Stuff Happens: Or My Life as a Monkey

By Jack Henry Markowitz

Who is Dobbin Feldman and why is he saying those awful things about me? In this fictional yet semi-autobiographical novella the author tries to explore the existential experience of being born Jewish into a particularly strange set of familial circumstances that encapsulates the Boomer generations struggle to make sense of the Helter Skelter world bequeathed to them by their fathers and mothers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 11, 2008
• ISBN: 9781465332813

Jack Henry Markowitz

Jack Henry Markowitz, born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, grew up in a magical time when Coney Island was still thought of as the entertainment capital of the world – a time when the Brooklyn Dodgers still played at Ebbets Field and millions of people came to visit the fabled beaches and boardwalk, Steeplechase Park, Parachute Jump, Cyclone Roller Coaster and Nathan’s Famous. During his undergraduate years at Hamilton College, Markowitz studied creative writing with Wallace Markfi eld (To An Early Grave, Teitlebaum’s Window) and with Alex Haley (Roots, The Autobiography of Malcolm X). Markowitz resides in Philadelphia where he continues to work and write. In this new volume of The Kool-Aid Drinkers & Other Poems the author presents a collection some of his more recent poems.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

I AM BORN

Hello. Dobbin Feldman here. Like my three siblings before me, I happen to have been born in Coney Island Hospital to a fairly non-descript down on their luck and mostly piss poor immigrant Jewish couple by the names of Sarah and Shlomo Feldman. Weighing in at a healthy, but far from exceptional, eight pounds nine ounces, December 27th, in the Year of our Lord 1947, I made my debut (so the legend goes) during one of the worst snow storms to have hit the greater New York metropolitan area in recent memory.

For some odd reason or other that I could never fully grasp, in the inevitable telling and retelling of the boring (to me) details of the particulars of my birth as related innumerable times by various members of my immediate family, the significance of the snow storm was the one fact that would always receive exaggerated emphasis (to my way of thinking). Granted, the storm did drop a record 26.4 inches of snow which was more than the 21 inches that fell during the legendary Blizzard of ’88. And what woman would want to schlep a newborn babe through mounds and mounds of drifting snow? Believe me I can sympathize fully with my unfortunate mother’s plight. But somehow, in the telling and retelling of this birthday urban folk legend, it is always made to sound as if somehow I was the one who should be blamed as the cause for all the bad weather. Sure, granted some 77 people died due to storm related reasons. To hear my family tell it you would think that I was somehow (wait one beat for dramatic effect) implicated.

And since I also happened to be what was then euphemistically referred to as "a change of life" baby, (the implication being that in one way or another everything about me was therefore deemed to be somehow just a little odd and peculiar) I leave it to the reader to judge just how damaging the effects of these carelessly inflicted aspersions and innuendos could have been to my youthful innocence and to my still developing yet ever so fragile psyche. As you can well imagine, these negative assessments of my person and personality did nothing to help improve my self image, to say nothing of my already shaky sense of self-esteem.

CHAPTER TWO

HOME SWEET HOME

Our home sweet home was a third floor walk-up on a dark and dingy street. Home was a very old three bedroom apartment in a run-down Coney Island tenement slum on the corner of W. 36th Street and Neptune Avenue. The story of Coney Island is the story of a tiny spit of land at the foot of Brooklyn that at the turn of the century became the most extravagant playground in the world. In scale, in variety, in sheer inventiveness, Coney Island was unlike anything anyone had ever seen, and sooner or later everyone came to see it. Coney, one man said in 1904, is the most bewilderingly up-to-date place of amusement in the world. Coney Island in its heyday was a lively and absorbing tourist destination, part of an extraordinary amusement empire that once had the power to astonish, delight and shock the nation—the power to take Americans, however reluctantly, from the Victorian age into the modern world.

Hot water was a rarity in our three bedrooms flat and the place was always freezing cold in winter and hot as blazes in summer. I can still remember watching in awe as the ice man, cursing under his breath with every aching step, man-hauled huge dripping blocks of ice on his brawny back up and down the stairs to the various walk up apartments. The residents, too poor to buy the new fangled electrically cooled refrigerators, depended on the blocks of ice to keep their ice-box refrigerators cold. Me and all the other poor kids on the block used to wait for the ice-man to leave before we climbed into the back of his truck to pick up the fallen dirt encrusted chunks of ice so that we could suck and chew on them as if they were the most delectable of lolly pops. No wonder strep throat was such a common ailment among the kids on our block. The ice man would return to his truck and shoe us away with a menacing swing of his grappling hook and a few well chosen swear words that we quickly incorporated into our own quickly growing vocabularies.

