wedge blog

VS.

Pistol Packin' Jewish Cowgirl, ca. 1964

I missed the Ivy League experience.

I missed the sorority houses, I missed the keggers.  Unlike Walter Kirn, I pretty much took the low road through higher education.

It wasn’t as though I didn’t have a road map, marked with red arrows, even. My siblings are all doctors & lawyers…when the song gets to ‘and such’, I raise my hand from the back of the room.  I wound up eight blocks from my childhood home, selling jewelry in Big Sky Country.

Last year when I read Lost in the Meritocracy, I thought about my own formative years in public school. I remember warm milk and soggy graham crackers in kindergarten. I remember Dick. To be fair, I also remember Jane and Spot.

The pivotal memory I have of grade school is hearing that I killed God.

It was the fall of 1966, and I refused to sing Christmas Carols. I was in fourth grade.

Wanda Button pulled me away from a spirited game of Chinese Jump Rope at recess. Wanda and I were not friends. She had bad news.

 “You killed God.”

I was nine years old and I denied it. “Did not.”

“My mom said the Jews killed God.”

I knew a little about Judaism, but I didn’t remember this part.  Flat dry matzo, I knew. Dressing up at Purim, I knew. Passover Seders, I knew.

I was only nine, but hearing that I killed God explained a lot.

It explained why I was the only Jew in class. Who else would fess up? It explained why the Germans, who were probably Christians, had been so mad at us. It also explained why my dad was home dying of cancer. He was a German, and he married a Jew. We were being punished.

I barely realized what it meant to be a Jew, and I was already riddled with guilt.

Even then, though, I wondered, if we killed God, God is dead. Why are these Christians still going to churches? If we killed God, I mean like, what’s the point?

Out there on the Emerson School playground, I started to cry.

I went home and confronted my mother, who had problems of her own, with five kids and my very sick father. Alone after dinner, her red hands dripping over the sink, I asked her if what Wanda said was true.

Mom was tired. She may have been having her own crisis of faith. “It was a long time ago. Some people think Jewish leaders killed Jesus,” she said. “But it’s not your fault. It’s not my fault, and it might not even be true.”

It was a weak defense.

Three months later my father died. I took a week off school, and everyone in my class signed a sympathy card. Even Wanda.

Because there is an Air Base in Great Falls, there were always a couple of military kids in my class.  There was a Bully, a Fat Kid, one Black Girl, a slew of Indians, and I got to be…the Jew.

Walter Kirn was the Smart Kid. This may have driven him slightly nuts, but it gave Walter plenty of tragicomic fodder.  All that stuff that teachers tried to pour into poor Walter—he literally got the last word. For the rest of his life, all Walter has to do is push his hand down his psyche and make smart shit from shit that smarts.

When I reach down my psychic gullet, all I get is a gag reflex.

Given the role of Montana Jew, I guess I made it my job to be strange. After Wanda’s diatribe, I perfected a look that told my classmates not to come any closer or I might crucify them.

When I picked up Walter’s book, I thought that Lost in the Meritocracy would be heavy and literate and full of footnotes to prove we are depriving ourselves of creative thinkers by shoving square brains through progressively smaller round holes. Instead, Kirn, by recounting his own dysfunctional youth, picks up all the shavings and ignites a fine cautionary tale.

The book isn’t cautionary enough to discourage aspiring miserable literati, however. If I’d read it when I was in high school, I might have actually been enticed into being the Smart One just to suffer through the bookish fodder of degradation, adoration and isolation, which may have resulted in enough ‘fuck you smarts’ to earn a fellowship of my own.

Sometimes, though, instead of getting lost in the meritocracy, it’s safer not to open the door.

The first time my mother saw Great Falls, Montana she cried.

She had an image in her head: babbling brooks, mountain vistas, general stores, crisp air, cowboys. For the last few hours on the train, she worried that she had been duped by my dad. He had let her prattle on about pictures of Glacier Park in the World Book, claiming it was at “our back door”.

My father took Mom from the platform by the shoulders and aimed her toward the Highwoods, claiming they were just a few minutes away, then he turned to her and asked her to squint hard. “Them there are the Rockies.” My dad didn’t mention you had to drive through Browning to get to “our backyard”.

