Both Benny and Marty were short, but that was the only characteristic they shared. Benny talked tough and fast; Marty presence was soft and almost frightened. Benny drove a green and white Nash Metropolitan; Marty had a big Chrysler. Marty was dapper and married to a woman who was invisible even when she was present. They were childless. Benny was a bachelor whose social life, if he had one, must have existed outside Oxnard. Marty was an active member of the very small and spread-out Jewish community in Ventura County and was a regular at the sole synagogue’s Friday night services. No one ever saw Benny on the weekends. I think he often went to Vegas.

Marty and Benny had one thing in common. When they ate lunch together, they lied about shoes.

Benny: So, how’s business?
Marty: Terrible. [Terrific.]
Benny: It’s terrible for me, too. [I'm having a record week.]
Marty: So how’re you doing with house shoes?
Benny: Can’t keep them in stock. [Even though business is great, slipper sales are way off.]
Marty: Good for you. I’m going to have to mark mine down. [Unlike you, I really can't keep them in stock.]

It was a game they played. Each knew the other was lying.

When I was 15, I got a job working for Benny. It was my first real job, and under Benny’s tutelage, I learned what it meant to work hard. When business was non-existent, I unpacked merchandise shipments and stocked shelves. When it was slow, I started at one end of the store and made certain that every box was ordered by style and size. When it was brisk, I waited on several customers at once, measuring feet or tying shoes, then moving to the next customer while the shopper paced around assessing the fit. On really busy days, like the Saturday before Easter, I might have a half-dozen customers, almost all women, that I flitted rapidly among, but with order and intent, like a honeybee working the blossoms.

I earned $1.55 per hour, with extras added for selling PMs, those shoes with colored stickers on the boxes. Each sticker gave you Pocket Money, from ten cents up to a dollar depending upon sticker color. They were affixed to out-of-style or one-of-a-kind shoes. Benny used PMs to motivate the sales force to clean out old stock.

Benny made it clear that it was unforgivable to let any customer leave the store without making a purchase. If a matron had tried on several pairs of shoes and then gave an indication that she was ready to walk out, I was to ask her to wait a moment…”Ma’am, I have another idea”…and then call out, “Benny, can you show this customer the 99s.” That was code for, “I’m losing her. Help!” Benny would then immediately add my customer to however many he was waiting on at the moment. Invariably, a few minutes later I would look up from whatever zapata I was lacing, and he’d be sliding a box of shoes into a bag and ringing the sale up. He was that good.

Someone once told me that it’s like the Bar Mitzvah’s rite of passage: every Jewish boy will sell shoes at least once in his life. I did it…and actually liked the work. Even the unwashed feet didn’t bother me.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Over the years, her disappearing shades routine, unpredictable, yet certain as California earthquakes, has clashed spectacularly with a strong preference for fashion and quality. But the former dominated the latter, and she purchased inexpensive dark glasses, one after another after another.

Until last week.

For months she had been badgering her style-oblivious husband to venture mallward on a clothes shopping expedition. He employed every excuse (“There’s a documentary on kiwi pruning I can’t miss”), but finally he entered the emporia on her arm. Three stores, five shirts, two sweaters, a package of underwear, and 31 minutes later, he was finished. On their way out, recalling the evaporation of her last pair, she paused, then entered a store devoted to protecting every eye.

“Go next door and look at hats,” she suggested, and her husband, prejudicially bored by sunglasses (he never wears them), went next door to look at hats. After one quick walk around the chapeau shop (99% baseball caps) and a scientific examination of embroidering machine technology, he strolled back to find her at a register, paying for her purchase.

“I bought a this,” she said, holding up a decorative string with little rubber loops at each end. “Hook it on my sunglasses, and I’ll never lose them again.”

Edwin Land

Noting his horror-struck mien, she said, “I was hoping for you to stay longer in the hat store.”

There was nothing more to say, and they spoke no more about it.

Until today.

They went out to dinner at a local restaurant not yet tried, ordered the day’s special to share, and were pleasantly surprised by the presentation, quality, and quantity of the meal. The owner/manager was courteous, almost charming, and attentive, and the atmosphere was just right. But the Monday night service was repetitively lacking.

