The Circumcision of James Buttonwood

Next time I met Buttonwood, he was early bartender in a café on Pico called the She's Inn. He bought me a drink but wouldn't let me reciprocate. "To steal anything on this job, you got to stay sober," he claimed. And besides, the customers were a Christian example. "They will come in here about eight in the morning, which is about as early as they can get to the Owl Drugstore and buy their cough medicine, and they will sit down and drink Western beer straight out of the can, and just about half of the time without bothering to open it."

I made a small noise in my chest, which in Jimmy's world was the sound of wild applause. He mopped the bar with an ancient undershirt, sucked at a tender tooth and leaned toward me. He had an upcounty, sunburned and Cherokee face, with frozen blue eyes and half-dollar cheekbones and that scar across the left ear, as if it had been slashed, lost, found and sewed back on again, though not quite in the original position. He spoke, but his lips didn't move, so dark and solemn was his next confidence.

"Ever tell and relate to you," said Buttonwood, "how I come to be a Jew?"

• • •

It all happened the year he was so flat broke that he was forced to live in a room about the size of an abandoned Santa Fe railway station; which, in fact, is exactly what it was. This part of the old Santa Fe track, he went on to explain, was not too far from the Pacific Ocean, which made it a convenient place to wash one's feet and brush one's teeth, not necessarily at the same time. "They didn't mind if I stayed there. It was cheaper than a night watchman." But not much, because he was using the station for firewood and aimed to sleep there only till the halfway mark, which was till he had torn down about one half to warm the other half. "There's nothing in the world--have you noticed?--that takes more firewood than a pail of clam chowder." The great coarse sandy clams he dug (continued on page 301)Circumcision of James Buttonwood(continued on page 187) up from a little-frequented part of the beach that said, every 100 yards, Danger firing range U.S. Marines. "I figured if I stayed in between the signs, I was safe."

The necessary potatoes he borrowed from a supermarket in West Pismo, California, which, almost unknown to itself, was Buttonwood's favorite store. The spuds were only of medium size, because Jimmy, a man of delicate conscience, took only what he could hide in his armpits and which he could, therefore, hold firmly while he limped and palsied his way out past the electric door. "Did you know that nobody will look a cripple in the eye?"

I admitted that I didn't, and it was a useful fact, but if he had such success as a cripple, why did he have to become a Jew?

"Pure bad luck," said Buttonwood. One of his vices, and he had several, was a compulsive curiosity that forced him to read all signs, billboards, posters, throwaways, lost library books and inscriptions penciled on the privy walls of Standard Oil stations, particularly if they rhymed. So, for him, one of the great libraries of the world was the free bulletin board outside the supermarket. One evening, right under a notice offering a used baby carriage in exchange for prostate massage by a "young technician," there was this modest card, inquiring if there wasn't an altruistic person willing to teach Sunday school at the Jewish Center of West Pismo, California.

"That really threw me into next week," said Buttonwood. "Because I had always figured the Hebrews had staked out Saturday for their own, it wasn't used at the time, anyhow." He didn't, as yet, know what altruism was; but the notice began to work on his mind. He had visions of becoming a useful member of society for a short while, particularly as he thought there could be no better hideaway than teaching Scripture while he was waiting out the statute of limitations on a charge of technical rape in Calumet City. Illinois--as if anyone in his right mind would or, indeed, could rape anybody in Calumet City, Illinois.

"But how in the hell could I--painlessly, that is--pass myself off as a genuine Hebe?"

He figured the cheap way was to wear glasses, so he lifted a loose pair from a shop in Pismo that was called Clothing Used by the Stars, Including TV Personalities. "I wore those hornrimmed gonkers for a mean and miserable week," trying to get used to the effect, which was sickening. Their previous owner had apparently had a borderline case of binocular astigmatism, and the specs corrected this defect with considerable vigor. Most people remained simply foreshortened, especially if they had the decency to remain at a distance. But if they came forward, they swelled as if they were pregnant. "It made me yearn to lean right forward and throw up my cud," said Jimmy. However, he reckoned that if the Jews could endure this type of horn-rimmed torture for well past 5000 years, he could learn to wrestle with it till he got his first check.

Two days later, in a state of fair equilibrium, he got himself to the West Pismo Jewish Center, a great blob of cream-colored cement, and took the elevator to room 807. Actually, it was the second floor, but the place had been upnumbered to give the Center more prestige. Both the Committee for Folk Culture and the Bureau for the Critique of Traditional Values, since they had exactly the same personnel, had decided to sacrifice personal comfort and occupy the same quarters. Jimmy took off his hat and sat down on one of the three wooden folding chairs; it happened to be the one, according to the brass plate modestly fixed to the back, contributed entirely by Local 349B. Journeymen Kosher Picklers of United States and Canada.

