Hero in My Own Eyes: Tripping a Life Fantastic

By Max Roytenberg

This is a book about the fictional life of Maxie Blum. It is a view of the world through the eyes of this fictional character. Maxie comes to the conclusion that he has a messianic role that only he can accomplish, to salvage the world from some indeterminate fate he believes is unacceptable. Marching to the beat of some mysterious inner drummer, he seeks a heroic role that will realize his near divinity.

This book details how he copes with the messy realities of an actual life, always searching to find a satisfactory resolution to his dreams. There are women, marriages, and children as well as the travails of the working world. He finds his redemption and salvation not in the physical world that may lead only to small successes of some satisfaction but in the arms of a woman from his youth who haunts his dreams. This work is that love story, how we got there, and what we do then, having arrived in paradise without a crucifixion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524546120

Max Roytenberg

Max Roytenberg, born and raised in Winnipeg, is a Canadian who lives in Ireland and spends some of the winter months in Arizona. An economist and businessman by trade, he and his spouse have had nine children between them and currently have eight grandchildren.

Book preview

I

LOOKING BACK

Thinking Back to Young

My name is Maxie Blum. When and where I came from, who knows? Who can remember all that stuff from the time I was young? Suddenly, I was there. That’s all I remember. It’s all a fog with only a few pictures floating to the surface. Why one scene should have stuck while others are lost is a mystery to me. I know some stuff about being a kid because people told me about them when I got older. Why should anyone else care? But I struggle to recapture those moments. From time to time, little nuggets of memory are panned from the sludge in my head. Flushed to the surface, they glint like gold. These days, I seize upon those memories to decorate my days.

The engine puffed great clouds of smoke. Suddenly, as I came around the corner, there it was. With a great roar, it slowly moved off, a giant of a thing, the first steam engine I had ever seen. It was large beyond any imagination I had ever had of the size of things. It must have frightened me with its noise and its size, its blackness and its whiteness, but I don’t remember the fear. I felt I could ride this iron horse. Its image is there, still stamped on my mind many decades later. It is the only early image I can recall of that early age. What was I doing there alone on the street? There was no adult present in my remembrance. It seems remarkable that I would be alone on the street so close to such a potential danger with no adults around. What’s with that?

Another picture swims before my eyes. There are no stories of beatings, starvation, abandonment, and drunk or depraved parents. Only very ordinary stuff. My sister and I are alone in this very large building. There were many other children there. I don’t remember the sleeping arrangements there, but there must have been a dormitory. I saw my sister only at mealtimes. We would all be seated at a long table for meals.

I remember my sister had to sit for hours at that table after all the other kids had left because she wouldn’t eat the canned peas on her plate. I remember eating lots of sandwiches. I found out later that we were there because my mom was in the hospital. My mother had fallen ill and the orphanage was the only solution as a temporary shelter while my mother was getting better. Where was my dad?

I have no recollection of parents coming or going, only that suddenly, I was with other children in that orphanage. I do not recall coming home. I do not recall missing parents. I only recall being a boarder in this building with other children. Why did I not feel the absence of my parents? Why were they not an important presence in my young life when I was in that place?

I remember visiting the homes of other children that I met there. They were doing good deeds, they and their parents, by visiting kids in the orphanage. After going home (my parents were a vague presence until much later in my life), I would occasionally be invited to come over to play at their homes. I recognized that they lived an entirely different lifestyle from the one I was experiencing. I liked their lifestyle better than the one I was living.

Still later, we lived on another street in a terrace home, two homes with a common wall. Now my parents were more of a presence. We each had a front veranda with a partition. Across the street was the lane that led to the school we attended. We always came home for lunch. We would always wait for the bell to ring before we returned to class. We would always be late for class. There was a terrace house across the street as well. One of the families there had a great many children. I remember that at least two of them did not seem right somehow, not entirely normal.

