Free JD by Mark Merlis

so perfect: you picture Isaac a wilting little golden lamb, but he is a dirty and sticky kid with scuffed knees, like my own son Mickey coming home sweaty after an afternoon shooting baskets with his buddies.
    Abraham is afraid he hasn’t been summoned at all. Then the passage that seems, weeks like these, to be hurled straight at me: about how they’re giving out the prizes at the end of the school year, and the slowest kid in the class thinks he hears his name. He marches forward from his seat in the last row, perplexed but solemn, and then the whole class explodes in laughter. And maybe the teacher called out the dunce’s name deliberately, just to make a fool of him. That’s what Abraham is afraid of, that he is the butt of a celestial prank.
    During my brief and costly fling with Dr. Bartholdy, he accused me of grandiosity. “You are not quite meckalomanick,”he said. “But you do not, what? You do not see yourself as other men.” I’m afraid I may have laughed at him, grandiosely, perhaps that minute beginning our rapid slide to the day he’d announce I had no Über - Ich, no superego. Of course I didn’t see myself as other men. Who could have the temerity to type the first word of a novel or an essay or a poem if he didn’t harbor, deep in that recess where other men store their little superegos, the nagging certainty that he was entitled--not to speak, every schlemiel is entitled to speak, but entitled to be heard? I said, “It’s grandiosity if you’re wrong and grandeur if you’re right.”
    â€œExactly,” he said, with a tiny smile. He only smiled when he knew he had me pinned. “Or not exactly, those are two quite similar species of delusion. Cousins. The difference? The grandiose have a small fear they may be mistaken. Because nobody else thinks they’re so grand. And how could everyone else be mistaken?”
    When I sold my first novel, ascended the front steps of the double brownstone off Madison that was the temple of the hallowed Aurora Press, sat waiting in the anteroom with the threadbare carpet and the discreetly ticking grandfather clock, was ushered in at last to see my first editor, the platonically tweedy Ernest Garvin: I was the chosen, the elect, of all the Jew boys in my year at City College the first to cross this threshold, or any editor’s. I was the winner, out of that clamorous, hotly competitive rabble the one who had managed to shimmy a foot or two up the pole.
    I sat across from Garvin in a fragile Chippendale chair, listened as he murmured about my talent and promise and, cough, a few little spots that could use some sprucing up. I leaned forward, ecstatic, I was going to be working with this famous editor, together we were going to polish The Abandoned Steam Shovel into a flawless masterpiece. Tense with joy, I clutched the armrests of the chair; at some point I glanced down a moment and saw that my fingernails were dirty.
    Shovel came out the next spring. It got three lines in the Saturday Review , “evocative account of Jewish life”--as if that’s what I’d been writing about! Nothing in the Times or the Trib or even the Forward , so much for Jewish life. Even before the pub date you could find copies marked down at the Fourth Avenue Bookstore, Biblo and Tannen’s, all the other mausoleums on that boulevard of oblivion.
    Then Orpheus in Crown Heights , and Straphangers . The same each time: a little party, each more sparsely attended than the one before. A scattering of perplexed reviews--I did crack the Times , finally, the only result of which was that some parakeets might have seen my name at the bottom of their cage. A few months later the first royalty statement, ending with a negative number.
    And still, from that day in Bartholdy’s office to this stifling night, the conviction that I had been called, that I was the chosen one. Accompanied always, as Bartholdy had