The secretary, who was eating a raisin bun, offered him a large piece, studded with raisins, which he immediately devoured. It was the first unpiscatorial food he'd had in many months and his savage, direct attack rather intrigued the secretary. She had long, dark hair, with an artificial silver streak she would not normally have had for another 30 years and was given to biting her lower lip, especially when she was sexually interested, "which was generally." She leaned her sweater toward him at an intoxicating angle, close enough to tickle his wrist with pale-pink fuzz; and while he was inhaling and recovering, she asked him how to spell grievance and, after that, disgusted. She was typing a letter addressed, it would seem, to some Very Much Higher Committee. Her name, she told him, was Sharon Weiss; and his name, he suddenly decided, was Buttonholtz; the Holtz part of it he got from a bronze plaque in grateful acknowledgment to the man who had installed the vent that was the subject of Sharon's letter: "Be it noticed, I have a tendency to allergy"--she misspelled the word too hideously to record here--"and it is no help to have this air conditioner blowing right straight down my neck!" Buttonwood told me it was about the only time in his life he wished he were an air conditioner.

Meanwhile, some sort of anguished quarrel was going on in the office just beyond Sharon. Buttonwood thought they were beating up on one another, but Sharon Weiss said the Committee (or was it the Bureau?) was simply trying to decide where to go to lunch. For some reason, this depressed the hell out of Buttonwood. He got up to leave, but Sharon hissed at him to sit down, bit her lower lip, got on the intercom and announced that Mr. Buttonholtz, the new Sunday-school teacher, was waiting to meet the members. Nothing happened.

Sharon went on typing and out of kindness and, perhaps, attraction, would occasionally ask him to lick an envelope, on account of her allergy.

About one half hour later, several members, all of them small men with great shocks of white hair, opened the door, frowned at him, closed the door, opened it again, nodded to him, closed the door once more and, through the shut door, invited him to come in. Buttonwood did nothing; he was too scared; but no one seemed to notice his disobedience.

The Committee and/or the Bureau consisted of anywhere from three to eleven persons; impossible for Buttonwood to reckon how many, for they kept getting up and going on various errands, answering--and at some length--phones that were not for them, or simply appearing at the inner door with several paper cups of coffee with cream, which they offered to Buttonwood with hisses, because they were so hot. "The Jews are a very unselfish people when it comes to coffee with cream," said Buttonwood.

Sharon snapped on the intercom and shouted, "This man has been waiting here for exactly two hours!" At which an exceptionally short, brisk man, with a magnificent mane of curly while hair, scarlet tie loosened at the collar and a chest as massive as a gorilla's, came out and shook Buttonwood's hand with painful sincerity. "I cannot tell you, sir, how very happy we are to have you on the staff."

Buttonwood, a little shocked at finding himself hired before they had checked with the local police, inquired the man's name. "My name, O! My name! After this morning, my name is Schlimazel!" He brushed several flecks of imaginary dust off his shoulders, then did the same for Buttonwood. "Our previous teacher, the Honorable Mr. J. Victor Kapell, judge of the municipal court, which fortunately he didn't work Sundays, he fell sick with gall bladder, the human person is a very delicate machine." He added that as soon as the judge was better, they were going to have a banquet for him. "We don't thank our people enough. I include myself." With all this talk of ingratitude, it became quite plain to Buttonwood that his salary was nil.

Furthermore, that he was also expected to coach basketball, which was convenient, since all classes met in the gymnasium, anyway--at least until the Monster Jubilee Building Fund got around to plastering the Albert Einstein Annex.

Buttonwood was just writing out his letter of resignation, mentally speaking, when the phone rang on Sharon's desk. Schlimazel seized it triumphantly; and while it still rang, he said, "Why is it, wherever I go, they trackme down, not a moment's rest, this is me, to whom do I speak?" and without pausing, he handed it to Buttonwood. "A certain Mrs. Holtz," said he, "has an ethical question. So you be the expert and tell her to go to hell, will you please?"

Buttonwood found himself with two pieces of phone in his hands. He put them on Sharon's desk and waited until they stopped screaming. Then he said, in his best native drawl, "Yes, ma'am?"

"I'm very upset, I'm very," said the lady.

Buttonwood, out of a lifelong experience with upset ladies, told her to lie down and suck on a piece of Arizona lemon. She said, "Men, they are really something!"

Buttonwood agreed with her. "You wouldn't want it otherwise," he said.

She grew a lot calmer at this reassurance. "They are really something, they are," she told him. And she asked him, did he want to go to work for her, evenings, that is?

