LEYNER
When I was a little boy, sometimes I used to stay over on Saturday nights at my grandparents’ apartment, these were my dad’s parents, Sam and Rose…this little, one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment over on Gifford Avenue and the Boulevard in Jersey City. And we’d all watch The Jackie Gleason Show together, one of the incarnations of the variety show he used to do for CBS in the sixties, the one with the June Taylor Dancers and Sammy Spear and His Orchestra and Frank Fontaine. And Gleason used to come back out on stage at the end of the show, in his bathrobe, and address the audience and sometimes bring some of the cast members out for curtain calls. And he’d seem spent, but so happily, so exuberantly spent, if that makes any sense…which is just the way I feel right now, right here, tonight.
When my grandfather Sam was in his mid-seventies, he developed leukemia, and he endured several terribly arduous years with the disease…he developed sores in his mouth that were excruciatingly painful and made it very difficult for him to eat just about anything that he liked, he was exhausted, debilitated, homebound for the most part. It was a difficult time, a grim time for him. And then one day — so I remember it — he seemed to spontaneously recover. He woke up with terrific energy and high spirits…And that evening, he got dressed up (he’d always been quite a dandy, quite a clotheshorse), picked out one of his fancy walking sticks, got in his car (he’d always loved driving, loved his flying balcony), and he took my grandma Rose to some restaurant down on the Jersey shore that they both loved, and they had a fabulous lobster dinner. And he died in his sleep early the next morning.
I was talking to Rose once — I don’t remember if it was when she was living in her apartment in Florida or if it was when she was in that assisted-living facility in, uh…in the Valley, in LA — and I was talking about some particular married couple and whether they were happy or not, and Rose said with this very memorable kind of disdain and incredulity, “Happy? Do you think your grandfather and I were happy?” I don’t think she meant to imply that she and my grandfather were miserable in any way, it was just that word happy that she seemed to find so patently inappropriate, because, I think, in her mind it implied this sort of blithe fantasy world, when, in reality — and I’m putting words in her mouth here — an enduring marriage requires a hard-won and often begrudging modus vivendi. I don’t think she meant any of this in an especially cynical way, and I’m fairly certain most other women her age, and of her generation, would have said basically the same thing. Although Rose did frequently add that all men were snakes. But she’d say even that with a smile and her Betty Boop blink-blink-blink. And then she’d look at me and say, “He was such a handsome man…I miss him.” Blink-blink-blink.
Well…I miss him too. And I miss you, Rose… and I miss Ray and Harriet, and all those wonderful, inimitable people from that time. And I miss that whole world, with its lulling strobe of passing verdant days, the pointillist haze of its afternoons, with all its rooms and murmuring voices. That has all disappeared forever… (He shrugs and sighs, and smiles.)
LEYNER
I want to express my immense gratitude to my mom.
When I first asked her if she’d like to do this…to sit with me and let me interview her and use the transcripts in this book…she said, “Oh, honey, I don’t know if I could do that. I’d be so self-conscious. I’d almost feel as if I were playing myself.” And I said, “Of course you can do it. You’ll be great.” I said, “Look at all these silly people…these, these silly reality stars, all these buxom socialites and degenerate hillbillies, these lonesome dwarfs and hoarders. You’ll be absolutely fantastic.”
And even though she’s never watched any of these kinds of shows, she’s never even seen a single episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians or the Real Housewives of This or That, never mind anything like Wives with Knives or Sex Sent Me to the Slammer or anything of that ilk — she’s much more of a Downton Abbey / Inspector Morse kind of person — she acquiesced, and she was, as she has always, always been, so beautifully astute and insightful and eloquent and, as I predicted, just absolutely fantastic.
But the main reason that I came out here is to thank you.
You know, Jackie Gleason used to end his variety show bellowing, “Miami Beach audiences are the greatest audiences in the world!” Well, we’re not in Miami Beach…and I’m not much of a bellower now, if I ever was, but…you are the greatest too. You really are. The hours you spent reading this really do represent an irrevocable loss for you. You can never get that time back. That part of your life is gone forever. I’m profoundly grateful to you for that.
And so with this, I say good-bye to you, a very real good-bye:
I am going west, to better secure material subsistence for my family and myself.
I have released my mind, after almost sixty years of loyal service.
I can only hope it will find its way back to its primordial home, which it left so long ago.
Moushiwake gozaimasen deshita.
About the Author
Mark Leyner is the author of the novels The Sugar Frosted Nutsack; My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist; Et Tu, Babe; and The Tetherballs of Bougainville. His nonfiction includes the #1 New York Times bestseller Why Do Men Have Nipples? Leyner cowrote the movie War, Inc. He currently lives in Hoboken, New Jersey.