Like those trips to the beach. My God. Late Sunday morning, Dr. Mindish would come by in his car; I remember it, a 1942 Chrysler New Yorker, high off the ground, with small windows, the upholstery torn. And we’d all pile in and go down the Concourse, across the Triborough Bridge, to the Grand Central Parkway, on toward Jones Beach (named for the common man), and the traffic would stack up, and maybe by three in the afternoon we’d get to the huge parking lot packed with baking cars and buses fourteen miles from any beach, and they’d all be sweating, and grumbling and arguing with each other and shushing each other, Dr. Mindish and his dumb wife and their cretin daughter, almost six feet tall, and Mom and Pop and me and the baby, Susan, all stuck in that stuffy car, sick with the fumes, and no, my father would say, this lot is too far away and we’d angle around, and sneak past the attendants, and bickering and sweating, complaining, and swearing never to do it again, my mother declaring my father a torturer, the Mindishes mad now because they wanted to park and walk the damn five hundred miles from the lot to the beach, with the sun baking the roof of that car and the baby spitting up like mushed bananas, and little carsick bastard Daniel complaining too (Mindish drove cruelly, starting and stopping, a jerk driver too), and then my father, leaping out of the car and guarding a parking space, miraculously found near the beach itself, with horns blowing and another driver threatening, he, Paul Isaacson, sweating and triumphant, guiding, like a cop, the big dented Chrysler into the space; and then a long enough walk to the beach through odd grass gardens for the common man: planted with tiger lilies and geraniums unbelievably ugly in the hot sun; to the beach so crowded that it seemed impossible to find room to put down a blanket. And following Paul, our safari of babies and towels and blankets, large paper bags with sandwiches, thermoses, the Sunday Worker, the week’s Workers, the Sunday Times, bottles of baby food, through the sand that burned your feet; and then finally to Paul’s mystical spot, the best spot inevitably and all the fussing and grunting and exchange of directions as the rented umbrella went up and the blankets went down, and the goods were arranged, and the shoes off, and the clothes, and finally, sweating, unbelievably, hours since the first good idea had occurred to go to the beach this Sunday, I stood at the shore of the ocean and looked out at the waves.
And my father said, “Some things are worth the effort.”
So if they walked around nude or shopped for the best meat at the lowest price, or joined the Party, it was to know the truth, to be up on it; it was the refusal to be victim; and it would justify them — their poverty, their failure, their unhappiness, and the really third-rate families they came from. They rushed after self-esteem. If you could recognize a Humphrey Bogart movie for the cheap trash it was, you had culture. If you discovered the working class you found the roots of democracy. In social justice you discovered your own virtue. To desire social justice was a way of living without envy, which is the emotion of a loser. It was a way of transforming envy into constructive outgoing hate.
But they stuck to it, didn’t they, Daniel? When the call came they answered. They offered up those genitals, didn’t they, Dandan? Yes, they did. There were moments when I thought he would crack, I had my doubts about him. But I knew she would take it finally, to the last volt, in absolute selfishness, in unbelievably rigid fury. But with Paul you couldn’t help feeling that the final connection was impossible for him to make between what he believed and how the world reacted. He couldn’t quite make that violent connection. Rochelle was the realist. Her politics was the politics of want, the things she never got, the chances she never had. If my mother had been anything but poor, I don’t think she would have been a Red. I can’t say that about him. He had that analytic cool; he claimed to believe in the insignificance of personal experience within the pattern of history. He even wrote that when he was in jail. The electric chair as methodology of capitalist economics. But he didn’t fool me. He was scared. He was without real resources of character, like most intellectuals. He was a brash, untested young man who walked out of CCNY into the nineteen forties, and found no one following him. No one followed my papa where he went. He was a selfish man. Or maybe no, merely so physically rude that he appeared selfish. Whatever he did had such personal force that it seemed offensive. Like sticking his tongue out to examine it in the mirror. Like shaving in front of me, talking all the while, while my eyes followed his razor through the thin spread of brushless cream. And when he was through, his jaw was as blue as before. That was offensive. That was selfishness of a profound sort. He didn’t keep his razor clean. He left blotches of gloppy shaving cream in the sink. He left the shower faucet dripping. He left towels wadded up. You knew he’d been there. He had a way of being conspicuous. Nothing he did was obscure — how beautiful that is to contemplate. Even his breathing was noisy. Bending over those radios. You could hear the concentration of the job in his release of breath, as if assuring himself that he was working hard and that something considerable was at stake. I would stand at his worktable and listen to him breathe, the twist of a screw or the soldering of a wire allowing him to reward himself with another exhalation. It was just the way he existed in the space he occupied. Right out to the edges. He didn’t dig me for a long time. He found it odd that he was my father. Why would I think that if it wasn’t so? Smoking one of those cigars that didn’t go with his face, he studied his son like a psychologist through a pane of glass. He didn’t understand what I meant when I flirted with him like a woman, as all little boys flirt with their fathers, or my angers, or what I wanted when I pleased him. With his long legs crossed at the knees and his large rude eyes magnified by his glasses. Like Susan’s eyes. And his skinniness, and the same face I have with the big lips and big teeth, and round bulb Russian nose. And the sleeves of his blue work shirt rolled up to the elbows — to just below the elbows. I remember his thin arms, with then jet-black hair, and the sinews moving under the skin. The hair grew right down over the backs of his hands to his knuckles. He was skinnier than I am. His hair was like wire.
But this describes just a moment’s oversensitive perception by the little criminal of perception. He was warm and affectionate. What I remember is the lectures. He wanted me to grow up right. He wrestled society for my soul. He worked on me to counteract the bad influences of my culture. That was our relationship — his teaching me how to be a psychic alien. That was part of the training. He had to exorcize the influences, the bad spirits. Did I ever wonder why my radio programs had commercials? He’d find me reading the back of the cereal box at breakfast, and break the ad down and show what it appealed to, how it was intended to make me believe something that wasn’t — that eating the cereal would make me an athlete. There were foods one didn’t eat, like bananas, because they were the fruit of some notorious exploitation. There were companies whose products we boycotted because of their politics or labor history. Like National Biscuit Company cookies. He didn’t like National Biscuit Company. He didn’t like Standard Oil. He didn’t like General Motors — not that we were ever in a position to buy a car. He didn’t like General Motors because they were owned by Du Pont, and Du Pont had had cartel agreements with I. G. Farben of Nazi Germany.