Read Online Stuffed by Patricia Volk - Free Book Online
Authors: Patricia Volk
Tags: Fiction
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cremated. My sister is devastated.
The
Guide to Jewish Religious Practice
says the Jewish way of burial is “to place the body in the earth.” Aboveground burial and cremation are
Nivul Hamet,
“a disgrace to the dead.” Some
Nivul Hamets
are arguable. It’s
Nivul Hamet
to donate an organ. But it’s a
mitzvah
to save a life. Mom and Dad couldn’t care less about
Nivul
Hamet.
They’re agnostics.
Dad tries to sell the slots back to the slot owner, but he refuses to refund the money. “Fine,” Dad tells him. “I’ll sell them myself.”
“You can’t,” the slot man says. Slot prices are up. The slot man won’t be undersold.
Dad writes his congressman. He cc:’s the Attorney General, the local papers, the Better Business Bureau, the Consumer Protection Agency. Dad is energized. He’s in full battle mode. He’s six feet one and a half of megawatt power. He’s right, and he knows it. He owns the slots, hence the slots are his to sell. Dad’s latest plan is picketing the slot wall wearing a sandwich board explaining how the slot place violates free trade.
After two months the slot man crumbles. Dad sells the slots for less than the going rate. A couple who wants to go in headfirst gets a bargain. Dad carries a laminated card in his wallet that says who to call to cremate him. He signs up for organ donation and flattens a green bumper sticker onto his car: RECYCLE YOURSELF. BE AN EYE, ORGAN & TISSUE DONOR. He earmarks his new titanium hip for a medical school so they can study the effects of wear. He wants his de-cataracted eyes to go to Columbia’s Eye Institute.
Dad tells me his slot victory over the phone. He won’t come to New York anymore. He’s turned on his birthplace. The last time Dad came up, we spent over an hour in the Museum of Natural History looking for Admiral Peary’s sled. In 1909 Admiral Robert Edwin Peary
claimed
he discovered the North Pole. (There’s proof that he doctored his journals and so did the explorer Dr. Frederick A. Cook, which means the first man to set foot on the North Pole was someone named Joseph Fletcher, who landed there in an air force C-47 in 1952, but why would I get into that?) Dad used to visit Admiral Peary’s sled on Saturday between radiation appointments for acne and the burlesque. I thought I’d known every lonely fact of my father’s childhood. I am sad-struck anew thinking about Dad’s solitary Saturdays, a twelve-year-old boy with pubescent pimples taking the subway alone to a skin doctor, then going to the burlesque, where for fifty cents he could sit in the balcony and watch the
Earl Carroll Vanities
with “75 of the Most Beautiful Girls in the World.”
“I learned to live by myself, for myself,” Dad says. “I had no expectations.”
We pass the Indian war canoe three times. We scour the basement. All we can find is Roald Amundson’s sled, the one he used crossing the Arctic via the North Pole. That and some threadbare gear from the Antarctic explorer Lincoln Ellsworth. No one can tell us anything about Admiral Peary’s sled. None of the guards or information people has
heard
of Admiral Peary. That does it. Standing outside at the top of the stairs behind J. E. Fraser’s statue of Teddy Roosevelt and his guides, staring into the marvelous scrotum of Roosevelt’s horse, Dad takes one last look around. “That’s it for me,” he says. “I’ve had it with New York.”
The fact that Dad won’t fly up anymore doesn’t stop him from mailing envelopes stuffed with articles:
MUSIC BOOSTS INTELLIGENCE
LAPTOP PROTECTION
TEST YOUR FINANCIAL FITNESS
And just today, MICHELLE PFEIFFER: FORMER OUTCAST. Sometimes he sends them with a little note: “Thought this would be of service—Dad.”
SLIDE WOODEN DRAWERS MORE EASILY
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT CAFFEINE
BE A WINNER
Four times a year now, Mom comes alone.
