Early life was a blur of mother and dad fighting, always pulling me in two different directions. And I mean that both figuratively and literally. One time, we were on the sidewalk outside the Mott's 5/10 and they got into a fight about my trying out for youth league baseball. Mother wanted to keep me safe and she thought that anyone who would willingly throw balls at me was mean and needed to be kept as far away from me as possible. Dad, on the other hand, was trying to explain to mother that baseball was a fine sport and was something that every boy, even himself, grew up doing. Mother then pointed out that baseball must be why my dad was such a blockheaded ninnywillows and began to pull me by the wrist toward temple. Dad said there was no way I was no gonna be allowed to play baseball, telling mother that she was a sniveling, uppity, no bacon eating, un-American slagathor, and he grabbed my other arm, trying to jerk me away and take me to the YMCA to sign up for baseball. As he and my mother opposed each other and pulled on me, dad started to get the upper hand, as it were, and my mother lost her grip. Dad ended up flinging me off the sidewalk and down into the street where I got hit by an oncoming bicyclist.
The bicycle slammed into my ribs and flipped over the top of me, and the handlebars came crashing down on my neck. I was pretty much fine, but the girl that was riding the bike got thrown completely off and went flying headlong toward an oncoming truck. Luckily for her, the truck driver saw the accident, and the girl, and swerved to miss her to spare her life. Sadly, when he did that, the truck driver didn't see that there was a fruit cart vendor on the sidewalk that he was headed straight toward. When the truck hit the curb of the street and popped up on to the sidewalk, it slammed right into the fruit cart, sending the vendor and the cart flying. The vendor went slamming backward through the plate glass storefront of the Jenkins Hardware supply store, which was harmless enough, but he landed on a rack of aluminum rakes and punctured his lungs.
Unfortunately, though, the fruit cart and all its' wares were hurled up and forward from the impact, and oranges, lemons, and apples went sailing all over the place. The cart itself was thrown over the tops of the buildings that lined the street and flew, in all its glory, right into the base of the ancient, much beloved, fragile ash tree that the town was founded around. The cart crashed speedily into the bottom third of the ash and splintered the trunk. Of course that caused the ash to fall over, and because it was such a majestic and ancient tree, it was well over one hundred feet tall and very heavy. All that weight crashed to the earth and unfortunately landed on the mayor's 1968 Corvette, right on the trunk.
The Corvette flipped up into the air on impact like it was being thrown from a catapult, or more accurately a trebuchet, and it sailed in a beautiful arc over the Ashtown Savings and Bank, coming to a stop as it careened into the massive stone and iron steeple of the First Episcopal Church of Ashtown. The spire fractured most perfectly and was flung down from its' perch where it slammed into a fire hydrant below. The hydrant, free of its' concrete home, shot off like a rocket from the pressure of the water in the lines under the city streets, and lazered its' way toward the sky. The flight was short lived, and the fire hydrant came crashing down right on top of my mother. She was killed almost instantly, though her legs flew out from under her with the impact and she gave my father one last, good kick in the groin. My father was immediately stricken with pain and grief, but once he regained his composure from the kick he took me to sign up for baseball. While I was doing my tryout to see what team I would be placed on, my dad went to the house to grab a bite to eat. Six hours later, I left the YMCA and struck out for home on foot. I had guessed my dad was home drunk and had forgotten about me. When I got home, though, I found a very different scene. My dad had decided, I guess, that since my mother was no longer with us that he would become a playboy. There were clothes and women everywhere when I got home. I was in shock, not because my dad had decided to sleep with a bunch of women but because there were definitely more women at our house than there were teeth. Dad yelled at me to get out and so I ran away, never to see him again.
I got picked up by the police an hour later, and when they asked me where I lived I told them that I was an orphan and that I had been living at the Heckle & Shmeckle Jewish Home for Displaced and Abandoned Boys. I lived at the home until I was eighteen and was trained in the ways of Rabbi-ery. I felt like this was a good way to honor my tragically killed mother, so it seemed like I would have a good life. Unfortunately for me, you can't always escape your genetic pool - sometimes you just float around and end up drowning in it.
When I was twenty six, I was moved from the temple which I was rabbi over to another temple that was much less fortunate money-wise than where I came from. I started taking small amounts of petty cash - a dollar here, a dollar there just so I could make ends meet. Soon though, I was taking handfuls of cash from the donations boxes and collection plates. I didn't really need much more than a few dollars a week but I was taking nearly a thousand. I didn't know what to do with the extra money so I started trying to honor my father, whom I presumed to be dead by this point, by making some moonshine on the side. It went well at first, I was making just enough for me to have a drink every day and little else. But soon I got the idea to start mass production and sales. I hired a small Jewish boy, Kenneth, and he helped me out by tending the stills when I was teaching classes or was just too drunk to move.
It was Kenneth that got me busted. That little rat fink discovered my stash of excess cash, and because he was good at math figured out that I wasn't selling near enough moonshine to have that kind of money laying around. He turned me in for fraud and lying. And now I get to do the next ten years in a small cell, probably with some sketchy guy named Bo or something equally trashy.....thanks, Kenneth.
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