Insult as Love

Reckoning with Auggie.  “The Adventures” is underway and I’ve just met Einhorn.  That means the “idiot” son George had just put away, left crying in the institution and I suppose that was the scene that unpredictably drew my attention to the fact that I was reading something masterful.

The machinations of his grandmother: the Tolstoy reading, Trotsky admiring, fragile grip on power, matriarch from Odessa; she had me interested but certainly not lassoed.  I’m at twenty-thousand feet and the double espresso I had before boarding was no match for the curved fingers of sleep in a sitting chair with a pillow behind my back.  Reading anything when you’re tired is a chore but trying to make sense of something thick and demanding when you’ve read a passage two and now three and four times, popping up to consciousness like a bobber, there isn’t any fun and even less meaning in it.

Trying to imagine Chicago in the 1930’s the only thing I could do was populate the place in the stage set I’ve otherwise always peopled with the only other humans I really knew from that time.  I fancy my maternal grandmother in this world.  Augie’s grandmother’s scowl must be her scowl.  The hard luck kids who cheat and punch each other in the nose, must been those kids I conceive of when I recall stories of the students she once taught.  It would have been the same tough Depression era pugilism.  I know what Chicago actually looks like in this century.  But that’s not what I imagined.

The rhythm of Augie's grandmother’s cruel tirades, took time to adjust to.  This couldn’t match anyone I knew well who also shared the earth at that time.  And, in coordination with his passing a few weeks back I admit I applied the sharp bald smile of Don Rickles bobbing like a viper as a paste-on for her visage with this tough, mean, urban Jewish cadence of insult as love.

Simple, like George, maybe I needed someone to care about before I cared much.  I wouldn’t have cared for him either but for his first and only moment of realization in the story.  He knows he’s being left alone at the home.  And the mother knows she’s now doing something indefensible and finite and Auggie who otherwise simply observes and endures now feels horribly sad and at this point I acknowledge that I am interested in him.

Monday, 04/24/17