Dog Training The American Male Read online

  “Did he molest you or something?”

  “Nothing like that.”

  “Was he a zoo keeper?”

  “No, and stop guessing. After you lost your job with Lehman Brothers, what did you do?”

  Jacob exhaled. “Boy, that’s a long story. Right now, I’m working as an I.T. tech in Boca. It’s just a filler job. I’ve been training for a far more lucrative career.”

  “Programming analyst for the C.I.A.?”

  “Close. Ventriloquist.”

  Nancy laughed. “I’m sorry. I’ve never actually met a ventriloquist before. Show me some ventriloquism.”

  “I can’t. Not without my dummy.”

  “I’ll be your dummy.” She scooted next to him, resting her legs over his thighs. “There. Now slide your hand behind my neck and I’ll mouth your words.”

  Jacob slipped his right hand beneath her blonde hair, his eyes focused on her tight jeans and exposed thong panties. “Normally I’d have my George Bush dummy on my lap, so pretend you’re President Bush. So, President Bush, can you tell us any personal details about your two terms in office?”

  Jacob maneuvered Nancy’s jaw as he threw his voice, imitating the former president. “Heck yeah, Jacob. One time, me, Vice, and Rummy got snowed in on a hunting trip and had to sleep together in the same tent. Naturally, as the Decider, I decided to take the middle where it was warmest. Anyway, about three in the morning Rummy and Vice start moaning, waking me up. So I said, ‘hey Cheney, what gives?’ Dick says, ‘Mr. President, I just had a wet dream . . . I dreamt I was getting a hand job from a beautiful psychologist.’ Rummy says, ‘That’s amazing, Mr. President, I just had the same wet dream.’ Then I said, ‘Heck, fellas, you two sure are lucky. All I dreamed about was skiing.’ See, he was gripping the poles . . .”

  Nancy laughed, hysterical. “You’re really good. A beautiful psychologist, huh?”

  “Yes. And no amputees. All four limbs intact.”

  “My four limbs are intact.” Reaching between her legs, she rubbed his inner thigh. “So, how did you know I like skiing?”

  * * * * *

  VIN WATCHED NERVOUSLY as Jeanne prepared to take her approach. “Money shot, Jeanne. Try to focus. By the way, how’s the yeast infection holding up? Hope you’re not chafing.”

  “Thanks to you, she’s minty-fresh,” Lana answered.

  Jeanne unleashed her shot like a Greek god hurtling hail at a cluster of frightened mortals, the ball skimming the slick wood surface before blasting the pins into an orifice of fallen ivory.

  “Game, strike, and match. Let’s see if I can bake this turkey in the oven.”

  “Hey, Vin, we’re going to go.”

  The two couples turned to find Jacob and Nancy wearing their street shoes, ready to leave.

  “Jacob’s going to drive me home,” Nancy announced.

  “You go, girl.” Lana hugged her sister.

  Vince exchanged a knuckle-punch with his younger brother. “Whatever gets you through the night, John Lennon.”

  Jacob nodded, then led his date outside where his chariot awaited.

  ONE MONTH LATER...

  WOWF - AM

  “I need your help, listeners. As you know, I have a new man in my life—George. George and I met on a blind date about a month ago at a bowling alley and we’ve been seeing each other pretty steadily ever since. Well, George’s sublet is up and he needs to move out, and I’ve been sharing an apartment with my sister and her significant other and I need to move, so naturally George and I have been talking about possibly moving in together into a two bedroom rental. Is it too soon? Call in and tell me what you think. Our land line is 561-222-WOWF, or you can text star-WOWF on your mobile phone.”

  Nancy glanced across her radio booth at Patricia Kieras. Situated behind glass in the control room, her producer’s face was buried behind a paperback copy of Shades of Gray. “I see my producer, Trish is signaling me that we have open lines. Did I mention that my boyfriend is an adult entertainer? Wait, that sounded bad. What I meant is that he’s an up-and-coming comedian but his humor is geared more for adults.”

  A yellow light illuminated on the control board. Without moving her book, Trish took the call, wrote something on a flash card, then held it up against the glass partition.

  LINE 1. BOYNTON - RACHEL.