"Being I had two jobs locked up already, both of them highly virtuous--had to be, as they were highly unpaid--and being I looked to be the highest unpaid voluntary Hebrew in West Pismo, I figured a little monetary sin would do no harm. So I kind of leaped at the lady's offer. But I leaped slowly. Asked her how much per hour, including travel time, she was prepared to pay. She opened with two dollars and I hit her with five dollars. She thought for about one bat of an eyelash and compromised on five dollars plus coffee. She didn't mention cream, but I didn't press her on that one. I'm about to tell you, I was kind of scared. I couldn't imagine--and, what's worse, she wouldn't tell me on the phone--what in the hell was I supposed to do that could possibly be worth five dollars an hour?"

• • •

Buttonwood was five minutes late to the Sunday-morning junior Bible-study class. That was a mistake. Because no one, least of all the paying pupils, would think of arriving anywhere on time. He sat under an empty basket in an empty gymnasium, absolutely alone, until he began to think that he was a victim of his Jewish glasses and that if he took them off, this whole thing would quietly go away.

About a quarter of ten or thereabouts, some dozen students, aged nine to twelve, wearing dark suits, ties, hats, and glasses too large for their faces, had each unfolded a chair and sat around Buttonwood in a circle, from which it was impossible, now, to escape. Jimmy always, at a time of crisis, astonished himself; he had a lifelong propensity for doing the right thing at the wrong time; and this so confused the issue that he was able to escape unscratched. Now he remembered, out of his dusty childhood, a verse from Colossians and took it as his text; it was about the Second Coming of Christ. Little by little, Buttonwood warmed to his subject. He shouted, he whispered, he got down on his knees and pounded the newly varnished floor. The boys were pretty fascinated. They all agreed this was about the most highly interesting Sunday-school class they had had in several weeks. About an hour later, someone said, "Amen, brother! Tell it like it is!" His young audience swiveled around to look at the interruption.

Three dark, bearded young men, wearing black ankle-length Naugahyde coats, black fezzes with red tassels and carrying identical black attaché cases, came marching up toward him, diagonally, across the whole length of the basketball court.

The fact was, the Jewish Center was conveniently located in an area of West Pismo that was 57.62-percent black. The three young fezzes were the Committee of Resistance to Alien Power, a title chosen for its snappy abbreviation. They said they were black peasants, and while their strategic objective was secession from a sick United States, their tactical objective, they explained, was to have the West Pismo Jewish Center turned over to an ad hoc cabal. To prove they were right, they opened their attaché cases and showed him the contents. One held a snub .38 in blue oxide and the two others were ordinary Winchester single shotguns, but cut down to the firing chamber.

Jimmy got up on a folding chair, gave a Cherokee hand salute, said he agreed with them down to the last honkie and explained that any white blood he might appear to have was due to an assault near Window Rock on his poor old grandma, by an imperialistic cowboy by the name of Scott. Furthermore, he pulled out his shirt and showed them the hereditary scar where one of Custer's honkie bullets had slit open his grandpa's stomach. "Didn't hurt him one little bit. He could digest a Federal honkie bullet about as fast as a Mexican pinto bean and with about the same results." And further, as the sole representative in West Pismo of an oppressed minority, he proposed, singlehanded, to turn over the basketball court to any black boy, over six feet tall, who could loop a free throw nine out of ten.

The parley ended with the arrival of Sharon Weiss through the upstairs door. She came down each stair from the balcony in the same Irish sweater and black plastic skirt. In a state of dreamy resentment, she bit her lip at Jimmy Butlonwood and told him that Mrs. Holtz had called three times, and her advice to him was pay no attention, thank you.

"That ol' Sharon Weiss," said Buttonwood. "She had two of everything."

• • •

Mrs. Holtz, when he went to see her, had a small, blue monster in a cage, who, if you approached it with sweet words, would come muttering lo the bars; and if you proffered it a friendly finger, would open it to the bone for you. Mrs. Holtz said it was a boy, she knew that because it had a blue beak. She said, "And furthermore, he's fallen in love with me, he's fallen." And she smiled at Jimmy, very briefly. She said she couldn't get him to eat a thing, because when she opened the cage to fill its little plastic bin, he would attack Mrs. Holtz' hand, dragging its tail over her knuckles, leaving a love offering of some pale seminal fluid. She would pull back her hand in fury. "He's such a naughty boy!" And the bird would get only those few millet seeds that were flung to one side in the loving, biting encounter.

Jimmy looked at Mrs. Holtz' hand; it was knobby, with swollen tendons and a hollow wrist, which she had got, she said, wearing herself to the bone as a bookkeeper for her ex-husband, may he perish in hell, "which I doubt if they'll even take him." Her nails were silver and as long as talons, and Jimmy suddenly understood why the parakeet thought she was a bird. He borrowed her lipstick, painted a face on his bent forefinger and thumb and, making noises like a man, entered the cage and filled the box. The bird, after retreating in horror, muttered instructions to its own image on the brass floor and, when the intruder was gone, flung itself triumphantly on the food and began to cat like a feathered maniac.

