"There I Go"

                Irving Weinblatt could have gone to Hollywood.

“Now look at him,” my mother pointed to the chaise as Goldie, Mrs. Irving Weinblatt, went into the house to refill her drink.  Irving lay snoring with mouth open, molars showing.

He could have, should have, would have gone to Hollywood.  That’s the story I heard.  But he didn’t.  Now he was only our next door neighbor on Walter Drive.  I took accordian lessons from him on Wednesdays after school.  Heave, ho, went the bellows of the accordian, sucking air as Irving tapped his foot to the notes on the page in hopes that his rhythmic sense was contagious.  At the half hour mark, he’d check his wristwatch with his sad, pouched, basset hound eyes.  It was almost hopeless, this attempt to make me into an accordian player, and we both knew it.

On hot weekends like this one, he’d nap.  His snores found the rhythm that my music lacked.  He was lost in the dream of life in Hollywood.  His toes wiggled to Busby Berkeley’s big productions,  his ears twitched Jimmy Dorsey,  his eye lids rapidly blinked Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy and his mouth puckered Dean Martin.   I sat on a lawn chair next to my mother, waiting for my food to digest before I would be allowed to go swimming.  Who really knew what food was doing, where it went and how long it took to go down all those inside tubes.  I swallowed hard to make it go faster.  My mother’s warning was clear - I would get cramps that would drag me under in the pool if the food wasn’t digested properly.

“You have to strike when the iron is hot,” my mother waved vaguely towards Irving, “or look at what you will become.”  

Irving was wearing a pair of plaid swimming trunks and nothing else.  His stomach heaved with every snore.  I couldn’t see how I could become like him.  He was a man for one thing.

“Let that be a lesson,” my mother said.  “You can be anything you want to be.”  

When girls were pining over Frank Sinatra, when boys were coming home from World War II, Irving wrote a song.  That was the hot iron.  The song was upbeat and caught the mood.  It became a hit.  But not Irving.  Someone stole the lyrics and the music and went to Hollywood before him.

“Don’t let anyone beat you to it,” my mother said.

She sat upright in her lawn chair.  I never saw her relax.  She was always vigilant, always looking to take her enemies on.  I burped and she glanced at me with disapproval.  Clearly, a burping person was not what she wanted me to be.

Returning with her tall plastic tumbler, Goldie sat next to us in a lawn chair under the mimosa tree.  She lit a filtered Parliament and exhaled the first good puff, making that little “o” shape wiht her mouth like a Hollywood starlet.  She picked up the drink and tinkled the already melting ice, sighing.  She stared up at the tree, the pink, shimmering, flowers were tropical like Hawaii or Hollywood, not Long Island.  She looked at the brick wall of her suburban, split level house wondering how she, a girl from Canarsie, could have ended up here in a place that was supposed to be better but was really so much worse.  Even at twelve, I knew that suburbia had a way of declaring you finished.  You could add on to the house ike the Millman’s down the block.  You could build up like the Kornbluth’s when they had their third red-headed child.  You could make the basement a den, enclose the patio, put up the pool every year. You could do all those things but still you were on Walter Drive, the next street being Jane Drive, the street after that Crescent Lane.  Housewives navigated the even grid of suburban streets in cars as big as boats.  Every meadow and field had been razed for new subdivisions that looked like the older ones.  Every tree that didn’t conform had been cut down and new trees planted that subscribed to their placement on the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street.  Only the mimosa was saved, bent at an angle, shaking with the wind and showering us with its pink filaments.

From the lawn chair, I could hear the gang of kids hooting from the big blue plastic pool in the neighbor’s back yard.  My friends were all having fun without me.  Soon the summer would be over and there would be no more swimming.  The circle of dirt that remained after the pool was dismantled would be an ice skating rink in the winter.

“Please, Mom,” I begged, sure that all the food was digested, made into energy.

My mother consulted her wristwatch.

“Ten more minutes,” she pronounced.

“I never bother to do that with Scottie,” Goldie said about her son.

My mother looked at her and at Irving sleeping.  It was clear that she did not consider these people capable of meeting her high standards.  It was a look that suggested that dying of stomach cramps in the pool was the least of Scottie Weinblatt’s problems.

“Pull up your suit,” my mother said.  “You’re showing.”

“You’re a young lady now,” Goldie said without much enthusiasm.

  Goldie’s face was a fortress of blank expressions.  She never seemed to care  about all the imperatives my mother subscribed to and I wondered if I could learn to set my mouth that way. For right now, I crossed my arms and squeezed.  I hated having to wear a girl’s bathing suit.  Boys got to run around with no tops.   Already my mother decided that playing with Scottie was no longer allowed.  It had something to do with how boys and girls at a certain age were supposed to stop playing like kids and start acting like they didn’t like each other even if they did.  Pretty soon,  I wouldn’t be a shortstop at the end of the block where the ball games took place and Scottie wouldn’t be showing me how well he walked in his mother’s high heels.

“Where is your son?”  my mother asked.

Goldie pointed up to the window of his room. A twitch crossed Irving’s face.  Suddenly, the music in his head seemed to hit a bad tune.  His legs jerked and  every loud shriek that came from the kids splashing in the pool seemed to etch its mark across his face.

