Episode - 074 - If You Live That Long

Stop Making Yourself Miserable

In this episode, we continue to look into the text and the subtext of a few portions from my memoir called, “Wilt, Ike and Me.” Again, the text relates to the written words and the subtext relates to the meanings behind them.

In the last episode, we dealt with the subtextual theme of death, when a classic comic book dramatized to me how my hero, Davy Crockett, had died at the Alamo. This unexpected encounter with the certain impermanence of life took me completely by surprise, which made it all the more powerful.

This coming episode also deals with an unexpected encounter with impermanence, but it comes in a different flavor.

* * *

My mother was thinking of adopting a dog, a big Afghan poodle that belonged to an old woman who couldn’t care for it anymore. I was supposed to go take a look at it and see if it was too big for our house.

“Isaac Ruvah will drive you over,” she said. “He knows the old lady pretty well.”

“Isaac Ruvah” was another name for my father’s uncle, Uncle Ike. When you talked to him directly, you always called him “Uncle Ike.” But when you referred to him in the third person, he was Isaac Ruvah. Ruvah was a nickname. There were so many Isaacs, they gave each one a Yiddish modifier, so you could tell who they were talking about. It was like an Italian family that had so many Paulies, they had to give them nicknames like Paulie Walnuts, Paulie Bag o’ Donuts, and so on.

A few days later, Uncle Ike picked me up, and we drove over to the woman’s apartment. He said her name was Cousin Agnes and asked me if I knew who she was. When I told him I didn’t, he wasn’t a bit surprised and explained that she was the widow of one of my father’s cousins, Natey Schaeffer. He asked me if I knew who he was.

“I’m sure you don’t,” he said before I even had a chance to answer. And he was right. I had never heard of him, but that was nothing new. Our extended family was huge and a lot of them didn’t speak English, so to me, they were a big blur.

Uncle Ike didn’t say anything for a few moments as he drove. His salt-and-pepper hair, now far more salt than pepper, shimmered in the flickering sunlight as it poured through the windshield. Then, with a smile of both irony and affection, he started telling me about this unfamiliar relative, and I quickly understood why I had never heard of him before.

Apparently, Cousin Natey was a Jewish gangster, and a fairly significant one at that. As with most American subcultures, the Jews had a dark side, a criminal underbelly. And like the Irish, the Italians, the blacks, the Asians, and so on—they didn’t like to talk about it. To them, it was best kept private. Natey had been dead for quite some, but it was clear that Uncle Ike’s memories of him were still very much alive.

“Yeah, Cousin Natey was really something. There was never anybody like him,” he mused. “He was our cousin, a first cousin to your Bubbe and me, and we were really close.”

He got quiet again, like he was trying to decide how much of the vault he wanted to open. “Listen, this is just between you and me, so don’t talk about it to anybody, but he was with Meyer Lansky.”

He looked at me like he had just revealed a great truth, but I had never heard that name before. As it turned out, Meyer Lansky was the most notorious alleged Jewish mobster in American history, but it meant nothing to me.

Since he sounded important, I figured he might have owned one of the stores on Castor Avenue, the neighborhood’s big shopping strip. It couldn’t have been the toy store because the brothers who owned it, Hershel and Zvi Slansky, were tight with my parents, but there were dozens of others.

“You know who that is, don’t you?” he asked.

“Sure!” I shot back.

“OK, good. So, during prohibition, Natey and his group ran Philly for Lansky,” he said. “Made a fortune.”

“A lot of people in the family were ashamed of him, but not your Bubbe,” he went on. “No sir. She would never let anyone say anything bad about him. She wouldn’t hear of it. And I’ll tell you one thing, you don’t want to get on her bad side.”

As tough as he was, Uncle Ike was my grandmother’s baby brother, the youngest of eight, and I could hear a definite sound of fear in his voice. It was surprising because to me, she was just my sweet grandmother. She was always full of love, and although I could barely understand her, I always felt it. She’d been here over fifty years and still sounded like she just got off the boat. It didn’t matter though. Her hugs and kisses, and the light in her eyes told us everything we needed to know. She was all heart, and Uncle Ike’s comment about her fierce loyalty made perfect sense.

“If somebody had a bar mitzvah or a wedding and they couldn’t afford it, Natey would always cover it,” Uncle Ike continued. “Same thing with a shiva. If somebody in the family died and they didn’t have the money, Natey was right there. Great guy!”

A shiva is a gathering that happens at a mourner’s house, and there’s always a lot of food put out for the visitors. Before then, it hadn’t occurred to me that you had to pay for it. Somehow it seemed to come along with the death.

“Cousin Agnes is really something,” Uncle Ike said as we got to her apartment. When we walked up to the door, he took out his own key.

“She was a flapper, you know? Great dancer. I don’t know how they met, but she was a real looker and Natey fell hard for her.”

He opened the door, bent down, and picked up the mail. “She was a real shiksa [a non-Jewish woman] too. That was another big strike against him with the family. But Natey didn’t give a shit. He was nuts for her. My God, she was pretty, though. Really, really gorgeous.”

We walked down the hall, into a dimly lit bedroom full of stale cigarette smoke. A huge white dog was lying at the foot of a double bed. And an unbelievably old, white-haired lady was lying in it. She looked like a creature in a comedy/ horror film, a kindly old ghoul who had been dead for years but could still smoke cigarettes. There was a bottle on her end table with a half-filled glass of clear liquid next to it. A sort of pungent odor filled the air that I would later come to know as vodka.

