thinking of her

Garmentos

“Zev fucked everybody,” Ellen says. Our parents are dead, and my sister is the keeper of the family lore, the juicier the better. We like being Jews who lack propriety, the kind you would want to ban from your society. You want a Jew to back away from? We’ll be your Jews. So when Ellen evokes Zev’s exploits, we feel a sense of family pride.

Uncle Zev had a gleaming smile and wavy black hair, and when I was a little girl, a little temptress, he said, “You will drive boys wild.” He was the Bill Clinton of furriers, an equal opportunity womanizer.

“Zev fucked Bell,” Ellen says. She means our mother’s younger sister. My sister and I are in Starbucks, and Ellen leans close. Aunt Bell was tan and wiry, thinner than our mother. In the Long Beach years, Toby packed on a little padding, but never Bell. She was a stringy, tendony thing you’d have to pull from your teeth if you ate her. Her mouth must have watered when Zev flashed his Clark Gable smile.

We wrote in our intro that "our fabulous Willie Smith is back! His new book "nothing done" is out from Honest Publishing (2012)," but while it's true that the fabulous Willie Smith is back, the title of his book is not "nothing done," but "Nothing Doing." We misread the title to read almost hopefully (and uncharacteristically for Smith's work) that things are unfinished and thus, possibly, could, one day, be done (albeit in lower case.) Correcting the error, Mr. Smith wrote:

"All right! Thanks kindly for making space in the electronic coffin! I am already inviting folks to the viewing. One minor item, though: the title of the newly-released book containing 22 of my parables, fairy tales and longwinded, lewd jokes is NOTHING DOING (http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Doing-Willie-Smith/dp/0956665896/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340677963&sr=1-1&keywords=nothing+doing+willie+smith). "nothing done," as it shows in the previous intro works, too, and might invite controversy, touch off orthographic duelling and otherwise stir up interest. But I like the phrase "nothing doing," because it and it's synonymous riposte "no soap" were gangster talk from the thirties; my high-school dropout innercity father used both phrases regularly: "Daddy -- can I have a dime for some baseball cards?" "Nothing doing, kid;" or "Say, Dad -- could I have the keys to the car tonight so I can take my girlfriend to go see WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? and afterwards fuck the poop out of her in the backseat?" "No soap, son." I guess I could have titled the anthology NO SOAP. But I've already used No Soap in some of my stories and, besides, there is something appealing about the juxtaposition of two words ending in "-ing," one a noun, the other the present participle of a verb. Or am I just full of shit? Well, of course I am full of shit. That's beside the point.   Regards, Willie