Different Slants

Part 4 

After Buddy was released from ‘The Slammer’, as my Dad always phrased it, his relationship with my Dad resumed like nothing had ever interrupted it, like World War II, for example. 

Buddy the Hun was unavailable to serve his country in that war because he was already serving his sentence in that same government’s Federal Penitentiary.   

When they had their first post-prison reunion in 1951, Buddy was trying to decide how to make a living.  My Dad suggested Buddy try becoming a jeweler like he himself had done, after the war.  My Dad laid it out for him: No heavy lifting, the merchandise would never break down, like say, a washing machine, for instance, and (not a small part of my Dad’s reasoning in this situation of career repair) it was distinctly possible to run a store selling jewelry as a cash business. 

Buddy the Hun thought it over, especially the ‘cash business’ aspect of it.  Because to Buddy’s way of thinking, he wanted nothing further to do with the Federal Government of the United States—including paying any taxes.  He figured he’d already paid them enough in years of his life. 

 Buddy knew he had lines-of-credit waiting for him, and he was also fairly certain he could obtain an ample supply of easy-to-move merchandise like diamonds and watches.  What he didn’t know, like how to convincingly portray himself as an experienced jeweler, he would learn.  And his old pal Izzy would be there to help him, as long as it took. 

So, with old chits to collect for time served, Buddy the Hun became Buddy the Jeweler, by appointment only. 

Time passed. 

Decades. 

Now we’re back in December 1977. 

A week before I made the decision to propose marriage to Joyce, I called my Dad—the former jeweler—and asked him where I should go to buy her a ring, since I knew nothing about jewelry, carats or what something like that should cost.  Being a jeweler wasn’t genetic. 

My Dad told me he knew a guy “who would take good care of me”, and to let him make a phone call to arrange a meeting, first.  I said ok. 

A couple of days later, on December 27^th, my Dad called me and told me to meet him Downtown at 5 North Wabash, under the elevated tracks, or in other words…at the location of his former store from long ago.  He must have thought I had no recollection of his place, but I did. 

He told me he had an old friend there, a guy named Buddy the Hun, who would sell me a ring on December 31^st, the same day I planned to propose. 

I first thought, 

“Buddy the Hun?  Is he serious?” 

(Read on …)

Part 3 

In the furniture store’s office, there was a secretary who answered the phones and did all the filing as the various orders came through from all the salesmen who worked there.  She was a young black woman who set up all the appointments, called “leads” (and pronounced like “leeds”) for my father and the other salesmen to go out and try to make sales.  She was a pretty woman—I met her several times when I was a child—with a big smile and a friendly, cooperative attitude.  She was very popular with all the salesmen.

Her name was Lorene. 

One morning, in 1958, when my father came in as usual to pick up another stack of leads waiting for him in his box on the wall so he could contact potential customers and make arrangements to see them, he was surprised to see Lorene sitting at her desk, quietly crying.  He had never seen this happen before. 

After a moment, not sure if he should intrude in her privacy, he asked Lorene what was the matter?  Was she sick? Did one of her relatives die?  Could he help her somehow?  My father was very chivalrous and protective of women, and seeing her sitting there crying in that office was disturbing to him.  He told me all about this incident years later, just like he told me one hundred other stories about his life. 

Lorene blew her nose, wiped her eyes and told my father that she’d broken up with her boyfriend because he was always drunk and he kept hitting her.  Now he was stalking her and refused to leave her alone no matter how much she pleaded with him.  She was terrified and felt she was at his mercy. 

My father became angry upon hearing her words.  A completely different situation than he was expecting from her.  Flowers wouldn’t do it, this time.  He had three sisters including his baby sister Estelle, then 34 and now 86.  In my father’s immigrant world no one touched the women.  A rule had been broken. 

My father asked Lorene for her former boyfriend’s phone number.  She hesitated, unsure what this friendly Jewish man had in mind.  But then she wrote the boyfriend’s number on a scrap of paper and handed it to him.  My father assured Lorene he would solve her problem.  That was his whole persona.  He would either become the Lone Ranger himself, or knew where to find someone else who would assume the role.

A few days later, my father came into the furniture store to pick up his leads from Lorene, and she quietly asked him to step inside of her little office.  He went in there, waited and then she whispered to him, 

“What did you say to him?  My boyfriend called me up last night screaming about cement shoes or something like that and then told me he was through with me, that we were over.  He said he’d never, ever call me or follow me again.  What did you do?”    

(Read on …)

Part 2: 

About a year prior to that evening at the Kinzie Steakhouse, I once read an item in a movie magazine about actor Richard Burton, giving his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, a ridiculously enormous diamond ring.  I remember dismissively saying to Joy that for a diamond that large, a person could go to Europe twenty times.  I said that would be a far better use of money, in my opinion. 

I am certain that Joy silently filed this unwelcome comment from me in her mental file cabinet under, 

Bob: Clueless!!  

However, like numerous other people have in my life, she underestimated me.  Her shock at receiving the diamond ring that night was also a subtle jolt from me to her that I was far more aware about what was important to her than she had previously assumed.  It certainly redefined our relationship on that wintery December night in 1977 when I asked Joy to marry me.

So…okay, a nice romantic moment, yes? 

Maybe, but not nearly as fascinating a story as where Joy’s ring came from.  Because on the morning of December 31, 1977, that diamond ring did not exist.  Yet. 

What follows now, is the truly convoluted story of the long, long journey leading to the creation of Joy’s diamond ring.  I suppose I’m writing this story for my granddaughter Natalia, and her soon-to-be sibling and cousin whom are both presently on the way.  The next generation should know about these intricate old family stories. 