  “And we have our first caller; Rachel from Boynton Beach. Good afternoon, Rachel, and welcome to the show.”

  “Yeah . . . I think you should dump this loser, George, and go out with a real man. I know this guy, Arnoldo . . . he’s got his own trailer out in Loxahatchee by the sugar fields and—”

  “Thank you, Rachel.” Nancy hung up on Lynnie and took the next call. “Christine, from West Palm, welcome to Life’s a Beach.”

  “Hi, Dr. Beach. Weren’t you living with a guy who cheated on you?”

  “My fiancé, Sebastian. He was sleeping with my roommate, Carol. What’s your point? You think it’s too soon? Sebastian and I dated for eight months and we never lived together.”

  “My point is—if you live in sin then you’ll pay the price. My advice is to pray to the Holy Trinity and wait until you’re married to share your bed with a man.”

  “Thank you, Christine. Our next caller is from Boca. Hi, caller, to whom am I speaking?”

  “It’s your mother. Who’s this George? I thought you were seeing Jacob?”

  The blood drained from Nancy’s face. “Thank you, mother. Yes, listeners, my boyfriend’s name is really Jacob. I was just trying to be discrete—”

  “Your sister tells me he’s a Jew.”

  Oh, God. “Yes, Mom. Is that a problem?”

  “It wouldn’t be my first choice, but I suppose it could be worse—look at your sister, for heaven’s sake. Actually, I prefer a Jew over your last boyfriend . . . what was the little Spanish prick’s name?”

  “Sebastian, and let’s keep it clean.”

  “If you recall, I warned you about him, he had a wandering eye. The Jew . . . he’s not a doctor, is he?”

  “No, mother.”

  “Too bad. I’m leaving on a cruise and need a prescription called in.”

  “Thanks for checking in, mom, but we have other callers waiting—”

  “Your father was circumcised. Did you know that?”

  Nancy disconnected the call. “Mary from Boynton Beach, bless you for calling.”

  “Yeah, Dr. Beach, I think the listeners want to hear more about this Arnoldo fella from Loxahatchee.”

  “Good-bye, Lynnie!”

  MOTHER COPE

  The recreation room at the Shusterman Retirement Home was bright and airy—but not too bright because the visually-impaired residents complained that they had difficulty seeing the ceiling-mounted televisions, and not too airy because the draft could cause a chill, which is why the air-conditioning was set at a balmy seventy-seven degrees.

  There were several cliques of seniors in the rec room—the card players and the mahjong crowd, the kibitzers offering their unwanted advice and the yentas gossiping about it. The TV groupies were divided among the serious viewers (Matlock and Jeopardy being reserved time slots) and the drifters—those who drifted off into their afternoon catnaps. Snorers were relegated to the chairs along the shuffleboard patio.

  To the outsider, living out one’s days in a retirement home may have seemed like a slow regimented death march to the grave, but for the active senior there were numerous opportunities to explore their heterosexual “urges” thanks to the miracle of impotency drugs.

  For seventy-two-year-old Carmella Cope, winter romances were something akin to a game of musical chairs. In the last four years the feisty widow had buried three of her last five lovers, earning the nickname C.C. Rider.

  Morty Goldman had been eyeing Carmella ever since he had seen the big-breasted woman during water aerobics. When her companion of eighteen months, Sheldon Finklestein, had succumbed to colon cancer, Morty had made his intentions known. He and C.C. had eaten lunch together
every day this week (except for Tuesday, when Morty had his urologist appointment) and the last two dinners. This afternoon, Carmella had invited the former manager at Levitz Furniture to join her for the Jeopardy Hour—a prelude to dinner in her room.

  Morty’s plan was simple: he’d impress the seductress with his razor-sharp wit, then pop the Viagra right before the start of the double Jeopardy round.

  All was going according to plan – until Carmella’s younger son had shown up unexpectedly, throwing the widower off his game.

  “You’re moving in with a whore?”

  “Ma, Nancy’s not a whore.”

  “If she’s screwing you to cover her share of the rent, she’s a whore.”

  “She’ll be paying her half, and my boss upped my hours so I’ll be paying mine. I think I love her, Ma.”

  “Love? Jacob, you have no idea what love is.”

