“It’s a wonderful name!” That’s what my mother used to tell me. If your own mother won’t tell you the truth, who will? But Hyman Bookbinder is not a wonderful name, not unless you plan to spend your entire life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. For some people, of course, that’s heaven, but for me it’s not. I was raised a long way from Manhattan, and when I go there, I’m a long way from being a native. Occasionally I run into people who know me from Hyman Bookbinder, and that can be a problem. The original Hyman Bookbinder, the Hyman Bookbinder, was a big deal in the Civil Rights movement back in the sixties. “A Great Man!” my mother says, although she’s not related to him. We’re pretty far removed from the Hyman Bookbinder, two or three times, although I don’t think that’s far enough for my dad. My dad’s kind of like that guy Munch on “Homicide,” except that he doesn’t solve murders, and he doesn’t own a bar, and he only says one or two sardonic things a week instead of three or four an hour. Dad covers New Jersey politics for the New York Times, which he considers just a little bit of a sell-out, even though we get free tickets to Mets games. He worked for the Bergen County Record for ten years and he used to say that the Record beats the Times seven days a week.
New Jersey is one thing my dad and I agree on. Of course, I’m from New Jersey! North Bergen, to be precise. Where else could I be from? Not where else would I be, but where else could I be? Because for me, New Jersey is reality. I’ve spent time in Boston, and New York, and Philadelphia, and Washington, and those cities aren’t real. They’re Disneyland. You think the Empire State Building is real? The minute the tourists stop showing up, it’s history. New Jersey is real. New Jersey is reality. New Jersey is sweat, New Jersey is flesh, New Jersey is humanity. New Jersey is never going to go away. Not even Christie Whitman, who is really more of a horse than a human being, can change that. When a man is tired of New Jersey, he’s tired of life.
I went to college at Cornell, and the only thing that saved me was Rachel. We met in the beginning of our junior year. Even though she’s from Long Island, she was my little piece of New Jersey, right there beside me.
I know that some people, like my mother, find Rachel a little intimidating, but I’ve never felt that way. For me, Rachel was peace. I spent high school studying and playing basketball. I’m six four, which in North Bergen was quite an advantage. I was restless, I guess, but I didn’t know it. I didn’t get a scholarship to Cornell, but I was on the JV my freshman year and I had great expectations. I guess I was kidding myself, because it came as a complete shock in the beginning of sophomore year when the coach told me that I wasn’t a fighter. I mean, I had been listening to coaches telling me to fight for the ball ever since I was thirteen, and I thought I was doing a good job. I wasn’t, of course. I get excited, and I get aggressive, but I’m not a fighter. I don’t like to hurt people. It’s the old nice Jewish boy thing. I knew I was a nice Jewish boy, of course, but I didn’t know it showed so much. I played intramural basketball, just to get myself out of the dorm, but I was still sore. I had intended on being an English major because it was easy and gave me time to play basketball, but I was getting tired of it. My literature classes seemed so useless, listening to people gas on about their theories. I was taking a class in Wordsworth and I decided I hated Wordsworth. A little extreme I know, because what had the guy ever done to me? But still I hated him.