I remember registering for school in grade 1. I felt awkward because my mother could not speak a fluent English. The worst thing was when Billy O’Reilly threw a stone and hit me in the head. When I told my mother, she came with me to the principal’s office and made a great fuss. I never told tales out of school again.

We moved again to a district that was farther from the school, near the railroad tracks. Now we lived across from a coal yard and in front of a junkyard. I learned that the junkyard could be my treasure house in the hours when it was closed. I learned a lot about life in that new neighborhood. I learned we were poor. I learned that we were Jewish and that was not always a good thing. I learned that we were on welfare. I learned I lived in a neighborhood that for some reason was hostile. It was hostile to me because we were Jewish. I learned that some people would try to do me harm for just this reason. I learned that whether I liked it or not, I would have to fight to defend myself. I learned that I would have to hurt others if I wanted them to stop hurting me.

After a while, I got the picture. Life meant that I would face many times and places that I would rather have avoided. They were the price of surviving to that time when I could be the master of my own fate. I knew I was a hero. But I was going to have to educate the world, a lot of other people, before they knew it as I did.

The street life in that place occupied many of my hours when I was not at school. I spent time with companions in the neighborhood I inhabited, but they could never be friends. They could only be momentary companions. My future, I knew, would have to be in another place with other people. And that included my parents as well. I was just passing through.

Those were some of the things I learned on the street.

In my youngest years, I just kept my eyes and ears open and tried to figure out what was going on around me without asking too many questions. I did not ask many questions at all. I never turned to my parents. If they offered advice, which they must have, I do not recall placing much weight on anything they had to tell me. I have the same problem today. Even though a trusted person may tell me something, I feel bound to verify it for myself. That drives them ’round the bend.

Is that why I am so opinionated? I seem to remember that by the time I was in grade 5, I had figured out all the important things about life. I just had to bide my time until I could be in charge. I was the teacher’s pet in that year. In grade 6, my teacher allowed me to run classes. I knew I was the cat’s meow. My teachers’ admiration only confirmed my own view of myself.

There must have been lots of times when I wasn’t sure which way to go. Then I would just do nothing until I was forced to jump one way or another. But when I decided where to go, it was full speed ahead in the direction I chose, come hell or high water! I spent a lot of my life just biding my time to get through things and situations I didn’t like. I can’t remember ever being really satisfied with my surroundings.

I never asked the bigger questions. I didn’t ask why are we here. Where did we come from? What’s it all about? I don’t remember asking any of those questions? Why did it take me so many years to get around to thinking about those fundamental questions? Probably because everything in my head was about me.

Where was I all my life? What did I think about? I did notice that people were all pretty different. I did notice that it was sometimes hard to understand why they did the things they did and said the things they said. I must have spent some time trying to figure that out. I think I did learn that there were some patterns to the way people behaved, so I might be able to predict their reactions to events that might occur. That was useful. That way, you could avoid events you might not like.

I must have noticed that my parents seemed to have some concern for my welfare. I just accepted that without question, without asking why. I did notice that other people did not necessarily act that way. Sometimes my siblings pushed for things that I would never dare to ask for. I didn’t like that. But they always were in my corner if I was threatened by someone outside my family. I learned about loyalty.

So I learned that there was some kind of mysterious code that dictated what was acceptable behavior between individuals depending on who they were. I learned that out on the street anything goes. Specifically, you are on your own among your buddies. The fingers on your hands can be organized to make useful fists. One had better learn how to use them for whenever the situation demanded it.

I learned early that the world of books took one away from all that mundane stuff, the often unpleasant reality, the existence into which I had been inexplicably thrust. I found my escape on the bookshelves of the library offering a more attractive world than the one I actually inhabited. I filled my time with reading during every moment I could spare from the normal activities of life. In that world, I could be the hero I knew I was. I learned to cope with that reality as one has to, as best one can, parents, siblings, school, the schoolyard, the street, and later, the career.

