WHACKING OFF
397
you running around, and that's it. Or eating hamburgers out. Or
mayonnaise. Or chopped liver. Or tuna. Not everybody is careful the
way your mother is about spoilage, Alex. You're used to a spotless
house where nothing is in the refrigerator for more than two days,
where whether it is used or not it gets thrown out rather than take
the risk. You don't begin to know what goes on in restaurants. Do
you know why your mother when we go to the chinks will never sit
facing the kitchen? Because I don't want to see what goes on back
there. Alex, you must wash everything, is that clear? Everything. God
only knows who touched it before you did.
Look, am I exaggerating to think it's practically miraculous that
I'm ambulatory? The hysteria, Doctor, and the superstition! The
watch-its, and the be-carefuls! You mustn't do this, you can't do that,
don't don't, you're breaking an important law!
What
law?
Whose
law? They might as well have had plates in their lips and rings
through their noses and painted themselves blue for all the human
sense they made! Oh, and the
milchiks
and the
fleishiks
besides-all
those
mishuggeneh
rules and regulations on top of their own personal
craziness! Doctor, it's a family joke that when I was a tiny boy I
turned from a snowstorm I was watching out the window and hope–
fully asked my mother, "Mamma, do
we
believe in winter?" Doctor,
do you get what I'm saying? I was raised by Hottentots and Zulus!
I could not even contemplate drinking a glass of milk with my salami
sandwich without giving serious offense to God Almighty. Imagine
then, oh just imagine what my conscience gave me for all that jerk–
ing off! Oh, the guilt and the fears--the endlessness of our crises!
Oh, the terror of life bred into my bones! What in their world was
not charged with danger, dripping with germs, fraught with peril?
Doctor, where was the gusto, where was the confidence and the
courage? Who filled these parents of mine with such a fearful sense
of life? My father, in his retirement now, has really only one subject
into which he can sink his teeth, the New Jersey Turnpike. "I
wouldn't go near that thing if they paid me. You have to be out of
your mind to travel on that thing. It's Murder, Incorporated.
It
is a
legalized way for people to go out and get themselves killed." And
on-and on-and on! You know what he says to me three times a
week on the telephone-and I'm only counting when I pick it up,