Mrs. Holtz watched with tears spilling over the ledges of her lower lids. "Oh, you got a head on your shoulders, you got a head," and she fed Jimmy everything she could find in the fridge at such short notice: lamb chops, boiled beef, lentil soup, stuffed derma, cooked prunes with apricots, cheese knishes, fricassee of lung, raw potato pancakes with fried onion and a soup plate of ptcha--a curiously filling concoction of garlic, chicken feet and little unborn eggs. Jimmy ate and drank from one end of the plastic kitchen table to the other. With his paranoid Jewish glasses, the front of every plate seemed enormous, while the back receded to infinity. Far, far in the background, Mrs. Holtz' lovesick bird ran up and down its wooden perch, bowing and screeching with jealousy; while in the foreground, the object of the creature's impossible affection kept opening lukewarm cans of creamed corn, garbanzo beans and, for an exotic touch. Italian stewed tomatoes. Stupefied with all these calories, washed down, it was true, with No-Cal cherry soda, Jimmy pulled himself to his feet and began to clear the table of all its hideous carnage. So far, nobody, to his knowledge, had said a word about what he was expected to do for his five dollars per hour.

Finally, Mrs. Holtz said, "Jimmy, Jimmy, what a very attractive name, why not, it belongs to a very attractive person, nessie pa?" And she smiled at him through the enormous cloud of steam that rose from the cup of tea she was putting before him, with her terrible, perfect teeth. It struck him, suddenly, that what Mrs. Holtz had in mind was some monstrous, acrobatic perversion. "Sit down, Jimmy boy, sit, sit," and though he obeyed, the command confirmed his worst fears. He began to put absolute mental limits to what he would do for five dollars an hour, which, come to think of it, was pretty poor pay.

Mrs. Holtz walked up and down, rattling dishes and scraping silverware off on fellow silverware. Obviously, she was having a lot of trouble expressing her desires; it could be that it was something so dreadful and fantastic that not even the Germans had a name for it.

She wept, she took two aspirins and wept some more. Then she brought out a manila envelope stuck with rolls of Scotch tape and said, "Here is my grave full of memories, here is." It contained nine different postcards Mr. Holtz had sent her from New Orleans, one every day, except the hotel clerk made a mistake and sent them all in the same mail. So now the trial was coming up on the 15th of May, and he was so insulted when she sued for divorce that he moved out of the house and never came back. And she was absolutely sure he had gone to live with his bookkeeper, by whom he already had three redheaded children over the years, but how to prove it?

So she wanted Jimmy Buttonwood to follow Mr. Holtz every evening he left the shop and report to her where he went and whom he saw, and she would give him "a Polaroid camera with flash attachment for your very own, plus the use of Mr. Holtz' car, which he left in the garage, a Polaroid," Jimmy kind of doubted the ethics of tailing a man with his own car, but he figured, what the hell, he was in no financial position to be struck down by conscience.

"Could you show me a picture of this husband you claim to have had?" asked Jimmy politely. She dug out a clipping from the West Pismo Brotherhood Bulletin & Sholom Aleichem Messenger: It was a vigorous, square-faced man getting a plaque just slightly smaller than he was. It was also, no doubt of it, Mr. Schlimazel: the founder and president and sole owner of Holtz Holtz-Ale Plumbing--Your sanitary worries are over.

The next night, with advance pay in his pocket and a gut distended beyond recognition by another of Mrs.Holtz' impromptu banquets, he squeezed himself behind the steering wheel of Mrs. Holtz' husband's car and drove off, with a horrible noise, to shadow him. Age and mismanagement had given this 1939 Hudson convertible a neurosis that can only be described as excruciating. It groaned as soon as it was touched; the turn of the ignition key drove its putative six-cylinder engine into explosive hysterics; the gearbox was made of coarse gravel, connected with barbed wire, and at every shift these elements performed atrocious mayhem upon one another; forced to take to the road, the car screamed with apprehension at every turn of the ramshackle steering wheel; in short, it was the ideal vehicle for the amateur detective, for any normal suspect would think he was being tailed by a monster out of the cinematic deep and flee to the nearest shrink to have his nerves scraped clean again.

Mr. Holtz, he was bitterly informed, spent his wife's community property at a joint up the coast called the Bar None, which featured modern country music, continuously (if the music stopped, even for five minutes, the customers drifted home, the silence in their heads was that ghastly), played by an all-girl instant topless band, known as the Four Milkmaids but mentioned locally by a title that featured exactly double that particular numeral.