“I have a new way of looking at your apartment,” she tells me after her latest visit. I’m driving her to La Guardia
The
Guide to Jewish Religious Practice
says the Jewish way of burial is “to place the body in the earth.” Aboveground burial and cremation are
Nivul Hamet,
“a disgrace to the dead.” Some
Nivul Hamets
are arguable. It’s
Nivul Hamet
to donate an organ. But it’s a
mitzvah
to save a life. Mom and Dad couldn’t care less about
Nivul
Hamet.
They’re agnostics.
Dad tries to sell the slots back to the slot owner, but he refuses to refund the money. “Fine,” Dad tells him. “I’ll sell them myself.”
“You can’t,” the slot man says. Slot prices are up. The slot man won’t be undersold.
Dad writes his congressman. He cc:’s the Attorney General, the local papers, the Better Business Bureau, the Consumer Protection Agency. Dad is energized. He’s in full battle mode. He’s six feet one and a half of megawatt power. He’s right, and he knows it. He owns the slots, hence the slots are his to sell. Dad’s latest plan is picketing the slot wall wearing a sandwich board explaining how the slot place violates free trade.
After two months the slot man crumbles. Dad sells the slots for less than the going rate. A couple who wants to go in headfirst gets a bargain. Dad carries a laminated card in his wallet that says who to call to cremate him. He signs up for organ donation and flattens a green bumper sticker onto his car: RECYCLE YOURSELF. BE AN EYE, ORGAN & TISSUE DONOR. He earmarks his new titanium hip for a medical school so they can study the effects of wear. He wants his de-cataracted eyes to go to Columbia’s Eye Institute.
Dad tells me his slot victory over the phone. He won’t come to New York anymore. He’s turned on his birthplace. The last time Dad came up, we spent over an hour in the Museum of Natural History looking for Admiral Peary’s sled. In 1909 Admiral Robert Edwin Peary
claimed
he discovered the North Pole. (There’s proof that he doctored his journals and so did the explorer Dr. Frederick A. Cook, which means the first man to set foot on the North Pole was someone named Joseph Fletcher, who landed there in an air force C-47 in 1952, but why would I get into that?) Dad used to visit Admiral Peary’s sled on Saturday between radiation appointments for acne and the burlesque. I thought I’d known every lonely fact of my father’s childhood. I am sad-struck anew thinking about Dad’s solitary Saturdays, a twelve-year-old boy with pubescent pimples taking the subway alone to a skin doctor, then going to the burlesque, where for fifty cents he could sit in the balcony and watch the
Earl Carroll Vanities
with “75 of the Most Beautiful Girls in the World.”
“I learned to live by myself, for myself,” Dad says. “I had no expectations.”
We pass the Indian war canoe three times. We scour the basement. All we can find is Roald Amundson’s sled, the one he used crossing the Arctic via the North Pole. That and some threadbare gear from the Antarctic explorer Lincoln Ellsworth. No one can tell us anything about Admiral Peary’s sled. None of the guards or information people has
heard
of Admiral Peary. That does it. Standing outside at the top of the stairs behind J. E. Fraser’s statue of Teddy Roosevelt and his guides, staring into the marvelous scrotum of Roosevelt’s horse, Dad takes one last look around. “That’s it for me,” he says. “I’ve had it with New York.”
The fact that Dad won’t fly up anymore doesn’t stop him from mailing envelopes stuffed with articles:
MUSIC BOOSTS INTELLIGENCE
LAPTOP PROTECTION
TEST YOUR FINANCIAL FITNESS
And just today, MICHELLE PFEIFFER: FORMER OUTCAST. Sometimes he sends them with a little note: “Thought this would be of service—Dad.”
SLIDE WOODEN DRAWERS MORE EASILY
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT CAFFEINE
BE A WINNER
Four times a year now, Mom comes alone.
“I have a new way of looking at your apartment,” she tells me after her latest visit. I’m driving her to La Guardia
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