(the cover of my father’s first book, published in Prague in 1965)
At the ripe age of 71, I finally decided to follow the family tradition and do some serious writing. I have the first chapter of a novel provisionally titled “Kafka’s Ghost” Unfortunately, as all writers know, if the first chapter takes a week, the second chapter takes three months. So that’s where I’m at.
My music life ground to a screeching halt in March 2020 and although the screeching has subsided, the halt continues. I had an excellent local gig until a few weeks ago. Had to give it up due to damaged vocal cords. The damage can be fixed with a laser procedure but trying to get accurate information from the “healthcare” system is almost as difficult as getting information from the Secretary General of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan in 1965. Well, that’s how I imagine it, anyway. Every place I call with my croaky, raspy voice, has tons of secretaries, nurses, administrators and “coordinators” (though what they co-ordinate is an opaque mystery) but none can give me succinct information about the procedure I will need to undergo. You see, I am deathly afraid of general anesthesia and unless I need open heart surgery (God forbid), I want everything done under local or sans anesthesia. TMI. All I’m saying, dealing with doctor offices sucks the big one.
(a scene from my dad’s Oscar winning movie, “The Shop on Main Street” - 1966, with the inimitable Jozef Kroner and Ida Kaminska in the title roles)
In the absinth of an active musical career, I have the time to write my novel. That does not mean I have the patience and the stick-to-itiveness. But I’ll keep trying. In the meantime, here’s a short story from my self-published book “Dead to Writes”. I think this story best exemplifies my style: an illegitimate child of Friedrich Nietzsche and Woody Allen. If you happen to have my book, please give it a long glowing review 😁here: Dead to Writes If you don’t yet have the book you can purchase it for $2.90 on Kindle or get it for zilch dollars on Kindle Unlimited. OR: if you still like hard copy books, shoot me an email (georgegrosman at gmail dot com) and I’ll mail you one for $30, including shipping. ($100 to Uzbekistan, $200 to Zimbabwe)
Before I forget: the title is of course a line from the Beatles’ “Get Back”. I have been immersing myself in Beatle trivia lately, buying all sorts of out of print books and listening to weird podcasts. To me, alas, there is no “where you once belonged”. Maybe we can talk about that some other time. Here’s the promised story:
I AM DEAD
I am dead. No regrets. No contrition, no ruminating, no two soft-boiled eggs “in a glass”. No more enchanting sunsets and sunrises to stir my soul – never worked anyway. Eyes shut. No fireworks shattering a quiet night, no psychedelic glory of strutting peacocks. The manifold beauties of nature which always left me cold. I was always too deep in my head, always too overwhelmed by the buzzing of my synapses to notice beauty. As if I care now, feh!
I'll tell you what did stir my soul and filled me with awe while I was alive: a woman's slim ankle. A subtle whiff of perfume, pouty red lips, the moist tang of love. I also enjoyed history books. History, being over and done with, demanded no action, only comprehension. But really, so what? None of it matters now that I have “slipped the surly bonds of earth” - albeit not in the direction rhapsodized in the famous poem.
I don't care about your commands and your reprimands. No earthly need or feeling is of interest to me, not even the dreadful anxiety that plagued me when I was alive. It haunted my every thought while my brain was still in the business of thinking. My body was sore, my muscles twitched, my stomach churned. Everything I ever did or contemplated was soaked in a brine of anxiety so tart, every emotion had the taste of kosher pickles. Just add cloves.
Forget about the whole God business. That's for the living. Some people find meaning in a deity, some join a cult. Some find it in building model trains or collecting stamps. Some take up pottery or the study of insects. Some are gluttons, some are ascetics. Always searching, always floundering – that’s the God business.
Let me recount a story: I stopped at a toll booth once and asked the attendant how she was doing. “I'm doing just fine, thanks, and things will get even better.” “Yeah,” I spat, “fingers crossed.” She gave me an injured look. “Not at all! No need to cross fingers. I have faith in the Lord.” “Well, that'll do, too,” I said, and stepped on the gas. It was rude and I was ashamed for having said it. Devotion to the idea of God and eternal life is not any kind of "it'll do". It's everything. But, like I said, it's for the living. I am dead. Those notions are irrelevant.
Paradoxically, the world prior to my birth is etched in my mind in sharper relief than my own life on earth. The run from, say 1914 till 1945 contains clear sequences, chapters with inner logic. Conversely, my life has no strictly demarcated regions. It's a mishmash of people and events, lovers and leavers, wives, children, moves, point and counterpoint, harmony and dissonance, all jointed, then disjointed, meals, trips, couplings and hopes, jittery dreams followed by gasping awakenings that felt like someone had pulled me out of a river of molasses just as I was about to inhale the first lungful.
