Rat Bohemia Read Free Page B

mother, Louisa Rosenthal Weems, was one of those hollowed-out blonde beauties who made their way to New York via Thereisenstadt and then a displaced persons’ camp. There are a lot of them still walking around. I see them on the subways now and then. But, in Jackson Heights where I grew up, they were a dime a dozen.
    My mother smoked four packages of Chesterfields a day and died of cancer when I was ten. All my memories of her are stained nicotine yellow and accompanied by a deep, painful, hacking cough. Officially, I’ve given up on smoking. I rarely buy a pack. But some days I just do it. The privacy of a good smoke on a cold day.
    Then, at night, I’ll lie in bed clutching my breasts, my lungs, that hold in my chest where the burning smoke sits. My mind rolls over as I beg for redemption.
    When I pray, I pray to the Jewish God. I pray to the patriarchal Got—not an energy or spirit—but that old white man with a beard sitting up there deciding things. My mother prayed to him. My grandmother prayed to him. And, as far as I am concerned, that is reason enough. We exist together in that moment of panic where my thoughts turn up to the sky.
    Judaism isn’t that hard to understand. It all boils down to a few basic principles. There is one God. That is sort of the main belief. Second, but also important, is the idea that you can’t worship things. You can’t bow down before idols. I’m not saying that I think
this way of looking at things is the only or best way. But it is my burden and my gift because I inherited it from my mother. I don’t care to know what the reason is that I am gay. But when it comes to being a Jew who only has one God, I know for sure that I was born that way.
    My first job was cashier. Then I cleaned up a Catholic school cafeteria. All those girls in green plaid kilts with dusty white skin and matching white food. Instant mashed potatoes. Dishes of mayonnaise. A glass of milk. Instant vanilla pudding. By senior year I started working at J. Chuckles on Forty-second Street in Manhattan. There I earned enough money to buy a camel’s hair coat.
    My mother, Louisa Rosenthal, was born in Bremen and lost everything during the war. I, Rita, am named for her mother. My brother Howie is named for her father and my older brother Sam is named for her brother. Rest in peace.
    She married my dad, a Catholic. But my mother was a person who could not care about things like propriety. She just went through the motions. What could the neighbors do to her now?
    â€œYour mother liked the worst,” my dad said a hundred thousand times. “She liked bratwurst, teawurst, and knockwurst.”
    But he pronounced it “woist” like Huntz Hall in those old Dead End Kids movies. It is the way most white people in Queens actually talk.
    My mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. She had that fragile, German, movie-star sensuality. She had blue eyes and soft lips. Her mouth was shapely. Her hair was fine and bright. But her eyes were nothing, flat. That worked, though, for the completed beautiful victim look.
    I have a photograph of her in a suit with shoulder pads, when
she first came to New York and worked as a clerk at Woolworth’s. She had thick lipstick and pale empty eyes. On the way to work some fashion photographer saw her on the bus and invited her into his studio to take a few pictures. Her face was slightly twisted. She held a sultry cigarette.
    â€œYour mother was like Marilyn Monroe,” my father said. “A real doll.”
    There are a few other photographs. Louisa and Eddie at Niagara Falls. Louisa and Eddie at Rockaway Beach. Louisa and Eddie eating a Kitchen Sink ice cream sundae at Jahn’s Ice Cream Parlour. The kids are in that one too. Me, age three, sitting on my father’s lap. Sam, age seven, happy, benign, acting just the way kids are supposed to act. Howie, age ten, looking to the side at the wrong moment, ice cream all