He also used to say — the Imaginary Intern — this funny thing…whenever we’d disagree about something, he’d say, “Let’s get our stories straight before the cops get here.” Which I just thought was completely adorable. And he’d always point out things to me he knew I loved…We’d be walking down the street, and he’d be like, “Wimpled nuns at ten o’clock”…
It’s still a hard thing for me to talk about sometimes, still a painful thing…
Y’know, it will be exactly three years ago this coming Saturday that, sitting on the toilet, I looked down at a pattern of cracks in the tile on my bathroom floor and conjured him up, and almost immediately asked him how he’d feel about collaborating with me on a book about the hedonism of suffering. “How would I feel?” he replied — and I remember this as clearly as if it happened yesterday — he said, “I’m feelin’ like a mogul / hittin’ jackpots on my mobile,” which is a line from a TV ad for online gambling in New Jersey. This was just the way he expressed himself sometimes, in a kind of code or through citations like that.
I mean, he was very enigmatic, which is probably pretty par for the course for a paracosmic entity, but he was also, I think, just very sensitive and very shy. There was a show on Nickelodeon that we watched together once called Victorious, and one of the characters was this kid Robbie who had a puppet named Rex, and Robbie did this whole ventriloquist thing…he was a shy kid and the puppet had this brash, sassy personality…and so it enabled Robbie to express himself in ways that he couldn’t on his own. And I could see that the show made the Imaginary Intern really uncomfortable. And I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why, and I’d even tease him about it and suggest we binge-watch all four seasons…until I realized that it was really bothering him. But I never got an opportunity to sit down and talk to him about it…He left…and…we just never had a chance to…I’m not going to get into all that again, but…Y’know…I could get impatient with him…exasperated sometimes…and I never realized back then that his aversion to the show, which was ostensibly about the acting and the writing, was…I don’t know…veiled or displaced…that it really was a sensitivity about playing the role of the ventriloquist’s dummy in our relationship…And my failure to discern that, to acknowledge his insecurities about his own autonomy — something he was far too proud to ever broach explicitly — it pains me still…because I never thought of our relationship in that way, ever. The fact is that the Imaginary Intern frequently said things to me, cryptic, puzzling things, that I simply could not have put in his mouth…things I couldn’t even fully comprehend at the time he uttered them to me. For instance, once he said: “Autobiography is the Auschwitz of psycholinguistics.” Not in those exact words of course, but that was basically the gist of what he said. And for a long time I tried to work through what that might actually mean. And in the end I think this may be the complete opposite of what I was talking about before. This may actually be something that turned out to be completely specious, that seemed to be abstruse and profound at first, but then turned out to be completely puerile. But I don’t care…I still love it.
There are enigmas that we can gnaw on throughout our lives from which we derive sustenance, some kind of spiritual nourishment…I’m thinking of certain kinds of riddles and koans and philosophical conundrums, things like that…But there are also enigmas that, throughout our lives, gnaw on us.
At my bar mitzvah in 1969 (the day before the Jets defeated the Baltimore Colts in the Super Bowl, the game Broadway Joe Namath notoriously predicted the underdog Jets would win), toward the end of the ceremony, the rabbi leaned over and whispered something in my ear. This is something I’d seen him do at each of my friends’ bar mitzvahs, and I’d asked them what he said, and it was usually a version of what you might call “words of wisdom”—sometimes a bit platitudinous, but other times, very specific to the boy and his idiosyncrasies and predilections and, in my thirteen-year-old opinion, extremely wise and pertinent, and, again, in my callow opinion (and boys that age do tend to overdramatize and over-romanticize things), perhaps even constituting the essential key to life. And I had a great deal of respect for this rabbi — he was a very personable guy who’d written a highly regarded book about the kabbalah, and I was actually anticipating with avid interest what he was going to whisper to me. I should add here that, for my bar mitzvah, I was wearing this ridiculous multicolor brocade Nehru jacket that my mom had picked out for me…Do you remember that jacket?
MARK’S MOM
You wore that jacket for the party the next day. At the bar mitzvah itself, you wore a regular suit.
MARK
Well, anyway…the rabbi leaned over and he whispered something in my ear, but he was so close to my ear that the words were completely garbled, completely unintelligible, it just sounded like static to me. And I said, “What?” And he did the same thing, put his mouth right up to my ear, too close, and said…said who knows what? It was just more distorted static. And I asked him one more time, “What did you say?” But I could see out of the corner of my eye, some guy — I don’t know who it was or what his function was (in my memory’s “eye,” he’s wearing a headset, like the producer on a talk show, but surely that’s an interpolation) — and he was making that circular motion in the air with his arm to indicate that we needed to get things moving here, and the rabbi resumed whatever other tasks he needed to resume in order to finish the ceremony.
So what had he said? Was it English, Hebrew, some version of faux-Japanese gibberish (i.e., a kind of placebo wisdom)? Was it some kabbalistic invocation from the Zohar? Was it my secret mantra? Or some banal platitude I could easily live without? I’ll never know. Was it — given the fact that life is essentially one long BDSM scene — was it my special safe word that I could use to make it all stop? I did ask him, by the way, a couple of weeks later, but he clearly couldn’t remember — I mean the guy did a lot of bar mitzvahs, never mind weddings, funerals, regular sermons, special-event sermons, etc., so I’m not blaming him. But I do feel, to put it simply, that I missed out on my words of wisdom…words of wisdom without which I’ve struggled and floundered perhaps more than I would have if only the words had been audible to me…and I’ve maintained this stubborn, completely quixotic…optimism, I guess you’d have to call it, that someday the mysterious garbled words will spontaneously emerge in perfect, pristine intelligibility from the sedimentary static in which they’ve been buried all these years (sort of the way on crime shows they’re able to “clean” distorted voices in wiretapped phone conversations), but unfortunately this special message will most likely forever remain in the gnawing-enigma file.
Then, in the eighties, I had a job as a waiter at a place in Jersey City called the Summit House. And one of the first tables I ever waited on was a “deuce,” in restaurant lingo, a middle-aged married couple, for whom Friday-night dinner at this particular spot was a custom, a ritual they’d really spruce up for — he always in a carefully pressed polo shirt, seersucker jacket, and dark slacks, she in some sort of floral-print dress, pretty earrings, a pretty tortoiseshell comb in her hair, that sort of thing. The husband pronounced his r’s as w’s, a speech defect (sometimes actually a dialect) called r-labialization, most famously portrayed, of course, by Elmer Fudd. So, this exceedingly pleasant, exceedingly soft-spoken guy would, each and every Friday evening, invariably order a “Wob Woy, vewy dwy, a wum and Coke for my wife, the pwime wib, vewy ware, and the bwoiled scwod…and would it be possible for my wife to have that with wice instead of Fwench fwies?” he’d politely ask, each and every time.