We also used to torment all the other delivery men that tried to make the rounds of the neighborhood barking out their wares—Get your fresh vegetables here! Tomatoes! Ten for ten cents! Fish for sale! Fish for sale! All kinds’ fresh fish for sale! The seemingly endless parade of vendors and barkers would include the egg man, the milk man, the fish man, the scissors sharpening man, the coal delivery man, the produce man and most especially the filthy, smelly junk man whose bell-clanging wagon was pulled by an even dirtier and smellier broken down wreck of a horse. These men became familiar fixtures in our daily lives and they all fell prey sooner or later, in one way or another to the gangs of neighborhood kids who were always seeking to find plunder wherever and whenever they could.

The kids on the block usually tried to make a game out of it—like cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians. It was all part of the daily routine of life on the highway of winding streets and alley ways that made up our neighborhood—the only world that we knew. And the streets were always dirty and strewn with litter and bits of broken glass.

And the alley ways between the apartment buildings were not much better. They were always strewn with all kinds of garbage, not to mention the piles of broken odds and ends that the poor always seem to accumulate in large quantities and then discard with equal abandon.

So what was so special about me? Not much really. I was more or less just like all the other millions of snot-nosed, dirty faced kids from the poor immigrant neighborhoods of New York City. We were kids whose families came to America from a hundred different countries, to the Golden Land, to struggle for the basic necessities of life while striving—always striving—to achieve the American Dream. All of us more or less shared the same hopes and dreams to find our fortunes or perhaps just a better way of life than the miserable existences that our families had hopefully left behind in "The Old Country!"

Except for the blinding snow storm that raged outside the hospital, there was nothing special about the day that I was born, no astrological or other propitious signs or omens to indicate the birth of someone special, of someone destined to change the course of world history. Although the snow storm did drop more than twenty inches all over town, it was by no stretch of the imagination nearly as dramatic as, let’s say, the legendary blizzard of 1888 that did in fact paralyze all of New York City and much of the East Coast to boot.

While my birthday snow event did not paralyze the entire city as its infamous predecessor had done, it did manage to cause enough of an inconvenience to seriously piss off every member of my family who had to traipse around in the cold and muck on various errands having to do with bringing a new baby into this glorious world. No wonder my arrival may have been somewhat resented.

And no one was more inconvenienced by my arrival than me own dear old Mum, who, bless her heart, would often introduce me to strangers and family alike as "the tumor" child. Imagine caring around a moniker like that in your tender growing up years!

I guess my mother probably resented me because she didn’t want or need, at her stage of life, another whining, demanding and no doubt sickly child to complicate her already overstressed and severely constrained poverty stricken existence. To say those times were hard does not begin to describe just how dire the family’s situation actually was.

So just imagine my mother’s joy upon learning that she was again pregnant at a time of life when she couldn’t bring herself to believe that such a thing was even biologically or physically possible. When she went to her doctor to find out why her insides had drooped the last thing she expected to hear was that she was with child. She actually thought she had a tumor or some other such ailment, anything other than being pregnant. When her doctor did indeed inform her that she was in fact carrying she cursed him and spat at him and called him a shoemaker.

So much for being overjoyed at the news of my impending birth and since abortion at that time was not a practical option for a woman with my mother’s religious inclinations or even available except in back alleys to any woman in my mother’s particular socio-economic bracket (piss poor) mom dutifully carried her new addition to term and voila—little yellow skinned Dobbin Feldman was born. The yellow skin color was due to the presence of Jaundice which apparently was fairly common among newborns in those days. But the doctors told my mother that the condition wasn’t anything to be overly concerned about and that it would most likely clear up in a few weeks without treatment. Fortunately it did.

Though my mother was not overtly neglectful, it would be something of a stretch to say that she went out of her way to be a loving, doting mother. She was not. She gave what little emotional and physical support she could with the very limited resources that she had at hand. When the cupboard was full there was plenty to go around. And when the cupboard was bare (as it was more often than not) she did her best to make sure we at least had one good meal a day to sustain us until the next government check arrived or until she could prevail upon one of my grown up siblings to help us out from time to time with whatever they could spare from their own tight family budgets.