In 1939, when my talented and artistic mother, Anne, then only 18 years old, was already designing detailed, imaginative jewelry.  Although her parents, who were from the Jewish Pale in Eastern Europe, were not in that business and her father was essentially a peddler to other immigrants near the steel mills located at the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan, the Chicago-area Jewish community was still small enough so that she was able to befriend, through friends of friends, some of the veteran jewelers working Downtown on Wabash Street.  For a curvaceous pretty girl, which she certainly was, doors frequently opened more easily for her than they might have opened for any man. 

These old men whom she gradually came to know, turned her designs into reality, and as those finished designs sold, my mother began to make a name for herself in the tight little world of men who handled diamonds, rubies and pearls every day. 

One of those unusual people I can still remember from over fifty years ago was a very old, very short man named Sander Goldstein.  He appeared to me to be a formally-dressed and always laughing…elf.  

He always wore a white dress shirt, a black vest, had thick-lensed glasses with gold wire frames plus a jeweler’s loop—a kind of high-powered miniature magnifying glass inside of a small black plastic tube—with him at all times.  He had a wispy angelic-looking fringe of fine white hair, was round-shouldered from endlessly sitting hunched over his cluttered work table for so many decades, skillfully placing precious stones in gold, silver and platinum settings.  He also repaired broken watches and necklaces. 

In 1955, when I was five years old, I thought he must have been at least one hundred years old.  I still do. 

(Read on …)

As it happens, my longtime wife, Joyce, has seemingly perfect memory and total recall of the names of everything in the Universe, especially movies and actors.  Out marriage, therefore, was evidently divinely preordained.  With her mental plus and my mental minus, I guess there is some mercy for me out there, after all. 

Because when I can write a story like this one, incredibly detailed and with perfect recollection, but still, frankly, can’t remember the name of that nurse or scores of other similar situations, I just call Joyce and she provides the name I need to me, instantly. 

It is easy for me to say, as husbands do, that I love her.  But much more than that, she has made it possible for me to exist with a disability that would otherwise torture me with a selectively frozen mind.  So, I pray God gives me a long life, but selfishly, to be honest I admit, I sure hope he gives Joyce a longer one. 

She has become more than metaphorically my “other half.”  She’s become the keeper of so many of my own memories; we are sometimes like one mind in two bodies.  She is essential to me, and so appreciated.  Why, in the very writing of this story, some viruses—probably Republican—attacked my computer, paralyzing it.  But Joyce, mighty Joyce, vanquished all of them and allowed me to continue writing. 

“Love” doesn’t really cover how I feel about her. 

(Read on …)

You enter a hospital with a name, your characteristic clothes, a personality and a problem. 

Within 48 hours you have been reduced to a chart, a bed and a room number.  The person you came in as has disappeared.  Soon enough you are treated accordingly, as part of the room’s furniture. 

My life is like that famed existential movie, Groundhog’s Day, about a clueless insensitive man stuck in a repeating purgatory until he fundamentally realized how much his callous attitude damaged other people.  Not many movie goers who love this movie understand that he has been trapped in this repeating day for thousands of days.  That is part of what makes that movie profound for me.  He’s in a Hell of his own making.

 Except, people, my life is such that I keep waking up, cut up, in yet another identical hospital bed, somewhere…over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over… 

Except it’s not fucking fiction! 

To defend myself from this reoccurring nightmare, every single time I’m forced to undergo yet another something, I silently re-join the Hospital Resistance, the Bandaged Underground swearing to not take any bullshit behavior lying down, even if I am actually…lying down.  

Casualties?  Always 100%. 

Treat me like an unwanted interloper in your day, or with the standard (and universal) hospital attitude of indifference, like I’m a wrinkle on a bed instead of a real person—and you’ll see the quiet person in Room 405, Bed One swiftly transform into one angry son-of-a-bitch, determined to hold onto his humanity. 

A real person—not a number—in pain. 

So, though this last day I just recounted was not a day I’d chosen to remember, but I did anyway. 

So, listen to me: 

When you go to a hospital and are treated shabbily, don’t take it, man.  Rise up! Absolutely demand respect. It works. Under all your bandages, you are still you.  Plus, you’re paying all of those uniformed pod-people ignoring you a damn fortune.  And when you do that, think of me. 

I’m Spartacus!!! 

(Read on …)

Part Four

by Robert M. Katzman

April 2010

I quickly saw why there was no rush to tell me the answer to my oft repeated question all that morning about how to attach the plastic box to my head, or before that, either.

 My attentive nurse produced four stainless steel machine screws that fit exactly into the four little holes, two in front and two in back, of the plastic box on my head.  The way that box was to be held securely in place on my head during the gamma-knife surgery, was by her screwing those four machine screws directly into my skull.  I was told this in an off-hand way, like she was giving me the time and weather.

 I looked at the (now formerly) nice nurse and said to her,

 “You’re kidding.”

 No, she answered all business now, no, she wasn’t.

 Jesus Christ!!!

 I panicked, stunned by this response from her.

 “No, Lady, NO! 

 That’s like some insane medieval torture!  You’re gonna screw metal screws into my skull??

 You can’t mean it!”

 She did.

 Oh, and no anesthetic was possible, either.  But she assured me it was not at all painful and I would be fine.  Just fine.

 She was facing me as I looked into her lying eyes.

 I looked down and saw the Phillips screwdriver in her hand.

 What?  No power tools?

(Read on …)