Amongst the history of my mother, the detritus of her life, is her correspondence. It is preserved in the page upon page, pad upon pad, carbon upon carbon. She was raised back in the day when people did correspond, in written form both frequent and copious. She saved copies of this correspondence as carbon copies when carbon paper was at hand, and as hand written copies when it was not. It is these copies of correspondence which preserve her memory, in part. And it is these correspondence, too, that weight me down, spiritually and literally. The boxes and bags of this written evidence of a life once lived fill closets.

These days our correspondence too frequently is both slight and fleeting. I have realized, however, that one trait I share with my mother is my collecting of it. I have archives of email going back many many years, to a time when most people still didn’t know what email was. In today’s world of electronic avatar and emoticon this archive still connects me back, tethers me in a way, to the past.

It is in my mother’s archive that I have found a way to share in parts of her life which I was not around for and that in her mind were either not worthy of remembering to her son, or would not bear foreign scrutiny. I have learned, for example, of her initial impressions of my father, her affairs of the heart, and then finally of her rapture at the prospect of marriage. “Alec Bernstein, English biochemist, pleasant enough, somewhat boring” is how she described him in the dramatus personae in a letter to her youngest sister written only 10 months before they would wed. She went on to write of a magical late February night of capering with several other grad students and one young man, her professor’s younger brother who was visiting from Chicago and had caught her eye. This was all written in the form of a play (hence the cast list). Later that year, in June if I recall correctly, she wrote with passion of a weekend visit to Chicago to the campus of this chap. Nothing more is preserved in the written record until November of that year and her letter to her oldest brother, Billy, to tell of her impending marriage to my father and of her joy and happiness.

Someone examining my own archive in some far off future will have to dig mightily to find anything of such passion or import. They will find a record of the dissolution of my relationship with my brother Joe, and of the prosaic rendering of my mother’s estate to its various heirs. There would be the history of my business dealings and my worries and concerns of entreaties both rash and over reasoned. That collection does not burden me.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Copyright © 2004 by Nic Bernstein

When I was a young man, well – eleven or twelve years old, perhaps – a bicycle store opened around the corner from my house.

The storefront had already had an interesting history, at least from my child-eye-view. In my earliest memories it was a bakery. I would occasionally accompany my mother there for shopping, and the bakery ladies would slip me a great big pretzel-rod; enormous in my eyes, my stomach.

A Saturday may take us there, my siblings and I, to spend a bit of our pocket money on cookies or other treats, and always a pretzel-rod would be included. As you can guess, this store was the sort of place to make an impression on a young child, and the storefront earned a place in fond memory.

In the late sixties, while protests about war and racism and fair housing were wracking the city, the nearby university, and our own corner of the world, the bakery kind of slipped away one night. I no longer recall just when that happened. You would be excused for thinking, seeing how I have just described the place, that it’s closing might have had a more profound impact on my child mind, memory, time-line. It would seem, however, that a child’s thoughts are not always so firmly cemented.

The smells, the tastes, the kind bakery ladies with the immense pretzel-rods: these are memories which are seemingly unshakable. But the absence of that, its slipping over the event horizon of history, that I do not recall.

I’m sorry, I digress.

So, the bakery of my youngest years, it closed at some point, some time near the summer of love, and then there was a Hi-Fi store. This was an interesting place to a young boy like me, a kid interested in things mechanical and electrical could easily be intrigued and entertained for hours by the nifty new gizmos of a Hi-Fi store.

And the people! There were men working there who had long hair! Now I don’t want to leave the impression that I hadn’t seen men with long hair before, my family had hosted Students for McCarthy, for instance, and they had long hair. I grew up only a block from a college campus, and there were plenty of long-haired men there, but those guys weren’t workers, they were students, and at that point in my life I understood that there was some sort of separation, long hair meant student, short hair meant worker.

One of the guys working at the store, John, (he had short hair, by the way) used to play chess with a woman named Karen. Karen I knew from the neighborhood, she had been a nanny to the kids across the street from me when their mother was ill. So Karen let me come in to the store, and I would watch her play chess with John, and I would kibitz. John would ignore me. John was a student of military history, and this was a game of chess, and John would ignore me. Karen would listen to me, and sometimes would do what I has said I would do (for all I know she would have done it anyway, but an 8 year-old’s mind doesn’t think that way) and then she would win, and John would call me an urchin and tell me that he heard my mother calling me. John ended up being one of the most important men in my life – probably second only to my father in his influence on me – but neither of us knew that then. He only knew that I bugged him, and I only knew that for some reason John was hearing things.

