Getting and Spending on Christmas and Hannukah on Long Island

A social satire of Jappy Jerks spewing dollars like a Covid Patient spreading viruses

By

David Gottfried

There is one thing I like about the goyische (non-Jewish) world: Pumpkin pie.  Basically, the consumption of the muddy substance makes me happier than a pig in shit.  In a word, I go fucking ape-shit over nutmeg.   Since I just ate an entire pumpkin pie, I may, with a little bit of luck, start tripping.  (nutmeg is a hallucinogen).   Of course, if I don’t cross the psychic Rubicon and fly with Lucy while wearing a diamond studded Tuxedo, I have a few medicinal friends that can do just the trick.

And as I meander down the pennied, petalled lanes of my memory, I cannot help but think about Brooklyn, Long Island and Christmas,  the diabolical trinity of this essay. 

The Pride of the Rodent

I was raised in proletarian Brooklyn.  Although my family was not proletarian, my apartment building was like a Noah’s ark of sorts for rodents and roaches.  And since we were neurotic, our G-d was neurotic, and so he did not pack the house with one rat couple and one roach couple.  Like a good obsessive-compulsive, our G-d packed the building with hundreds or maybe thousands of rodents and perhaps millions of roaches.  Since I lived in a zoo of pathogenic vermin, I decided I was entitled to pose before the world as a hard-bitten Jackie Cooper or one of the guys in “The Little Rascals,” battered, shabby but with a valiant, Che Guevera, revolutionary esprit de corp.  And if my Brooklyn “eat the chawcolate in the awfice and play with the dawg” accent was too rough-hewn and reminded people of the “Dead End Kids,” I balanced that by being an intellectuall\y astute little rascal as I discussed rats with enthusiasm and spoke with millennial fervor about the diseases they portended. From grades 3 through 6, I wrote book reports on rats and became quite the scientific specialist on creepie crawlies.         

 The Many Splendored Succulence of Long Island

As a rat-addled runt from working class Brooklyn, I was awed and envious of Long Island, a suburb to the East of New York City, by all accounts rich, radiant and ratless.   First, there was James Bell, a very rich Jewish guy from Long Island whose very rich Jewish Parents managed to give themselves a hotsy totsy Protestant name. (Sort of Like Madeline Albright, Clinton’s Jewish Secretary of State)   I was 7 and he was 9, and I am not going to tell you what James Bell did to me, but he forever made me furious and fascinated by rich people and their ineluctably freaky sexuality.  I can still remember the sound of his voice as he recounted the Long Island restaurants his parents had taken him too. “We had shrimp and we had lobster,” he boasted, the way a debutante might petulantly exclaim, “I wore cashmere, and I wore mink.” 

The next thing that killed me about Long Island was the name of one of its highways, “The Southern State Parkway.”  This highway augured  an evil that was rich and arrogant.  The name of the highway reminded me of the name of a TV show which glowered like gorgeous whores and great baseball players like Micky Mantle (In the early sixties, Mantle of the NY Yankees was G-d).  Whenever I got on the Southern State Parkway, I thought of the show, “77 Sunset Strip,” the most compelling distillation of cool I had ever laid my five-year-old eyes upon: 

And the Southern State Parkway was more than sexy.  It was sultry and wanton and Southern.  Hell, it was called the Southern State Parkway, and it reminded me of all those epic American movies starring a Southern bitch of a belle – Scarlett Ohara, Elizabeth Taylor – sashaying her hips and subverting a man’s mind like a shaman with swagger.  And the sleek lines of the Southern State Parkway were supported by heavy, heavy stone, and this reminded me of a scene, in the 1963 version of “Anthony and Cleopatra,” in which Sleek and infinitely sarcastic Elizabeth Taylor is held aloft, on a chair, and her chair is carried by several enormously muscled and miserable African slaves.   I knew that Long Island believed in Slavery just as Elizabeth Taylor and the South believed in slavery. 

And there were more Long Island names that struck my fancy and filled me with revulsion, but the sort of revulsion that makes you keep going back for more, like a horror movie or a sexual obsession.  One town in Long Island bore a name that was a physical disfigurement. It was called Mastic Shirley, and I knew that in this rich and sardonic world women whose breasts had been stolen by cancer were brutalized by catty ladies who   called them mastic shirleys to mock their mastectomies.   And another town was called Babylon, and I knew that the rich Jews of Long Island now deigned to mock their faith by bringing back  Nebuchadnezzar in the form of Alphonse D’Amato, New York’s Republican Senator from January 1981 to January 1989.     