Next to the bottle was a black and white picture in an ornate silver frame. Clearly from the Jazz Age, a dapper-looking guy in a sharp tuxedo was standing next to a curvaceous flapper in a short dress. She wore one of those 1920s hats that covered her forehead, framing her face with a perfect blend of pearls and curls. They were obviously at a fashionable party or some fancy joint, having an amazing time, and she had a dazzling smile.

“There’s your Cousin Natey,” Uncle Ike said, pointing to the picture. “And Duvid, take a guess who’s on his arm.” I shrugged. I didn’t know, and I really didn’t care. The whole scene was starting to get to me; I just wanted to get out of there. “That’s right,” he said, smiling at the pale ghost in the bed. “It’s Agnes.”

She lit another cigarette, took a long drag, and blew out an enormous billow of smoke. It didn’t seem possible for that much exhaust to come pouring out of a body that small and frail. She gave me a wide smile. Her white skin crinkled into a thousand pieces, and her mouth revealed a smattering of teeth that were more orange than yellow.

“Boy, was she something,” he mused, with a faraway look in his eyes. He peered into the dense cigarette smoke, like he was looking through a veil, at a vision of the distant past.

“You were one pretty lady, Agnes,” Uncle Ike said to her. “And according to Natey, nobody could do the Charleston like you. He always said there was magic in those hips of yours.” He did some ridiculous Charleston imitation, swiveling his hips around like he was twirling a hula hoop, which really cracked Agnes up. She laughed for a moment, then broke out into a long, hacking cough. She reached over, grabbed a tissue, and spit into it.

That did it. I really had to go. She seemed like a nice enough lady, but I couldn’t handle being there any longer. I had never been around anybody that old before, and I wasn’t prepared for it. I mean, Uncle Ike was up there in years, but next to her, he looked like a teenager. It was all just too much.

After another few minutes, we left. As far as I was concerned, I wasn’t coming back. My mother could handle anything further with the dog. I was done.

Later that night, as I was lying in my bed, I was too agitated to fall asleep. We all know getting old is a fact of life, but this face-to-face encounter had really thrown me. In my mind’s eye, I kept seeing that great old picture of Agnes and Natey. They were at the high point of their lives, young, happy and clearly in love. But the suave and handsome Natey was long since dead. And his vivacious showgirl had turned into the withered, ancient, woman, confined to bed, laying in a shroud of smoke.

“Is this what’s going to happen to me?” I wondered. But I knew the answer before I even finished asking the question. “Of course, this is what’s going to happen to you,’ I replied to myself. “This is exactly what’s going to happen to you. That is if you live that long.”

Images of the young Agnes and the old Agnes kept alternating in my mind, like someone was running a slideshow in there. It was hard to believe they were the same person.

“What else do you think is going to happen? How do you think this whole thing ends?” my inner dialogue continued. “One way or another, you die.” After about an hour of this mental back and forth, I finally drifted off. But I didn’t sleep well that night.

* * *

That’s the end of the text of the story. Now for some of the meaning behind the words.

I was only sixteen at the time and had just gotten my driver’s license. And it seemed like the whole world was opening up to me. I don’t know about you, but getting my license is still one of the most transformative events that has ever happened to me. It changed everything.

So, here I was, this excited and happy adolescent, enthralled by the thrill of this whole new stage of life, suddenly running headlong into the brick wall of truly serious old age. And let me tell you that my description of it didn’t even come close to imparting the true severity of the blow.

As he was telling me about them, Uncle Ike had built up Agnes and Natey’s life together to a lavishly mythic level, which made sense because he was ten years younger than them and they were clearly his idols. I don’t know what I was expecting, but when I finally met her, not only did I meet the oldest person I had ever seen, I also came face to face with the unequivocally transient nature of our life on earth.

And it really got driven home when I saw that picture of them in their heyday, this jazzed-up couple, jazzing it up in the jazz age, and then looked back at this frail, ancient lady, smoking her cigarettes, as her crumpled sheets matched the crevices that made up the atlas of wrinkles that covered the pale skin of her face.

In the picture, they seemed so cool, but now, the faded glory of their bygone era was so ancient, that I might as well have been looking at a picture of the Sphinx in front of the Great Pyramid,

And that night, when I couldn’t fall asleep and the images of the young Agnes and the old Agnes kept alternating in my inner vision, it was clear to me that I too would someday be that old. That is if I lived that long.

I’m sure you get the picture, because this subtext is true for all of us. All of our hopes and dreams, our cares and fears, and our successes and failures are just temporary stops along this road of life, and we all know all too well, that regardless of any circumstances, this road inevitably comes to an end.

But for me and for anyone else who cares to look a little deeper, the outlook isn’t as dark as it may seem, because according to the Wisdom of the Ages, understanding impermanence can mark the doorway out of the prison of self-limitation that leads to the liberating freedom of self-knowledge, along with the inherent joy that comes along with that territory. And even though I may only be just starting to scratch the surface of this whole thing, so far, the view has certainly been worth the climb.

And with that, let’s let this be the end of this episode. As always, keep your eyes, mind and heart opened, and let’s get together in the next one.