This storefront was making it’s way through time in much the same way that I was, it was maturing and it seemed to change from one interest, say bakery, to another, stereos, at about the same pace that I did. It seemed only natural, then, when the Hi-Fi store closed and a bicycle store opened.

My mother had always liked to cycle, and she introduced us to cycling early in our lives. My best friend, David, also liked to cycle. Milwaukee, where I grew up, was a center for cycling, nationwide, and was home to both state and national clubs, had miles of bike paths, and avid riders.

Every year there was a bike ride, the Milwaukee 64, which made a large loop around the county, and when I was nine years old I got a new bike – a Raleigh – and I got to go on my first Milwaukee 64. I invited my friend David along, and together with my Mom we rode the entire ride! It took us nearly thirteen hours, but we did it! The whole affair, however was a little more involved than just that.

David and I had been playing over at the university. Growing up as close to it as we did, it was kind of a back yard to us. We would spend long hours playing in the buildings and around the campus there, and there was always something to keep us entertained. This one particular weekend, the last really warm weekend of a rapidly encroaching autumn, it was the escalators, great long escalators, up and down right next to each other, just waiting for us kids to play on them. One of our favorite things to do with an escalator was to go in the reverse direction; either down the up escalator or up the down escalator. When one walks at the right speed it is much like a treadmill, an inclined treadmill.

This was great novel fun to us, and we were doing just this, me going up a down escalator, when I tripped, falling forward, my knee hitting the leading edge of a descending step, the step slicing into my knee and shredding a bit of it. I collapsed in a bunch into the step and howled as I rode the step to the bottom, while David ran to my aid, helping me get clear of the escalator and to the nearest bathroom to tend to the wound.

Our nascent scout training in first-aid was stretched to the limit by the meager resources of paper towels and water with which we tried to staunch the bleeding. We knew that more was needed, but that would mean going to one of our homes. Mine was closer, so we stashed our bikes (unlocked!) in a hiding place we had found under a stairway, and David helped me back to my house a few blocks away.

We had to slip in through the back door. I was a trouble prone child, going to the hospital for something or another every odd year of my young life, and I knew that my parents would not take well to the knowledge that I had hurt myself playing on an escalator (forbidden) on campus (forbidden). I found some big gauze bandages. I applied one, but it wouldn’t stick, and was plain as day to the casual observer with me in shorts, so we snuck up to my room and I pulled on the tightest pair of jeans I had, thus hiding the offense while securing the bandage at the same time.

Now properly repaired, we went back to get our bikes. I could hardly be expected to ride mine (and in the tight pants couldn’t), so we walked back through the university with them. As we were walking through the Fine Arts building, past the theater, we heard noises. Not voices, not speaking voices at least, but strange sounds. We had to investigate!

What we found was wonderful to an eight year old’s mind – there was a theater workshop in progress, the students were experimenting, clamoring all over some scaffolding on the stage, acting like apes of some sort. They beckoned us in, and drew us up on stage with them. They soon had us enthroned as royalty of a sorts, and groveled to us. I had a kind of robe and scepter and was thoroughly enjoying myself, when the workshop came to a close. The students stopped being apes and went back to being students (a transition which, to my young eyes, was remarkable in its suddenness and totality) and David and I were no longer royalty.

Thus humbled, we went on our way back to our homes.

Later that night I had to tell my parents that I had injured myself. Our improvised first aid was giving out, and my wound was starting to get scary. I made up a story about falling while riding my bike (still a kid’s bike with 20″ wheels) and my mother took me off to the hospital to get the wound tended to. This is the first time that I heard my mother joke that the hospital should name a wing after me, and I can still remember the nurse agreeing.

I had had stitches before, so I knew what await me as I lay in the curtained off room. I imagined the stitches, the pain, and I felt the humility of having hurt myself in such a stupid way. It was so stupid, I realized, that my deceit, my lying, had as much to do with my pride as with my fear of punishment. I laid there and cried my eyes out while my mother talked to doctors or nurses or filled out paperwork, or did whatever it was that was happening out in that part of the world that I couldn’t see. All I could see was my self in this curtained off room, with this horrific looking hole in my knee, and I had the biggest cry of my young life.

Or so it seemed, at least.

After some time a doctor came in and said he was going to give me an injection to kill the pain, and that then he would clean me up and put me back together again. I think that this last part intrigued me, I kind of felt like the scarecrow in Wizard of Oz, and as the benzocaine took effect I actually sat up and watched as the doctor cleaned the wound, chopping out bits of flesh that had been ground up by the escalator, and then stitching it all closed again. The whole thing was pretty cool, and I felt foolish for having cried so.