Their ragout arrived bubbling hot, but there was no spoon with which to serve it. The husband lifted his head, raised an arm, and finally had to leave their table to locate a waitress and make a request.

The couple soon exhausted their bread and wished more, and when no employee passed by, it was she who rose to summon a refill. Even with these service gaffes, when the gracious host appeared tableside to ask if he could do anything else for them, the two carped at nothing, rather they expressed delight with the flavors. The proprietor nodded and smiled. They asked for waters. He never returned.

Finally, watered by yet another summoned waitress, they requested the check…and chuckled to each other (“We’re in no hurry.”) when it didn’t come.

At last, the tab paid, they exited the restaurant holding hands, pleasantly full and agreeing that the food warranted a repeat visit.

“But,” he began as they reached their car, “the service was…”

He was interrupted by a waitress calling out to them as she ran across the parking lot, carrying the wife’s new sunglasses aloft.

Husband and wife stood for an instant.

Then she laughed.

And he laughed harder. “…the service was terrific.”

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

For all the panels, go to the Bridget over troubled Waters website.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Satif Luwi Qatlar

Their destination was Oakland, where they would be met by their widowed 61-year old mother. She had decided to move from the East Bay to Los Angeles to be closer to her sons and had requested their packing and moving help.

They referred to themselves as screenwriters, work that had not yet brought in any significant rewards. Being a screenwriter with little income was commonplace in Los Angeles. Satif, a Harvard Business School MBA, had done a not-so-unscientific survey the previous year that indicated upwards of 30,000 screenplays were always available for purchase in the area surrounding the studios (from Hollywood west to the ocean plus the San Fernando Valley). Almost every dentist, massage therapist, and waiter had something on a shelf.

Success was elusive, but occasionally someone won, so the brothers worked hard…and constantly.

It was a full flight. The only two seats together were in the back…the last row. The brothers sat, buckled up, and watched out the window as the plane lifted up over the Pacific Ocean and turned northward. A few minutes later the stewardess (this was the era before “flight attendants”) offered orange juice and coffee in paper cups. The men accepted, drank, and drew no attention to themselves.

Refreshments consumed, Ali turned to Satif. “Okay, here’s your stay-sharp writing assignment. We’re going to come up with a scene.”

It was here that Ali unwittingly set the brotherly caravan on an unstoppable rendezvous with disaster. “Let’s say that you’re a hijacker,” he began, “and I’m your prisoner. Somehow I have to let the pilot know that the plane is in danger. How do we write the scene?”

Satif gave a weary sigh, “I’m tired. I think I’ll nap.” Sitting in the window seat, he rested his head against the fuselage wall and closed his eyes. About an hour later, he awoke to the seatbacks-and-traytables announcement. The stewardesses picked up the empty cups, and the BAe-146 Smiliner descended over San Francisco Bay, landing on time in Oakland, and taxied to the gate.

The two men were the last to reach the exit door. As Satif looked out past Ali, he noticed, but did not react to, two men in dark suits standing on the ground, each about five yards from either side of the roll-to-the-plane stairway, hand inside suit jacket. One step later, just as Satif’s foot touched the stairs’ top platform, both his arms were grasped by men identically besuited.

“Would you come with us, sir?” one of the men said. It was not really a question.

“What’s the problem?” Ali asked.

“Please come with us, too.” the other man-in-black said firmly.

Satif and Ali were led across the tarmac to a nondescript room where they were searched and interrogated. (When asked today about their ordeal, both agree that it was fortunate that their questioning took place one month before Dick Cheney was elected to represent Wyoming in the U.S. House of Representatives.)

It took an hour for Satif and Ali to convince the Federal officers that their government-issued driver licenses (same last name, same home address) demonstrated that they were brothers, and that it was unreasonable to assume that one of them was holding the other hostage.

It was then that one of the gendarmes produced the artifact that triggered the bust: a paper cup.

Ali gasped and, in a flood of explanation, revealed all.

“It was a movie scene. I mean, I asked my brother to— But he was asleep.”

After explaining the setup (hijacker and hostage), Ali continued, “The scene needed for my character to get a message to the pilot without the hijacker noticing. How do you do that? And then, while I was finishing my coffee, I figured it out.”