Life was divided into four sections: anticipation, disappointment, misery, and boredom. Anticipation is where productive thinking and planning happens. Disappointment is to anticipation what diarrhea is to Mexican food...the logical outcome. Misery is almost everything else: your dog dying, your kid being sick, your parents being killjoy assholes, your wife being a nag whose favorite words are "wrong direction", miserable morons doing forty in the left lane, and a million other cuts life isn't long enough to heal. And where misery fails, boredom triumphs.
Geez, all this morbid talk! Well, what else would you expect from a dead man? If you want romantic poetry, read Lord Byron.
I lived. I loved. I longed. But I never be-longed. I was a stranger in many strange lands and a stranger to myself. All my life was an attempt to set a badly fractured bone but I'm a lousy osteopath. The two sections were never seamlessly rejoined. One piece continued on, pushed forward but was hobbled and incomplete. The other piece pulled back, swamped by lazy nostalgia and reminiscing. Speaking of...may I indulge in a reminiscence? Forgive a dead man. Old habits die hard. Harder than people.
I was in the middle of teaching a class. Twenty pairs of eyes were fixed on me as I tried to explain some twist of English grammar. Out of nowhere, I suddenly sensed a wave of irrepressible horniness seizing my loins in an iron grip. Two avenues of relief presented themselves: I could excuse myself, jog to the bathroom and jerk off into the sink. Not the bowl - never the bowl. Spilling my DNA into a toilet bowl always seemed demeaning, and offensive to the Divine. (Yes, I said “the Divine.” Dead men don’t have to be consistent) Once, when I was 15, aboard a long-distance train, a similar urge had overtaken me. I was seated in a cramped compartment between a lanky student bent over a book and a dirty mountain man who periodically pulled a knife out of his knapsack, sliced off a foul-smelling piece of bacon, chewed it, and put it all back again. I felt my sap rising - at fifteen years of age there's no pushing back the welling tsunami - sprang up, ran to the bathroom at the end of the carriage and I jerked off into the indescribably vile bowl, depositing my seed into all manner of malodorous filth. Since that day I vowed always to find a clean repository for my precious bodily fluids – to use the immortal words of Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper.
There was another avenue of action: “Look, guys,” I said to the class, “I need to step away for about half an hour. Just continue doing your work. We’ll go over it together as soon as I get back” I ran downstairs, got into my car and gunned it, prodded by the fire burning in my testicles. The desire was as keen as a toothache. I reached my girlfriend’s house and honked. She leaned out of the window: “Wow, you’re home early. Come on up!” “No! I’m in the middle of a class. What are you wearing?” “What am I wearing? I don’t know…this blouse and a skirt, no shoes” “OK, take off your panties and run downstairs! Like NOW!” She giggled and in a few seconds, she was seated next to me. I gunned it again, my right hand on her thigh. I drove around the corner and parked the car on a narrow hilly side street. We tilted the driver’s seat back and did the dirty right there, risking embarrassment and arrest. It was reckless, furious, almost angry – but utterly unstoppable.
I was back in the classroom within 30 minutes, droning on about English grammar to my patient and wonderful students. Some of the students may have been suspicious of my speedy exit and breathless return but decorum wasn’t broken. Nothing was said. We continued discussing the present perfect.
PRESENT. What a wonderful word. The present is perfect. A perfect present. My own past was just a hindrance, a series of never-ending speed bumps that I sped over hoping to make headway. But the bumps kept getting bigger and ended up imprisoning me before I could reach the PRESENT. And what of the future? The future is a fata morgana. That shimmering reflection in the desert that your eyes can see but your hands will never touch. The future is that anticipation that drives ambition, only to grind its gears into misery. The future is a cake with cherries and layers of cream, sitting on top of a 100-foot-high shelf. That’s the future – but you have no ladder. Take the gift, baby. Take the PRESENT.
But hey, don’t listen to a word I say. You can’t hear anything anyway since I’m dead. If you could hear, you’d hear me whisper, a hoarse, rough whisper of a man who’s seen it all: love is everything. All the God stuff…the God stuff resides in a love that has a beating heart and a fierce soul. It is well-nigh impossible to find a person to love, though. Most people you’ll run across are morons. Useless. Waste of time. But you might find one, and if you do, you’ll glimpse the Divine through love.
For a godless dead man I seem to mention the Divine somewhat frequently. While we speak of love and the Divine, there is one more thing: dogs. Dogs are what we all should aspire to be – minus the doggie breath. Real, truthful, devoted, always lending an ear, not yammering their own narcissist bullshit.
Enough now. What do I care? I’m a dead man. No longer among the living. A spirit. A dybbuk, maybe. A shadow. A has been. A memory in someone’s brain. Maybe more than just one “someone.” Feh. I don’t care. I am dead.