The Jewban

I got this friend see, he's half Jewish and half Cuban so obviously he is a Jewban. That's what we call him. The Jewban. It's not a disparaging or derogatory or racist name. No racial slur applies since it's a self-appellation. He invented it and embraces it. I love the guy and sadly he even reads this blog. Which tells you how his life worked out. But I'm not going to mince words cuz I don't really care if he likes or doesn't like what I say. Because, again, I love the guy. And we've known each other for almost 50 years. He was socially inappropriate when I first met him and he remains so to this very day. It's one of his most endearing characteristics. And he really doesn't have many others. 

I could tell stories about him for several nights over beers. But I'll just mention a few here. 

I knew we were kindred spirits the first time we went out to dinner together, him and his wife at a Chinese restaurant. The restaurant had long padded booth-like seats extending along an entire wall, with individual tables in front of them, and chairs on the other side. The tables were close together, a mere foot or two between them so that you had to squeeze in. We sat down and waited interminably for a waiter who seemingly never came. While we were sitting there, the people next to us were finishing dinner and complaining that they had ordered too much food. There was a big plate with a bunch of shrimp on it that everybody was trying to push on each other and everybody said they were just too stuffed to eat it. 

The Jewban and I were eyeballing it voraciously until they finally got up and left. Without saying a word and after checking out the waiters who were barely around as potential witnesses, we deftly reached over and plucked a shrimp off the dish and popped it into our mouths. His wife was horrified but we pointed out how clean the people looked and the whole thing was a lot cleaner than any smorgasbord restaurant or wedding. We kept plucking them off until they were all gone. It reduced our bill significantly, having had appetizers already. We were clearly kindred spirits, but there's no question that he was the instigator.

I had an opportunity to physically torture the Jewban, since we were med school classmates. And I took it. In those days, when you were learning simple procedures like drawing blood or putting tubes down people's noses, you did it to each other as students rather than practice the initial ones on unsuspecting patients. I have no idea how it's done now, but I think it was a great way to do it so that you could actually experience the ineptitude of medical students yourself and appreciate what you were doing to patients. 

It turns out that most of the medical students had already learned how to do it in other jobs or volunteer work. The Jewban had. I had not. So we partnered up and I told him to go first and he did a fabulous job drawing blood from me. But it was my turn and I had absolutely no idea what the hell I was doing. He inappropriately warned me not to injure him, which I found provoking and insulting. And accurate. I stuck that needle so far into his arm at the elbow that when I drew back I got clear fluid. He started screaming and yelling at me until the instructor came over and incredulously said, “I think you just stuck that into his elbow joint and that's joint fluid. I've never seen anybody do that before.” The Jewban was howling in pain and I sort of moved the needle around a bit to inflict a bit more, just for the fun of it. I'm not sure he ever forgave me for that and I'm pretty sure that it affected his tennis and pickleball game for life. 

When you took the subway downtown from our uptown location in med school, it was understood that you took the Express A train. Yup, the same A Train as in the Duke Ellington song. Not only for speed but for safety. The local, with its many stops minutes apart, afforded opportunities for thieves to jump on and off the train, snatching what they could or worse. The Jewban one day, inadvertently took his wife on the local to go downtown. Fairly quickly a young thug came up to them and put a knife to the throat of his wife and demanded all their money and wallet and purse, etc. They followed his instructions accordingly. But then the young hoodlum demanded their wedding rings to which my friend resisted, saying, “You don't really want our wedding rings. Their only value is sentimental for us. They are really cheap and gold-plated. They're totally worthless.”

His wife immediately turned toward him with a scowl and ignored the knife at her throat and said, “What do you mean that these are cheap. You said they were gold. I can't believe you lied to me.” He responded that he didn't lie, it was just a fib and they were sort of gold, just plated. They proceeded to have a 2-minute argument about the quality of their wedding rings while the robber became quite impatient. I can't remember if they ended up yielding the rings or not, but the argument regarding the quality of the wedding rings clearly had a greater impact on his wife than the thefts. And so it went. This is what living in New York City and riding the subway does to you.

Both his parents hated me even though I barely knew them and only met them a couple of times. I have to say that I understand their perception. 

They were divorced and one day I accompanied him to his father's house and as we walked by his father's bedroom I noticed a rifle sitting on the bed. I immediately took umbrage at this and started spouting off how incredibly unsafe it was for someone to leave a rifle sitting out on top of their bed. And of course I asked why there was a rifle out on the bed. He said he didn't know and he didn't care. I said I was going to put it in a closet. At that time I had never handled or shot a gun in my life.  Though that changed after I moved to Arizona where non-New York people took me to a shooting range and made me a pretty good shot at targets. 

In any event, I picked up the rifle to put it away and of course the rifle went off somehow, likely I must have pulled the trigger inadvertently or something and I blew a huge hole in the carpeting and flooring of his father's bedroom. I was banned for life from ever entering his father's home again. I have to admit, his father's reaction was fairly appropriate.

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His mother on the other hand was not appropriate. She said I was a thief and while I may have perpetrated some thefts with minor shoplifting as a child, her accusations were entirely false. At the time, I was crashing at his apartment for a few days, when his mother appeared unannounced, to me at least, to stay at the apartment as well. Since there was only one bedroom, I very graciously gave it to her since the Jewban and his wife were away, and slept on the couch. On Sunday morning I thought I would do a good deed and got up and went out and got bagels and lox and cream cheese and picked up a copy of the Sunday New York Times for her to read. She responded fairly graciously to this until later in the day. 

It turned out that a neighbor in the hallway had a sign on their door that said: “I would greatly appreciate it if the asshole who keeps stealing my Sunday New York Times from my door in the morning would stop doing that.” She obviously saw that later in the day and immediately assumed that I had stolen the paper in the morning. She even told her son that, when she spoke to him next. She never actually confronted me but became rather hostile towards me for the rest of the day and the next. I was falsely accused, but I learned to live with it.

More recently, several years ago, the Jewban visited me in Arizona. He's in pretty good shape and likes to go running and I gave him a really nice route to run that went through the very pretty mall of the University of Arizona. When he returned, he asked me if they had security cameras in the area. I said I didn't know for sure, but I was fairly certain they had the whole place covered. Since it's a college campus where there's a lot of fraternities and drinking. 

He told me that we might be visited by the police and of course I asked why. And he responded that during the course of the run he needed to find a bathroom to make a deposit and the doors to all the buildings were locked since it was a Sunday. So he made a deposit behind a bunch of bushes and said that he was smiling and waving the whole time just in case he was being captured on CCTV and that they would know that he harbored no ill feelings and was not making a particular social or political statement against the university.

I got endless stories on this guy, a variant of The Big Lebowski. But most of them actually can't be put in print for reasons of taste, credulity, and offensiveness. My apologies.

I would like to remind you that this person is actually a physician, a surgeon in fact, who takes care of other human beings. Yes, it's truly hard to believe. 

But I still love the guy.