Ali got animated, waving his arms like a film director mapping out a take for his crew. “You film the actor draining his cup, but then, instead of setting it back on the tray, he drops his hand into his lap, and with the other hand, takes his pen and upside-down, without looking, he writes a message on the bottom of the cup. We lift the row of seats into the air and shoot straight up, right between his legs, zooming in so we can actually read the message as he writes it.”

Satif saw the main interrogator’s mouth twitch upward slightly.

“But my brother slept the whole flight, and by the time we started down, I had completely forgotten about it.” He paused. “But…since you guys are here, I guess the scene works.”

The G-men kept us for another 30 minutes, one of them pitching a “terrific idea for a movie,” while Mom watched our baggage rotate.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Irie (EYE-ree)—to be at total peace with your current state of being. The way you feel when you have no worries. (Jamaican)

The small-town paraders and bystanders were more than irie long before the procession began just before noon.  This is a big deal in Christiansted. Everyone knows this isn’t the right day, but we’re on an island, so what the hey!

Some candids:

I conversed with both the Grand Marshal (self-appointed) and the donkey and discerned no appreciable difference in intellect.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Winter in Southern California is barely winter. But colds, coughs, and bad dreams can besiege a child in any clime.

I was six. My older brother was nine. Our baby brother was just months old. Dad came into the big boys’ bedroom to solve some medical or psychological problem. He carried two glasses of what appeared to be milk. My brother and I immediately noticed globules of melted butter floating on the surface of the warm liquid. We questioned.

“It’s a guggle-muggle,” Dad explained. “Drink.”

The name was intriguing and, I was sure, fabricated to entrance his boys. The concoction was sweet, warm, and delicious.

We feigned illness several times thereafter in order to occasion repeats.

His recipe, we eventually learned, was simply milk, butter, and honey, warmed until the butter melted. I can’t imagine it had any real medical efficacy, especially for those illnesses where phlegm might be one of the symptoms, but a search has revealed the guggle-muggle’s widespread use in Jewish folk medicine. Who knew?

Clearly, almost everyone but me. But once I looked, I found guggle-muggles galore!

I even found one in an Uruguayan bookstore’s blurb for a book entitled, Gogl Mogl! El Gran Libro Del Humor Judi: “El Gogl Mogl es un exquisito postre muy popular entre los judíos de Europa Oriental.”

The name has various spellings (not surprising since it is a tranliteration into English of Yiddish, which is written with Hebrew letters). Gogl-mogl, gogol-mogol, gogel-mogel, kogel mogel, gurgle-murgle, and uggle-muggle are the ones I’ve found. There are undoubtedly others. I found one source that claimed the name comes from a cantor named Gogel who sang in a synagogue in Russia. He lost his voice and couldn’t sing, only regaining his voice by drinking a mixture of raw eggs and wine…with sugar, because he had a sweet tooth. This is, IMO, bogus.

Do not confuse the guggle-muggle with the muggles in Harry Potter’s saga. Not Jewish!

The recipe is even more varied than the spelling. It is always hot, and most preparers include a raw egg yolk…some the whole egg. Some use sugar instead of honey. Cinnamon, occasionally. Maybe grapefruit or lemon juice. Many include a bissel bronfen (a little slivovitz, rum, or brandy—maybe a lot!). Hot tea? Yeah, some.

I even found this reminiscence: “If I am not mistaken this was a concoction of cod liver oil and chocolate syrup. My father would take me to the druggistnik to make a guggle muggle when I was constipated or just had the blahs.“

Oy!

There’s an old saw about two Jews having three opinions. There is no definitive recipe for a guggle muggle. It is to be made exactly how bubbie used to do it.

Former NYC mayor Ed Koch spoke of it on his radio show. Barbra Streisand said her mother gave it to her to strengthen her voice.