Buttonwood never made it. About three miles out of West Pismo, the left front wheel snapped off as he was going round a right-handed switchback; there was a solid rock cliff on the right and Buttonwood, last descendant of a long line of deputy sheriffs, would have been crushed into a bloody parfait if the brakes, perhaps in sympathy, hadn't locked. The car turned over twice, and Buttonwood got out, upside down. His glasses were intact, so he deduced, somewhat illogically, that he was still alive. Some time later, as he was trying to light a cigarette with two stones, a poultry truck slammed sideways into the ex-Hudson, releasing about 2000 baby ducks, who, because of his tattered white shirt and windy hair, thought Buttonwood was their mother. In the next half hour, four other vehicles came round the dark curve and joined, with a horrid splintering of glass and chromium plate. Buttonwood's party. The 1939 Hudson, afire by this time, was bulldozed down the slope at the left, where it went hissing into the cool waters of the Pacific. It landed on all four stumps. "They don't make cars like that anymore," said Buttonwood.

Buttonwood, though, never gave up his sleuthing job. He had no idea where Mr. Holtz was, but he would phone in imaginary details to Mrs. Holtz, who was tremendously impressed; for without the nasty restriction of truth, Buttonwood was able to give Mr. Holtz' infidelity a much more lurid, dramatic and disgusting development. Meantime, perhaps to pass the time, he and Sharon Weiss would drive out to the scene of the great accident, slide down the loose gravel and snuggle inside the salty ruins of Mr. Holtz' old Hudson. It commanded a nice view of the moonlit sea. "Frustration Motel," said Buttonwood.

Jimmy would start his courtship, he told me, something as follows: "Sharon, honeybee! How about a real kiss this time around?"

To which Sharon would reply: "Oh, my goodness, thanks for the Sue Jess Chee On, but you know my rule. I stop at the count of five. Sharon, the C. P. A. of sex, that's me."

"What do I have to do to get me a six-count kiss?"

"Say you love me."

"I adore you."

"That's not the same thing and you know it."

"Oh, it was real struggle buggy," said Buttonwood. "These Jewish girls are born with a very strong left hand."

• • •

About the fifth time out, on a Wednesday evening, to be precise, when any decent American-Jewish date would be taking Sharon to a dinner dance and a foreign movie so as to give them a little inspiration for their premarital wrestling match. Jimmy B. and Sharon Weiss were listening to the ocean, which is what this primitive Hudson had instead of the normal four-track cartridge stereo, when a hand loomed forward out of the rolling fog and rapped at what was left of the roof. Jimmy took a tire iron out of the side pocket and rolled down the busted glass about two inches.

Mr. Holtz had parked his Holtz-Ale truck up on the Coast Highway; he had a wax bag in one hand--which contained two fat hamburgers on buns, one with, one without. He said, "You are breaking my heart, you son of a gun, hello, Sharon, sweetie, I want to prove to you that Holtz of Holtz Holtz-Ale does not bear a grudge, who wants the with-onions? Nobody? Sharon, Sharon, you should be ashamed to let your boyfriend here to persecute me in this manner, does he realize he is making an enemy of one of the, if not the, biggest givers ever known to the Jewish Center of West Pismo in recent years? So let us be friends, OK?"

He came and sat in the front seat of the demolished car with them. It seemed a bit too intimate to Jimmy, but Sharon didn't seem to mind. She put on fresh lipstick and began to devour both hamburgers, biting first one, then the other. "I'm just a hungry chile," she said. The two men scowled at each other, listening to the spray against the front axle, as the world turned and the tide came slowly in.

At last, Mr. Holtz belched out of the very depth of his misery and muttered that he knew who put Buttonwood up to doing this dirty job, and wasn't this a bitch, spending a man's own alimony to spy on him? He said, "You see? I am very sensitive when it comes to money. I don't mind so much when I owe money myself, but I simply can't stand when other people owe money to me."

Sharon said, "Mrs. Holtz is not interested in you." She leaned across the broken steering wheel and said, "Mr. Holtz, you have missed the boat. She's interested in Jimmy."

Mr. Holtz looked at Buttonwood and Buttonwood looked at his beer. He admitted he might have grinned a little, too, which was a mistake. Sharon said, "Mrs. Holtz simply wanted to get laid."

This remark made Mr. Holtz sad. Tears came to his large, bloodshot eyes, and he said. "Well, well. Sex is a study in itself." He blew his nose in a handkerchief, which he afterward showed Jimmy with some pride, for these were pure Irish linen with rolled edges and hand embroidery that carried the following message: If Your Nose Leaks, Don't Use Me, Call Holtz-Ale Plumbing. These had been made up for him especially by Mrs. Holtz not six months ago, and here she was suing for divorce. Suddenly, he began to sob; next week--the 23rd, to be exact--was the 17th anniversary of their marriage; the nuptial arch had been covered with pink flowers; "she loves pink, that momser"; the hotel room at Atlantic City looked right out on the boardwalk; it cost a fortune, but Mrs. Holtz preferred to lie out on the sand; she had such a pink sunburn, "it was like making love to an electric plate"; such was their honeymoon: passion, pain and Unguentine.