On the way home, as I lay in the back of the station wagon, my mother commented that she couldn’t understand how falling of a bike could do such damage. My humility flushed back, and I felt the fool again.

Anyway, with my birthday approaching, we went, the next night, to go get my present – a new bicycle – so that I could ride with my mother in the Milwaukee 64. The Raleigh was everything that a nine year old could want, big wheels, caliper brake, and Raleigh Racing Green! It would be ridden in the street, and it would need to be licensed! I was no longer a boy, I was a man! At least that’s how I saw it.

So we rode that next weekend, and after 64 miles and thirteen hours we finished. I managed to pop every stitch in my knee, but that was nothing next to the fascination with bicycles which now gripped me. David was gripped too, and soon had his own Raleigh, also green, and we were on our way to a new juvenile passion.

By the time the bike shop opened around the corner from my house David and I were avid cyclists. Just the perfect thing to make us the perfect pests for the new store, and we wasted no time in making ourselves invaluable to them (at least that’s how we saw it). We cleaned chains and trued wheels, we watched the store while the brothers who owned it went to grab a bite.

Over the next couple of years we each built a bike or two, real bikes, the kind that real racers rode, and David even raced on his. I was soon surpassed by my friend that I had introduced not so long ago to the sport, and he became quite a good cyclist.

It was during this time that my father died. He was young, then, only 54, and I was only thirteen. I had just finished my first year in high school, had a job working at yet another stereo store around the corner (this one owned by John) and still dabbled with bicycles.

By the next summer I had augmented my afternoon job at the stereo store with work as a dishwasher at an Italian restaurant downstairs from the stereo store, and was preparing to enter college a year later. Tinkering with stereos was pulling me away from cycling, as were computers and other technical interests, as was a growing appreciation for socializing, as was a growing appreciation for girls.

Between high school, the park outside high school (its a toss up where I spent more time), the waitresses at the restaurant, and the girls who lived in the apartment across the hall from the stereo store, I was surrounded by girls and I was really growing interested in that!

But when you add it up: bikes, Hi-Fi, computers, dope, it doesn’t really draw the chicks. At least not in 1977 it didn’t. I was in some serious need of coolness if I was to get anywhere. Help was just around the corner…

My older brother had put off college and got a real job (at the post office, I think, or was it the florist?) and moved into an apartment with some friends. One of his friends had made some sort of a deal or a trade or collected on a debt, I am not sure of the details, but in any event, deals were made – let’s leave it at that, and this friend ended up with this very strange thing, a PPV, a People Powered Vehicle, and I was to make it work.

The thing looked like a cross between a golf cart and a paddle boat. It had a steering wheel, two bucket seats, three wheels, drum brakes, a stick shift and a bow like a boat. The chain drive transmission was screwed-up somehow, and the whole thing needed a really good cleaning. The deal I was offered was if I fixed the PPV I would get to use it for the summer. I jumped at the chance.

The driveway behind the house became my workshop. I soon had the beast over on its back, the entire drive-train stripped off, and various parts made the trip around the corner to the bike shop, where I still had privileges, to be cleaned, lubed, trued, painted … whatever was needed.

It took the better part of a month to get the basic work done, and then a long effort to get the transmission working properly. Between the end of school, the stereo store, the restaurant and getting stoned, I had my hands full.

By the time I got the thing working there was hardly anyone around who hadn’t either seen it or heard about it. The couple of guys I knew at the restaurant, friends from school, thought it was the coolest thing, and told the rest of the staff about it. This, I figured, was the thing that could make me cool. I screwed up my courage and asked Candie (a waitress whose name belied her seriousness and studiousness) if she would like to join me for the inaugural ride. She agreed!

I “picked her up” with the PPV at the dorm(!) and she was amazed by the thing. We rode through the university, down to the lake, along the lake front, and back through the tony part of town back to the school. It was everything my young heart could have hoped for; a warm day, a light breeze, this cool vehicle, people honking and waving as they passed, Candie smiling and whooping as people waved! It would have been perfect if it wasn’t all so damn teenage GEEKY!

When I dropped Candie off she thanked me for the ride, and said she would “see me around,” and as I watched her older, college student butt walk back into the dorms, as I sat in my geek-dream-mobile, I realized that I had done nothing to pierce through the aura of nerdy younger brother, friend, whatever which seemed to color all of my relationships with women.

And then my time with the PPV was up.

Before that, my brother came over one day to take it for a spin. A newspaper photographer spotted him riding it, with his wavy hair and cool aviator-frame sun glasses. That picture ended up in the paper the next day, and he didn’t look nerdy at all, proving once and for all that it was me and not the equipment.

