HELLO, COMPLETE IDIOT
 
I have to remind myself again and again that it is by my own volition that I am at a Christmas dinner. Me, a Jew, just praying for it to be December 27, for me to be on a plane flying out of the Midwest back to a place where I can spend about 30% of my time alone or doing some solitary activity while my girlfriend is nearby. So I take deep breaths to pass the time and act like myself only in short frenzied bursts where my girlfriend and I are alone, or when she leans in for a kiss and I can get out some hi-pitched rant or nonsense talk. The rest of the time I am the Jewish boyfriend. The new Jewish boyfriend, who gets asked again and again how we met (which I hear as, “How did Jew meet?”), and, again and again, makes groups of Christians laugh with any punch line that emphasizes my Judaism. When every meal, invariably, includes some pork product, people apologize and I say something like, “Well, I don’t want Jesus to be mad, so I’ll eat it,” (which gets a small laugh) or, “I guess I’ll compromise my lifetime moral beliefs as a Jew and eat it, cuz it looks so damn good,” (which gets a huge laugh because I said Jew, which is hilarious to non-Jews because the can’t say it at all in my presence.  It’s like saying the n-word, isn’t it?). For some reason, the fact that I eat shrimp from the shrimp cocktail, just as un-kosher a selection, amuses no one. But, it would if I told them and finished my thought with the word Jew.
 
Jew. Jew. Jew. J-Jew. J-Jew. That’s about all I can manage. Because I don’t want to know these people? Probably. But, won’t I see them next year? If I do, won’t it all be easier then? Maybe by then some Jew will make great strides and make Jews acceptable in mixed company. Or maybe I won’t be neurotic then.
All I know is that if I am to overcome neurosis, it will not be with the help of any of these people, save my girlfriend (a Jew-lover). Every family is insane, they say. Because God didn’t mean to give any of us more than they can handle at one time, he gave us just one family. Of course most marry, so why wouldn’t the entry into a new family be as difficult as out first? Shouldn’t I kick and scream and sleep twenty hours a day the first time? Shouldn’t the next year everyone just be thrilled when I walk and mutter something cognizant? I’ll talk the second year. A reasonable goal, by then I should have something to say to the complete idiot next to me.
 
“So why won’t they give you Workers’ Comp?” I said. If you did work in a detox clinic and a patient deep in painful withdrawals did suddenly grab you by the stethoscope and start choking you, and you did pinch a nerve (now infected!) that gives you that stilted way your swelled head sits on your poor neck and you have been out of work for now six-months, WHY WOULDN’T THEY GIVE YOU WORKERS COMP?
 
“Your guess is as good as mine,” she said.
 
No, it’s not. No fucking way it is. My guess as good as your completely informed, involved guess? I hope not because my guess is the only reasonable one possible: you are lying. You injured yourself eating the new Grilled Stuffed Fajita Burrito and claimed a patient attacked you when his hand got stuck in your stethoscope? That’s my guess.
 
And if thoughts have energy, my guess sits in the air for a while slowing down time like staff meeting gone late. So what do we talk about next? I already told her how I met my girlfriend and I can’t ask, “How do you know my girlfriend?” since presumably she’s family. And I’ve resolved not to be funny unless it involves selling-out the Jewish people. So she’s silent for a minute before she starts telling the whole table about a Halloween party she had for her teenage daughter.
 
“Do you know that show on MTV, I Bet You Will?”
 
No one does. Not even me and I was her best hope.
 
“Or Fear Factor?”
OK, I get it now. The gross-out shows, where gross-out games are acted out and turned in television programming. My mind jumps ahead. She had a party with gross-out games for her kids and she’s telling a woman that appears to be her Mom, her child’s Grandma, about it. Jesus, these people aren’t Jews, I think. Maybe being Jewish isn’t the thing. These people aren’t my family. My family may not keep kosher but if I was eating gross shit the last thing in the world my mom would do is brag about it to her mom, my Grandma, who would certainly look at all of us with the disdain of a Pope’s edict.
 
“So I got some earth worms and some goldfish. I thought they were going to just touch them.”
 
Again with the lying.
 
“So Jen (her daughter) psyched herself out and ate three goldfish. I couldn’t believe it!” Everyone laughed.
 
Was I horrified or just so not amused that I couldn‘t contain myself? I’m not sure why I became the person that I actually am. A person that has opinions, suffers fools only through a TV screen and struggles through Yuletide alone waiting for the next wave? I just had to interject.
 
“Did she die?” I said.
 
She looked around and everyone looked at me like I was delivery not DiGiorno. “No she’s right there. At the kid’s table.”
I looked over to the kids’ table like I didn’t believe her. There, four kids aged two to twelve were looking for something under the table while Jen filmed it all with her new digital camera.
 
“She’s there, filming.”
 
“Oh, good,” I said. Because you are such a fucking idiot I wouldn’t be surprised if you killed your kid in an effort to amuse her and her friends, I wanted to say. There was pause and my girlfriend’s begging and confused eyes caught mine. So I said, “Because raw goldfish aren’t kosher and you know how that scares Jews.”

BACK