"And now, Mr. Tactful," said Sharon, "suppose you tell Jimmy the real reason you followed him here, because I don't dare."

Holtz said, "Son, about that basketball team you were so kind to help it along?"

Jimmy said, "Sir?"

"I hear you have piled up a great, but a great, record."

"Seven straight wins," said Jimmy. "Those boys are pistols."

"I have not yet had the pleasure to congratulate the team in person, but I read their names every week in the Bulletin."

"They'd be mighty proud," said Jimmy.

"One thing I remarked," said Mr. Holtz, "there is very few Jewish names on the team," and he blew his nose, one enormous nostril at a time.

"They're all Abyssinian Baptist, sir," said Jimmy.

Mr. Holtz said, "We are a very liberal bunch. We take pride in fighting prejudice to the last drop. But don't you think it would be a nice gesture to put one Jewish name onto the team?"

"Nossir," said Jimmy.

"Tell him, will you tell him or shall I tell him," Sharon said to Mr. Holtz.

"We got a letter yesterday," said Holtz, "advising that we are challenged to a special exhibit game, which, if I explain, you will see what a situation we are in. We want Jewish boys on a Jewish team. Is that so tragic?"

"The answer is still no, Mr. Holtz," said Buttonwood.

"The letter is from the champion basketball team of Tel Aviv, in the state of Israel!"

"So?"

"So it should penetrate by now! The absolute necessity! That we have to have at least! One! Jewish name! On the team!"

"They tried out," said Jimmy. "They didn't cut the mustard."

"They'll try again and you'll change your mind," said Mr. Holtz.

"They're too short," said Jimmy.

"They will grow overnight," said Holtz.

Jimmy said, "Mr. Holtz--no."

Sharon said, "That's my boy! He's on full-time ethics! One day he will break my heart--I hope." And she kissed Jimmy and then, with an overflow of her enthusiasm, kissed Mr. Holtz, too.

• • •

Jimmy Buttonwood, a veteran of a hundred overnight affairs, three marriages and a weekend with two sisters, grade school teachers in Norfolk, Virginia, was beginning to find Sharon's talkative, passionate virginity almost too much for his health. He had a pretty fair room on Abalone Boulevard, which is not a bad district, if you know West Pismo at all. It was smaller than the Santa Fe station but had two windows with real glass in them, "which was misfortunate." That night, after leaving Sharon and taking a pint bottle of Irish milk to bed with him, he awoke dead drunk and tried to climb through one of them to take a relief, "which there's nothing like a pee in the open air, it cools and soothes your mellow soul," but the glass gave way and he went to the hospital with a nasty cut: He got 11 stitches, a wooden splint made of three brand-new tongue depressors and a large bandage with a hole at one end.

When he phoned in sick the next Sunday, Sharon, wearing a casual outfit of new red boots, Hong Kong skirt slit up one side to a point under the left armpit and a white blouse with false ruffles and real nipples, rang his bell and walked in before he had a chance to shoot himself. She made him lie down in bed at once; he broke into a horrible sweat, for fear she might lie down beside him.

"Don't sit on the bed, it's just not right," Jimmy, with some astonishment, heard himself say.

"My, what a gentleman you turned out to be, you must be delirious with fever," said Sharon, and put the tip of her tongue on his forehead, in lieu of a thermometer. Jimmy gritted his teeth with invisible pain. She diagnosed his case as "the grip," "a disease I always thought was confined to members of a fraternal order." She had brought four oranges in her purse and she squeezed them at arm's length and heated the juice in a small pot and made Jimmy drink these steaming vitamins until he sweat like a bathhouse janitor. She offered to sponge him with what was left of the whiskey he kept in the bathroom sink, but he fought that one off, pretending to need sleep very desperately. "The more you're stubborn, the more I love you," said Sharon.

She sat down, took off her boots and removed her stockings, which were apparently secured on each side to her hipbone, except that Sharon had no hipbone. Jimmy, overcome by the contest between desire and pain, shut his eyes and groaned. Sharon came and bent over him and went "Ts, ts, ts," while she absent-mindedly fixed the strap on her stage-right.

"Poor little mouse," she said to him, and lifted the covers just enough so she could slide in next to him. "Count ten," she said, laughing, and leaned on one elbow to kiss him. About 30 seconds later, the lady manager of the one-story apartment house, with a view, if you could see ten miles through the fog, of the great blue Pacific, and who sat among great knobs of German-Milwaukee-style furniture, along with a ginger cat and a lovely lacquer box, Viennese in origin, in which she kept the coiled hair combings of the past half century, heard a man scream in apartment 3-C.

