The Unexpected Salami: A Novel (15 page)

When they got to
the family apartment, the afternoon of Janet’s and my conversation on Sy Cooper, there was no one there because I was over at my brother’s loft. Mom left a note on the kitchen table that I was not to hook up with the band and what I should and shouldn’t do in an emergency. Then, because Frank’s phone was busy (it was accidentally off the hook), they concluded he was home. They got a cab to the loft and rang the buzzer.

I ran down the five flights of stairs in a state of shock. I had counted on withdrawal surprises. In my head they fused with the plagues God foisted upon the Egyptians: need for the Man, frogs, shakes, vermin, vomit, loss of bowels, slaying of the first born. But my parents! I argued with my mother in front of Bowery Bulbs, the store on the first floor of Frank’s building.

“We’ve come from the airport to check on you,” Mom said. “We haven’t physically seen you for two years, and you act like we’re an imposition. What is going on, Rachel? I smell a rat. You two are ‘hanging out’ a hell of a lot. I heard on the radio that
the Tall Poppies are hitting town—Frank’s not housing the band, is he?”

“I heard that, too, but no, I haven’t told anyone. And I wasn’t planning on seeing them.”

“I want you to swear to me that you won’t see them.”

“I won’t see them for me, not for you.”

She stared me down like she didn’t buy this. “As long as you stay away. Let’s go upstairs and talk about this more. Can you help us with the suitcases?”

“This is not my place. Frank should be the one inviting you over.”

Dad was losing his patience. “You’re not making sense! This is farcical. We’re your parents. Why can’t we go upstairs?”

“Frank isn’t around,” I said. “I’m thrilled to see you. You guys look so tanned! Why don’t we go to the Vietnamese place across the street?—they have great French coffee—”

“I’m having trouble with my bladder,” Mom insisted. “I’ll have to make number one on the street if you don’t let me upstairs.”

“You can pee in the Vietnamese place.”

Dad rolled his eyes. “Rachel, stop this piffling—we’re going up.” He pushed past me.

“Sh’ma Yisroel, Adenoi Elohanu Adenoi Echad,” I whispered to myself. “Hail Mary, full of grace,” I added, hedging my bets.

Frank was a half-hour late. Just me and my folks, and oh yeah, Stuart, the corkscrew of pain on the bare mattress. The coverless addict had glazed eyes and a full erection. Since bumping into Stuart at Eisenberg’s, I’d seen his penis a bit too frequently.

“And who’s that?” Mom breathed heavily, after a quick now-I’ve-seen-it-all turnaround.

“A friend of Frank’s. He’s asleep really. I think this is related to sleepwalking.”

“You’re watching a naked friend of Frank’s?”

“Is Frank homosexual?” Dad said, trying to mask his alarm. “Is that what this is about? I mean it would be okay, but is Frank going to—how do you say that Sylvia—come outward? Is that why he broke up with Ingrid? Jesus Christ, Sylvia—I wasn’t prepared for this now—”

“Come out,” I said with enunciated disgust. “No he’s not a h-oh-moh-sexual, Dad. You’re such fucking worrywarts! You always expand everything. Frank and I were planning a thirtieth anniversary party, if you want to know the truth, with Aunt Virginia. Frank’s always had people he’s met traveling crashing over. This one’s from England, I think—Frank’s been sleeping on the floor. And I’m here for a few minutes, leaving Frank stamps—we were going to surprise you. But Mom, you’re too fucking nosy, huh?”

I did a great job browbeating them—an Academy Award performance. Except for one unforeseen problem: Stuart proceeded to vomit the grains of oatmeal remaining in his stomach a couple of feet from my mother’s smallest suitcase.

“Oh, my,” Mom said, checking her skirt for vomit.

My father had already inched forward to survey the creature more closely.

“Joe, step back,” Mom called. None of us had seen that Stuart was clenching the wooden spiral bedpost Frank had chained him to in our earlier bout of optimism. The carved gargoyle posts were
a wedding gift he’d taken from Minnesota after his divorce; his prize because the carver was his friend before Ingrid’s. My father tried to take the post from his hand, but Stuart hurled it at him before Dad could get to it.

“Stuart, no!” I cried out. “Oh, God, that’s my fucking father!”

Fortunately Stuart’s aim was impaired. He hit the sheet instead of Dad’s head.

“Dad!” I called out. “Oh, Christ, you okay? Frank said he super-glued that!”

