7.It was a terrible Sunday in the fall. Many Sundays are terrible in the fall in Chicago.
You’d think the colorful leaves bouncing off the gray sky would make you feel something quite the opposite. But they don’t. Those leaves are dead. And the sky is, again, gray. I was currently in the middle of transitioning from all the friends I had just stopped being friends with to the new friends I would acquire, and that I would soon end friendships with soon after becoming friends with them. The Freudenbergers have always been loners. Who would want to be anything but? So it was probably this state of solitude that clouded my judgment much like the gray sky I was living under, that, in turn, led me into the living room to act as audience as my father, Mordecai Freudenberger, called me to attendance.
“Mendel! Come here! Get your ass in here. I want to tell you something!”
I crept into the living room. Hoping this “Get your ass in here” had the slight chance of being what I hoped it to be. That he’d be handing me the keys to my very own penthouse apartment in the city, and would inform me that school was now optional, and the only time I was obligated to communicate with him for now on was if he or my mother were in the hospital.
But there were no keys. Just a pair of depressed eyes and a forceful hand commanding me to sit for what was sure to be an audible living hell for the next thirty to ninety minutes.
“Did I ever tell you how I was in a gang?”
Did he know that he had told me this several thousand times? Did it matter to him if I knew?
“Yeah, Dad.”
My father leaned his brown leather La-Z-Boy forward. The nightly news was playing in the background. An interview with Saddam Hussein. “Oh boy, was I in a gang. I mean there’s being in a gang and then there’s being in a gang. And I was in one, boy. You bet your goddamn ass I was in a gang.”
My father’s gaze sharpened, eyes smirking like the ghosts of his former enemies were in the room. Stroking me. Caressing me to taunt him. His look reminded the ghosts how pathetic their feeble efforts were to unbalance him. He knew the man he was and always would be. Mordecai got up and poured himself a vodka. He farted. My leg started to restlessly bounce. Saddam laughed.
“We were called the Rockets! Don’t totally remember who named us that, but it was probably me. ’Cause along with being the fucking killer of the bunch I was also the brains. Ideas, see?! Like for instance, you probably didn’t know this, but we were the first gang to use switchblade combs. All the other greasers had regular combs, but I got us switchblade combs at the novelty store. See, we’d be having a conversation, right? Let’s say with a rival gang member, who we wanted to scare shitless, or a little tuna we wanted to shtup, and we’d take out those switchblade combs mid-conversation and whoever we was talking to would think we was about to cut into our own goddamn heads, but then it wouldn’t be knives that would come out of the handle! It would be friggin’ combs. Then we’d comb our hair all goddamn smooth and sexy-like and whoever we was talking to would know that we meant business. So if it was an enemy they’d run away, and if it was a hot chick, she’d pull her poodle skirt up and tell us to go to town.”
Saddam laughed again.
“You see, son, this is what I keep trying to tell you but you don’t listen. The same thing that’ll scare the shit out of a guy will make a woman want to screw your brains out. Anyway, you know why I named us the Rockets? Well, I loved West Side Story, see? And the gang in that friggin’ musical is called the Jets. And they were the coolest in the musical, but, the thing is, they were also all goys. So even though me and every other guy I knew thought the Jets were the coolest in that musical, in real life they still weren’t that cool because they were all goys. I mean, how can you be that cool if you believe in Santa, am I right? So we knew we were cooler, because we was all Jews, so that meant our gang name had to be cooler, just like we was cooler. And what’s cooler than a jet? What’s cooler than a jet, Mendel? Come on! Don’t make me wait all goddamn day! What’s cooler than a jet?”
My leg was now bouncing so anxiously that I couldn’t think straight enough to answer correctly even though I already knew the answer.
“Two jets?”
The old man spit out his vodka. “NO, not two jets, you fucking idiot! A rocket! A rocket is cooler than a jet. So I named us the Rockets! And guess what my nickname was. Go ahead, guess!”
“Mr. Ideas?”
“No, you fucking moron! Bird Man! Wanna know why?”
“I guess so.”
The old man spit out his vodka again. More vodka had definitely been spit than swallowed. The rug was shit-faced. “What do you mean, you guess so? Why don’t you know so? See, the trouble with you, Mendel, is you wouldn’t know a good story if it knocked on your door, delivered you a package, had you sign for it, and asked you for a goddamn tip. But of course you wouldn’t give a tip, would you? You know why? Because you got no respect for people who actually work for a goddamn living. Anyway, my nickname was Bird Man because of the Birdman from Alcatraz. He was this killer that was in Alcatraz. You know what Alcatraz is?”
“No.”