“All he does is sleep.”  Goldie flicked the long ash of her cigarette in his direction.  “He could get a job on the weekends.  He could play bar mitzvahs.  But does he?”

     Goldie’s long red nails and bright lipstick seemed perfect for Hollywood.  Her blonde hair was faded and washed out now but it clung to the sides of her head like a flapper.  Her terrycloth robe was cinched tightly around her still narrow waist and when she leaned forward, her cleavage in that one piece swim suit made me blush.  Even the bedroom slippers she was still wearing looked glamorous, dangling from her arched foot and swinging madly as her shapely leg waved about. 

“She’s from Carnarsie,”  my mother had explained Goldie’s looks to me.  The borough of Brooklyn could only produce harridans and shrews according to my mother.  Everyone knew that.  Queens, where my mother was from, was the launching pad for better things like Long Island.   When you marry an accountant like my mother had and not a high school music teacher like Irving, you are well on your way to being provided with a comfortable lifestyle.  My mother hoped that I was learning this valuable lesson.  Look at the two houses!  Even though they were the same split level, there was a world of difference there.  My mother already had the inside redone by a decorator while Goldie’s house was threadbare, worn down.  We had aluminum siding and a new patio installed.  We drove a shiny new Chevrolet station wagon.  Even the mimosa was on our property. 

“On such a nice day,  Scottie should be out,” my mother pronounced and nodded emphatically, her laquered hair not moving because of all the hairspray.

Goldie shrugged.  She had given up the stewardship of her family.  What Scottie did locked up in his room, venetian blinds drawn, on a sunny day was beyond her.  What Irving did on rainy days was not something she cared to think about.

On those days when thunder rumbled and lightning lit up the darkening sky, Irving came out of the house and stood in his driveway, face upwards.  When the sprinkling began falling, he would start off down Walter Drive in the same plaid swimming trunks he wore to sleep on the chaise.  When the clouds rubbed together and threatened to pour their excess to the ground, he had already turned the corner onto Crescent Street, whistling his tune. He was alone out there.  Everyone else  was protecting themselves from a case of summer pneumonia by going indoors.  

One day, I decided to follow Irving on my bike.  I sneaked out of the house before my mother could find me and scream that I was going to die from the rain.   I rode slowly behind him watching the water fall off his bare shoulders and slide down his back.  It wasn’t as bad out here as I had been told, it was humid and the rain was warm.  It seemed a nice break from the sun and the glaring heat.  From Crescent, Irving turned onto John Drive and towards the last remaining piece of land that hadn’t been developed yet.  It was called the old farm and maybe some years ago it was but now it just lay rutted and vacant, a place where we played hide and seek and rode our bikes over hills and into ditches.  Irving was going there, his flip flops making a slapping sound as he went along.  

When he got to the entrance which was really just a path where weeds had parted, Irving stopped and turned around.  I was only a few feet behind him.  He looked at me like he had never seen me before.  Rain poured from his hair and tangled onto his arms like snakes.  He looked like no one else in suburbia.  He looked like a madman.   My  soaking tee shirt was sticking to my body and I suddenly became self conscious of my chest.  But Irving wasn’t looking that way.   

“I love the rain,” he said.  His voice was deeper than I remembered.  I shivered.  

“I love the rain,” he echoed himself, seeming now far away.  

“Hollywood,”  I thought.  In your mind you could go anywhere.  It was like when Scottie and I pretended that the aluminum picnic table in the closet was the sides of our spaceship to Mars.  You could go anywhere and be anyone if you pushed.

“The rain is...musical,”  Irving said.  He seemed surprised to have put it in words.  “Maybe if you listen to the rain more, your accordian playing will get better, ” he added.

“Is it like your song?”  

“What song?”

“The one you almost took to Hollywood,” I said and then felt bad about reminding him, as if he could forget.  I was at the age where I felt that my words could destroy someone, that they would take it as hard as I took my mother’s criticisms.  I half expected Irving to fall down dead with a heart attack.

“Who told you I had a song?”  he asked.

“Well, Goldie said....”

“Bubsey told you I had a song?”

“Well, yes she did.”

“And did she sing this song?”

“Well, part of it.”

“And it goes like?”

My mind was a blank.

“Ah ha! A song with no words.  What does the melody sound like?”

Again, my mind was blank.  I was still waiting for Irving to fall to his knees screaming at me or at the world.

“Bubsey lives in a fantasy world is all I can tell you.  A song. Sure. Hollywood.  Right.”  He turned his face up to the sky and the rain became like tears rolling down his cheeks.

I wondered if having a song and losing it was better or worse than never having one to start with.  The possiblity of failure being a chronic condition presented itself to me for the first time.  Irving was always just a high school music teacher with a bare house, an unhappy wife and a son who liked to play dress up.  

“You’re shivering,” he said.  “You better ride that bike home before you get pneumonia.”

I turned the bike around.  Thunder rolled and lightning jagged through the sky.  The rushing cascade of the first line of Irving’s song came back to me.   

“There I go...” I said over my shoulder as I started to ride away, “leading with my heart again...”

My own heart swelled with renewed possibility. Irving stared coldly at me.

And then the second line revealed itself with a corresponding ache,  “And there I go acting not so smart again.”

“Maybe once,” he said, “but not mine anymore.”  He turned and walked into the old abandoned lot and the weeds swallowed him up.