Tacked above the Girardi sink is a picture of Jesus Christ floating up to Heaven in a pink nightgown. How disgusting can human beings be! The Jews I despise for their narrow-mindedness, their self-righteousness, the incredibly bizarre sense that these cave men who are my parents and relatives have somehow gotten of their superiority—but when it comes to tawdriness and cheapness, to beliefs that would shame even a gorilla, you simply cannot top the goyim. What kind of base and brainless schmucks are these people to worship somebody who, number one, never existed, and number two, if he did, looking as he does in that picture, was without a doubt The Pansy of Palestine. In a pageboy haircut, with a Palmolive complexion—and wearing a gown that I realize today must have come from Fredericks of Hollywood! Enough of God and the rest of that garbage! Down with religion and human groveling! Up with socialism and the dignity of man! Actually, why I should be visiting the Girardi home is not so as to lay their daughter—please God!—but to evangelize for Henry Wallace and Glen Taylor. Of course! For who are the Girardis if not the people, on whose behalf, for whose rights and liberties and dignities, I and my brother-in-law-to-be wind up arguing every Sunday afternoon with our hopelessly ignorant elders (who vote Democratic and think Neanderthal), my father and my uncle. If we don’t like it here, they tell us, why don’t we go back to Russia where everything is hunky-dory? “You’re going to turn that kid into a Communist,” my father warns Morty, whereupon I cry out, “You don’t understand! All men are brothers!” Christ, I could strangle him on the spot for being so blind to human brotherhood!
Now that he is marrying my sister, Morty drives the truck and works in the warehouse for my uncle, and in a manner of speaking, so do I: three Saturdays in a row now I have risen before dawn to go out with him delivering cases of Squeeze to general stores off in the rural wilds where New Jersey joins with the Poconos. I have written a radio play, inspired by my master, Norman Corwin, and his celebration of V-E Day, On a Note of Triumph (a copy of which Morty has bought me for my birthday). So the enemy is dead in an alley back of the Wilhelmstrasse; take a bow, G.I., take a bow, little guy . . . Just the rhythm alone can cause my flesh to ripple, like the beat of the marching song of the victorious Red Army, and the song we learned in grade school during the war, which our teachers called “The Chinese National Anthem.” “Arise, ye who refuse to be bond-slaves, with our very flesh and blood”—oh, that defiant cadence! I remember every single heroic word!—“we will build a new great wall!” And then my favorite line, commencing as it does with my favorite word in the English language: “In-dig-na- tion fills the hearts of all of our coun-try-men ! A-rise! A-rise! A-RISE!”
I open to the first page of my play and begin to read aloud to Morty as we start off in the truck, through Irvington, the Oranges, on toward the West-Illinois! Indiana! Iowa! O my America of the plains and the mountains and the valleys and the rivers and the canyons . . . It is with just such patriotic incantations as these that I have begun to put myself to sleep at night, after jerking off into my sock. My radio play is called Let Freedom Ring! It is a morality play (now I know) whose two major characters are named Prejudice and Tolerance, and it is written in what I call “prose-poetry.” We pull into a diner in Dover, New Jersey, just as Tolerance begins to defend Negroes for the way they smell. The sound of my own humane, compassionate, Latinate, alliterative rhetoric, inflated almost beyond recognition by Roget’s Thesaurus (a birthday gift from my sister)—plus the fact of the dawn and my being out in it—plus the tattooed counterman in the diner whom Morty calls “Chief”—plus eating for the first time in my life home-fried potatoes for breakfast—plus swinging back up into the cab of the truck in my Levis and lumber jacket and moccasins (which out on the highway no longer seem the costume that they do in the halls of the high school)-plus the sun just beginning to shine over the hilly farmlands of New Jersey, my state!—I am reborn! Free, I find, of shameful secrets! So clean—feeling, so strong and virtuous-feeling-so American! Morty pulls back onto the highway, and right then and there I take my vow, I swear that I will dedicate my life to the righting of wrongs, to the elevation of the downtrodden and the underprivileged, to the liberation of the unjustly imprisoned. With Morty as my witness—my manly left-wing new-found older brother, the living proof that it is possible to love mankind and baseball both (and who loves my older sister, whom I am ready to love now, too, for the escape hatch with which she has provided the two of us), who is my link through the A.V.C. to Bill Mauldin, as much my hero as Corwin or Howard Fast—to Morty, with tears of love (for him, for me) in my eyes, I vow to use “the power of the pen” to liberate from injustice and exploitation, from humiliation and poverty and ignorance, the people I now think of (giving myself gooseflesh) as The People.
I am icy with fear. Of the girl and her syph! of the father and his friends! of the brother and his fists! (even though Smolka has tried to get me to believe what strikes me as wholly incredible, even for goyim : that both brother and father know, and neither cares, that Bubbles is a “hoor”). And fear, too, that beneath the kitchen window, which I plan to leap out of if I should hear so much as a footstep on the stairway, is an iron picket fence upon which I will be impaled. Of course, the fence I am thinking of surrounds the Catholic orphanage on Lyons Avenue, but I am by now halfway between hallucination and coma, and somewhat woozy, as though I’ve gone too long without food. I see the photograph in the Newark News, of the fence and the dark puddle of my blood on the sidewalk, and the caption from which my family will never recover: INSURANCE MAN’S SON LEAPS TO DEATH.