“Jesus. You don’t know nothin’, do you? Well, Alcatraz only happens to be the most famous prison in the world. The place where every major criminal got sent back in the day. It’d be the prison you’d be put in if being a fucking idiot were against the law. Anyway, there was this killer in prison there named the Birdman of Alcatraz. And he was called that because he lived in Alcatraz and he was so crazy his only friends were birds, and that’s why my nickname was Bird Man.”
“Because you were only friends with birds?”
More vodka spitting. Good thing the rug didn’t have to drive that day. “No, you moron! Because I was a violent person who people feared. And during rumbles, when everyone was fighting on the ground like a schmuck, your old man would climb to the tops of trees and jump onto their goddamn shoulders, just like a bird, but I’m also a man. So I’m a Bird Man!”
“Don’t birds fly?”
My father paused. Had I stumped him? “Yeah . . . birds fly. That’s true. But not birdmen. Birdmen jump onto shoulders.”
Saddam, for some reason, was now crying.
I rested my weary head in my underworked hands. “Seems like that could really hurt someone.”
“You’re goddamn right! And that’s why when your father was around, people did one of two things: bow or run! Now how about the dragon. Did I tell you the story about the time I defeated the dragon?”
“The dragon?”
Saddam was now wailing. Tears splashing on the camera lens. He tore at his uniform as the interviewer and camera crew restrained him.
“The dragon! There was a dragon in Chicago and your father slayed it. What? You didn’t know this? How can you know yourself if you don’t know your family history? If you don’t know what your family’s done, how can you know what you’re doing? But I guess that makes sense ’cause you wouldn’t know what you were doing if God read you the instruction booklet on how to live your stupid fucking life. Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah! The dragon! So this dragon had been sleeping for three hundred years and then some asshole was poking around its cave looking for coal to turn into diamonds and poked the dragon awake. This pissed off the dragon to no end, and after the dragon ate the putz he looked at his license to see where the guy was from. So the dragon sees that this poking prick was from Chicago, so, naturally, the dragon says, ‘Chicago can go fuck itself. I’m gonna fry that shit!’ So next thing we all knew a dragon was here in Chicago lighting everything in sight on goddamn fire. I don’t remember what I was doing at the time . . . probably shtupping a beauty queen or a model or a famous movie starlet or someone even prettier. Anyway, I see this dragon out my bedroom window and I’m pissed off because (A) this dragon was burning down the city I love, and (B) it had interrupted my world-class shtup session. So after I put my shmeckle back in my jeans, I grabbed my sword that I had pulled from a rock in the middle of Lake Michigan a couple months earlier. Funny, ’cause the day I pulled out the sword, I was like, ‘Too bad there’s no dragons that I can kill with this, because this sword is just gonna sit in the goddamn garage and go to waste.’ For once I was wrong ’cause here I was now: face-to-face with this friggin’ dragon. I raise up my sword, about to shove it into this dragon’s fat friggin’ chest, and what does this dragon do? He eats it. Grabs it with its long snaky tongue and swallows it whole! So, naturally, now I’m extra pissed. But not pissed enough to lose my strategic thinking. I get a genius idea! I say, ‘Hey, dragon, have you ever tried deep-dish pizza?’
“Then the dragon says, ‘Deep-dish pizza? Hey, asshole, I’ve been asleep for three hundred years. I’ve never tried thin-crust pizza, let alone deep-dish pizza.’ So I call Giorgino’s and I tells them to cook me up a thousand sausage-and-pepperoni pizzas with extra cheese. I talk the dragon into taking a break from lighting the city on fire until the pizzas arrive. He agrees, ’cause he’s really curious about what they taste like. The pizzas get there. He gobbles ’em down. One pizza. Two pizzas. Three pizzas. One after the other. Just lovin’ ’em. Now, my plan was that while he was distracted with eating the pizzas I’d sneak to one of my neighbors’ houses, see if they had a sword, borrow it, and kill the dragon that way. But it turned out the dragon was allergic to cheese. And I don’t mean just lactose intolerance. I mean like cheese is poison to a dragon like chocolate is poison to a goddamn dog. So the dragon puffed up real bad. Its face turned into a big green friggin’ marshmallow. And then, BOOM, the dragon drops dead. And not only did the city throw your father a parade, Giorgino’s didn’t make me pay for the deep-dish pizzas on account that I used them to kill the dragon. And that’s how your father saved the Windy City. Which, if it wasn’t for him, would have had to change its name to the friggin’ Burnt-the-Fuck-Up City.”
Shortly after this terrible Sunday my father was committed. I think it was the following terrible Sunday. He was released soon after. The breakdown turned out to be the reaction to a kidney infection due to his fatty diet. His kidneys recovered, but my mother never let him eat a deep-dish pizza ever again. Some years later, Saddam Hussein was executed.