Kalooki Nights (5 page)

‘Get him to talk about what exactly?’ I asked over lunch in a rabbit-hutch restaurant in Soho, somewhere you could only get to via Berwick Street market, halfway down a passage which even a dog wouldn’t piss in, elbowed between a tattooist’s and a novelty shop for perverts.

My hosts were Lipsync Productions UK, otherwise the sisters Francine and Marina Bryson-Smith. Not my world, film and television. The moving picture left me cold, whatever its size. Too naturalistic. Never funny or despairing enough. Never both at the same time, anyway, which is how I like it. But for all my indifference to the medium I always seemed to know who was powering it. ‘Don’t watch, then,’ is what they tell you when you complain of television. But it’s not the watching that’s the problem – it’s the being made aware of those of whom, all things considered, you would rather not have heard. Francine and Marina Bryson-Smith, for example. Somehow or other, though I did no light reading, I knew of them as media socialites and, for all that I couldn’t have told you the name of anything they’d made, had
even heard of Lipsync Productions. A witty and rather sexy name for a production company, I thought, despite myself. Beyond the technical reference, I heard something lippy in it – an ironic, syncopated allusion, perhaps, to Francine Bryson-Smith’s onetime reputation (vehemently denied) as a society lipstick lesbian, and maybe a pun on sink, as in Kitchensync – an assertion, however you read it, of the glamorously contrary. Hence, I assumed, the location of the hellhole restaurant.

That I would therefore be expected to begin our meeting on a sexual note I never doubted. ‘Don’t you think it’s funny,’ I’d remarked, even as we were shaking hands, ‘that all you can ever buy in “adult” shops are toys?’

They didn’t, as it happened. In retrospect I see I could have put it better, or at least not made it sound as though buying toys in adult shops was all I ever did. But they smiled at me politely enough, or rather Marina smiled. What Francine did was glimmer. She was what I remember my father calling a fascinator. ‘It’s just short-sightedness,’ my mother used to tell him, reducing her own vision to show him. In Francine Bryson-Smith’s case, however, it didn’t look like an impairment; it looked more like wariness posing as intense curiosity.
Who are you,
Maxie Glickman?
she seemed to be asking me.
Who is the
real
Maxie Glickman? What, if I am not careful, is he going to do to me?
And when a beautiful woman in the flower of her middle age asks you those questions through a short-sighted, green-eyed mist, you have to be an exceptional man not to feel intense curiosity in return. She had three university degrees, I believed I’d read somewhere. Not the nugatory stuff, not media studies or journalism, but Middle English, philosophy, history, possibly even divinity – real subjects. Yet before that, aged eighteen, she had won a beauty contest. Miss Whitstable, or Miss Herne Bay. Somewhere there. Because she wore her hair long and blonded, in glamour-girl flounces, and didn’t skimp with the lipstick, you could still see the beauty queen in her. Miss East Grinstead, DPhil. She was hard to say no to if you like your women vexed.

Marina hadn’t made so good a job of keeping her figure, or her face. She had grey bags under her eyes, somewhat desperately flecked with silver glitter, and wore make-up more to hide than adorn. She did the shmoozing and the PR, filling me in on what else Lipsync was up to at the moment – a docudrama, still in development, about Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli who blew the whistle on Israel’s nuclear arsenal; a costume extravaganza, also still in development, about the philosopher Spinoza; and one or two other things in pre-development, but all at the serious end of the market, as I could see, programmes you made for love not money. She did the snuggling up to me, too, calling me darling and telling me how excited they were, etc, before recognising people at other tables who excited her more, and eventually, with a squeeze of my upper arm, leaving me to Francine, who all the time surveyed me, even when she wasn’t looking in my direction, through sensors situated snake-like in the sides of her head.

‘Get him to talk about himself. How he feels about what he did. What his life has been like since then, etc . . .’ was how she countered my initial wariness.

‘We were never all that close, you know,’ I warned her.

‘But you did know him, that’s the thing. You were neighbours. You played together. Am I right in thinking you went to the same school?’

‘Yes, but only briefly. He went his way, I went mine.’

‘I understand that. Your paths diverged. But they diverged from the same starting place. You grew up together. You shared interests and beliefs.’

‘Not exactly. In many ways our upbringings were diametrically opposed.’

She subjected me to her unnerving peer. Who
are
you, Maxie Glickman? Why are you making these distinctions? To trap me? ‘That I understand,’ she said, ‘but you knew that world.’

That world.