And from the beginning of a short story that won third prize in a 1997 online literary contest:

I came down with a heavy bronchial cough one year to the day after my Bar Mitzvah and on the very day that my mother went to the hospital to give birth to her third child, a baby girl, my little sister. My father tended to me in her absence. When on the third day of my illness the cough hadn’t disappeared in spite of my taking medicine prescribed by a doctor, my father took matters into his own hands. He put together a concoction that his own parents had given him when he was a child: the yellow of eggs, one squeezed lemon, one spoon of honey, and two or three teaspoons of sugar, all mixed together and taken down as if I were drinking a milkshake or an egg cream in the candy store downstairs. Unlike all other medicines, this tasted fine. In fact, I made note of the ingredients so that I could put all that stuff together for myself secretly, even when I didn’t have a cold.

“What is it called?” I asked my father.

“In our shtetl in Galicia and in Russia, an uggle-muggle,” he said. “In Rumania, a guggle-muggle. In France, a chateau, but what do they know.”

You could say the same about me. I thought my father invented the whole thing. What do I know?

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

The shirt was chocolate. The tie was garish.

The suit, of blessed memory, was lemon and taupe.

Nuff sed.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

“Wells Fargo holds the first and second mortgages on a condominium….As holder of the first, Wells Fargo is suing all other lien holders, including the holder of the second, which is itself.”

Nice move, Wells Fargo. But I had that self-abusive idea first.

In 1989, while working for Montgomery Securities in San Francisco, I zapped a friend by hacking into our pre-internet business wire and generating this official-looking “news story.”

The hard-to-read original text in the sidebar is:

BROKER SUES SELF FOR CHURNING

San Francisco, Ca, April 5/PRNewswire/ — In an unprecedented legal maneuver, Montgomery Securities broker Michael Balog sued himself in Federal District Court for churning his own account.

“I’m a compulsive trader,” charged Balog, “and since a broker should know his customer, I should have protected me from myself.”

“Nonsense,” countered Balog, “I show poor judgment in almost every aspect of my life, and I find such behavior consistent with my investment objectives and trading patterns.”

The formal complaint charges that Balog coerced himself into trading extensively in options and futures as well as common stocks his firm did not even cover in its research activities. Balog has demanded full restitution, as well as unspecified punitive damages that are expected to exceed his personal net worth. Melvin Belli, Balog’s attorney, explained, “My client has been emotionally unable to total up the thousands of confirmations that flooded his mailbox in 1988, but the commissions were at least seven times the capital he started with.”

“What makes this case especially tragic,” continued Belli, “is that Mr. Balog, an average American Joe, entrusted his life savings to someone who was inexperienced and out-of-control.” Belli described Balog as a “hard-driving, aggressive salesman whose high-pressure technique overpowered the naïve plaintiff. It’s a damn shame when an unscrupulous egomaniac rides roughshod over an honest gentleman whose only mistake was to trust himself.”

Officials at Montgomery Securities praised Balog’s salesmanship. “He’s one of our top youngsters,” acknowledged John Skeen, the firm’s grandfatherly sales manager. “Balog’s production was really jagnormous. Whenever a month got slow, he was always willing to work his own account for the benefit of the firm. If I have one complaint, it’s that he spent too much time on his own investments.”

In evaluating the charges that Balog brought against himself, Montgomery Securities general counsel Jack Levin stated, “We stand behind our brokers. Balog did nothing wrong. He signed the discretionary papers. He chose himself as his broker. He knew what he was getting.”

Balog cautioned that he might countersue both himself and his employer. “Montgomery prohibited me from stuffing my account with our deals. And they gave me zero payout. When I think about what I could have made, I’m just sick.”

Life again imitates Art. The Art is humorous; the Life is laughable.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

An intelligent, worldly woman is leaning over her laptop late at night, paying almost no attention to the conversations behind her. She is startled out of her browsing by her sister’s voice.

“Is there any news about Golda Meir?”

She spins away from her laptop and demands, “What’s going on with Golda Meir?”

Three adults stare at her as if she’s grown a second head. Meir’s been dead for 31 years.

She persists, “Golda Meir. What’s the news?”

After several whats and huhs, she finally learns that her sister, bored with the non-stop, pan-media banality of Michael Jackson’s death reportage, had inquired about the latest Supreme Court nominee.

