And the newspaper David started when he was eleven, and they were living in a better apartment on Mosholu Parkway, bigger than the first one up the street. His father did all the hand-lettering for the four-page newspaper, on the stencils you had to make for the Hectograph. The Hectograph was a tray of yellow Jell-O, it looked like, and first you rubbed the stencil with its lettering over the stuff in the tray, and then you put the blank sheets of paper in the tray and you rubbed those, and what was on the stencil appeared on the blank paper, in purple ink. The lead story was about a two-headed cat. David’s father copied it word for word from a clipping he’d cut out of the Bronx Home News, and then he made up a new headline for it: DOUBLEHEADER FOR KATZ FAMILY! The puns, ah, yes (“That joke’ll be the urination of me”), the puns were something else David had inherited, he supposed.
They were his father’s revenge upon the English language, perhaps, his way of coming to terms with the fact that he’d never got beyond the first year of high school because his own father (the grandfather David had never met) died when he was just a boy and he and his brother Martin had been forced to find jobs to help out their widowed mother. That was when Uncle Martin became the only Jewish apprentice house painter in the city of New York. It was also when his father became the only Jewish kid on the Lower East Side who was rushing the growler for an Irish bar on Canal Street, a job that was short-lived because the owner of the place learned first that he was only fourteen and not sixteen (as he’d claimed) and next that his name wasn’t Webb (as he’d further claimed) but was instead Weber. “He took me for a Sweeney,” his father later told David, “but I was only a sheeny.”
Whatever the psychological roots of his word games, they never ceased. When he caught David smoking for the first time, he said, “Put out that cigarette before you make an ash of yourself.” He described an inept tailor on Fordham Road as a man “panting for customers,” and then compounded the felony by adding, “ill-suited to his trade.” Of an uppity barber, he said, “He thinks he’s hair to the throne,” which was better, but only somewhat, than his constant remark about his own baldness, “Oh, well, hair today, gone tomorrow.” He punned interminably and often outrageously. When his brother Max caught a trout he claimed was two feet long, David’s father said, “You don’t expect me to swallow that, do you?” and then immediately added, “Well, maybe I will, just for the halibut.” When his cousin Bernice began cheating on her violinist husband, David’s father said, “He’s fiddling while Bernice roams.” The first time he met Molly (but that was another story) and learned she was a nurse, he said, “I’ve always wanted a panhandler in the family.”
During the trial David had just lost, opposing counsel was a man who prefaced each of his harangues by first removing his eyeglasses and then jabbing them in a witness’s face whenever he posed a question. In objecting to one such verbal and physical attack, David said, “Your Honor, my brother is harassing the witness,” and then could not resist adding, “and he’s also making a spectacle of himself,” which the judge did not find amusing. (“Chip off the old block. Ike and Mike, we look alike.”) But back in 1943, when his father came up with the “MRS. KATZ” headline and despite the fact that his mother’s maiden name had been Katz — was there more to the headline than David guessed? — he’d thought it was the cat’s meow. (“What has four legs and follows cats?” his father asked that very same day. “What?” David said. “Mrs. Katz and her lawyer!” his father bellowed in triumph. Jesus!) In fact, David believed that the headline, together with a gossip column about all the kids in the neighborhood, was what sold out the first issue. They made fourteen dollars on that first issue because there were ads in it from all the neighborhood merchants, including one for David’s father’s clothing store that was about to fold in the fall, a full-page ad that had cost a dollar. The newspaper suspended publication after its second issue, but only because David dropped the Hectograph tray one afternoon and the now thoroughly purple jelly spilled out all over the floor. “That jelly’s gonna get you in a jam,” his father said, smiling, even though he’d already hand-lettered his way through half of the third issue.
His father had good penmanship (“I like to keep my hand in,” he said), and he was a good letterer as well (“A man of letters,” he said), a skill he had acquired when making signs for the front windows of all his failed businesses. David’s mother yelled that he’d ruined the rug on the floor of the room where his father kept all his collected junk and which had been the newspaper office. David said he would give her all the paper’s profits to have the rug cleaned. His mother graciously declined the offer, but she never stopped telling everyone how David had spilled all that purple shmutz on the heirloom rug her grandmother had carried on her back all the way from Russia — “See the stain? You can still see it. This is exactly where he dropped the tray.”
His father said, “That stain has real stayin’ power,” which was reaching, even for him.
His father used to cheat at poker.
His poker game was on Wednesday nights, a floating game that met at their house every seventh Wednesday. If David had finished his homework, his father would let him pull up a chair beside him, and he would explain all the poker hands to him. The men played for pennies; none of them could afford higher stakes. But every now and then, David noticed his father shortchanging the pot when he put his “lights” in. Each time, his father gave him a little wink that meant he was just kidding around, there wasn’t any real theft involved here, he was just putting one over on these wisenheimers. “A penny saved is a penny urned,” he said, whenever he dropped a coin into David’s piggy bank. It took David years and years to realize he was making another pun, a rather literary one at that since its appreciation depended on visual input. His father’s cheating delighted him. He kept fearfully waiting for the other men in the game to catch his father at it, but they never did. His father invariably won. Years later, when David was on the troopship heading for Inchon and monumental poker games were being played on blankets all over the deck, David wished his father were there with him. His father would have cleaned out all those fancy gamblers in a minute.