Mishpokhe Means Family

The Alley Road Bar & Grill, half full of drinkers and drunks, hummed like a clinking, clanking drone. "Here's a good one," a young man said, eyeing a column of classified ads in the back pages of a small newspaper. "She's a horny one. I'll bet you she's somebody's mother."

Another young man, named Noah, leaned over and took a look at the paper that was spread open on the bar. "She's the same age as my Ma," he said. "A fuckin' gangbang?"

"Yeah, man. She's looking for a big night. We should sign up. What do you say?"

"Yeah, right," Noah said. "I'm gonna bang an old skank from the back of this paper? No fuckin' way." He tipped his beer bottle up, drank the last drops from it, and scanned some more of the ads. "These massage parlors aren't even real, I don't think. They're, like, in the back rooms of people's houses. And the whores in here think they're sneaky, gettin' around the fuckin' law. I bet you the cops read this thing. They probably bust half of these skanks."

The friend shrugged his shoulders. "It's worth readin' just for the stripper club ads. Look at the fuckin' tits on this girl."

"Oh, fuck!" Noah said, giving her picture a long look. "We should go there again. We haven't been there in a while, right?"

Noah caught the bartender's eye and ordered another round of beers. He pulled the little newspaper over in front of him, and his eyes found the five line classified ad again. Something about it grabbed him, enough to keep him staring at it. The gangbang-seeking author of it was indeed his mother's age, and even wrote it out the way she always liked to say it — "44 years young." It seemed a common enough way of expressing it for a woman his mother's age, although he couldn't ever remember anyone else saying it that way. "I'll be needing" is another common thing to say, he thought, because his mother did indeed say it often, so "I'll be needing as many well hung men as I can get," didn't strike him as odd, coming, as it was, from a horny skank in the back of the stripper ads paper.

Noah's friend wasn't paying attention to the paper anymore. He started talking about his niece, and how her tits had grown to "at least a D cup, man. And she still wears fuckin' pig tails and shit."

"You better keep your dick in your pants," Noah said. "That kind of family shit's fucked up."

"How cool would it be if she started workin' at one of the strip clubs," the friend said. "She'll be old enough in, like, a year, and her tits'll be even fuckin' bigger."

"Is the rest of her good?" Noah asked.

"Fuckin' killer. I don't know where she got it, but her ass smokes all the other girls in the family."

"Maybe daddy's not her daddy," Noah said.

"Maybe," the friend said, nodding, with a twinkle in his eye. "My aunt's kinda hot, so...yeah...maybe."

—

Noah's bedroom is a somewhat primitive space, in the attic above his parents' two-car garage. The knee-high walls and slanted ceilings are sheetrocked and painted, and it's heated and has electricity, but the nearest indoor plumbing is inside the house, so Noah pees in a jar at night the way his great great grandfather probably did. The small beer-stained newspaper from the bar—the NightTimes, it's called—lay spread open on his mattress on the floor; it's the place where he sleeps at night, and reclines with his bong, and has sex with two girls from the neighborhood, one at a time, girls he'd gone all through elementary and high school with. One of them, a girl named Eliana, claims Noah's cock is the only one she's seen that's circumcised, even though she's a Jewish girl.

Noah was stuck on that word, "circumcised," and it was that little five line classified ad where his eyes were frozen on it. That "44 years young" woman had written it, twice. "Circumcised" and "un-circumcised." She was asking for men of both types, and Noah found that interesting. Was it a visual thing, he wondered, or was there a pleasure difference? Was the woman, like Eliana, someone who had gone through life experiencing only one, or the other? And didn't she realize those words are long, real space hogs when you're paying for a classified ad? It must have been important to her.

He knew for a fact that his mother Sabella—Ma, as he called her—had only ever been with his father, a Jew who, he knew for another fact, was circumcised. Ma had gone on and on about it on many occasions—not about the skin on the tip of his father's cock, but about being his sweetheart since the day she found out she'd been promised to him, and never even so much as kissing another boy or man. Except for Noah, of course. Jewish mothers love to kiss their sons, and they love it even more when their sons kiss them.

Noah was there, on his bed, with that ad that was printed on cheep newsprint paper that smelled like a barroom floor, because he couldn't shake the feeling that his mother—Ma, herself—had written and submitted and payed for that five-line request for a roomful of the city's men to come forth and fuck her, all at once, or as close to all at once as they could manage. It made him numb, thinking about it, like being stunned, but in a slow-burn kind of way. The pieces fell into place in his mind but he couldn't quite believe them. He'd shake his head every once in a while and say "no" to the silence, and then he'd read "44 years young," and "I'll be needing...", and it was Ma's voice doing the talking.

