Dog Training The American Male (7 page)

ONE MONTH LATER...

WOWF
- AM

“I need your
help, listeners. As you know, I have a new man in my life—George. George and I
met on a blind date about a month ago at a bowling alley and we’ve been seeing
each other pretty steadily ever since. Well, George’s sublet is up and he needs
to move out, and I’ve been sharing an apartment with my sister and her
significant other and I need to move, so naturally George and I have been
talking about possibly moving in together into a two bedroom rental. Is it too
soon? Call in and tell me what you think. Our land line is 561-222-WOWF, or you
can text star-WOWF on your mobile phone.”

Nancy glanced across her radio
booth at Patricia Kieras. Situated behind glass in the control room, her
producer’s face was buried behind a paperback copy of
Shades of Gray. “
I
see my producer, Trish is signaling me that we have open lines. Did I mention
that my boyfriend is an adult entertainer? Wait, that sounded bad. What I meant
is that he’s an up-and-coming comedian but his humor is geared more for adults.”

A yellow light illuminated on the
control board. Without moving her book, Trish took the call, wrote something on
a flash card, then held it up against the glass partition.

LINE 1. BOYNTON - RACHEL.

“And we have our first caller;
Rachel from Boynton Beach. Good afternoon, Rachel, and welcome to the show.”

“Yeah . . . I
think you should dump this loser, George, and go out with a real man. I know
this guy, Arnoldo . . . he’s got his own trailer out in
Loxahatchee by the sugar fields and—”

“Thank you, Rachel.” Nancy hung
up on Lynnie and took the next call. “Christine, from West Palm, welcome to
Life’s
a Beach
.”

“Hi, Dr. Beach. Weren’t you
living with a guy who cheated on you?”

“My fiancé, Sebastian. He was
sleeping with my roommate, Carol. What’s your point? You think it’s too soon?
Sebastian and I dated for eight months and we never lived together.”

“My point is—if you live in sin
then you’ll pay the price. My advice is to pray to the Holy Trinity and wait
until you’re married to share your bed with a man.”

“Thank you, Christine. Our next
caller is from Boca. Hi, caller, to whom am I speaking?”

“It’s your mother. Who’s this
George? I thought you were seeing Jacob?”

The blood drained from Nancy’s
face. “Thank you, mother. Yes, listeners, my boyfriend’s name is really Jacob.
I was just trying to be discrete—”

“Your sister tells me he’s a
Jew.”

Oh, God.
“Yes, Mom. Is
that a problem?”

“It wouldn’t be my first choice,
but I suppose it could be worse—look at your sister, for heaven’s sake.
Actually, I prefer a Jew over your last boyfriend . . . what
was the little Spanish prick’s name?”

“Sebastian, and let’s keep it
clean.”

“If you recall, I warned you
about him, he had a wandering eye. The Jew . . . he’s not a
doctor, is he?”

“No, mother.”

“Too bad. I’m leaving on a cruise
and need a prescription called in.”

“Thanks for checking in, mom, but
we have other callers waiting—”

“Your father was circumcised. Did
you know that?”

Nancy disconnected the call.
“Mary from Boynton Beach, bless you for calling.”

“Yeah, Dr. Beach, I think the
listeners want to hear more about this Arnoldo fella from Loxahatchee.”

“Good-bye, Lynnie!”

MOTHER
COPE

The recreation room at the
Shusterman Retirement Home was bright and airy—but not too bright because the
visually-impaired residents complained that they had difficulty seeing the
ceiling-mounted televisions, and not too airy because the draft could cause a
chill, which is why the air-conditioning was set at a balmy seventy-seven
degrees.

There were several cliques of
seniors in the rec room—the card players and the mahjong crowd, the
kibitzers
offering their unwanted advice and the
yentas
gossiping about it.
The TV groupies were divided among the serious viewers (
Matlock
and
Jeopardy
being reserved time slots) and the drifters—those who drifted off into their
afternoon catnaps. Snorers were relegated to the chairs along the shuffleboard
patio.

To the outsider, living out one’s
days in a retirement home may have seemed like a slow regimented death march to
the grave, but for the active senior there were numerous opportunities to
explore their heterosexual “urges” thanks to the miracle of impotency drugs.

For seventy-two-year-old Carmella
Cope, winter romances were something akin to a game of musical chairs. In the
last four years the feisty widow had buried three of her last five lovers,
earning the nickname C.C. Rider.