  “Shush!” Morty pointed to the television as Alex Trebeck read the next question: “Definitions for one hundred: It’s a four letter word for deep personal affection.”

  “What is anal?”

  Mother Cope whacked Morty Goldman across his shoulder with her gripper. “Watch your language around my son. And just so you don’t get any ideas, I’m not a three-input gal.”

  “Geez, Ma.”

  “As for you, Jacob, I don’t want you living in sin with this whore.”

  “It’s my decision. And stop calling her a whore. Who knows? If our living arrangement works out, one day I could marry her.”

  “Marry her? Oy gevalt! This is all your brother’s fault. He’s kicking you out, isn’t he? That ungrateful son of a bitch.”

  Morty chuckled. “Carm, I think you just insulted yourself.”

  Carmella whacked the old man again with her gripper.

  “It’s not Vin’s fault. Helen’s mother’s coming to visit, so yes, I needed to find a place to stay. But Vin and Helen let me use the guest house for over a year. The house we’re renting is affordable, and it’s on a month-to-month lease, so there’s not a whole lot of risk. Plus Nancy and I need some privacy.”

  “You want affordable; I have a better solution. We’ll buy you a cheap air mattress; you’ll move in with me!”

  MOVING DAY

  The single-family home was a one-story, two bedroom dwelling located in a lower-middle class neighborhood in Deerfield Beach. Helen, who worked part-time as a realtor, had negotiated the lease, the first, last, and security deposit guaranteeing occupancy throughout the time her mother would be staying in their guest house.

  It took most of Saturday morning for Jeanne and her two female bodybuilding training partners to move Nancy’s bedroom furniture and the rest of her stored belongings into the new house.

  It took Jacob less than half an hour to toss his belongings in the back of his van.

  By noon, Helen Cope had a cleaning crew stripping the linens and removing the furnishings to disinfect the entire guest house. The painters would arrive by three.

  * * * * *

  THE ORANGE AND white Volkswagen van rumbled its way east on Hillsboro Boulevard, its driver lost in a whirlwind of thought. Neighborhoods in South Florida can change from one mile to the next—from million dollar homes with plush golf courses for backyards to low income dwellings with barred windows, the stucco walls perpetually stained in rust from iron-infested water supplies feeding the sprinklers.

  Jacob Cope has experienced both income extremes . . . and worse.

  An introvert lacking his older brother’s confidence, Jacob went through his early childhood years as the quiet pale kid with the curly brown “Jew ‘fro.” By middle school, his peers had become the “geek-squaders,” a group of video game junkies who escaped the pressures of adolescence in the library’s computer lab. It was here that Jacob discovered a talent for writing algorithms, and by his senior year of high school “the Copemeister” was engineering programs on par with developers at M.I.T.

  Unfortunately, Jacob’s grade point average was not on par with the admission requirements of a major university. With few options (attending a community college in Palm Beach County while living at his mother’s home coming in just above suicide) he enrolled as a part-time student at New York’s City College where he earned just enough money setting up accounting programs for a small investment firm to afford a rat-infested basement apartment in Chinatown.

  It was in the spring of 2001 during Jacob’s sophomore year that Lehman Brothers came calling, the talented undergrad’s work having caught the attention of the Wall Street giant. A two week interview process led to a six-figure salary offer and bonus plan to pay the nineteen year old whiz kid to develop a series of new accounting programs at the investment firm. A week later, Jacob withdrew from City College and moved to the Upper West Side where the rats had to scale twenty-three floors in order to visit. And visit they did, sometimes in the middle of the night, carrying ledgers and requests to “disappear” deficits with algorithmic solutions that, to their naive young superstar made no sense.

  Encouraged by the real estate market, with no federal regulations to fret over, Lehman and other investment firms continued buying, slicing, dicing, repackaging and reselling residential mortgages while raking in billions of dollars in profits. Jacob’s stock bonuses continued piling higher. On paper he was a multimillionaire, and his bosses and new peers gleefully taught him how to leverage his assets to attract women. Suddenly, the social dweeb was styling in Armani suits, a new haircut, and hot ladies vying to be his permanent arm candy to sleep with.