So there it was. They wanted me to Jew it up for them, put some Yiddler angst and colour on the page for Christopher Christmas to draw around when he was next free. A writer whose own knowledge of Jews, needless to say, extended not a bowshot beyond Anne Frank’s diary.

Uncanny, but she seemed to know what I was thinking. Who
are
you, Francine Bryson-Smith? ‘Chris might or not stay with this, ’ she said. ‘He ’s very busy. And he might not be the person for it anyway. There are no egos here. We can discuss all that as we get further in.’ Meaning: play your cards right and the job, the whole project, could end up being yours, Max. One of the unspoken advantages of which, I took it, was any number of lunches being peered at by Francine Bryson-Smith.

We shook on it. I only knew Manny a bit, and couldn’t swear that he ’d admit to knowing me. But I’d give it a go. Here’s to Lipsync.

And here’s to you, Max.

Here’s to Manny, no one thought of saying.

Before I left, Francine did a strange thing. She came to my side of the table, stood behind me, produced a camera from her bag, and got the waiter to take our picture.

4

But I had done a strange thing too. I had lied about how well I knew Manny. Though he had changed his name to Stroganoff and was almost certainly an entirely different person from the one I had known, and known well, I had disowned him again before people I didn’t know at all.

Why did I do that?

Where was the necessity for it,
now
?

And why, if I’d convinced myself we hadn’t been close friends, was I so troubled to hear of him again, and so rattled – no, not rattled, so
pierced
– to learn he ’d changed his name to Stroganoff?

Why, why, why?

Some things you think are dead and buried, as the shitty shtetls of Mother Russia were meant to be for my father. Stroganoff was the absurd nom de plume, or in my case
nom de caricaturiste
, which Manny and I came up with after we’d grown out of playing concentration camps. The Brothers Stroganoff we thought we’d call ourselves, under which pseudonym we were going to publish works that would change the world.
Five Thousand Years of Bitterness
was our first, a comic-book history of the sufferings of the Jewish people over the last five millennia. We had argued over the title. Manny believed it should be
Two Thousand Years of Bitterness
, the sufferings of our people dating from the destruction of the second Temple in 70
CE
. As an Orthodox Jew he didn’t, of course, acknowledge the Christian calendar. Even 70
CE
was a concession to me. Between themselves, Orthodox Jews put the date of the destruction of the Second Temple as 3829. My own view was that our afflictions began from the minute we showed we couldn’t be natural in nature. We did a Jewish thing, we ate of the tree of knowledge, and didn’t know a day’s happiness thereafter.
Five
Thousand Years of Bitterness
was already concession enough to creationists –
Five Thousand Million Years of Bitterness
more like – but if we believed that God made the world only five thousand years ago, then that was how long we’d been bitter. And I got my way. I was the one with the coloured pencils.

Manny provided the research and what you might call the background information, I did the comic illustrations. If drawing is what you turn to when the words won’t come, then drawing of the comico-savage sort is what you turn to when the first word that does come is the J-word. That or shmaltz, but shmaltz was not an option in our house. Any chicken-fat sentimentality attaching to our Novoropissik origins had long been burnt off by the white fires of my father’s secularity. We were a team, Manny and I, anyway. The better, we both thought, for our ill-assortedness. And in no time we had produced fifty pages. We got as far as paying to have them cyclostyled and showing them to our parents. But in their view they weren’t going to change the world. Not for the better, anyway.

‘Get yourself another subject,’ my father told me.

‘Like what?’

‘Boxing.’

Boxing was his subject. He’d been a champion boxer himself before I was born. Jack ‘The Jew’ Glickman. Not a soubriquet he chose for himself. Jack ‘Drop the Jew’ Glickman would have suited him the better, but his opponents knew the J-word riled him into lowering his guard. Only amateur, though by all accounts he could have made it big as a professional had it not been for a predisposition to nosebleeds. Epistaxis as I now know it’s called. My father’s nasal membranes dried quicker than other people ’s. As do mine. Quick to dry, quick to rupture. Though in my case it doesn’t matter quite so much. I don’t have to go twelve rounds with anybody, unless you count Zoë and Chloë and the rest. And in those circumstances a nosebleed can be a blessing in disguise. There’s always the faint chance it will upset them and cause them to repent. But it never upset or planted the idea of repentance in any of my father’s opponents. Once the secret of his weakness was out, they went straight for the nose, and it was all over. ‘It’s just blood,’ he used to complain to the referee standing in front of him with his arms flailing, counting him out although he hadn’t so much as touched the canvas, ‘you’ve seen blood before, haven’t you?’ Indeed he had. Just never as much as spilled from my father’s nose.

