HOWDY DOODY AND THE ATOMIC BOMB

I found the lost chapter! So excited, am printing it here. it's the beginning of the last book in the series

HOWDY DOODY AND
THE
ATOMIC BOMB

BY

ROBERT … JACK RUBENSTEIN



__________________________________________________________________________CHAPTER 1

Dearest Ruby:
He calls it a diagnosis but how can I trust the physician who hears a cash register as he puts the stethoscope to my heart? It is funny, though, how the worn down infrastructure can bring the whole building down. Time will pass, and we are but a breath, the last gasp of a dying wave upon an endless shore. So just in case, I take the coward’s way out, by writing, cause I’m still not able to talk to you about this directly. You see, I am ashamed.
The story involves secrets I kept from you. Loyalties even misguided honor. It is about a blood oath of confidences, too scared to tell, too much grief to carry. Or worse. I thought: boys would go out with you just to tell their friends they made it with that girl. They would think of you as having the blood of a killer no matter how gentle you were.
But secrets cannot be held even in scared hearts, not forever. The ball must be kept rolling. Ruby, some of our patriarchs was heroes, others demons-- the wisdom or folly of the fathers is often just a bounce one way or the other. In that world of light and darkness, courage to carry on is born--a strong hand to guide, a mother’s love, a dunk shot.
Looking back into our own history, I realize I was blessed with many gifts. Yours, Ruby, is the most wonderful gift of all. That is why I cannot leave with blood, in the figurative sense, on my hands.
I am, in my declining years, suffered to be a wordsmith—to doctor one’s thoughts and transform them into sweet prose. I can be a storyteller or a liar, who would know which? But I had both my mother and father’s blessings, and they taught me there were consequences to the latter.
Your grandfather, my father, never lied. Nor did he ever talk about his family--about his mother or father, or the brothers and sister that came and went. Once a year, he lit candles for them. Cloaked in the traditional white shawl, he mouthed the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. With my silences, I guess I am a lot like him.
I knew some of their names. The candles burned a twenty-four hour flame for my grandmother, Fannie, and my grandfather, Joseph, after whom, had my father kept to the Ashkenazi tradition, I would have been named. My father skipped that by naming me after my long forgotten great-grandfather. I think he wanted to go very far away from the shame my grandfather had caused him. He was always silent about Joseph and the whole family that settled in Chicago. The word was that Joseph was a drinker and very unpleasant. Eight children had been officially born, but there were others. Some were assumed lost to the heavy weight of infant mortality deaths. But ours, though recorded as such, stayed very much alive. Our side of the family moved to New York during the days of prohibition when many large families were separated by poverty or drink.
About my given name—it was Jacob, nicely turned by my father to Jack. That is my middle name now, spun by your grandma, coming off ‘Twilight,’ the anesthesia she used during my birth, circa nineteen fifty-two, to the nickname, Jackie. I was conceived Jack Rubenstein until mother, once again, had a flying fit. That was how I became Robert Jack Rubenstein. By the time she really awoke, G-d bless her soul, your grandma did not remember my name. When my first novel, Ghost Runners, was published, I decided to drop the Jack and to use Robert Rubenstein, instead. My family calls me Bobby, but my friends complicated my life. To this day, they still call me by the family nickname...Ruby.
I thought I’d be cute by calling you by that name, flat out. What a burden for you to carry: Ruby Rubenstein. I’m sorry about that.
After the first printing of the book, and its most surprising success, I thought I would return to the name that would be on my stone in a quiet corner of a tree lined street in an old cemetery in its due time:
Jack Rubenstein.

About those candles--Joseph’s does not stand near anybody’s. Neither would the solitary one that burned only once for my uncle, who also had my own name. Strangely, for I thought he was still alive when my father lit one for him.
I did not know then that my uncle Jack had already gone and changed his name. That pale, temporary glow that lifted from the glass, first shone like ash, two days after the President, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas.
I also did not know, for I was still a child, that Jack had changed his name to our family nickname, which is your name as well: He was Jack Ruby.
I remember the drapes were closed and black paper covered the mirrors. I was ten years old and that was the day of firsts. It was the day my family went into mourning in the ritual Jewish way, not for family, not even for a Jew, but for our beloved first Catholic president. But it was two days later that my father lit the lone candle and the only time I saw him cry. He said he lit it for Uncle Jack, but I did not follow the dots that are now so obviously connected with that part of the nation’s common sad history. I was too young to understand when the newscasts blurted out what sounded like my own name...

