HOW THE FIRST JEWISH KIMBERLY GOT HER LIFE STUCK IN A GROOVE

744 wds.

by Kitty Myers

Everyone thought I was a Jewish princess. “My wife, the first Jewish Kimberly,” my first husband would begin, “doesn’t want San Pellegrino, she wants Fonte Travina.” Or: “My wife, the first Jewish Kimberly, prefers to sleep in.” I was pretty damn tired of hearing, “My wife, the first Jewish Kimberly.”

Like a schmuck, I thought he was just fucking with my mind. The truth is that the pervert has been a full-time bisexual who likes to get dressed up in women’s clothing. I wanted to kill him. Every time he got on a plane, I would imagine the plane crash, and the funeral, and what I would wear to the funeral and flirting at the funeral, and how soon I could start dating after the funeral. When you divorce a first husband like that, you never want to get married again.

My second husband had taken a lover, Jeffrey, spelled Geoffrey, a ballet dancer. I was hardly in a position to date. I was fat, ugly, ass size of neighboring state. I knew my body was not fawnlike. Fat sex would be no good. Is this how I would go down in history, like a character in a trashy novel?

Decide to get honest and straight with self – to find new way to reduce ass and to recreate once-beautiful life.

Fast-forward a year and a half. Lost 8 pounds.

When he first asked me out, Arthur Siegel said, “You picked the one person on earth you could have problems with.” But I had a good feeling about this, so I accepted this date. We went into the kitchen and sat down with some of Arthur’s fetishistically brewed coffee.

The good news is he was born a very wealthy American Jew. The bad news is he was thirty, unmarried, and still living with his mother.

Two months passed. I was ready to do “it.”

It was a Friday night, the beginning of another fun-filled New York weekend. I tipped the cabbie and got out at 42 Jane. I pushed the door open to our love nest. There were several chairs pulled up around a table with a brightly checkered red and white tablecloth. He was lying on the floor, dressed in a skimpy French maid’s uniform -- just a coincidence, or am I just noticing patterns? -- with a cute little hole right about where his third eye should be. A neat, rather artistic little bull’s-eye. “That son of a bitch,” I whisper.

Just then I heard knock, knock, knocking.

The cops from the Sixth Precinct flashed their wallets at me. The cop apparently in charge of the case, Detective Sergeant Buddy Fox, was tall, lean and mean. Detective Sergeant Mort Cooperman has a face like a hastily sculptured hamburger. I don’t think I have ever seen such a huge man. He was breathing heavily. I wondered if he’d been out walking his pet stomach.

“What do you know about this?” Fox asked.

“By a wild stroke of incredible luck, I discovered a body lying on the floor.”

“Hear the shot?” he asked.

I shook my head. I haven’t begun to think of what to say about a 45 in my pocket. The part of downtown I’m in does not qualify as beautiful or modern. It’s dirty, run-down and littered with skid row’s spookiest occupants.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I was afraid you were going to ask that.”

Detective Sergeant Fox became slightly agitato. “I didn’t do anything wrong!” I say defensively.

They looked at me like, yeah, so, we knew you were lying. My heart started to pound, I began to sweat, and that’s when I started ranting and raving.

“I have been used, abused, lied about and cheated on. I’m tired of being stupid and naïve. I’m tired of loving queers. Let’s just say that if I had a 45 in my pocket, I would have used it at that moment.” Shut up, shut up!

“It says here a Beretta twenty-five caliber automatic was the murder weapon. Anything else you’d like to tell me?”

I immediately wondered whether he was single, and if so, whether he was a college graduate and straight. I wondered if he was uncircumcised.

I clear my throat and sighed deeply. “I just want to have a partner in life, a family.”

Like a well-timed kick in the pants, he says, “With all due respect, you picked the one person on earth you could have problems with.”

***

Books plagiarized:

1) How To Lose Your Ass And Regain Your Life, by Kirstie Alley
2) Heartburn, by Nora Ephron
3) Chore Whore, by Heather H. Howard
4) Christopher Walken and the Tuna Fish Sandwich, by Rodger Jacobs
5) How To Talk Dirty And Influence People, by Lenny Bruce
6) Greenwich Killing Time, by Kinky Friedman
7) What a Coincidence!, by Susan M. Watkins
8) Jewish Humor, by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin
9) Lady Sings The Blues, by Billie Holliday w/William Dufty

***