Lucky Bruce by Bruce Jay Friedman

Author:Bruce Jay Friedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: 2011-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

After his death in 2007, I ran into Mailer’s widow, Norris Church, at a cocktail party.

“I’ve heard about you,” she said. “When Norman was courting me, he said you once picked a fight with him and he was forced to beat you up.”

“It didn’t happen quite that way,” I said. “But I had great admiration for your husband. If that was his version, let it stand.”

And so there he was, taking away my one clearcut boxing victory, striking at me from beyond the grave.

Violence. A friend, who’d read much of what I’d written, pointed out that many of my short stories end in violence, either verbal or physical. There was some truth to this, though I hadn’t realized it. What was the source of it? The Bronx in the thirties and forties is often portrayed as a congenial place, with a comfortable ethnic mix of Italians, Jews, Blacks and Irish. And so it was – to a point. There was a layer of violence that ran beneath the surface. The distance from my apartment building to the drugstore was a short city block. It was fairly standard to have a fight or two on the way to pick up some aspirin. My nose took the brunt of it. The fistfights, being flung face-down on the ocean floor at the Rockaways, suddenly cracked across the head in the school cafeteria by a grinning nutcase for his own amusement. There was a popular game in which a boy stood in the center of a circle, and had rocks thrown at him. He was given the lid of a garbage can to defend himself. I wasn’t quick enough to be good at the game; on one occasion I had to be carted off to Morrisania Hospital with yet another broken nose. In Southampton, Irwin Shaw introduced me to friends as being a member of the artists’ community, “though he doesn’t look it.”

I had a fighter’s face with no particular interest or skills at fighting.

Not the most cheerful situation.

My father hit me just once, which is not a bad score for a Depression boy. The blow was sudden, unexpected. It knocked me halfway across the street. I’d used a slang word, putz, though I had no idea it meant penis. Was that it? A fear that he might hit me again? My mother, when angered, would put her fist in her mouth and bite down on it as if to restrain herself from the horrors she might inflict. That fist in the mouth, the eyes popping. Much worse than the actual horrors. So maybe that was it. Violence.

More than likely, it’s been a literary device.

I’m a story.

Wind me up.

With a bang.

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