After that summer the PPV was stolen from behind my brother’s apartment house. The next year I discovered theater in my senior year of high school, further bolstering my geek portfolio by joining stage crew. This led to my college career of technical theater, and my work career of computers, science and the Internet.

I never really left that awkward high school geek behind, or my odd collection of talents, interests and skills. But the PPV will always be with me for the brief weeks of hope that it gave me of breaking through it all and being cool, just a little bit cool, for one day, for one ride, with the coolest waitress in the place.

“It really doesn’t matter what size I try,” she thought, as she pushed the last of her long locks into the bowler, and seated it firmly on her head. No matter how tight the hat she wore, the words still leaked out of her and worked their way down her body, some stopping at her mouth, taking the express route into the greater consciousness of the world, while others prefered to suanter slowly down to her hands, awaiting the long and lanquid process of inscription into one or another of her tomes. Now, however, most of the words were to get no further than her body itself.She contemplated this as she observed the verse she had inscribed on her left breast. She had been carefull not to smudge the writting as she squeezed her bussom into the bustier which she was now modeling for herself in front of the mirror. She had been so meticulous as she had penned the poems of love and desire onto her body. She wanted to make sure that they would survive there until he could read them all. Not a single word, letter or minor punctuation should be rendered unreadable by bodily fluid or foolish wipe. Already she could appreciate the sublime act of temptation this posed for herself. The final stansas of the verse read backwards in the mirror as she twisted first one thigh and then the other to check if their placement was still just so, and to confirm that they had not turned to little rivulets of inked persperation and musk as her excitement at the temptation mounted.

She wanted him to read her slowly and thuroughly. To fully savour each vowel, consonant and punctuation mark as he digested her love and desire. If the tantric lust of the exercise teased and tempted him as much as it did her then it would certainly be the kind of dream that she had wanted. Ending in the all consuming embrace of two lovers who had shared the suffering of the wait while smothering in each others intimate presence. Perhaps she would recite more of her poems, gently, to his phallus, as he read loud from the sweep of her hip, or the inside of her knee. Or might she scream out these words while he read his prose into her womb, caressing her with words of his own.

The final stansas were putting up a fight to survive unsmudged as she arefully trimmed the lips that she had cut from the image in the mirror, and fitted them into the floral arrangement on the bedstead. The mirror had given up the pair of arms which even now were writing further words of want and hunger across her shoulder blades and the cleft at the top of her curving behind. In the mirror the lettering on her neck was beginning to run under the insistant urging of the small beads of persperation which sprang from beneath her jawline. Lucky that she had traded places with the image so long ago, feeling safer with the body that she saw on the other side, the body that had returned her stare.

The ink on her didn’t run, not yet, the mirror was more excited than she, in its role as a voyeur it had no promise of release as she did. The best that it could hope for was the pleasures that his reflection might lavish upon it, if the light were still good.

When the phantom arms had finished their part of the literary cosmetic she rubbed them with the glue stick and fitted them into the collage she was constructing on the top of the bureau, along with the limbs and genetalia of the previous nights collecting. Throwing back the covers of her bed, she gave one last glance at the mirror and lowered herself to the mattress. Arranging the covers over her poetry she closed her eyes and hoped that perhaps she would awaken to find that, during the dream, he would replace her words of passion and desire with words of his own.

For its part, the mirror would know no dreams, only the emptiness of a darkened room, a darkness which robbed it of its own dreaming.

For a modern day version of my 17 year old essay, look here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/markvelasquez/sets/72157594300193433/detail/

Croissants of the world

Copyright © 1991

Nic Bernstein

So, today, I was contemplating language, language and attitude. It came rather naturally, as I was sitting in a café, surrounded by the more affluent members of our community. I had ordered a croissant, and coffee, and received the usual odd look from the waitress due to my pronunciation, not only of croissant “krwah – sahn” but also of coffee “kaw – fee.” I have grown rather used to getting funny looks for the way I say coffee, or fog for that matter. I once had a woman exclaim to me, “But you must be from Boston, the way you say fog. I’m a linguist you know, when did you move from Boston?” Needless to say, she was a little put off when I insisted that I had lived nearly my entire life in Milwaukee. I lost any shred of prestige she had conjured up for me. Once, however, a friend of mine who probably considered himself more cosmopolitan than any of the rest of my acquaintances considered themselves, told me, “You know, Nic, you pronounce it correctly, that’s the way it should be pronounced.” He then went on to order another cup of “kah – fee.” Oh well…

So, I was sitting in the “ka – fay”, drinking my “kaw – fee,” and eating my “krwah – sahn,” all under the contemptuous eye of the “way – tris,” and I was contemplating language and attitude. Granted pronunciation, not language, is what I’m actually referring to, but specifically it is the pronunciation of foreign words. And I say attitude because I was pondering my own attitude, and that of the waitress, with regard to my pronunciations of these two words – croissant and coffee. I shan’t thrust this all upon the shoulders of the waitress. After all, she was a rather small player in this drama. The burden of language abuse rests more rightfully with the aforementioned affluent members of society surrounding me.