Through her tears, my mother pretended to see the spine of the continent. She did her best to smile.

I suppose my mother thought she would pass a few seasons in the Great American Desert…like the wandering Jews, she did not expect spend the rest of her life there; My dad, her Moses. 

I wonder how many of our Jewish neighbors expected to pass through, and for whatever reason, decided to stay.

Despite my mother’s first flat, dry impression, Great Falls became the Promised Land for our family and other Jews willing to put up with harsh winters and just a few harsh comments. Mid twentieth century Montana was the perfect place to be a Jew.

Local Jews were an intrepid crew: Irving Fineman, who sold furniture, then insurance; Zollie Kelman, who bought ‘useless land’ on Tenth Avenue South; the Samuelsons, the local jewelers, and the women—oy, the women: Sylvia and Pearl, the Twin Quin of Great Falls Jewish Matriarchy, Sylvia could fuel her big old jeep from the fumes that passed between her and her sister Pearl: from my view as a kid in the back seat, they had the kind of love that appeared to be fueled by friction.

Everyone welcomed my mother, and her mother with open arms. My father just shrugged: perhaps he felt this was the price to keep Jews happy in Big Sky Country.

To me, all the local Jewish families seemed pretty nice. Not exactly normal, but nice.  After my father died, the Kelmans gave us their old three-foot-deep hard-walled swimming pool. All we had to do was to drive to their house in the Country Club and pick it up in our 1958 station wagon. It was pretty strange to climb through a concrete drainpipe and drag our new pool from their bomb shelter. I was ten years old and I wondered if Zollie & Evelyn decided to cancel pool dates after the Commies dropped the big one, figuring the ashes might clog the filter.

With so few Jews, we didn’t have a synagogue. The nearby Air Force base, however, had a smattering of Jewish recruits. To serve their needs, occasionally rabbis were flown in, and the five or six local Jewish families would endure the ignominy of Air Force security procedures to join them. I remember a velvet covered torah in a big closet on wheels that they rolled in and put off to the side of the big blonde wood cross—never in front of it—and Union prayer books slid beside New Testaments in slots behind each pew.

I don’t remember the services, but I remember the room off to the right, where food was served and kids, after a cookie or two, awkwardly waited for the whole thing to end.

Once a year, the Jewish community would hold a rummage sale. We always had great rummage sales: it was the High Holy Day of my Jewish calendar: I’d come home with enough Reinstein girl dresses and Weissman toys to be the envy of my lower southside neighborhood for weeks. It seemed Jews always outgrew or tossed a better quality of junk, which made me proud to be Jewish.

I haven’t been back to the Chapel in decades. I walk past synagogues, I don’t go inside. And here I am, the wandering Jew, back in New York. I feel a strange comfort climbing the ancient wood escalators in Macy’s, not unlike the feeling New Yorkers must get when they visit the mountains of Glacier National Park, which, by the way, is “right in my back yard”.

Just outside the entrance to the old gym at Great Falls High there is a bronze plaque with a relief sculpture of a hockey player.

As a high schooler I didn’t read it but like every student at GFHS I knew it honored Terry Casey.

If I had been a few years older I’d have had a crush on Terry Casey. He was an All-Star quarterback and a fast pitch softball hero. Casey won a hockey scholarship and in 1968 he was named Captain of the U.S. Olympic Hockey team.

The whole town beamed. First John Misha Petkevitch, now Terry Casey. Great Falls was the place for ice.

In July of 1968, Terry and two buddies were killed in a head-on collision near Plentywood, where they were headed for a fast-pitch softball tournament.

Forty one years later our town still mourns the loss.

On the Casey Cup website there are two pictures of Terry. In the first picture he’s about fifteen, a thick butch shined with Brylcreem. His smile is wide enough to hold a hockey puck.

In the other picture Casey’s a few years older, his butch cut so close the scalp shows right through. This photo is impromtu, he’s in an oversized jersey with an appliqued Indian on his chest, the number twelve on his left shoulder. He might be thinking of a his lottery number in the draft, or some girl. Whatever the cause, Terry’s ‘Leave it to Beaver’ grin is long gone.