However, once having learned the code for entry into the world of books, it became the place I wanted to be. I carried books with me whenever I could, so I could reenter that fantasy world at will. Even mealtimes did not tempt me enough to separate my eyes from the printed page whenever such was tolerated by my indulgent mother. And many a night, I read under the covers with a flashlight far into the night. Well ahead of my cohort in school, as a consequence of my readings, my teachers presumed a level of intelligence far beyond what I actually had to offer. Only I knew the truth.

So my preferred existence lay in those worlds of adventure and achievement, conjured up by the authors who displayed a universe of past and future before my eager eyes. It was here that the answers appeared to the questions I never asked. Here I strode as a colossus.

Inevitably, wasn’t I the hero who could fill the courageous roles, right the wrongs? I was the discoverer of the unknown wonders waiting to be found. Naturally then, the world out there was just waiting for me. Obviously, I was meant for great things. It just remained for me to set off and find my proper place. I could fail, that was permitted. Indeed, that had to be expected as I learned the rules of the game and developed the necessary tools required to win the battles. I would forgive myself for my minor failings on the road to revelation, in my struggles with the angels in the night. It remained only to find the proper stage for the destined role to be played. I could hardly wait to get started on the task. I would have to put those books aside at a later stage, but I would remain infected by the passions they aroused.

I can now remember how we fumbled with our emotions during those years. I wanted things, but I had no idea how to go about getting those things. I knew no standards by which to measure the strength of feelings to decide how important they should be in determining priorities. And it was so crucial not to look foolish to ourselves or to others. I did not appreciate how important some of those experiences would prove to be in shaping who I would become. What I took so lightly in our give and take among ourselves, I learned, were the practice exercises for being a grown-up.

Looking back, I am amazed at how careless I was about what my future would become. Initially, aside from a general plan, I had no idea of how to proceed. My attitude was fatalistic, with the self-assurance that, however things would turn out, I could arrive at what would be, for me, a good result. Who gave me that idea? My grade 5 persona? And I was impatient. I was in a great hurry to get on with it, to take on the tasks of being an adult, to be in full charge of all my affairs. No hanging back with Mommy and Daddy for me.

Everything was being made up in my head as if I knew all the important answers to all the important questions. Actually, I was making things up as I went along. Where did that come from? That grade 5 monster again?

Pursuing the Golden Fleece, I nurtured to my breast my small victories. Assembled in my memory scrapbook, they glowed like jewels as I totted them up over the passing years. They satisfied the hunger I had assembled, during my youthful fantasies, for personal deeds of valor. The accomplishments that I, Maxie, would bring into being were to be wrested from an indifferent fate. The work of my own hands attained mythic value for me. They were heroic in my mind, my most precious of valued treasures. They certainly did not have the same worth for most of the fellow travelers with whom I shared the road. But I continued to draw a measure of contentment from them as I went along.

The Junkyard

On that street where I lived (Jarvis was the name), in the terraced housing, drunken fathers beat wives and children. In another hovel, a woman drank peroxide to escape from an unbearable existence. The neighbor’s oldest daughter dated a bootlegger with a shiny car. The younger children of our neighbor marched outside our door, shouting catcalls and throwing stones at our windows. This is the world I inhabited with solicitous parents and two sisters, one older, one younger. I was the sole male offspring, a matter of some importance in the context of that time in my family.

I had to scrabble around on the ground many times, fighting my contemporaries, for no reason I could understand, except that only then could I walk upright on that street. We were at the nadir of a lifestyle descent that had led us from Magnus and McPhillips, to Powers and Stella, and finally to Jarvis. My early years paralleled the years of the Depression in Canada. In that world, my father was unemployed, and we were on welfare.

I remember the incident like it was yesterday. I had managed to find a trowel, a little metal shovel with which to dig in the hard ground. I dug a good-sized hole in a little patch of grass beside our house. The neighbor’s house, that of our landlord, unlike ours, was set back a little from the sidewalk. It had a small lawn. It even had a tree. This was precious territory in the urban desert that was Jarvis Street.