Rat and Cat Couples on Long Island

Long Island, first and foremost, signified undeserved wealth.  The people I knew, who possessed the wealth, were usually Jewish or Italian.  Of course, there were plenty of rich Irish Catholics in Long Island, and I suppose some rich wasps who thought they had an F Scott Fitzgerald Great Gatsby shtick going for them, but generally Jews and Italians hung together, and I knew only one Irish family and no Wasps in Long Island.

Although I am generally comfortable with Jews and Italians, on Long Island they tended to become royal pains in the ass.   Every character in Long Island seemed to have walked off of the pages of a Philip Roth Novel. I don’t mean his sensitive, sweet and sad novels, like “Nemesis” (I have read it 3 times in the past 6 months; read that novel and you’ll know, in the words of the Rock band “The Who,” that “my dreams are not as empty as my conscience seems to be.”)  I mean his blistering, ballistic, sexed-up emotional cyclones like “Portnoy’s Complaint” or “American Pastorale” where everyone yelps like an alley cat and bites like a rat.  

And I finally encountered a cat and rat couple from Long Island, a Jewish guy and a Roman Catholic Girl.  The girl was gorgeous. The guy was brilliant.   They ran around the watering holes looking as lush as lobster and as gritty as a rib steak. And just as the Kaiser said that Germany and England would not fight each other because Germany was a lion and England was a whale, they came together in a cataclysmic clash, and lit up the night sky with hatred so pure, so elemental, they seemed to have rediscovered the secret of the atom bomb.           

Although they marshalled the greatest armaments for their armies, the Italian girl, Cleopatra, and the Jewish guy, Uncle Julius, fought over the most mundane matters.   Basically, the girl would scream that she was more fully loved and appreciated because the aggregate amount of the Christmas  presents her parents had given her was $10,000.00.  The guy reminded us that he was more loved and more deserving of love because the total value of the Hannukah  Presents he had gotten was 12,000.00.   Then she amended her Christmas earnings to 14, and he amended his Hannukah earnings to 15K.    And, to paraphrase Sonny and Cher, the war went on.

They had this fight at about 3 AM in our law firm in lower Manhattan.  (It was great to party in our law firms at 3:00 o’clock in the morning and it made so much sense:  Our NYC apartments were too small, and our rich law firms were so expansive, and their somber libraries with a hint of the antique almost gave the place an Adams Family or Dark Shadows energy, perfect for sex with a fetishistic slant.)

And as I witnessed this fight, I realized that American capitalism had not only become more intense and hard-driving; the quantitative intensification had engendered a qualitative change. Just as boosting water’s temperature to over 100 degrees Celsius makes water fly in the sky like airborne serpents, heating the hysteria of the market till a son believes his father’s love is something measurable in dollars and cents means the wholesale degradation  of the triadic constellation (Father, Mother and Child) at the heart of man’s life on earth for thousands of years.  For example, I very well remember that at NYU law school a student refused to go to his father’s funeral because he claimed he had too much work to do at his firm.    

And when children skip funerals, you can be sure they don’t visit elders in hospitals.

And if you think I’m full of it, remember this:  Almost all of us Americans die miserable deaths.   In America, we value that which produces bucks.   Old and sick people don’t produce bucks. Hence, they are trash.  And as you are reading this, sneering at my  screed, all over New York City, in the most elite hospitals as well as those fetid, filthy places that are ante rooms to charnel homes, elderly people are all alone, and they are marinating in their urine in sheets that haven’t been changed in months, and the patients and the hospitals and the doctors prove that your relatives didn’t love you, and your friends didn’t love you.  Very simply, our neurons do not extend  beyond our skin. Mr. Clinton had it dead wrong:   He never felt anyone’s pain, and we don’t feel anyone’s pain.  We are atomized assholes hurtling toward an inevitable and ugly doom.  And within 48 hours after the end of Christmas, that stuff you heard about good will and charity will be put back in its box and remain there until next Christmas when we will once again use the dreams of Christmas  to sell unneeded merchandise and shabby services.