Who knows what he would have looked like at forty.

For me, my sister and three brothers, learning to skate at the Civic Center ice rink was a rite of passage. The grey rubber skate guards, the painted wood bleachers blocked off by curved plywood, the concession stand in the corner…like Terry Casey, it’s all long gone.

It’s because of Terry Casey and former Olympians Petkevitch and Scott Davis that folks like me donate to the Ice Foundation every year. Thanks to the skaters, their families, and a good dose of community pride we have a new ice arena filled with kids, pucks and blade guards.

Billings may boast sports commentator Brent Musberger, but we had the real deal with Casey, Petkevitch and Davis.

We have a tradition to uphold.

Photo: Tormenting Roger at the Kitchen Table

He was eight when I told him that every bubble in a glass of milk turns into a burp when it’s swallowed. For months he speared the edges of his tumbler with a toothpick. On occasion I’d tell him he swallowed one—I saw it!—he would open his little mouth wide to force it out. If I put on a pouty face and said, “Too late,” he’d produce a pitifully entertaining wail.

“Stop that, Roger.” Our mom was too busy with her job and a passel of other kids to ask Roger why he poured so slowly and why, at every meal, he rolled his milk around the inside rim to pop every last opaque dome with a small wooden stick.

He looked so pathetically intent and I felt so powerful. I was ten.

Roger, the youngest of five, was neat and quiet and still somewhat gullible in the year after Dad died. I was next-to-last, an ‘also ran’ in the family race, noisy and messy and as selfish then as I am to this day. The first three kids, Win, Place and Show, had ribbons in their stalls. I was left to run wild and Roger brought up the rear.

I had to get back at Roger. He was cute. He was deviously well behaved. He was a Virgo.

He parted his hair on the left, tucked in his plaid cotton shirts, folded his Cub Scout uniform and never got in trouble. He actually filed his Halloween candy in a locked chest in his bedroom closet, and he had the discipline to eat two nasty cheap candies between each really tasty treat. In this way, he made his booty last until Christmas and my rancor last for decades.

I’d eat all the good stuff in the first two days, and regret throwing away Jolly Ranchers and Pez, especially when I wound up watching Roger relish a fun size Butterfinger after Thanksgiving (amazingly, without making a mess).

I used to ruin Roger’s entire day by moving the orange Wheaties box from the cabinet to the left below the sink to the cabinet on the right above the refrigerator. When he got married I shared this trick with his new bride: every new wife deserves a small arsenal of ways to make her man suffer.

Roger is a Virgo, born in the second week of September. As a grown up physician whose most mystical reading is a PDR, he looks at me, shrugs, and carefully backs away. I am a Cancer: I remember taking a PDR to step aerobics class, then going home and opening it randomly to see if there was anything in the three inch medical volume that might offer me some relief.

Sooner or later, if I come up with the cure for what ails me, I’ll call my brother and ask for a prescription.

Perhaps there’s something in there for Roger, too.

July Fourth marks the 70th anniversary of Lou Gehrig’s famous ballpark farewell. I wrote this a few years back when our neighbor AnnaBeth was dying of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease).

Neighbors

For decades,
it was that shade of institutional green
with a hint of bilious yellow
until three days ago
they painted the whole house
crayon sky blue
in one day.

Two men covered the windows
with butcher paper

The compressor billowed gas fumes
into the house where I grew up
and the view from my childhood windows
was gone in an afternoon.

Now the neighbor lady gasps
not talking
barely breathing
bone thin
in an easy chair in the Cherwatenko’s small carpeted living room,
her closest companion a disease
that she cannot pronounce.

A nurse,
her husband,
two sons long gone
come back.

The aluminium screen door slams with repeated finality
as the boys, grown men,
visit the house that used to be green
for the very last time.

The clap of metal against their doorstop
whaps through our open spring window
barely nine feet away.

My mother glances up from the dishpan and leans over the sink
on tiptoe,
her own aging wet hand on the counter
to see who might be coming

or going.