• • •

Jimmy said to me, topping up my glass with fresh whiskey, "The accident also kind of effed up my relations with the all-black telephone poles that played their ass off every Thursday and Saturday night for the greater glory of Mr. Holtz' Greater West Pismo Jewish Community Building and Fund." Jimmy had got them new sweat shirts with a Jewish star on the front and a black panther on the back; so far, so good; he coached them in the style of play that he remembered from the summer he had spent with his second cousins in Mournful, Oklahoma, which was basketball crazy, with a backboard and a ring in every driveway, and whose style of play was characterized by dribbling in place with specially sharpened elbows, and a pass pattern that ended with the sphere in the two long hands of Little John, who had simply to open them to let the ball swish neatly through the net. They beat the Junior Hadassah Maccabees of Carmel Highlands, for example, 159 to 34 and, having thus won the conference cup, went to the hot showers that were their sole reward.

Now, Jimmy Buttonwood, as his wound healed, had become exquisitely sensitive to the least call of nature, and it made him somewhat less than cautious. Anyway, the imitation-marble partitions were designed for nice Jewish boys of six feet or under. But the team was all over six, six, except for Little John, who was a little under seven-all. They not only could, without inconvenience, look over the partitions at their coach and mentor, but they did. That wouldn't have mattered so much--in spite of the placement, now that the splint had been damaged, of two very large Band-Aids--except that Jimmy, in his customary state of dreamy concentration, had put his broadcloth shorts on backward.

He found it pretty hard to function naturally, when his entire team was staring down at him over the steaming partitions. Little John accused him (1) of being drunk on duty, (2) of manhandling himself in a manner unbecoming a conch and mentor, (3) of getting himself secretly circumcised without inviting them to the party, (4) of being that most heinous of human beings, an artificial Jew. Jimmy had a snappy answer: The Cherokee were one of the ten lost tribes of Israel and were famous ("Don't you read your Bible?"). The ritual was bloody but superficial; consequently, "It had to be redid every eighteen and a half months exactly, or lose my standing in the Jewish race."

Little Boy Johnson, more or less speaking for the team, said, "That's kind of a drag for a mature man, isn't it, coach?"

Buttonwood said, "No, baby. I've got so I kind of look forward."

Next day, he got a special-delivery letter from the Bureau, thanking him profusely for his past effort and hoping he'd continue in an advisory capacity as far as his health would permit. It was clearly the West Pismo Community Center's form of dismissal notice. Jimmy became profoundly distressed. He was one of those persons who, unless everyone loved him, without exception, found life almost intolerable. After 24 hours, and by this time extremely drunk, he went home to his empty room, sat on the floor with his back to the wall and wrote the following letter:

Good old Sharon:

I know in my heart you want to get shut out of me, so I hasten to oblige the best way I know how. Hope it don't inconvenience you as bad as it does me. Please notify Deputy Sheriff Albert Buttonwood Featherbird at his office, open only afternoons except Sunday, in Mournful, Oklahoma, and he will dispose of the sad remains of....

Yours truly, J. Buttonwood

Then he exchanged his guitar for a secondhand shotgun and earnestly endeavored to kill himself. It could not be done in the normal way, because the gun, from muzzle to double trigger, was six inches longer than the distance he could stretch from his ear to his forefinger. He therefore worked out a lever arrangement with a stray tablespoon and a bit of lamp wire, so that if he took off his left shoe and pressed with his horny, stubby big toe into the bowl of the spoon, the handle would spring both triggers at once.

About four in the morning, he finished his last bottle, cried just a little bit, for all his sins, and stood up beside the gun, put the muzzle up against his left ear and tramped hard on the spoon. Nothing happened, which was natural, since Jimmy had forgotten to buy shells for the shotgun. "Story of my life," said Jimmy, "long on guns and short on bullets."

He then endeavored to hang himself with a lamp cord but was interrupted by the telephone: It was Sharon Weiss, very sad; where was he? What the hell was he doing? The game was already in progress.

Jimmy got to the Center, entered the wrong door, took the wrong stairs and fell into the kitchen, where there was an overflow audience; before he could get out to the basketball court, he found a plate of chicken and varenikns forced upon him, luckily without a fork, or he would have stabbed himself to death at what he saw. His team came charging out onto the floor, all five black giants, dribbling and passing in an exceedingly fancy exhibition of what they were going to do to the Israelis. What they thought was funny, and which possibly was not, was the cake mix they had applied to their faces, their hooked false Woolworth noses, their white-plastic horn-rimmed glasses. In short, they were in whiteface: Their idea of ironic support for Buttonwood's firm stand against honkie Hebe replacements. But now, they, in turn, were sickened and horrified to the point of laughter, when the Israeli team emerged from the opposite locker room and marched in military formation to their places on the court. Because the Israelis wore blackface, and somewhat more permanently, since they were Yemenites to a man; and, in fact, were a good six shades darker, by the International Color Standards adopted by the Warsaw Convention of 1928, than anybody on the West Pismo team, who had "more than considerable good, kind, everlovin' white-massa blood" in their elongated veins. The game began in a daze of mutual admiration, from which the Israelis recovered first, to score 26 points in a row. They could be said to have underplayed the West Pismo Black Panthers, for they were all remarkably short, as befits a team bred on a midget sea like the Mediterranean.

