To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (13 page)

It was around then that I learned a thing or two about Martin Luther. During Sunday school we were encouraged to consider Luther a kind of hero, the man who stood up to the pope and took back the Bible on behalf of the people. If I thought less of him
during the brief time I sided with the Catholic Santacroces, I came to understand that Luther’s legacy was no less than America itself, with all its variegated Protestant creeds. In the context of the Jews, however, Luther was no hero. Luther believed that once he reclaimed scripture from the vice of the papacy and unleashed the full power of the Word at last, the Jews would immediately convert en masse. You almost had to admire the man’s giant ballsack. The Jews had not converted in the presence of Jesus, during the oppression of the Romans and the pillage of Jerusalem, inside the fires of the Crusades, or when Europe’s royalty stripped them of their wealth and sent them and their children to die in exile—but, thought Luther, if I hand them their own personal copy of the Gospels, that’ll do the trick. When the Jews failed to convert, he changed his opinion and sat down to write “On the Jews and Their Lies,” the title of which pretty much summed up his true feelings.

I really wanted to ask Connie’s uncle Stuart if he knew how irresponsibly and hatefully Luther had spoken of the Jews and how his writings had set the stage for roughly five centuries of unrepentant anti-Semitism and eventually the Holocaust. I wanted to ask him what he thought of Martin Luther’s outrageous pair of sweaty German balls. But he was too forbidding even then—and that was
before
he sat down beside me at Connie’s sister’s wedding and told me that joke. But I could not just say nothing, not after reading what I’d read about Luther and now seeing what I was seeing, the Plotz family in celebration. Here were all the Jews and their lies, here they were, those “poisonous envenomed worms,” in Luther’s words, gathered together to celebrate Theo’s birthday: Connie’s grandmother Gloria Plotz, blind from macular degeneration but smiling benignly at her grandchildren; her cousin Joel with his booming laugh; the baby sleeping in the arms of her sister
Deborah; and her uncle Ira, who was standing off on his own, eating a cookie. “We are at fault in not slaying them,” Luther had concluded, speaking of people like these: aunts and uncles and cousins, present givers, drinkers of punch. I walked over to Ira.

“I’ve been reading about Martin Luther,” I said to him. He looked at me. “Did you know he wrote a pamphlet called ‘On the Jews and Their Lies’?” He raised his brows and kept them raised while he stared at me, chewing his cookie. “I’ve been reading it.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Yeah,” he said, swallowing. “Why?”

“Because I had never read him before.”

He casually wiped at his beard with a paper napkin as he stared at me.

“He was a serious anti-Semite.”

After a while, he said, “And?”

“And he said terrible things. Look. I jotted some of them down.”

I took out the slips of paper the library had made available, upon which I had written some of Luther’s choicest quotes. I handed them to Ira.

“ ‘Whenever you see or think about a Jew,’ ” read Ira, “ ‘say to yourself as follows: Behold, the mouth that I see there has every Saturday cursed, execrated, and spit upon my dear Lord, Jesus Christ, who has redeemed me with his precious blood; and also prayed and cursed—’ ” He cut himself off and looked at me. “Why did you write this down?”

I’d written it down because I was outraged that such things had ever been written down—that indeed they remained a matter of public record. But here I was writing them down myself on little
scraps of library paper, and carrying them around with me, and taking them out to show people at parties. Suddenly I saw it through Ira’s eyes, and what I saw looked insane.

“You go around with these quotes in your pocket?”

“Not always,” I said.

“Nice quotes,” he said, and handed them back to me. Turning away, he spoke volumes of his opinion of me with just a little effort of his brows.

I could have said or done anything during that time. So it was possible, I thought later, wide-eyed with terror at three in the morning, that I did in fact tell Michael Plotz that joke, possibly even while he was sitting shiva for his mother.