As it happened, this debility was a blessing in disguise for him. It meant that he was never sent to fight the Nazis on their territory. No point having a soldier who would bleed all over the regiment before a single shot was fired. So they kept him in a barracks in South Wales for the duration of the war, and let him run the gym.

Though he was no longer boxing himself by the time I was old enough to know anything about it, he retained his passionate devotion to the sport. He organised the boxing club at the local lads’ brigade, acted as a sort of personal trainer before there was such a thing to boys with pugilistic promise, kept his gloves in my mother’s display cabinet along with his cups, subscribed to every conceivable boxing magazine, drove up to Belle Vue every Friday night to see a bout, and could recite the past and present holders of every title at every weight. British Jewish boxers like Jackie ‘Kid’ Berg, otherwise known as ‘The Whitechapel Whirlwind’, and Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis, born Gershon Mendeloff, and Jack Bloomfield, he revered, and hung pictures of them above the stairs – one per step – where otherwise my mother would have hung photographs of Shani as a bridesmaid, or portraits of great kalooki players of the past, if such exist. But it was the American Jewish boxers who really fired my father up. I have never known why. Maybe they were more brutal in their despatch of opponents, or maybe it was just his idealising of America, American Jews having made their escape from humility and trepidation more finally than my father believed we had, or ever would. Barney Ross, for example, he admired as much for his rejection of his origins as for becoming lightweight champion of the world. Born Barnet Rasofsky, he had planned to be a rabbi like his father until thieves broke into the family grocery store and shot his father dead. Vowing revenge – a phrase my father relished – Barnet Rasofsky renounced the faith, changed his name, became a numbers runner and street-fighter, and eventually took up boxing. My father’s idea of making good. But even more of a favourite was Benny Leonard, originally Benjamin Leiner, the greatest lightweight, he assured me, who ever lived. Myself, I think the real reason he admired Benny Leonard was that he too had been a bit of a nosebleeder, actually losing his first fight that way, after being stopped in the third round by the sort of squeamish referee who ruined my father’s career. Thereafter he
developed a defence so impregnable that between 1912 and 1932 he shed not a single drop of blood, losing only one bout, and that by disqualification.

‘Think of that,’ I remember my father saying. ‘Twenty years without being beaten, twice the time you’ve been alive.’

Impressive, I agreed, but not so impressive that I wanted to do the same. Already my fingers were too important to me to risk them boxing. Break your fingers in the ring and where does that leave you as an artist? And I was a particularly fingery artist, a maker of fine satiric lines which sometimes worried me, so like needlecraft were they, so like little daggers of derision and selfhurt.

The only boxer in my father’s pantheon to capture my imagination was Maxie ‘Slapsie’ Rosenbloom, partly because he was what was known as a hit-and-run fighter, that’s to say he no sooner landed a punch than he back-pedalled round the ring so that he couldn’t be punched back (a tactic I could see the point of ); partly because he wasn’t much of a puncher anyway and resorted in the end to slapping his opponents (hence his nickname); but chiefly because I was named after him. Whether I have my mother to thank for it, I don’t know, but to this day I count myself lucky that I didn’t end up being called Slapsie.

In fact no one would have been more surprised than my father had I developed an active interest in boxing. Or, I suspect, more dismayed. He would not have wanted to see me knocked around. There was a sense in which he felt he ’d done that for the pair of us. In so far as the Jewish boxers whose pictures lined our stairs were intended as an example to me, they did not go beyond showing what we could do when we tried, that’s to say when we gave up believing that we drank physical cowardice in with our mothers’ milk. They were the obverse of those streets of medieval Jewishry through which, holding on tightly to my hand, he made a point of escorting me. They proved that we could live in the world without fear, go toe to toe with it, embrace what the daylight showed us in strong clear outlines instead of shrinking into the shadows, praying to what was unseen and unseeable. Fists were of the essence. He made fists of his own hands while he told me this – ‘Grab at life, Maxie! Grab what you can see!’ That lesson punched into me, he was happy for me to go to school and become a solicitor. Anything so long as I stayed away from Judaism, which he considered, somewhat illogically, to be a curse on the Jews. Farshimelt was one of his favourite words for the Orthodox. Farshimelt, meaning mouldy, mildewed. The consequence of being hidden from the air and light. What happened to you – to your skin and to your mind – when you refused the visible world.