Joey Cloudy online

TRAMP: Tavah’s Great Dilemma

“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”

—Patty Smith

Tavah’s great dilemma was that there was no great dilemma. Her life, as best she could tell, was untroubled, unchallenged, and without undue suffering. Her parents, likewise, were completely unremarkable. “Solid unshakable good German stock,” is how her mother referred to her father’s family, her own ancestry being Jewish by race rather than religion, since no one in her family in her memory was or ever had been observant.

The Frankfurt’s had worked hard to make the world safe for their children. They were a simple, earthy folk who were happy with the gentleness of their lives, which Tavah experienced only as oppressive boredom. Everything bored her: the synagogue, the neighbors, and the neighborhood boys, especially. Whenever she looked at the family photo album, she could see herself as if she were looking into a time machine, and she realized that the kind of beauty she possessed did not have much of a shelf life.

All of the portraits of the women in the family photo albums, holiday gatherings, vacations, and weddings seemed to sort of fall apart by the time they were thirty. Tavah wondered why. Was it the large families? The repeated strain of birth on the body, to have child after child, year after year? Was it the weather? The relentless yellow orb of hydrogen fusion beating down on you as you farmed in the merciless heat? Brutish winter winds that dried their thin, pale skin like jerked meat? Was it that soul-numbing loneliness experienced only by the married woman trapped in the gender role of cook, maid, and nanny?

Tavah didn’t know what she wanted. But she did know what she didn’t want, and that was to be one of those people who never got out of Brooklyn. You couldn’t do anything about where you were born or raised, but as an adult, you had something to say about where you lived. Tavah had no great ambition; she didn’t know if she wanted to be the president or the pope, but she knew what she didn’t want: to live a small life, die a small death.

The thought of going through life settling for mere animal existence, without ever having truly lived, was the true horror. To be born nowhere, live anonymously, and die the big death without knowing, without ever having seen what was out there in the great big world. Maybe that was the only thing she dug about reading Kerouac: he did it. He got up off his drunk ass and got out of Lowell, Massachusetts. He did it, and for a while, he escaped the small-town mind. For a little while, the world was infinite with its possibilities, and with possibilities, you realize you are free. What does that mean anyways? What are we free from? What do free people do with their time, time being another way of saying life? When one is free from want, what do the masses crave? Was the world, filled with the thoughts of countless billions, filled with the same unarticulated desires?

Before she went from attractive young woman to pot-bellied, fat-assed, hair-faced, wrinkled old hag, Tavah wanted to live. Knowing what the future held, it didn’t seem like too much to ask. She was getting the fuck outta Brooklyn.

Kerouac’s chicks didn’t seem real to her. They weren’t real people. He didn’t seem to get into the chicks the way he got into the guys. Tavah couldn’t relate to the whole Catholic guilt trip that Kerouac was so into that he transposed it onto his Buddhism. This was something else she had no concept of or curiosity about. Tavah had been raised a Jew, although she had no religious feelings that she could discern.

To her, god was just one more idiotic lie on an ever-lengthening list of boring, stupid things that didn’t matter, things her parents, with their provincial mindset, wasted too much time thinking about. The thing that confused her most as a child was god’s silence. When she asked the rabbi about this in the fifth grade, he gave her an answer that was the theological equivalent of “because I say so.” She asked her science teacher and finally her mother. Each stammered, reciting non-sequiturs from scripture about how mysterious god’s mind was, and quickly tried to distract her with personal questions to change the subject.

Finally, after breaking both legs when she leaped from the fire escape, after puncturing her palms with an ice pick, and after “the incident with the cat,” Tavah stopped testing for the presence of divinity.

“What did you want to be when you were a little kid? You know, what was your first true ambition? To get god to break his long silence.”

Aaron looked at Mona and Nathan, then at Tavah as she lay on her back in the shade of the poolside umbrella in a spam-colored string bikini, with her cigarette sticking straight up between her index and forefingers.

“When I was twelve, my parents had me committed. I was locked in a lunatic asylum for a year and a half because I was obsessing about getting god to talk to me. In the Bible stories, he seems to talk to everybody. Preachers, old ladies, and little kids all hear his voice. But he never said a goddamned word to me. I wondered why. Maybe I was deaf to his voice in the same way some people are tone deaf. I thought it was because I never did anything to get his attention, and if I could get his attention, then maybe he would talk to me too, and I would finally get to know him. From the stories the Rabbis liked to tell, he seemed to enjoy performing miracles and helping people.

“So, when I was nine, I climbed out onto the fire escape one day and jumped from the second floor, figuring god would save me somehow. Anyways, I landed on the roof of a parked car and broke both my legs. Over the years, I talked to everybody I could think of about it, but nobody could answer what seemed like such a simple question to me at the time.

“The cat got me locked up.”

“The cat?”

“One summer afternoon, while I was babysitting my seven-year-old cousin Alvin, I decided that I would kill his cat if god didn’t talk to me. To at least say no. So, I told my cousin that I was going to kill his cat, unless god told me right then and there not to do it. He thought I was joking at first, but when he realized I was serious, he begged me not to do it, to quit joking around, and give him back his cat.

“I asked him if he believed in god. ‘Yes,’ he whimpered.

“‘Good,’ I said. ‘Tell him to save your cat! Tell him he’d better talk to me right now! Ask him to tell me not to do it, and I’ll give you back your precious cat!’

“I watched him pray the sweetest, most sincere, purest little eight-year-old prayer, all full of terror, tears, fear for his cat’s life, and love of his little kitty. When he was done… silence. So, I tossed the cat off the roof. After that, my parents had me institutionalized.

“When I got out of the booby hatch, nobody ever asked me to babysit again. My parents shipped me off to an all-girls private school. While I was away, they got a divorce, and my father moved back to Israel, taking my little brother Milo with him. I moved in with Mom in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn and finished my junior and senior years in a public school.

“But while I was locked away with the ones these zealots call crazy, I realized that it was nothing worth thinking too much about. It was the vestiges of ancient customs, remnants of a less enlightened, superstitious era, like circumcision and other barbarous practices, Westerners still persist in clinging to, make believe to help people get through their little disappointing excuse for a life. A stupid lie that was allowed because it helped a lot of miserable people get through their meaningless day. I didn’t know much about how the world worked, but what I discovered was that nobody else did either. Sometimes, all you have to do is kill one cat, and then everything has a sort of clarity.

“Lately, I have been of a mind that that goat-fucking old Satanist Aleister Crowley was right… ‘There is but one law: Do what thou wilt.’”

-About the Author

JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals: Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, TX.