Lynn Hoffman

from Killing Philly

There was this moment when I decided to kill Mr. Philadelphia. It was almost noon on a Monday morning after a long Columbus Day weekend. I celebrated Columbus with three days of drinking , cursing and pissing on my shoes. By Tuesday I was way past drunk and well into poisoned; if Congress had proclaimed Columbus Week instead of Columbus Day, I would have drunk myself to death.
On the Friday before the festivities, I turned in two restaurant reviews ahead of deadline. I wrote the foreword for somebody else’s book of recipes, sent out some queries about a winery in Graz, Austria and edited this week’s tasting notes. Then I put my work away and started drinking: whole cedary, scratchy, dirty bottles of dark red wine. By Sunday I was sure I was dying. Someplace in the sour-smelling little vestibule in front of drinking-yourself-to-death, I saw my mother’s face, pinched and staring. The face didn’t look at me or move its lips, but I heard her voice saying “You’re not the one who should die.” Then I heard my own voice saying the name of the one who should.
Deciding to kill Pifkie was the best thing I did all day. Oh sure, it was the same day I screamed obscenities at my oldest living relative and threw a wine bottle at a male prostitute. And I almost bit a fat lady on the saggy flesh at the back of her neck. Drooled all over her in fact. Good stuff, highlights film stuff. But none of it was half as satisfying as deciding that I was going to kill Jim Pifkie.

When I was a kid, Columbus Day was special. My father-Solomone Cardoso- came to this country one Columbus Day in the early 1950’s. My mother-a sweet Catholic girl who converted to Judaism to marry him- let him name me Emanuel. My dad never said he ‘immigrated’, he always said he ‘discovered America’. In our family, Thanksgiving was the Dry Bird Festival and Christmas was just a day off, but Columbus Day was our Easter, our day of Resurrection.
We always had a big family party and after dinner, my father would dance. When he danced, his face danced with him. The dances felt like little stories and you could feel the narrations in the vibrations of his feet, imagine the characters at whom he was smiling and frowning and clicking his tongue. His eyes fluttered and his lips took a hundred different poses below the wide ledge of his moustache. I was five years old when I began to memorize his little smiles and smirks and pouts and purses. He swirled and dipped and his eyebrows could make a wave of their own, like a string of corks on the ocean. He would stamp his foot just softly enough not to upset the phonograph needle or the neighbors. His jaw would go down and out, lip-smacking the air to fill in the sound his heel barely made as he brushed it along the wooden floor.
I was a few years older when I discovered the rest, learned that the stories were about confiscations and late-night escapes and heroes and sick goodbyes and death. But those were just details. Everything that mattered was there in his dancing, all the feelings and all the ghosts.
Sometimes he would jig a handkerchief at my red-haired, freckly mother and she would take the bait, pinching her end of the cloth and following him around the room. Her movements were as compact as his were expansive; her hand just outboard of her hip, fingers splayed out suggestively, elbow thrown back. Her dancing was economically lewd, frugal, not stingy. It gave the scratchy middle eastern music everything it deserved. When he danced with her, his story changed. In this chapter, he was playful, then macho, then silly then desperately wanting. Sometimes at the end of a dance, he would tremble and when I was little, I thought it meant he was cold.
My mother moved as if she were a seed blown on the wind. Her dance seemed to cost her no effort but that of willing it. My father perspired when he danced. It should have been grotesque and it was beautiful. To this day, I am not especially moved by the people they call charismatic - I was raised by a man who could dance in tongues.