They lined up in a 1-3-1 zone but shifted every once in a while to a 2-3 and slashed in double with their ace, Ben Said Mizrachi Cohen, looping in his typical left-hand jumper from the corner. Their plays were all executed about the level of the Panthers' monumental kneecaps. The half ended 88 to 22. Between halves, Buttonwood's white-face all-black team sat in the lockers, in the mingled scent of sweat and denatured alcohol, with their tall heads in their hands or doused under the cold-water tap, saying, "Shit, man," over and over and over.

"Worst of all was the Ayrabs," Buttonwood told me.

"What?" I cried. "What Arabs?"

He told me there were 200, 300 of them, come down in buses from some college in Berkeley, under the impression that Allah was in danger of losing his basketball title. They led a whole sheep onto the floor and were about to blood-sacrifice it under the north basket, when they were challenged by black power, but which black power? The various factions, in their various fezzes, opened their attaché cases and pulled out their weapons and drew on one another as betrayers and sellouts to Mr. Whitey. Meanwhile, the sheep ran into the kitchen, where it ate the herring and cole slaw amid general consternation.

It was time for direct action. Jimmy took his jackknife, descended to the basement, pried open the fuse box and put the blade across all the terminals at once. Upstairs, on the basketball court, there ensued a screaming, howling, booing, baaing, ribald, rib-crushing, Arabic, Aramaic, aromatic, sensuous and joyful darkness. Someone seized him by the little hairs at the back of his neck, and began kissing him. He lit a match, just for the record: It was good old Sharon Weiss, wearing her usual white lipstick.

She said, "I don't care. You're a nut. I love you anyway. Isn't that nice of me?"

The police raid netted 237 men, 192 women and six persons who stood on their constitutional rights and refused to say.

• • •

After this, Jimmy desperately wanted to marry Sharon. But no, she wouldn't have him. Her reasoning was very good: She was perfectly willing to sleep with him on date nights, anyway, "If I'm in the moody mood." In the morning, her mother would knock at Sharon's door and ask whether her visitor wanted ham or bacon for breakfast. But as for marriage, that was obviously impossible, "Button-Wood-Weiss Nuptials"? How would it look in the West Pismo Brotherhood Bulletin & Sholom Aleichem Messenger? Yes. Buttonwood could see the absolute logic of this position. What really made him mad was the announcement, one day, that Sharon Weiss was to marry the previous Sunday-school instructor, Municipal Judge J. Victor Kapell, gall bladder and all.

Butlonwood cashed in his shotgun, took the bus to San Francisco and got an appointment with the eminent neurologist Dr. Shpitz-Catarrh (not his actual name), and asked to be, however gruesome, uncircumciscd; out of revenge, he had decided to go gentile again. The surgeon, looking forward to an absolutely unique paper on the subject, offered to perform the operation at minimum cost, providing, of course, a transplant could be volunteered. "That's when I learned," said Jimmy, "that I had no real God-honest friends in this world."

About three days later, he was sufficiently sober to notice that some really disgusting man was staring at him from behind the bathroom mirror. It took him an hour or two to deduce that this monster, with bloody scabs on his cheekbones, was probably himself.

That was the day he got religion. "Not the visual crud," Jimmy told me. "No. I figured out what my friend Jesus would have done in a similar situation, boy," he said to me. "Did you ever take time to think what Jesus did between the ages of fourteen and thirty-three? Well, I have given it some thought and, buddy, I have come to the conclusion that he was a low-class bartender in the city of Rome. And I got the same calling.

"For, after all," he explained, "a low-class bartender is a saint; he's got to be. He gives sacraments, receives confessions, settles quarrels with a sports encyclopedia, using it to conk the contestants on the top of the head, if necessary; and deals out absolution--in short, cheat-bottomed jiggers. A polished wooden bar separates him from the sins of the world."

Meanwhile, he was having one hell of a time adjusting to a world without anastigmatic glasses. Everything from here to the horizon was bent the other way. Worse yet, the universe seemed, and perhaps it really had, shrunk. He also feared, for a long while, that his circumcision had had the same effect, but was actively endeavoring to find out.

We drank to that, all right.