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A Brooklyn Love Story (Classic Romantic Repost)

7 Aug

August 7, 2012
from August 5, 2007

Ah, August! Love is in the air! Or is that the humidity? At any rate, I feel nauseous. Inspired by the impending nuptials of Marc and Emily, my tale of my semi-near-sort of-brush with marriage:

This happened about five or six years ago. My building has always had a certain percentage of apartments rented by Russians who stay a few months and then leave. This seems to be their first stop in America. (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, send them to Bensonhurst,” you know the poem.) I rarely get to know them for a variety of reasons.

A- They don’t stick around long enough.

B- Many speak only a few words of English.

C- I am an antisocial tool. (But you love me when you get to know me!)

But occasionally I get into a conversation with one or another of them. Usually it begins like this: “Excuse me, you are teacher?” I can’t explain it. For some reason it gets around that I am a teacher. I’ve been asked that by four or five immigrant Russian parents over the years, people whom I could not pick out of a police lineup. I’ve been offered tutoring jobs, once even as a math tutor, but never accepted one.

Well, this story is about a proposition of a different kind. I was in my lobby on a Saturday getting the mail when someone whom I knew on sight only, and just barely, asked me if I knew his daughter. I said “No.” He said “wait a minute” and ran up the stairs.

I took my mail and got in the elevator, back up to my apartment.

A couple of days later I was coming home from work and the guy and his daughter were in the hallway. I had seen the daughter around. She was about 20 or 21 at most, very nice looking but not quite attractive. He jogged over and laughed “I missed you the other day!” Or at least that’s why I think he said. He had a very thick accent. It may have been “I pissed you the other day,” but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. I said “sorry” and pressed the elevator button. He said “you know my daughter?” And now I really became curious, but mostly suspicious. I said that I’d seen her around. (I’ll try to get the conversation as close as I can remember.)

GUY- You like her?

ME- I don’t even know her.

GUY- She like you. Why don’t you go out?

The elevator came but I was sticking around for this one.

ME- She’s too young.

GUY- You work hard. Why don’t you two go away for weekend? (And some Russian words to his daughter.)

His daughter was standing about fifteen feet away, somehow managing to look both embarrassed and coquettish at the same time.

ME- I really don’t think so.

Now I was ready to get in the elevator but it had left.

GUY- You go away, go to beach, I pay. Food, room, I give money. (With that he took a huge roll of cash from his pocket and waved it at me, then put it away.)

ME- OK, look, forget it, I’m really not interested.

He put his arm around me. Not only did he not lower his voice as you’d expect, he raised it.

GUY- Don’t worry, she cook, she clean, and how about the sex? (Here I felt so sorry for her.) She’ll do anything! She’s good!(And he looked at her, and she smiled!)

I asked him point blank what the hell he was doing. Very seriously, and now with a lowered voice, he told me that his daughter had to go back to Russia and he wanted to marry her off to an American so she could stay in the country. He’d heard I was a teacher and, because I had a steady city job, thought I could be the one. He told me that he’d pay for everything, rent, food, etc. He again told me that she’d do whatever I wanted when it came to “the sex.” The guy was pimping out his daughter for a green card!

I told him, firmly, that I wasn’t interested. I went upstairs when the elevator mercifully came and eventually they left the building and I never saw them again.

But I’d often wondered what it would be like to have married her. Would I have a dacha in Brighton Beach? Would I come home to fresh meals of borsht and vodka? And what about all the “the sex” the father had promised? I figure that by not marrying her, I saved myself from getting in severe trouble with the Russian mob, with whom this guy was undoubtedly involved. So I may be missing out on vacations on the Volga, but I still have two good strong legs.

Could have been my in-laws…

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A Sailor’s Life for Me! (Classic Rant Repost)

24 Jul

July 24, 2012

This one goes all the way back to 2006. And you know what? Nothing has changed since then.

from September 23, 2006

I’ve always been drawn to the sea. Even as a child, I had sea-water in my veins. This caused a big problem when I was born. I required a series of very dangerous transfusions to replace all that sea-water with actual blood. But I digress.

My family has a strong naval heritage. While Admiral Bradford Jacobson (1898-1953) may be the most prominent member of the Jacobson naval fraternity, he was by no means the first. The first documented sailor Jacobson was Bryce Jacobson, from Scotland in the 15th century. Trust me- it was not easy being a Scottish Jew. Haggis is not kosher, and that’s all anybody ate around there- haggis omelets for breakfast. Haggis on rye for lunch. Haggis fermented into a sort of rum for dinner. It was a real drag. Great-grandpa Bryce enlisted in the navy with the intent of jumping ship in a kosher country. Not finding one, he stayed on board for the next twenty years and eventually died of scurvy.

I have always had an affinity for the ocean. In my room at work I have nautical prints hung and at home a portrait of Lord Nelson hangs above my bed. I learned to swim in the Long Island Sound and the radioactive glow did little to diminish my love of the open water. As a youth, I first went fishing for fluke and then advanced to blues and, later, marlin, by age ten. So it has been a long, deliberate process which has brought me to this decision: I want to be a pirate.

That’s right. A pirate.

“Arrr me mateys! Avast there!” See? I have all the lingo down. Pirates do exist. In Indonesian and Asian waters there exists today a serious problem with piracy that costs the oil industry millions of dollars each year. That is not what I mean. I want to be an eye-patch wearing, stripped shirt sporting, walk-the-plank dude. Why not? Pirates don’t punch in at nine, go home at five. They’re pirates 24/7. Wake up, hang someone from the yardarm. Breakfast, then forty lashes for the cook. Lunch, then spot a Spanish galleon of the port bow, unfurl all sails, prepare the cannons. Dinner, then a cutlass duel and a drink till dawn. Plenty of lusty wenches, lots of treasure to bury, nothing but the open waves and the smell of freedom in the air. No boss to report to. Someone has beef with you, shoot them in the back. Go where you want, do what you want, take what you want. You can be as obnoxious as you want to and offend anyone you want.

Pirates remain the last group that is not politically correct. To be a pirate is to BE someone. To be respected. Walk tall, oh men of the ocean! For you are the last true free men. And that is what I aspire to be.

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