While standing in line to buy cigarettes the morning I saw Sookhart, I noticed a headline on the cover of a celebrity magazine. “Daughn and Taylor Back Together?” it read in big print, and my mind returned to it later that day while I worked on a patient. I didn’t know that Daughn and Taylor had gotten together, to mention nothing of them breaking up, and now, possibly, getting back together again. More troubling still, I didn’t know who Daughn and Taylor were. Daughn and Taylor… I thought to myself, Daughn and Taylor… who are Daughn and Taylor? It was clear that I should know them, given the significant real estate their debatable reconciliation had commanded on the cover of one of the more reputable celebrity magazines. But I didn’t know them, and not knowing them, I realized I was once again out of touch. I would be in touch for a while, and then a headline like “Daughn and Taylor Back Together?” would come along to let me know that I was out of touch again. Why was I so out of touch? Well, I was old, for one. Also, I didn’t engage with the TV shows and movies
and music videos of people like Daughn and Taylor. And I had a hard time finding and streaming the illicit sex tapes of people like Daughn and Taylor. Yet regardless of how little I cared to know about Daughn and Taylor, I felt left out. I now had an urgent need to know who Daughn and Taylor were. At the very least, I thought, I must find out if Daughn is the man in the relationship or if the man is Taylor. You can’t just make assumptions with names like Daughn and Taylor. I felt pretty confident that Daughn was the man, but I thought “Daughn” might be an alternative spelling of “Dawn.” Then Daughn would be the woman and Taylor the man. Unless, it suddenly occurred to me, they were both men, or both women. In this day and age, the first-name-only couples coming under scrutiny on the covers of celebrity magazines don’t always consist strictly of a man and a woman. It could easily be a same-sex couple, like Ellen and Portia. Ellen and Portia I knew. Brad and Angelina I knew. Before Brad and Angelina, I knew Brad and Jen, and before Brad and Jen, I knew Brad and Gwyneth, just as before Tom and Katie, I knew Tom and Nicole, and before Tom and Nicole I knew Tom and Mimi. I also knew Bruce and Demi, Johnny and Kate, and Ben and Jennifer. How many celebrity couples I’d known and how out of date all of them had become! For the people now following Daughn and Taylor, Bruce and Demi were an ancient artifact of the 1980s. The 1980s were thirty years ago. The people now following Daughn and Taylor thought of the 1980s as I used to think of the 1950s. The 1980s had, overnight, become the 1950s. It was unimaginable. I might as well have been wearing a Davy Crockett hat and cowering under my desk for fear of a Soviet attack, according to the people now following Daughn and Taylor. Soon the 2010s would become the 1980s, and no one would remember even Daughn and Taylor, and after that, we’d all
be dead. I had to find out who Daughn and Taylor were immediately, with great haste, my patient be damned. (I was suturing the mandibular gums during a badly needed graft.) I looked over at Abby. Abby would know who Daughn and Taylor were, I thought. I should ask her. But I can’t ask her, not if she’s so intimidated that she can’t even speak to me. No doubt she would just judge me for not knowing who Daughn and Taylor were, when
everyone
knew who Daughn and Taylor were. I could just picture her thinking, “He doesn’t know Daughn and Taylor? He’s so sadly out of touch. He is so sadly old and on his way out and depressing to even think about.” No way I was asking Abby. I’ll just have to sit here, I thought, finish these sutures, and feel the exile of age in America for another fifteen minutes until I can take up the me-machine and get myself back in—

“Dr. O’Rourke?”

It was Connie with her iPad.

“When you get a minute,” she said.

“Connie, it’s killing me,” I said. “Who are Daughn and Taylor?”

She looked at me like I’d just drunk a box of chlorine. “You don’t know Daughn and Taylor?”

“I do and I don’t,” I said.

She told me who they were. They were so minor!

I finished sewing up my gum graft and met her in the hallway.

“I just got a friend request,” she said.

“You mean on Facebook?”

“Yes, on Facebook.”

“Why are you telling
me
? What do I care? Listen, you want my advice? Friends are wonderful. Irreplaceable, really. Probably ultimately better than family. But next time you find yourself flicking through the contacts on your phone, ask yourself how many of those people are really your friends. You’ll find one, maybe
two. And if you really start to scrutinize even those two, you may find that it’s been forever since you last talked, and now, in all likelihood, you’ve drifted apart and have nothing to say to each other. So if you’re asking my opinion, I say decline. Who’s it from?”

She held out the iPad. “You,” she said.

The picture of me on Facebook was another surveillance-grade photo. A telephoto lens had poked its eye through the window of room 3 while I was chairside with a patient.

My name was there, too:
Dr. Paul C. O’Rourke, D.D.S., Manhattan, NY.

Under “Activities and Interests,” it was written “Boston Red Sox.”

The Boston Red Sox, an activity and an interest. Not a devotion to be suffered. Not a solemn vow in the off-season. Not a memorial to a dead man. Not a calling beyond reason. Just an interest. I take an interest in when they play, whether home or away, whether they win or lose—things like that. Maybe read about it in the paper the next morning. Millions of others just like me, taking an interest. Not “Coronaries and Rehabilitations.” Not “Dedications and Forfeitures.” Not “Life and Death.” “Activities and Interests.” This was how it was presented, in terrifying simplicity. What it was all reduced to, the thirty years, and the stupid tears, and every extra inning. An activity and an interest.