So that is what I remember most about my growing up years—the second hand toys and hand me down clothes, the daily scrimping along, Mom’s constant struggle to pay the rent and utility bills, her noble uphill fight to put food on the table. Widowed, in poor health and dependent on a pitifully inadequate VA check to keep the family afloat, Mom really did the best she could under the circumstances. As I said, it’s not that Mom was ever willfully absent minded or consciously neglectful of her obligations as a single parent to meet her newest rug rat’s basic needs. She was, however, more than just stressed out. She was in plain fact flat out overwhelmed by her circumstances.

Mom dutifully did the very best that she could do with the very minimum resources that she had and I have to admire her for her effort. I salute her. I take my hat off to her. I give her all the credit in the world for not quitting on life, though I know she did have her knock out drag out bouts with depression. Still, through out her ordeal she somehow managed to function well enough to dig deep into her residual pools of peasant resilience to one way or another find the strength, resilience, courage and sheer grit in the face of adversity to take care of herself and her family against all the odds.

Still, with all that being said, I always had the feeling that I had to compete with the family dog for scraps of food and genuine maternal affection and more often than not the dog was the winner. I don’t resent the dog getting better treatment. After all he was cuter than me and could beg better than I could. But I do not think it’s an exaggeration to say that I was somewhat starved for affection and I always felt grateful whenever someone, anyone, would take the time to notice me and I didn’t care whether the attention came out of kindness or pity. I treasured every small gift that I was given and every small gesture of kindness.

If I ever felt sorry for myself all I had to do was look out the window to see kids who were a lot worse off than me, some who had no parents at all and some who had terrible afflictions such as Polio. My mother often advised me not to look at all the people above me who were living better than I was, but rather to look down and realize how many people were living in a worse situation than we were. I think she was right about that one and her advice still goes for me today. But when I think back on those times I do not often smile. It was not until later in life when I had the opportunity to hear comedian Rodney Dangerfield perform his I never get any respect! routine, that I could see some of his humor in my own childhood situation. Rodney instantly became one of my favorite comics and influences.

So what was unique about being born in 1947? What was the world like that I and my fellow so-called Baby Boomers would inherit? Well, for starters, Harry S. Truman was in the White House and a General by the name of George Marshall was appointed Secretary of State and proposed the Marshall Plan to send economic aid to WWII-ravaged Europe. Journalist Walter Lippmann publicized the use of the phrase Cold War and a country named India proclaimed her independence from England.

The Atomic Bomb Commission reported abnormalities in the children of the survivors of the horrific Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb attacks that ended World War II. Schizophrenia was a disease that was thought to be curable through an experimental procedure called a Frontal Lobotomy and The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began its hearings on alleged Hollywood communists.

Also in 1947, Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act which favored employers over strikers and unions. In 1947, a lawyer earned an average of $7,437 a year and a brand new GE vacuum cleaner cost $27.95 and the flag of the United Nations was flown for the first time. Almond Joy, Redi Whip and Ajax were some of the hot new products to make their public debuts. Radio promoted a new show called You Bet Your Life with host Groucho Marx and that new fangled invention called Television premiered The Jack Paar Show, and Meet the Press as well as a folksy children’s’ program called Howdy Doody that featured a freckled string puppet, a show host named Buffalo Bob and a seltzer bottle squirting clown named Clarabell.

On TV during that same year, baseball’s World Series and Congressional hearings received television coverage for the first time. Box-office stars included: Bing Crosby, Betty Grable, Humphrey Bogart, and Ingrid Bergman. The Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy, opened on Broadway. Top musical performers included Benny Goodman, Nat King Cole, and Frank Sinatra. Popular songs on the radio were Almost like Being in Love, Woody Woodpecker, and I’ll Dance at Your Wedding.

Best-selling books included: The Diary of Anne Frank, East Side West Side, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism. Jackie Robinson, the first African-American major league baseball player, won the Rookie of the Year Award playing second base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Sugar Ray Robinson won the welterweight title in boxing.

As I was to learn later, my birth in 1947was just one small addition (a tiny seismic speck of a statistic) to the most historic demographic tidal wave ever to hit the good ol’ US A—the so-called Baby Boom generation. And a humbling experience it is to have been just one scrawny specimen in a generation of millions of newly minted rug rats who were spawned by the millions of triumphant, war-weary and horny GIs returning home from WWII. Except in my case the natural order of things was somewhat skewered.

In my somewhat skewered situation my dad was indeed a bonafide war veteran and hero, except that his war was WWI which was fought between the years of 1914 and 1919. So how did I become part of the Baby Boom of 1947? How’d that happen? Well,