“Frank—Den—Rachel—I need—I need—”

“I told you we should have spanked them as kids,” Dad said, having picked up the loose post.

“Now tell the
fucking
truth,” Mom said, mimicking our cinematically stylized sewer accents.

“You have to get
that boy into the hospital,” Mom decided, after a quick rehashing of the Eisenberg Tuna Salad Saga.

“Mom! Don’t make this your problem. He doesn’t exist. He doesn’t have insurance. This isn’t your problem.”

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for lying to us?” Dad asked. “You kids are going to kill him with your crazy plans.”

I could hear Frank walking up the stairs. He’d bumped into Janet returning after her nap. We could hear them in the stairwell. “He slipped back,” Janet said in her trademark clipped tone, “but he’s not as bad as the first night—”

“Oh, God,” Frank said, when he stepped through the open door.

“Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Ganelli,” Janet said. Her cheeks turned a salmon pink. “I guess I’ll leave the family alone.”

My mother eye-balled her son. “No, Janet—I think you should stay. You should hear what I have to say to my children. We came home to check on Rachel. We heard on the radio that a certain band was in America, and we decided to take a ride over before our plane leaves for France—to insure that Rachel wouldn’t do anything misguided. Turns out we were too late, wouldn’t you say?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Frank said. “What band’s in town?” A pathetic attempt at a deflection, considering Stuart was naked and moaning five feet away.

“Fools!” Dad hissed. My father has a streamlined head. With his pointy nostrils and angular chin, it looked like his reproach was headed to a vanishing point a foot away from his cleft.

Frank gave me a look much easier to decipher than his old walkie-talkie Morse code messages from our bathroom.
Your band is here? What have you kept from me, you idiot? How did you fuck this up?

Mom’s voice softened a notch to the same tone she uses whenever there’s a death. (She’s the stoic one who orders the deli platter for the Jewish side’s shivahs or lasagna for the Italian wakes.) “Your cousin Benji is a doctor. Joe, can you get the address book out of that suitcase?—in the front zip pocket—”

“Benji’s a hand surgeon,” Frank said.

“He’s family, and not only that, there’s something in this world called a Hippocratic Oath.”

Stuart looked like a zombie rescued minutes earlier from a cult; he had no idea what the commotion was about. He’d seemed clear-eyed eight hours before, devouring morsels of our childhood.
Why was he back to stage one? I couldn’t figure it out. Janet went over to him. My father’s and my eyes followed her. “Stuart, don’t worry, it’s Rachel’s parents.”

“They’re liars! Mum and Pop are dead. Liars. They’re going to kill me!”

My father went over to the bed. Two years had passed since I’d hugged Dad good-bye, but he still had a thick head of hair, though his salt-and-pepper strands were now the distinguished silver of a coffee-machine pitchman’s hair. I tended to picture him in his preretirement suit and tie, yet he was wearing comfy airplane clothes—jeans and the
I Slept Through Haley’s Comet
sweatshirt I’d bought him during one of my science conferences.

“I’m Joseph Ganelli, Rachel and Frank’s father. That woman is Sylvia, my wife. We are going to get you real help. We are not going to tell the police who you are.”

“This is unreal,” I whined to Frank. “You said we were over the hump.”

“I was helping you out. Don’t pin this on me.”

No, Frank, I’m the ogre trying to save a desperate man’s life. I pleaded with my father to leave Stuart alone, and he crossed past the sheet to a chair near the window, while my mother dialed the hospital.

“Tell him his Aunt Sylvia needs him. He’ll pick up the phone if you tell him that—Benji? Hi, honey—no, your Mom is fine—no I need to talk to you. Rachel and Frank need emergency medical attention for a friend and I don’t know where else to turn—”

I couldn’t listen. Sylvia Levine Ganelli had been in PR before she retired. Even Will, who was in the same profession and a polished
speaker, thought my mother unstoppable. She once charmed President Carter into attending a tribute dinner for a client.

“I’ve booked him in,” she said about fifteen minutes later. I pulled my fingers back in fear, hard enough that I almost broke my pinky.

My father addressed us from the window, Moses admonishing the wayward children of Israel: “Your heart was in the right place, but you were misguided. You should have consulted us. We’re your parents. We operate out of love. You act like we’re coming from someplace else.”

When will they stop treating us like infants? Frank offered my Dad water in a struggling artist’s spaghetti-sauce-jar glass.