Into the hole went the tableware over which I poured the boiling water I had carried from the stove in our kitchen. The water drained away quickly. I wrapped the utensils in a tea towel, careful not to burn my hands from the heat they retained from the water. Back into the house, I went to get another kettle full of boiling water and the dishes. Into the hole went the dishes. Then again, I poured the boiling water over the contents stacked in the hole I had dug. I gathered the hot plates up, wrapped again in tea towels, carrying them back into the house to be washed with the utensils in the kitchen sink.

We were preparing everything in the house for Passover. Not for us a second set of everything to celebrate the holiday. Every year, we would carry out the ritual cleansing, along with the requisite blessings, so that we would be properly prepared. We would be ready for the first Passover meal in the evening.

I found all these preparations mysterious, but I never questioned the rituals, carrying out Mama’s instructions. These were just the things that Jews did. Didn’t everybody? How this process of exposing the things we used to eat with to the mud on the ground somehow made them clean was never explained. More mysterious, my mother once shook a chicken over my head, accompanied by Hebrew blessings. How they somehow saved me from a horrible fate and guaranteed my life for another year never prompted a question from my lips. I would learn the rationale for all this later. This was the world I lived in, a much different world than the one inhabited by those who lived around us.

Directly across the street was the coal and lumber yard, large and occupying much of the frontage on the other side. Behind the yard were Winnipeg’s famous railway yards, stretching back on all sides seemingly without end. We often wandered there in our explorations, the far extremities a terra incognita.

Inside the four walls of our home, we lived our private fantasy life, where family was everything, the warmth of parental concern for our, we children’s, well-being, the beauty of our Sabbath. The inner life we lived was all taken for granted. We were protected by it from the brutal reality we experienced when we went out into the streets to go to school.

We also had our deep dark secret. During this period, my father began to suffer grand mal seizures, episodes striking suddenly in the night. I would awaken to my mother screaming, she trying to prevent my father from injuring himself in his wild flailing. Picture three children gathered in the dark as this scene played out. We would never know when these episodes would occur. Was this our fate? Would we become epileptics too? Some medication must have eventually brought these episodes to an end. The chiaroscuro half-lit scenes remained with me like Middle Ages paintings exhibiting the tortures of hell.

Our landlord owned a junkyard located behind our home. Today, we call this recycling. The junkyard was, for me, a metaphor for our place in life’s scheme, the low point in our journey. Could we, each one of us, be successfully recycled for a higher purpose, or would we remain as discards like the many others who lived around us?

Rats and vermin, all manner of noxious things, were present there among the piles of metal objects and mountains of used bottles and papers of every description. There were separate piles of like materials along a high wire fence on one side. On the other side was a barnlike two-story building with a large opening which could be closed by a door on rails. On the lane was a gated opening to permit the entry of vehicles. The dirt pathway ran almost up to the back door of our summer kitchen.

I could understand all this. My grandfather had a horse and wagon, and he collected the kinds of things that he would offer for purchase in this place. I would explore here. Was there something here that I might appropriate for myself? For me, all of this was mine for the taking. After all, it was in my backyard.

It was there I found the greatest treasure. Among the flotsam and jetsam of paper products were many discarded books of interest only for pulping. I had been emptying the shelves of libraries for years. They were my window on the world, and I was already well traveled. One day, I found a volume of the collected plays of one William Shakespeare among the refuse. As I drew it from the random garbage, I felt a chill run through me. I already knew the name. It had no cover, but the weight of it had substance. I hugged the sodden volume to my breast and ran quickly into the house. I went directly to my room. I would not emerge for hours.

Once entering this world, I was lost forever. I read it from one end to the other in just a few days. Those imaginings, those histories, the resonance of that language, the turn of phrase, the insight offered into the nature of man, there was enough there for a lifetime, many lifetimes. I now had something in my life against which