I hate blind dates.
I hate them because they destroy your peace of mind. They do it slowly–in stop motion, frame-by-frame detail–because they are built from the stuff of forever, those creeping seconds of eternity that reshape the ghost of time until it becomes, for all practical purposes, immovable. It is five years old again: not a sleepy-eyed, stocking-footed, Santa-Claus-is-coming-to-town five, but a mischievous, unruly, kill-the-baby-sitter five; a tow-headed, freckle-flecked, rambunctious collection of quantifiable units with big puddles of molasses that need jumping into. And if time and space are truly cut from the same cloth, those youthful hours flatten out into a one-lane dirt road across South Dakota with a flat tire, bad shocks, and no air-conditioning. Next rest area 437 miles.
You perhaps disagree, being unfamiliar with this particular form of ritualistic torture. Disagree away. It won’t save you.
Your heart will still shiver threads of lightning down your spine, and your tongue will still cleave helplessly to itself, writhing in slurred and mumble-toothed agony in the sudden enameled desert of your mouth. Simple facts will cunningly sidestep your mnemonic lasso and glide away into that hazy, blue-grey netherplace of the brain, that nine-tenths of untapped potential which keeps the hypothalamus warm and dry. Huge, nebulous gouts of stupidity will infiltrate your speech centers and make themselves at home. Your personality will cease to exist.
There is no peace of mind in this. It is a ride on Dante’s first-class, light speed, one-way bullet train to hell; exact change only, no refunds, please remain seated, and goodnight Gracie. This is a terror which cannot be bribed, threatened, tricked, or trapped. It must be avoided. Turn a deaf ear to the smoky mutterings of the serpent and his leaden tongue. Read a good book instead. Meditate. Take up archery. But never, ever, go on a blind date.
Unless her name is Katryzna.
• • •
Ira was born December 6, 1896. He didn’t find out what his name was until thirty-two years later. That was 1928, just one year before the Crash. It was the 1928 of Prohibition, Eliott Ness, and big-band jazz. It was a 1928 which didn’t know that George Gershwin–Ira’s genius kid brother–had only nine years to live. Ira didn’t know either. On March 11, he left for Europe. And his name was Israel.
No, I’m serious.
In the process of acquiring a passport for his first voyage overseas, Ira was astonished to discover that he was, in fact, named after the Jewish ancestral homeland. Not that the name itself was entirely inappropriate–both of his parents were first-generation Russian immigrant Jews–but you’d think, over the course of thirty-two years, somebody could have at least mentioned it.
Ira asked his father, Morris, about the oversight.
"Never came up," Morris told him, responding with his typical economy of speech. English was Morris’ third language; he didn’t have time to fool around with delicate grammar and complicated sentence structure. He said what he meant and then he shut up. It was a quality many admired. Maurice Ravel, upon meeting the elder Gershwin at one of George’s frequent parties, turned to a nearby Ira and whispered, "It is a wise tongue which keeps its own counsel." Unfortunately, he whispered it in French, so Ira nodded politely and pointed him towards the nearest bathroom.
Morris didn’t notice. He was too busy conserving himself, preparing to say very little if the need suddenly arose. George and Ira were used to this. Often when they were children, their father would go for days without uttering a single word in English. Instead, he would speak in thick, heavy torrents of Russian. They never knew what the hell he was saying, but they loved him anyway.
Ira’s relationship with his father was particularly close. While George was out tearing around New York’s lower East Side with other loud, fearless immigrant kids, Ira stayed at home and read cheap, overwritten detective novels. Morris, who had never had much in the way of an education, encouraged this unexpected pursuit of literacy. Whenever one of his many business ventures wasn’t losing money, he would stop at the corner bookstore and pick out a nickel paperback to bring home for Ira (usually it wasn’t a detective novel, but everything was cheap and overwritten, so it didn’t make much difference). Each book was quickly devoured, leaving impossible, heroic adventures whirling around behind Ira’s shining eyes. And when these fantastic visions had dimmed, obscured by the narrow, clotheslined, back-alley existence of city life, Ira would beg his father to throw the paper aside and steal away with him to the carney.
The supernatural spark which burned through those haphazard rows of brilliantly painted tents and gaunt sideshow booths had caught fire in Ira’s blood. He would stare for hours at the creaking Ferris wheel deathtraps and the skillfully raucous con artists who plucked their marks effortlessly, let them drift away, then reeled them back and plucked them again. He would slip his hand into his father’s to anchor himself against the mindless flow of the crowd, and absorb the sly, seductive thrill of gypsy magic. Morris would buy cotton candy–great, swirling mounds of faerie-spun sugar–and Ira would savor the forbidden treat with such delight that he made a sticky-sweet crystal disaster of himself and everything he touched. But people smiled at him as they passed, and Morris smiled back for both of them because Ira was someplace else, someplace where the gods were young and the clouds were wild and the stars never slept at night. And when the sun had burned itself out at the edge of dusk, they would walk home together happily in the darkness, and Ira’s mother, Rose, would scold them gently before hurrying her son off to bed.
Rose was a woman who knew what she wanted for her children, and it had nothing to do with traveling carnivals. She wanted her sons to be successful, well educated, and unmistakably cultured. So when Ira was fourteen, Rose decided it was time for him to learn something about music. She persuaded Morris to lay off the horses long enough for them to buy a piano, and when it arrived she hired Miss Green, the neighborhood musician, to teach Ira how to play.
Nice try, but wrong brother.
It was George–the giant of Tin Pan Alley, the American in Paris, the New World maestro–who mastered the piano. Ira never even learned to sight-read. Instead, he blazed through high school and enrolled at City College of New York to prepare for a teaching career. He dropped out after three semesters, unable to fathom the startling complexities of integral calculus. For the next several years, he worked odd jobs around the city and read everything he could get his hands on. Then, in 1919, he joined a traveling carnival.
His mother was hardly pleased. But Morris smiled secretly and assured her that it was just a phase. And, of course, it was. Ira spent a little over eight months working as secretary-treasurer for Lagg’s Great Empire Shows before coming back to New York.
He came back a lyricist.
Don’t look so surprised–it was bound to happen. A childhood of books and dreams and wild-eyed enchantment had turned Ira into a pretty damn good writer. So good in fact, that thirteen years later he won the Pulitzer Prize. But in the meantime, he got married.
• • •
Chip Howland
howland@skypoint.com