question, I’d have to ask you to clarify. I’d have to ask you not to take for granted that I take for granted that both you and I know what it is that the other one of us is talking about when that one of us inquires of the other about this extra mile and how often we went it for our wives. That is to say that I would have to ask you to first define the term extra mile.”
“You know what it means,” said the Goy. “Come on.”
“We all know what it means,” said the Schlub, licking some tea-drops off an ace of spades.
I said, “Go ahead, Heimie. Define it.”
“But I want first to know how you define it, Arthur.”
“But you had something in mind when you asked Bill and the Schlub over here.”
“Please don’t call me ‘the Schlub over here,’ Arthur,” said the Schlub.
“It’s a term of endearment,” I said. I said, “I call you ‘Schlub’? It means I am comfortable calling you ‘Schlub.’ It means we are acquainted, you and I.”
“Okay,” said the Schlub, sucking tea-dribble from the stain on his shirt. “But when you say ‘the Schlub over here,’ I feel like maybe I’m being a little bullied, belittled.”
“So don’t be such a tender-footed sissy,” I told him.
“You’re right,” said the Schlub. “You’re right.”
“It’s true,” I said. “So then what did you mean by extra mile, Heimie?”
“What did you think I meant, Bill?” Heimie said to the Goy.
“Don’t redirect my question to the Goy,” I said. “I’m asking you, Heimie.”
“I’m not too crazy for when you call me ‘the Goy,’” the Goy said.
“What is this?” I said. “Is this group therapy for whiners? You want to be the Schlub and he’ll be the Goy? You’re a pair of goyische schlubs, the both of you. Still, I suppose, if the Schlub over here agrees to it, we could pull a switcheroonie with the monikers—would you like that?”
“Forget it,” the Goy said. “Have it how you want it.”
“I’m trying my hardest,” I said. “Now answer the question you were asked. Establish us some mundanity so that Heimie can shock us in good faith with hot controversy.”
“What are you saying to me?” said the Goy.
Heimie said, “He means tell us what you think it means, extra mile.”
Unable to see clouds for the blockage of the umbrella, the Goy in his shyness studied pinstripes on cloth. “It means down there,” said the Goy.
“That is a very ambiguous answer,” I said.
“Down there… and the mouth,” added the Schlub.
“The mouth?” I said.
“The mouth and down there,” said the Schlub. “Add two and two, would you? We’re talking about our wives here, may they rest in peace.”
“We’re talking about an act!” said Heimie. “We’re talking about the extra mile! And I don’t know what you mean by down there. Do you know what he means, Arthur?”
“Only vaguely,” I said. “In my experience, there’s more than one down there.”
“There’s the one down there,” said the Goy, “and there’s the other down there. To put the mouth to the one is the extra mile. To put the mouth to the other is filthy and disgusting.”
“I agree,” said the Schlub.
“I disagree!” I said.
“I disagree!” said Heimie, looking a little farklempt. I’d stolen his fire. Or at the very least I’d stolen part of his fire. It was two-on-two now, and he’d expected one-on-three. He said, “And why filthy and disgusting?”
“Because waste comes from the other,” said the Goy.
“Waste comes from everywhere!”
“But this kind of waste causes illness.”
“I was never ill by such waste,” said Heimie.
“Nor was I ever ill by it,” said I.
“This is filthy and disgusting,” said the Schlub.
“Do you eat shrimp?” I said. “The veritable cockroach of the ocean?”
“Yes,” said the Goy.
“Do you eat bacon?” said Heimie. “The meat of a beast who rolls in its own excrement?”
“I love bacon,” said the Schlub. “It’s salty.”
“These crazies,” Heimie said to me.
“Bacon and shrimp for them?” I said. “Indeed. Maybe even some bacon wrapped around a shrimp, but not the other down there, God forbid.”
“Shellfish and pork, Arthur?”
“Please, Heimie,” I said. “Shellfish and pork, but ass no thank you!”
What did they do, the Schlub and the Goy? They left. We didn’t try to stop them. We knew the Goy would return soon enough and, surely, to be rid of the Schlub was a blessing.
“So how often did you go the extra mile, then?” Heimie said to me.
“Which one?”
“Both,” he said.
I told him the truth. I said, “Rarely the one and never the other.”
“Same here,” said Heimie. “It’s regrettable.”
“We should’ve done more,” I said.