“Benjamin Levine, you’re a true mensch,” I heard Mom say before she hung up the phone. Then she turned to us. Her naughty children.

“A special fund for young Jewish drug and alcohol addicts without coverage was set up at Beth Israel by a record executive who recovered from a cocaine addiction. Benji plays racquetball with the head of the program. Dr. Mentoff is a very compassionate man. Benji told him it’s a dire emergency. He’s sending over an ambulance.”

“But, Mrs. Ganelli,” Janet said, “I don’t think Stuart is Jewish.”

“He is now, darling. Stuart Lipschitz, of the Melbourne Lipschitzes.”

“Isn’t that Lipschitzi?” Frank cracked. No one smiled.

“Joe,” Mom said, “call Air France and cancel those reservations.”

“So you’re not going to France?” I said, half slumped against
the wall. She didn’t hear me. Mom was busy rousing Stuart like he had a 103-degree fever and it was imperative that he take another dosage of St. Joseph’s chewable cherry aspirin for children.

“Mom’s a professional,” Frank said. I nodded.

“You don’t play God, kids,” Dad said, with the final pulse on the situation.

Mom and I rode
with Stuart in the ambulance to Beth Israel’s Morris Bernstein Pavilion. The back reeked of Stuart’s diarrhea. Frank, Janet, and Dad took a cab. After Stuart was taken away in a wheelchair, I spoke for forty-five minutes with Dr. Mentoff, Benji’s racquetball partner.

“He lapsed on you because he never really got over the hump—it takes a full seventy-two hours for that stage to pass. To have him functioning and cognitive when you did is most unusual.”

“What are you going to do with him?”

“I know of one doctor who would take his rock-star patients to Jamaica, knock them out with sleeping pills, keep them snoring over the hump, and then apply acupressure massage.”

“That’s what you’re going to do?”

“No, that’s what
that
doctor did. I gave him an injection of clonadine—a cotapressin that regulates blood pressure. I’ll taper him off for four or five days and keep him in detox for a few days more. For that period of time clonadine’s not addictive.”

Give him more drugs? This seemed ridiculous, but he’s the doctor.

“Miss Ganelli, may I ask you a few more questions?”

“Yes?”

“Who’s the patient’s nearest kin?” Mentoff’s lips extended forward too much—from my angle his mouth looked like a beak.

“He’s an orphan.”

“How much heroin was Mr. Lipschitz using?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you his sexual partner?”

“God no.”

“When is the last known time he used heroin?”

Clinton Street. “I don’t know. Not for four days at least. He was chained to the bedpost—”

“Chained?”

“A figure of speech.”

“Did he snort it, smoke it, inject it?”

“As far as I know, he shoots it up—”

“Intravenously or intramuscularly?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Intravenously hits the veins. Intramuscularly he can take it in the buttock, arm, without hitting a vein.”

I felt like I was starring in an educational filmstrip for junior high school students. “I guess he was using it intravenously. He used a dinosaur tie to bulge a vein.”

“You kids would have killed him,” Dad said for the tenth time.

Dr. Mentoff corrected him. “Mr. Ganelli, Stuart would never have died from withdrawal. But he could have physically hurt someone or himself. Punched a hole in the wall. Thrown a glass at your daughter. That’s the main danger of cold turkey.”

“He couldn’t have died?” I asked, wanting to hear those words again.

“He could only die from an overdose. When you’re strung out, buying garbage from someone you don’t know is the real danger. It can be cut with bad stuff to stretch their profit. Battery acid—will kill you. Roach poison—will kill you.”

“My God,” Dad said. “They put roach poison in there?”

Dr. Mentoff should have done voice-overs for horror trailers. “Or sometimes, these young kids aren’t used to better quality. When there’s purer heroin available, the veteran will shoot in smaller doses.”

Benji sat in the corner of the room with a bag of microwaved popcorn, and I could hear him clucking. This is what happens when you intermarry and don’t discipline your kids, he was no doubt thinking.

The last time I’d seen Benji, three years earlier, we’d had a brutal argument at my Aunt Bea and Uncle Eddie’s Passover Seder, over the separation of women and men at the Wailing Wall. My feminism drew from lectures from my rabbi and priest. And especially from Benji, who had met his wife via a proven enthusiasm for Judaism: he’d colead a teen tour to Israel with her in the early eighties. Mom flashed her “Cool it, Rachel” look, but once again the volcano of religious dissent had erupted.

“There’s a place for your type,” Benji had said. “Leningrad.”