Morty Goldman had been eyeing
Carmella ever since he had seen the big-breasted woman during water aerobics.
When her companion of eighteen months, Sheldon Finklestein, had succumbed to
colon cancer, Morty had made his intentions known. He and C.C. had eaten lunch
together every day this week (except for Tuesday, when Morty had his urologist
appointment) and the last two dinners. This afternoon, Carmella had invited the
former manager at Levitz Furniture to join her for the
Jeopardy Hour
—a
prelude to dinner in her room.

Morty’s plan was simple: he’d
impress the seductress with his razor-sharp wit, then pop the
Viagra
right
before the start of the double Jeopardy round.

All was going according to plan –
until Carmella’s younger son had shown up unexpectedly, throwing the widower
off his game.

“You’re moving in with a whore?”

“Ma, Nancy’s not a whore.”

“If she’s screwing you to cover
her share of the rent, she’s a whore.”

“She’ll be paying her half, and
my boss upped my hours so I’ll be paying mine. I think I love her, Ma.”

“Love? Jacob, you have no idea
what love is.”

“Shush!” Morty pointed to the
television as Alex Trebeck read the next question: “Definitions for one
hundred: It’s a four letter word for deep personal affection.”

“What is
anal
?”

Mother Cope whacked Morty Goldman
across his shoulder with her gripper. “Watch your language around my son. And
just so you don’t get any ideas, I’m not a three-input gal.”

“Geez, Ma.”

“As for you, Jacob, I don’t want
you living in sin with this whore.”

“It’s my decision. And stop
calling her a whore. Who knows? If our living arrangement works out, one day I
could marry her.”

“Marry her?
Oy gevalt!
This
is all your brother’s fault. He’s kicking you out, isn’t he? That ungrateful
son of a bitch.”

Morty chuckled. “Carm, I think
you just insulted yourself.”

Carmella whacked the old man
again with her gripper.

“It’s not Vin’s fault. Helen’s
mother’s coming to visit, so yes, I needed to find a place to stay. But Vin and
Helen let me use the guest house for over a year. The house we’re renting is
affordable, and it’s on a month-to-month lease, so there’s not a whole lot of
risk. Plus Nancy and I need some privacy.”

“You want affordable; I have a
better solution. We’ll buy you a cheap air mattress; you’ll move in with me!”

MOVING
DAY

The single-family
home was a one-story, two bedroom dwelling located in a lower-middle class
neighborhood in Deerfield Beach. Helen, who worked part-time as a realtor, had
negotiated the lease, the first, last, and security deposit guaranteeing
occupancy throughout the time her mother would be staying in their guest house.

It took most of Saturday morning for
Jeanne and her two female bodybuilding training partners to move Nancy’s bedroom
furniture and the rest of her stored belongings into the new house.

It took Jacob less than half an
hour to toss his belongings in the back of his van.

By noon, Helen Cope had a
cleaning crew stripping the linens and removing the furnishings to disinfect
the entire guest house. The painters would arrive by three.

* * * *
*

The orange and
white Volkswagen van
rumbled its way east on Hillsboro Boulevard, its driver lost in a whirlwind of
thought. Neighborhoods in South Florida can change from one mile to the
next—from million dollar homes with plush golf courses for backyards to low
income dwellings with barred windows, the stucco walls perpetually stained in
rust from iron-infested water supplies feeding the sprinklers.

Jacob Cope has experienced both income
extremes . . . and worse.

An introvert lacking his older
brother’s confidence, Jacob went through his early childhood years as the quiet
pale kid with the curly brown “Jew ‘fro.” By middle school, his peers had
become the “geek-squaders,” a group of video game junkies who escaped the pressures
of adolescence in the library’s computer lab. It was here that Jacob discovered
a talent for writing algorithms, and by his senior year of high school “the
Copemeister” was engineering programs on par with developers at M.I.T.

Unfortunately, Jacob’s grade
point average was not on par with the admission requirements of a major
university. With few options (attending a community college in Palm Beach
County while living at his mother’s home coming in just above suicide) he enrolled
as a part-time student at New York’s City College where he earned just enough
money setting up accounting programs for a small investment firm to afford a
rat-infested basement apartment in Chinatown.

It was in the spring of 2001 during
Jacob’s sophomore year that Lehman Brothers came calling, the talented undergrad’s
work having caught the attention of the Wall Street giant. A two week interview
process led to a six-figure salary offer and bonus plan to pay the nineteen
year old whiz kid to develop a series of new accounting programs at the
investment firm. A week later, Jacob withdrew from City College and moved to
the Upper West Side where the rats had to scale twenty-three floors in order to
visit. And visit they did, sometimes in the middle of the night, carrying
ledgers and requests to “disappear” deficits with algorithmic solutions that,
to their naive young superstar made no sense.