I wasn’t just mad about the injustice done to my relationship with the Red Sox. Did I not have other interests? What about the banjo? Indoor lacrosse? Spanish? Before retiring my clubs, I’d paid an ironworks guy to remove three feet of railing from my balcony overlooking the Brooklyn Promenade, and on nights of chronic insomnia, I drove balls into the East River until the Port Authority boat came by with its telescoping light. Where was “river golf” under “Activities and Interests”?

In the summer of 2011, Facebook had only one toll-free number for users and nonusers alike to call if they encountered a problem or wished to voice a concern. The caller was greeted with this helpful message: “Thank you for calling Facebook User Operations. Unfortunately, we do not offer customer service over the phone at this time.”

I pressed a lot of buttons in hope of an extension, a human voice, but got nowhere.

No invention in the world, not the printing press or the telegraph, not the post office or the telephone, had done more to get people communicating than the Internet. But how did one person, the inaudible and insignificant single human voice, communicate with the Internet itself? To whom did it appeal an error? How did it seek redress?

“Why are you calling?” said Connie. “Who calls Facebook?”

“Shouldn’t they have some kind of customer service?”

“They don’t have customers.”

“A hotline? A complaint center? Shouldn’t you be able to pick up the phone and call your friends?”

“Let’s go to the site and see what they suggest,” she said.

“The site!” I cried. “This is outrageous. An activity and an interest! These soul-flattening fuckers!”

“Hey!”

I was screaming in Dolby. She nodded in the direction of the waiting room.

“Calm down.”

“Calm down how?” I whispered.

She looked at the screen a long time. “What is an Ulm?” she asked.

“A what?”

“An Ulm. You’re listed here as an Ulm.”

I looked at the iPad again. Fixated as I’d been on my “Activities and Interests,” I’d missed what “I” had listed as my religious affiliation: Ulm.

“That’s the thing Frushtick called me!”

“Who?”

“My patient! The guy who registered the website.”

“The one who said he was leaving for Israel?”

“He called himself an Ulm. He said I was one, too.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know, but they’re going to think I am one.”

“Who is?”

“Anyone. Everyone. I’ve lost control, Connie. I’m helpless. Look at this! They’ve hijacked my life!”

“Just online,” she said.

I thought about the difference between my life and my life online.

“You can’t opt out,” I said.

“Opt out?”

“I tried to opt out, but you can’t opt out. Not anymore. I’m in it,” I said, looking down at my Facebook page. “And this is what I am.”

I called Talsman, who referred me to someone specializing in cyberlaw.

Then I wrote to Seir Design, forgoing anger, threats, promises of retaliation, for an appeal to the heart.

I soon received this reply, only the second one, and much like the first.

I called Sookhart. He’d heard of Ulm, Germany, birthplace of Albert Einstein. But an ancient people descended from the Amalekites? He was doubtful.

“A second Semitic clan surviving from biblical times…” He trailed off. “I just don’t find it very likely.”

I asked him if he’d found out anything about this holy book, the Cantaveticles.

“I had a cursory look,” he said. “There’s nothing online, and I’ve never heard of it. I’ve made a few inquiries on your behalf, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. I will give you this, though,” he added. “It almost sounds like something real.”

Late in the day I sat down chairside with a new patient who immediately informed me of his aversion to pain. We all have an aversion to pain, he said, but his was greater than most. As a rule he didn’t go to the dentist. The plastic doohickeys we put in his mouth for the X-rays were too much to bear, and he never let anyone clean or polish his teeth for fear of the pain. He just wanted to open his mouth, have me shine a light into it and assure him that he didn’t have mouth cancer. He had woken up a few months prior with what he thought was a canker sore or some other temporary whatever, which he expected to go away as mysteriously as it had appeared, but it had not gone away. It may have even grown some, he thought, over the days and weeks he’d been worrying it with his tongue. When I asked him exactly how many months he had been aware of the growth, he said a total of maybe six or seven. “Okay,”
I said, “let’s have a look.” But he didn’t open his mouth. I’d never had anyone not open his mouth after I’d said, “Okay, let’s have a look.” He even sort of locked his jaw and pursed his lips and commenced to stare at me as if we had just met, sweaty and sexually deprived, in the middle of a ring. “I hope I’ve made myself clear,” he said. “I’m not here to see a dentist. I don’t give a damn if I have plaque buildup or gingivitis. I know it’s a wreck in there. You’ll want to do this and that. I don’t care. That’s the number one thing I want you to understand. I do not tolerate even the smallest bit of pain. And I don’t buy the anesthesia argument, either. After the anesthesia wears off, there’s pain, and I really, really can’t tolerate it. Is that absolutely clear?”