  By early 2006, the programming whiz kid was suddenly struggling just to sleep alone. Despite the juggling of accounts, it appeared to Jacob and a handful of other junior executives that Lehman was leveraged more than twenty times its own net worth. When Jacob tried to point out the potential dangers of this $600 billion deficit, he was ignored. When he attempted to sell his stock, he was delayed, bullied, and ultimately denied.

  Two years later the housing bubble officially burst and Lehman’s death spiral was complete, dragging Jacob Cope’s net worth with it. Within days he had lost his job, his stock, his pension, his corporate Mercedes, and his corporate-leased apartment. With the other big investment firms and banks entrenched in their own bailouts and mergers, there were no jobs to be had, Wall Street shedding its work force by the thousands.

  Waiting for the economy to recover, Jacob sublet a one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn and looked for work. He attempted to finish his degree, but his rise and fall had been so harsh that he couldn’t stay focused.

  Two years passed. He moved to Trenton, New Jersey and worked the grill at a local burger joint. He purchased the Volkswagen van from his boss, not because he liked the way it ran (which was rare), but because he feared that one day he might actually need to use the vehicle as his residence.

  Depressed, he drank . . . a lot.

  When he spent his rent money on booze, he was forced to moved into a homeless shelter. The shelters wanted him sober; his mind—wracked in fear—wanted him inebriated.

  In April of 2011, the van became his home—his self-fulfilling prophecy complete.

  * * * * *

  TURNING OFF THE main strip, Jacob followed 52nd Street into a lower-middle class neighborhood. The house he and Nancy were renting was two blocks down on the left, the driveway occupied by a PMS MOVERS truck. Two scantily-clad female bodybuilders were seated on the open tailgate of the vehicle, neither of them Jeanne.

  Jacob parked by the curb and climbed out. In the back of his van were two suitcases, his George W. Bush ventriloquist dummy, and a heavy cardboard box that held the Yoko doll. Vinnie had urged him to get rid of the life-like sex toy. In the end Jacob had decided to bring her along—not for sex (after all, he had Nancy for that) but because he was feeling anxious about the move and found he could talk to Yoko to alleviate his fears.

  I get by with a little help from my friends . . .

  Glancing over his shoulder at the two muscular females, he quickly decided it was bes
t to leave the heavy box inside the van until later when he could store the Yoko doll in the garage in privacy. Removing one of his suitcases, he tucked the ventriloquist dummy in the crook of his right arm and walked up the driveway . . .drawing the attention of the two female bodybuilders.

  Jamie Morrison competed as a middle weight. Although the ebony-skinned woman was lankier than Jeanne, she was no less intimidating. Her training partner, Stacy Shear, was a heavyweight, her bulging flesh lathered in cocoa-butter, her wavy brown hair bound in a ponytail that fell to the small of her sculpted back. Both bodybuilders wore red muscle-tees with PMS MOVERS emblazoned across the chest. Having finished unloading Nancy’s belongings, they were alternating sets using a Shaker weight dumbbell while they waited for Jeanne.

  Jacob entered their aura like a skirt-clad businesswoman walking by a construction site.

  Jamie smiled, pursing her lips. “Hey tough guy, need a hand with your doll collection?”

  Jacob avoided eye contact with the Nubian goliath. “No thank you. I think I can manage.”

  Stacy blocked his way. “Bet those chicken arms of yours couldn’t manage thirty seconds on the Shaker.” She grabbed the dumbbell in one hand and violently shook it, her right arm and upper body muscles reverberating, spraying him with sweat. “Try that, Doll Man.”

  “Yeah, Doll Man, show us your guns.”

  “Guns? Oh, you mean my biceps. Gee, I don’t know if I should. Let me ask my friend.” Jacob turned to the George Bush dummy, his right hand discreetly sliding into position beneath the doll’s shirt. “Mr. President, you’re the decider. Help me out here.”

  Jacob animated the doll, throwing his voice. “Jakester, are you seriously asking me if you should jerk-off a dumbbell? That’s just D-U-M dumb.”

  Stacy pointed. “Hey, the little man talks.”

  “You must be the brains of the outfit. Sweet Jesus, Jacob, check out the size of Godzilla’s camel toe. If it snows later we can all go skiing.”