It was a Friday morning, so he went down to the house, mildly hungover from two beers too many the night before.

"You're hungry" Sabella said when she saw him. "I'll make some eggs. Your father brought home some nice bagels, and that green-onion cream cheese you like."

"Yeah, Ma, that's...that's good."

"You won't forget to say goodbye to your father," she said. "He'll be leaving today."

"Oh. Yeah. How long this time?"

"Two weeks. The usual rounds to the Asian buyers. Almost three weeks, really, and at his age..."

"What, you planing on him dying, or somethin'?"

"I'm just saying," Sabella said. "Give him a hug and a kiss."

Noah's father, Mervin, was 67 years old. Grandfather age, but that's what sometimes happens with an arranged marriage. It's always an older man and a younger woman, never the other way around.

Noah smiled and nodded at his mother. He sat down at the kitchen table and the words from the ad crept into his head again, the "44 years young" woman saying, in his mother's voice, "looking for men younger than me, with athletic fitness."

Noah's father wasn't fit. He'd grown soft, and wheezed when he climbed more than a flight of stairs, and his hair-line was back where a pilot could see it best. As far as Noah could tell, the old man's testosterone level had dropped to negative numbers a decade and a half ago.

"You and Pop all right?" Noah asked, as he watched his mother make a perfect cheese omelet.

"All right? What do you mean?"

"I don't know. Just wonderin'. What are you gonna do when he's gone?"

"I'm getting my nails done, and there's a new spa that does...you know, some...lady things. I was thinking I might even get my hair cut short. I think it might look younger. What do you think?"

"Oh, yeah. I mean, you always look good, but...what are you doing? Like, a make-over or somethin'?"

Sabella smiled. The bagel popped up, nicely toasted, and she gave it a thick schmear of the green speckled cream cheese. "Or somethin', she said. "I'm not dead yet, you know."

"Jeeze, Ma, you're freakin' me out. You sure you're okay? Everything?"

"Yes, couldn't be better," she said. She kissed Noah on the top of his head and set a nicely plated breakfast down in front of him, just in time to revive his body and his mind.

—

Noah went out again that night. Friday in the city meant dance clubs, followed by strip clubs, followed by a late night nosh at an all-night diner. Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, begins a few minutes before sunset each Friday evening and lasts until early Saturday night, but over the years Noah had gradually stretched the rules and was often out on the town until the wee hours. Sabella was okay with it as long as he was functioning enough to accompany her and his father to Temple on Saturday morning, or sometimes in the afternoon.

On that particular Friday, none of the girls at the dance clubs panned out, as far as late night dalliances go, and the strip clubs felt like the same old same old, sucking twenty-dollar bills out of his and his friend's pockets like a vacuum cleaner. Alone again in his room in the wee hours, reclined against the pillows on his bed, with his smoking, bubbling bong to his mouth, his red eyes caught sight of the folded-up NightTimes newspaper. It was folded up backwards, with the busty stripper girl from the back cover looking right at him, like one of those eerie paintings with the eyes that follow you around. His turntable was spinning a well worn copy of Led Zeppelin IV, with Stairway to Heaven floating like a soft memory into his newly buzzed brain. Smoke hung in the air, freshening the ever-present scent of spilled drinks and spilled bong water. It was just a few moments later when the five lines of the little classified ad were in front of his eyes again, and his mother's voice was inside his head, reading it to him. It was tumultuous in there, inside his head, with hard-to-believe things bouncing around, but another good solid bong hit mellowed the feelings.

"Fuck," he said, to no one but himself. "I gotta figure this shit out."

It was just two minutes later when an email was gone from his quick-typing thumbs, flying through the cloud, bouncing off the NightTimes' reply service, ricocheting to the "44 years young" woman's phone.

A light switched on in the upstairs of the house, just ten feet from Noah's window. "Fuck!" he said when he noticed the sudden glow of it through his curtain. "You gotta be fuckin' shittin' me!"

He floated down the stairs on a big-ass buzz, half drunk and high as the sky. He stood in his mother's kitchen, unsure of what to do, and then he heard her voice.

"Noah? That better be you and not some scumbag looking for my jewelry."

"It's me, Ma. What are you doin' awake?"

