Mark Goldblatt - Right Tool for the Job: A Memoir of Manly Concerns

Right Tool for the Job

A Memoir of Manly Concerns

Mark Goldblatt

Also by Mark Goldblatt

Africa Speaks (novel, 2002)

Sloth (novel, 2010)

Bumper Sticker Liberalism (political commentary 2012)

The Unrequited (novel, 2013)

Twerp (novel, 2013)

Finding the Worm (novel, 2015)

FOR INGER STEVENS,

the shikses shikse,

R.I.P.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

The book youre holding in your hand is, as Huck Finn once said, mostly a true book, with some stretchers. Im supposing you are holding the book in your hand, either in paper-and-ink form, or encoded in binaries and magicked into an electronic device, but even in the unlikely event youre ingesting this a hundred years from now as a lozenge, youre still going to find a few things that are hard to swallow. But they did happen. With stretchers.

Huck Finn of course is a famous fictional character. Whereas the Mark Goldblatt who inhabits these pages is a creature of flesh and blood, not famous but not altogether obscure, subject to the usual set of human frailties whereby recollection is clouded by time and warped by ego. I have tried, insofar as possible, not to misremember to my advantage. When the seltzer goes down anyones pants, I want it to be mine. Nonetheless, there is more than enough here to give offense. Therefore: To friends, relatives, and occasional lovers who find themselves, or facsimiles of themselves, in the narratives that follow, I apologize abjectly and in advance.

Do I flatter myself to think a few readers may know me already as a novelist, or a childrens book author, or a right-of-center political columnist, or (that rarest of rarities) a tenured conservative at a public university? If fame can be gauged by Google searches, I seem to rank somewhere between a middling rapper and an Investigation Discovery murder-porn victim. Its enough. Several years ago, I was riding the subway in Manhattan when I noticed that the woman sitting across from me was reading one of my novels. Yeah, I was feeling pretty good about myself right then, debating whether or not to ask if she wanted an autograph. Before I could decide, however, she got off and the British actor Jeremy Irons got on and took her seat. Every atom of his being, the look on his face, the angle of his head, the slouch of his shoulders, the fold of his arms, the tightness of his jacket, seemed to cry out, Please, please, please, for once, let me ride the train in peace! Real celebrity carries a cost. And he was only Jeremy Irons. Not Sean P. Puff Diddy Daddy Combs

So, for the record, Im neither Sean P. Puff Diddy Daddy Combs nor Jeremy Irons. I ride the train safely cocooned in anonymity, content with my lot. Why wouldnt I be? I was born a grand-prize winner in that greatest of all secular lotteriesIm an Americanand have arrived at late middle age in decent health and relative prosperity. My good luck goes beyond that: Im a 1957 baby, the very peak of the boom. Too young to be drafted into the war in Vietnam, too old for the Middle East skirmishing and invading of the last two and a half decades. The most daunting challenges Ive confronted in adulthood have been paper cuts, pulled hamstrings, and the odd defriending on Facebook. Remember that Chinese guy who stared down a column of tanks? I once had to stare down a three-hour flight delay.

Prufrocks got nothing on me

Standing in front of the bathroom mirror each morning, we confront the truth. The receding hairline, the hangdog expression, the rounded gut didnt I go to school with that guy? Geez, what happened to him? But the minds eye sees what it wants to see. The dashing scoundrel. The leading man. The crazy bastard. Hey look! Isnt that me chasing Cathy Earnshaw across the moors or urging Ilsa Lund onto the plane or Tarzaning through the homecoming parade, getting even with the squares on the reviewing stand? Well, maybe. But how many of those moments crop up in a lifetime? Meanwhile, theres a lot of grocery shopping, shoelace threading, and sitting on the train reading hemorrhoid ads. Its in that gap, between our imagined selves and our actual selves, between the heroic and the humdrum, that comedy lies. This is a book about the moments when that gap is yawning.

TURKISH BATH

The memory is simultaneously blurred and seared in my mind. I was seven years old, built like a pond newt, and altogether startled to be spending a Sunday afternoon in 1964 with Morris Goldblattwho, as a rule, devoted his weekends to solo breakfasts at the Horn & Hardart, marathon poker games at his friends houses, horse racing at Aqueduct and, after he got home, the Million Dollar Movie on television. For whatever reason, my dad decided that he and I should bond on this particular Sunday. He mentioned the Turkish bath, which meant nothing to me, but he promised that there would be an indoor swimming pool, and afterward, if I wanted, a hot dog with spicy brown mustard, so I pulled on a pair of swimming trunks and a tee shirt and followed him downstairs. Six blocks laterparking was tough in Flushing, Queenswe came to the grimy white Plymouth he was driving that year.

The bathhouse was located in lower Manhattan. I remember a long drive with the sun in my eyes; it must have been around two oclock when we set out, and we hit patches of traffic. My dad was smoking Camel cigarettes the entire trip, filling the space above the dashboard with a noxious haze, but that seemed normal enough. Then, as we rode across the Brooklyn Bridge, I remember a sudden glimpse of the bleached spires of the Woolworth Building. Now that was a sight, a castle fortress jabbing into the cloudless blue sky. What the view must be like from that peak! Once we reached the city, I recall alternating waves of shadow and light bathing the front seat of the car. Then came more driving, very bumpy, more shadow now than light. Then at last we arrived at an underground parking garage, left the car, and walked for two blocks.

I dont remember the facade of the bathhouse itself, only that it didnt look like the kind of place that would have a swimming pool. But I had no reason to think things amissor at least no reason until my dad led me through a black metal door, and then down a long echoing hallway and into a dingy gray locker room that smelled of old-man sweat and cooked cabbage, where he told me, in a matter-of-fact tone, as he unbuttoned his trousers, to take off my bathing suit. To which I replied, and this, I am certain, is an exact quote, Nooooooooooooooooooooo!

He ignored me, but a moment later he thrust a single white towel in my direction, which I pulled at once around my waist, and I determined not to remove it until we were back once again in the locker room, and I could replace it once again with my bathing suit.

Cmon, he said, looming naked in front of me. Lets the two of us have a good sweat.

How do I describe what came next? Let me begin with the facts, unembellished. What came next was an elevator ride to the sauna and baths on an upper floor. The elevator was roughly six feet wide by six feet deep. There were perhaps a dozen men, middle-aged and older, crowded into that space. They were all naked.

I was four feet tall.

The sensations of that elevator ride! If I could douse my brain with rubbing alcohol, if I could disinfect the recollection, even at a distance of five decades, I would. Oh, I would in an instant! The undulating cloud of cigar smoke. The baritone laughter from above. The moles and scars. The tufted gray hair. The dimpled, creased and puckered flesh. The crevices.