You read it here first: (Sonia) SOTO MAYOR will be the next prime minister of Israel.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

It was 1967. I was a first-year graduate student living in Peabody Terrace, the married students’ housing, a walking bridge across the river from Harvard Business School. These were tall, narrow buildings, four units to a floor, all sharing a long narrow balcony that looked east over the Charles River toward Boston. We had the uppermost balcony, a twentieth-floor apartment. When the weather was warm, all four apartments might be open to the balcony, on which rested only two heavy chairs, the frequent strong winds making predictable patio furniture a hazard to ground dwellers.

Treswick lived two apartments away and often walked the parapets, pacing the railing, three feet down on one side, 200 on the other. One evening, our door to the balcony open, I stepped from the bedroom into the living room and found Treswick aprowl. Words of encouragement accompanied by mild gestures toward the open door did not inspire him to exit. Raised tones and more challenging approaches only served to anger the feline. He stood his ground, offering hisses as counterpoint. Rapid wieldings of a long-handled broom and several high-octaved unintelligibilities finally convinced him; Treswick backed out, expressing discontent and disaffection toward me, my wife, and our unborn children.

My wife Jane worked as a school nurse, often coming home before I did. Her previous and long-standing fear of non-cuddly felines was now in foment. I came in late one afternoon not long after the aforesaid interloping to find the bathroom door locked. Jane was in the tub. She had come home, leaped when she found Treswick in the living room again, and escaped to the the bathroom, where she had been closeted for two hours. The cat had exited, how long before I could not know. Jane was pruney; I was pissed. I trotted over to the owners’ apartment, explained the invasion, and suggested an accommodation. Each of us would look to see if the other’s exterior door was open. If so, the examiner would keep his closed. With such an arrangement, I explained, Treswick would patrol only when our living quarters were closed to him, and we would enjoy the air only when Treswick was locked in.

A few nights later, balmy weather prompted me to check the door status as I retired. Treswick’s was shut. I opened ours to the night air.

Jane, in her first trimester with our first child, had already gone to bed and was nearly asleep when I joined her. Our bedroom, small, concrete-walled, and spare, had one window that opened to the building side opposite the balcony, providing a welcome cross-breeze on this warm night. Twenty floors up, there was little ambient street light; the room was lit by starlight only. The moon, which began this evening on the balcony, east, was a building away. I fell asleep.

Sometime later in slumber, I turned from my left side onto my back, Jane to my right, and awoke with the realization that Treswick had come in our balcony door and settled down on the pillow between us, his fur brushing my cheek. Reptilian brain suddenly firing, my heartbeat leaped from ahhh-sleep to lion-on-the-veldt. But my body did not move. Even slogging through the sodden clod of partial consciousness, I knew that to startle Treswick was injudicious. But what to do? I am right-handed, and my right arm was beneath the beast. I am near-sighted, and the room, dimly lit by the toenail moon now in the west, was entirely undefined.

Lying on my back, cat near my right ear, I constructed a plan. I would slowly extract my left arm from the covers, carefully reach across my chest without translating that motion to the bed, pillow, or feline, grab Treswick with one sure snatch, and fling him back across my body hard against the concrete wall which stood only two feet from the edge of the bed. It was not a great plan, but it was all I had. If he awoke while I was cocking my arm… If I mishandled the grab and left him startled on the bed… If I muffed the fling and only angered him… the night murk would be claws, blood, and blinded eyes.

It was dark. I was desperate. I had one chance.

I slowly extricated my arm from the covers. The cat didn’t move.

I began moving my arm toward Treswick. I was just past halfway when I felt my wife begin to turn. The roll began at her hips; one moment more and Jane would turn her head, either discovering the cat or upsetting it. Either way I would have to strike immediately and with all the force I could muster..

The events that followed must have taken place in a blur of milliseconds, but even today those steps are clear, discrete memories.

The impulse to reach and snatch formed in my brain and began its electrochemical transit to my arm. My vision, heightened in the moment by adrenaline and necessity, focused on the back and neck of the cat. But my wife’s head turned, and in that sliver of time before my muscles fired, I realized that the darkness of fur that appeared as Treswick was actually Jane’s head. Motion and mind froze.

I had nearly grabbed my pregnant wife’s head and flung it against the wall.

I was the man who mistook his wife for a cat.

It was years before I told her.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.