"Oh. The phone just rang a few minutes ago. Wrong number, but it got my heart racing...I doubt if I can sleep now. Want to have a snack with me?"

She'd breezed into the kitchen wearing just a bra and a pair of daytime seersucker shorts. Her feet were bare, with recently applied bright red polish on her toenails, something Noah hadn't seen before. And it wasn't a motherly bra. Skimpy to the near extreme, finely detailed with touchable lace, it was cut so low and wide it showed more of her breasts than it covered, and it happily gave up glimpses of the darker pigmented flesh of the areolas surrounding her nipples. It was the type of lingerie that the word sexy was invented for.

"Ma! You sleep in that?" Noah's red, stoned-looking eyes seemed stuck on the pure white bra, or on what little of it there was.

"Oh," Sabella said. "I...uh...I bought some new things today." She glanced down at herself. "Oh, the shorts, you mean? No, I don't sleep in them. I just pulled them on so...so you wouldn't see how badly I need that...spa visit I mentioned. Did you know there's so many waxing choices? Bikini, Brazilian, Full Hollywood..."

"What the fuck is Full Hollywood?" Noah asked, his stoned mind bypassing the craziness of talking to his mother about crotch waxing.

Sabella decided to give him a pass on the blue language that evening, because there was a lot on both of their minds. "It's...you know...bare. Like a pre-pubescent school girl."

"Jeeze, Ma!"

"I bet there was at least one little slut when you were in school. Let me guess...Trinity Wexler."

Noah nodded, feeling way more stoned than he wanted to be at that moment. "Yeah...yeah."

"I know you lost your virginity to her," Sabella said. "Her mother told me, screaming about it."

"Oh, shit. Really?"

"Really," Sabella said.

"You knew about it and you didn't say anything?"

Sabella shrugged her shoulders, just enough to see. "No, I didn't say anything about it, or about Eliana, or Leah. Your sex life never bothered me, for some reason. I've always been sort of...fascinated by it, even when you were too young."

Noah sat down at the kitchen table, his mind in a swirling fog. It was a happy high, not a downer high, but it was twisted in a strange kind of way.

"You've been smoking, haven't you," Sabella said. "They say marijuana is going to be legal in New York, maybe in just a few months. I saw it on the news."

"Yeah, I saw it, too."

"I want to try it," Sabella said.

"You're gonna buy weed when it's legal?"

"No," Sabella said. "I mean now. Go get that contraption you use. I'm ready. I want to see if I like it."

"My...bong? Shit, ma, you want me to bring my bong into the house?"

"I do. And don't spare the weed. Bring me some...what do you call it...good buds?"

Noah smiled, and then he laughed. "Ma, it's three-thirty in the morning. Shouldn't you be asleep?"

"Go get it. Are you really going to let an opportunity to smoke it with your old Ma slip by?"

Noah returned two minutes later, to the sight of his mother slouching comfortably in her kitchen chair. Her shoulders were slightly askew, tightening one barely-big-enough bra cup and loosening the other, to the point of opening an easily seen gap, airing out a soft-looking nipple. "Jeeze, Ma. What, is your robe at the cleaners or somethin'?"

"What's the matter? I happen to know that you like tits."

The fact that his mother said tits in his presence didn't exactly slip by Noah, but his drunk and his high were conspiring again. He was in one-track-mind territory, and barely able to manage that. "How do you know that?"

"I've heard you say it," Sabella said. "I guess you don't think abut it, but, when you have your fun-and-games girls over, your window's always open."

"And your window's always closed."

"Your father wears soundproof earmuffs, so I sometimes open it."

"Oh, Christ."

Sabella smiled. "I've heard you say that a few times, too. Usually with an exclamation point, at the big moment."

Noah tried to get a grip on all the new knowledge, but it was seriously messing with his head. So was the sight of his mother looking like a sexual woman, and a pretty fucking great looking one, at that. Even something as simple as seeing his well-used old bong sitting on the kitchen table, where his father ate every day, was causing his synapses to miss-fire, screwing up the muscles in his fingers, causing spillage of good weed when he filled the bowl for his mother's first-ever hit.

And it was a solid hit, coughing but held pretty well, blown out slowly, minus the THC of course, which drilled into her mind like a million happy thoughts rushing her all at once.

"Whoa!" she said. Her wide-open eyes looked at Noah, and he smiled.

"Good shit, right?" he said, as if she'd know. "I like this bag. A lot."