It was when I overheard one of this group order a “kroi – sahnt” and an “ek – spres – oh” that I really got going. Who, I wondered, was being more arrogant; myself, for presuming to use the correct pronunciations of these foreign words, or this other knob for presuming to Americanize them? And, beyond that simple question, why is it that people constantly refer to espresso as though it were spelled expresso? Should people, for that matter, even be allowed to order things in public which they cannot pronounce, without at least some penalty for not admitting that they can’t pronounce them?

I’m not referring to the confused tourist who nervously orders a “wees” beer in the German restaurant, looking at the waiter to see if they’ve said it right. No, I’m referring to the guy who struts up to the bar and orders a “wIs” beer, smugly looking as though he’s part of some elite club, even though he hasn’t the foggiest idea that what he really wants to order is a “vIs” beer. The bartender, or waiter, if he has even the vaguest knowledge of German, will of course chuckle to himself more at the confident guy’s foolish bravado than he will at the tourist’s honest ignorance.

For my own part, I avoid such embarrassment all together – I don’t drink beer. What is to be done, then, about this generation of semi-literates who surround us now? You know to whom I refer: That crowd which frequent the cliquish cafés, ordering “kroi – sahnts,” “ek – spres – ohs,” “wIs” beer, and “herb bred.” Should they be forced to take language courses on tape? Should they be disallowed from indulging in their favorite foreign delights, until they can learn to pronounce the names correctly? Or, should they be summarily executed for having the audacity not even to recognize their precarious purchase upon their position in a world society where American is but one language, with a short and undistinguished career, amongst a plethora of others?

In closing, then, I would like to leave you with this to ponder: Many years ago, while I was spending my days in a decidedly blue-collar vocation, I worked with a man named Frank, Frank Olchewski. Frank had been born and bred on the Polish, south side of town. When I went to cafés with Frank, I would order a croissant, and he would order a butter horn. We both received the same thing, and neither of us embarrassed ourselves.

Note: This piece won an honorable mention in the 1994 Shepherd Express short fiction contest.

Visiting Chicago this weekending, and have much to report from my recent sojourn to “Iggys” on Dearborn. “Sublime Martinis” the sign outside proclaims, so I decide to imbibe in one to verify this claim. I enter and order. Out of the corner of my eye I see a blond curse.

After watching the bartender for a while I finally asked him how many martinis he might make in a night. “Oh, I don’t know.” he said. “Tonight, maybe 40 or so. It’s slow… But, a couple of months ago, over on North Avenue (there are 3 locations for Iggy’s) I made 500 in one night!” he proudly proclaims.

“And,” I ask, “how many can you drink?”

“Oh 20!” he replies. I doubt this.

“I am from Mexico,” he offers by way of explanation to me and the guy sitting just a few seats down the bar from me. “We have a very high tolerance.”

He’s slight of build with dark hair, a sprinkle of facial hair and has a voice like a Speyside scotch, dry and light. His lilting accent almost sounds more Italian than Mexican — almost like Don Novello’s Father Guido Sarducci character.

A quartet of lava lamps dance lazily on the back bar to strains of Sinatra, which anachronistically alternates with house music on the sound system. The back wall is adorned with a large painting of Sinatra with Count Basie.

I am at seat 6 at the bar, Carlos is tending. A nervous woman, kind of a tightly wound seating savant, hovers near the door like a ninja stalker. This is the blond who I saw cursing earlier. She will spend her night hovering, stalking and cursing. She manages to scare away a young grunge couple who just wanted some pasta.

With each martini ordered Carlos patiently fills a pint glass with ice, then ½ way with spirits. He caps it with a metal shaker, shakes it vigorously but not to excess, then bringing it over the waiting glass, cracks it like an egg, letting the chilled liquid run out while holding back the ice. Any ice which sneaks past he artfully scoops out with the lip of the pint glass.

A pair of cute, young girls come in and whip out their ID cards. They order gin and tonics. Later, when they ask for menus, Carlos explains the specials. “And there’s one special which isn’t on the menu,” he says, winking at his brother, seated at the bar. “Order this,” he says, pointing at the menu “and you get a free Martini, from Level Vodka.” No one else was offered this special. The girls demure.