THE USES OF THE JEWS

I’ve mentioned Benny before in these pages.  He is the maintenance man at the store where I work, and he’s the sort of guy who can fix anything.  Plumbing, electric, ceilings, floors, refrigeration, heating and cooling---you name it.  In addition to his job, he has a side business buying cars, restoring and reselling them.  He could probably fix your pacemaker if you gave him the instruction manual, a sharp knife, and an anatomy book.

The other day, I mentioned to him that I had taken my mother-in-law to the National Jewish Museum down at Fifth and Market in Philadelphia, and that we had enjoyed the trip.  He told me he had been there about a year ago with his daughters (who are eight- and ten-years old), and he agreed the place was well put together and said he was glad they had gone.

(Picturing Benny at the National Jewish Museum is itself amusing.  He is built like a fireplug, with a pointy, satanic beard.  Both arms are covered with tattoos that appear to encase his arms in dark, heavy chains.  He also has several piercings in his eyebrows and a five-inch-long, Frankenstein-type bolt that goes through the back of his neck.  At a glance, he appears to be a one-man Puerto Rican biker gang from hell, and imagining him strolling through the NJM, where the typical visitors are a 65-ish Jewish couple from the Main Line, made me smile.

The image is false, by the way.  I’m sure Benny is street-wise, but he’s a pussycat.  Since he has daughters, I once asked him how many times he had seen “Frozen,” the Disney movie.  “Double-digits,” he said, rolling his eyes.  “I know every fucking song by heart.”)

“So my daughters came home from school last year, and it must have been around Puerto Rican Day or something, and they start telling me about how poor the Puerto Ricans were in the 50’s and 60’s and how they had to leave the island, and how hard it was to find work, and then the Anglos were discriminating against them, and so on and so on and so on.  And you know, I just hate that shit they feed them in school.  I hate that victim shit.  We’re not victims.  I’m not a goddamn victim!  We have a house, we have cars and computers and a flat-screen and there’s food on the table.

“So I took them down to the Jewish Museum, and we walked through the whole place and read all the exhibits, and a few times, I made sure to tell them, ‘Now look at this.  You think Puerto Ricans had it tough?  Well, look what those bastards did to the Jews!!’

 “And that’s the last I heard of that crap about how pitiful the Puerto Ricans are.  Great museum.  Very useful.”

Copyright2016MichaelKubacki