Noah put the bong to his mouth. Sabella watched with a new and intense interest when he lit it and inhaled the cloud that swirled in the bubbling, clear glass cauldron. The smoke stayed in his lungs for a remarkably long time, and she vowed to do the same with her next hit.

Five minutes later Noah announced, "I'm high as fuck," and his laughing mother announced that she was, too. She opened the screw-top from a fresh bottle of Manischewitz Blackberry wine, two tall juice glasses were poured full, and half of them was drunk. Sabella laughed some more.

"Oh my god," she chuckled. "Why haven't you got me toked before? Is that what you call it? Getting toked?"

Noah was certain it was the funniest thing he'd ever heard in his life. "No, Ma!" he laughed. "Toking is the inhaling part. What I got you is shit-faced."

They both laughed until tears rolled down their cheeks, their open mouthed laughs showing their purple tongues. Sabella poured more of the sweet wine.

A deep discussion ensued, about the richly colored shades of green in the kitchen — the walls, the curtains, the countertops, the potholders and little hand towels, all of them green.

"Those curtains in your room over the garage are the same as these," Sabella said. "I ordered them at the same time."

"No fuckin' way!" Noah said. "I never noticed that before." His eyes appeared stuck on the slightly shiny, goldish-green fabric.

"Lucky for me they let the sound through pretty well," Sabella said. She tried to fight back a smile, but it won out. Her eyes went to her glass on the table, and her thoroughly stoned mind was blown by the intensity of the warm tingles that emanated from the flush of embarrassed heat that she felt.

Noah, focusing his mind as best he could, said, "How much you heard?"

"Oh, things, you know," Sabella said. Her eyes stayed on the deep purple that seemed to be glowing in her glass. "That Eliana, she's...pretty energetic, huh? And a talker."

"Jeeze, Ma, are you talkin' about what I think you're talkin' about?"

" 'Your cock's so big!' and 'Fuck Noah, you're deeper than fuck!'," Sabella said. "I heard her say those kinda things, lot's of times." Sabella sat there, slouched, her left nipple half visible again. Her first-time-shit-faced eyes rose to meet Noah's. "I learn from her. I'm better, 'cause of her."

Noah sat frozen, stunned. "Does Pop...know?"

"You're father? No. He and me, we don't hardly...do much anymore. And like I said, he wears those muffs to bed, so, he doesn't hear you. Never has, I don't think. If he heard you ended up with a big dick he'd probably be jealous. Luckily I don't think those Asian women he likes expect one. I'm thinking maybe size skips a generation, like baldness. Maybe your grandpa had one."

Noah couldn't shake the stunned feeling, but his high was still a happy one. And it was way, way high. "So...you and Pop...it's not good?"

"The sex isn't good for anything, no. But the marriage is good. Is that what you mean? Are you worrying about that?"

"Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Last night and today, I've been...confused about something."

"Is that why you came over?" Sabella asked. "You saw my light, didn't you. You sent that email and then you knew it was me."

"How the fuck do you know that?" Noah asked.

"Your email address, silly. Stonerider69. Did you think I wouldn't recognize it?"

"Oh, fuck!"

Sabella smiled and shook her head. "Sometimes I wish we'd hired some tutors for you, back when your brain was still soaking up things other than booze."

"So what the fuck, Ma. That ad is really you?"

"Your father and I, we have...an arrangement. It's nothing you need to be concerned about."

"Christ, Ma! Of course I need to be concerned about it! You can't expect me to just walk away and forget all this."

"No, I guess not. Give me another...what do you call it? A hit?"

Noah packed the bowl for his mother, and she took a huge, deep hit, like an old pro.

"Well if you must know," she said, exhaling as she spoke, "I had to confront your father. This was years ago. He was...I guess I'll just tell you. I found out he he'd hired a private secretary, an Asian girl, when he was over there on one of his long trips. She was more of a companion, really, but the expense account lists them as secretaries."

"Them? There was more than one?"

"Yes, but...just one at a time, each time he goes over there. There were orgies, too. I found out about at least one of those."

"Holy shit, Ma! Pop? Orgies?"

"It came as a shock to me, too. Our marriage almost ended, but there was you to think about, and your sister."

"Fuck!"

"Yes. Fuck," Sabella said. "But...it all worked out. I offered to stay with him, to keep the family together, but I insisted he had to give me the same freedoms. It's strictly when he travels. He does his thing, and I do mine."