"My Nemesis: Stories About the Enemies, Bullies, and Brawls That Have Shaped Us"
WHAT AN AMAZING AUDIENCE...
AND TO JAMES HANNAH: YOU ARE THE AMERICAN IDOL!
(BURPING ON CUE IS NO SMALL FEAT MY FRIEND)
love,
miss niki
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The Third Reich Open Mic
by niki lee © April 2007
My father believes that he is the illegitimate son of Albert Einstein. He told me this about two years ago and swore me to secrecy, which meant not telling my two younger brothers. However, there is a possibility that it's all true.
Why?
Because my grandmother, my father's mother, lived next door to Einstein in Princeton.
Then I thought, why the hell am I keeping this crazy shit in my brain? So I started telling everyone I knew just to get that poisonous delusion out of my head. To my friend Lisa, it cleared up a major issue. “Well, that would explain your hair.”
(al and me)
My father is an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, my opinion just in case he tries to sue me. He’s one of those guys who was able to slip through the system like Ted Bundy or O.J. As a young man, he was brilliant, charming and good looking--Prince Jeffrey Marshall Albert, J.M.A. On paper it only got better. He attended the prestigious Lawrenceville Prep, Princeton Undergrad and Harvard Law. He was the youngest law professor ever to receive tenure at George Washington University in the 1960s. They probably guessed he was nuts at G.W. But mostly, to everyone there, including his poor secretary, he was cruel. On one student evaluation form a kid pleaded “Please send Professor Albert to Viet Nam!” I protected my father for a long time. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I couldn’t imagine that my father was a man capable of beating small children; a man capable of telling me day after day, year after year, that I was stupid, worthless, fat and ugly and that I would never amount to anything. He was a man capable of calling his only daughter a whore while slapping her across the face with the back of his hand causing her lip to bleed. He was a man who lived in a small, dank basement room in our house from which the quality contact with his children was when he’d bang the end of a long broom stick on his ceiling screaming, “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” And people wonder why I’m nervous, depressed and anxious. He had a million irrational fears; fears he had no problem using as a form of mental torture toward others. Prince Albert once told me that he had a difficult time growing up Jewish in New Jersey during WWII. He was the unfortunate victim of discrimination. It was then that he developed an obsessive fear of Germans, specifically Nazis: A fear that never subsided. A fear he had no problem passing on to his children.
One lovely spring morning in 1969, Jeff Albert took the three of us, me 9, my brothers 7 and 5, to a cheap and crappy amusement park near our home. He rarely did anything that resembled fun with us, so it was exciting that we thought he cared. However, he failed to tell us that before we could go to the cheap and crappy Playland, we had to stop at the nearby Hebrew Academy to buy Israeli Bonds.
We would have none of it. From the back of the car we started whining, “We wanna go to Playland! We wanna go to Playland!”
Jeff Albert became furious. Pulling the car over, he turned to the three of us and with a creepy smile seethed:
“Do you know why we need to buy Israeli Bonds?? Do you?? I'll tell you why we need Israeli Bonds, because the Jews need a haven, a place to feel safe. Do you know what the Nazis did to little kids like you in the concentration camps? They would pick them by their ankles and swing them against brick walls until their skulls cracked open."
There was no buffer between J.M.A. and his children; we got the brunt of his brutality. There was no one to get in the middle: no friends, (because he had none), no parents, (they could have cared less), and especially not my mother (who had long since retreated to her bed and remained there for most of the 18 year I spent in that lonely crumbling house in Potomac, Maryland).
Now, when I see similar abusive situations, I jump in to be the buffer, the human shield, the witness. And so it was with trepidation that I agreed to participate in The Third Reich Open Mic.
I teach guitar and voice in the smallish town of Catonsville, Maryland outside of Baltimore. The Third Reich Open Mic is an open mic for kids held once a month in the dreary basement of the Catonsville library. The mom of one of my students gave the event its moniker as the woman who runs it has a heavy German accent and lots and lots of rules and regulations. This particular mom thought it might be a great experience if I got all my guitar students together to perform a song at the open mic as a sort of recital.
The kids and I had a great time at the library that fall night and everything sailed along fine even though The German Lady and I didn’t see eye to eye on several issues. My seven students and I performed Green Day’s Good Riddance without incident. Near the end of the entire show, The German Lady said, “Vee haf some extra time, vould someone else like to perform?”
With that James, the son of the mom who dubbed the evening, raised his hand. The bizzare thing about that is that James has paralyzing stage fright. I had to fight with him to perform drums with the group, and even then he want to sit on the floor of the stage where no one could see him. Weird.
I was sitting next to his mom and dad; we were all stunned -- as were his grandparents and half of Catonsville. On the edge of our seats we asked each other, “What’s he going to do? Will he sing a song? Will he recite a poem?”
He strode up the aisle toward the stage and took the cordless mic from The German Lady, then, with precision and commitment, he proceeded to burp the ABC’s. Once more: he proceeded to BURP THE ABC'S. I didn’t know whether to laugh or run. There was a strange awkward moment, then everyone exploded with laughter; every one except The German Lady.
The German Lady lost her mind. She ran up the aisle toward the stage screaming, “Zees eeze inappropriate, Zees eeze inappropriate!!!!!!!”
She grabbed James’ arm and started pulling him off the stage. But James kept burping and burping and burping even when The German Lady pulled the mic out of his hand. He kept burping all the way down the aisle until he sat down with his friends.
The German Lady pointed at James shrieking, “You vill be banned. You vill be banned.”
I thought the kid was brilliant. However, I’m in a small minority, a minority of middle-aged women who still find burps, especially talking in 'burp language,' extremely hilarious.
But, I knew The German Lady wasn’t through with James yet. She started coming for him from the front of the room. She was coming for him and she was coming fast. His parents, incapacitated with laughter and humiliation, didn't see what was about to happen. So, I immediately jumped out of my seat and leapt to James’ side becoming the buffer, the human shield, the witness.
I saw her, I saw that German Lady, I saw that light blue polyester pant’s suit of hers all in a bunch as she sped her gait. Then, in my minds’ eye, that blue polyester suit began turning into something ugly, something dark, something black, something resembling that of an S.S. officer. She rounded the aisle heading toward the back of the room and her angry grey hair was flying. Willing to take the hit, I stood in front of James, stuck out my arm and boldly yelled, “Israeli Bonds bitch!!! Israeli Bonds!!”
Now even though my alleged Granpappy Al inadvertently created a way for humans to blow themselves to smithereens, he was a peacenik. He was quoted as saying, “There is no peace through force, only understanding."
Wise words grandpa.
So fuck you dad, but I forgive you.
This is the daughter of the illegitimate son of Albert Einstein, out.