“a man named Luby or Ruby has shot the President’s assassin, Lee ‘Harold’ Oswald, in Dallas this Sunday morning, November 24, 1963 at 10:21 Central Time. Quoting him, Ruby said, ‘You killed my President, you rat,’ before pumping a bullet into his abdomen. From the wires now we are told the gunman’s name.
Jack Rubenstein. Jack Rubenstein has allegedly fired the gun and sent this sad city into more chaos and mortal fear. How much suffering is our nation to bear? “

And, when a young reporter, Dan Rather, played it over and over again... that they were talking about my uncle Jack. My only thought: why had my father lit a candle when Uncle Jack was still alive?



Now we will show you the film of Oswald being shot, still-framed, watch the hat in the right-hand corner of the frame. Watch Oswald's eyes as they seem to catch the eye of the assassin [Ruby]. His head turns, he looks at the assassin and his eyes never leave him. The assassin moves in ... and a few inches from {Oswald's} abdomen, fires a shot.”

In the corner of my parent’s room, on the high holy days, memorial candles lifted their sad flames by the window near the credenza. Enclosed by embroidered mahogany, that piece held a pocket watch, a camera, a Luger with black holster-- my father’s spoils of war. There were also his brother’s gifts and photographs of our often estranged, but large family. My grandfather was born in Sokolov, a town near Warsaw. In the 1890’s he joined the Russian artillery and became a lifetime drinker, and often Fannie was driven crazy from despair. Eight children or more and a drunken husband can often do that. Fannie had a fishbone delusion for many years. She eventually had her trachea removed, but that offered her no relief. A great unseen bone was choking her still.
The centerpiece of our trophy case was my father’s war medals in the battle for the Rhine. Since Uncle Jack moved around a lot, he left his sharpshooting medals and World War Two regiment patches there as well. The day my father lit the candle for Uncle Jack, on Sunday, November 24, 1963, he opened the credenza once more to remove the medals and a photograph, and one lone record—an old, bizarre seventy-eight with a black label, with preserved plastic coverings, off the shelf. It must have had sentimental value only because it held a fatal bullet-sized hole that stood inelegantly at the far corner of the grooves. The round disk, the medals, and an odd photograph of Howdy Doody stashed away past the black crepe paper drapes and the overall gloom.

Our secrets were so well kept--I didn’t even know we had any. Even when knocks came to our door that kept hammering us awake, sometimes night after night, I never made the connection.
“Just some Fuller Brush man,” my father said.
He never let us answer the door or hear the words these ‘darn salesmen’ said...the real words they said about the lies they wanted to tell about us...words about the big picture from the family’s point of view. Writers and newsmen, thrill seekers and the like. In my mind, Fuller Brush was the most aggressive company in the world.
I thought my family so dull and uninteresting that I never thought I’d write one word about them. Wanting always to be a writer, I sailed the seas with Nemo or won spectacular cases in the courtroom with Perry Mason. An avid sports fan, I followed my father, a gambling man, to sporting events. Sometimes Uncle Jack came along with my dad and me. He had a strong opinion, liked to handicap the game. A gambler like my father, Jack would dictate what team to bet, even what score the final would be. He often seemed nervous, hyper-vigilant. He looked around as if he was being followed, or to stop a disturbance, where no trouble had been, even during the playing of the National Anthem. If a loud-mouth would be talking, Uncle Jack took him to task with his own loud mouth and quick hands. Once, he tweaked a man’s breast, through his clean white shirt, for not standing fast enough, or for not removing his hat. It was nineteen fifty-eight. Though I was only six or seven years old, I remembered Uncle Jack lived in California and had an idea about opening up a club somewhere. He kept talking to my father about horses, and said the place would be named ‘Carousel.’
Living in other people’s rented space, usually in some rectangular cubicle apartment with uncontrolled steam piping unhealthily through the radiator vents, forty or fifty feet above the ground, your grandma cried about our ancestral home, a place, she said was mortgaged to a horse’s ass at Belmont or Saratoga Raceways.

My father took me to watch the Dodgers play at Ebbets Field or to the old Madison Square Garden on Fiftieth Street in Manhattan to sweat out the point spread during the first game of an evening basketball doubleheader. We saw Cousy, Petite, George Mikan, and the rest. If my father beat the point spread, it was a good night. Otherwise, there was this edge that made me wish I had stayed home. But heaven, win or lose, was centerfield in Yankees Stadium after the baseball game when we walked on the field and headed through the outfield gates near the monuments for the ‘L’ to take us home. I ran around the outfield and slid until I choked from dust and kissed the dirt. Centerfield was Mickey Mantle territory.

I was about six, dearest Ruby, and was alone only once with Uncle Jack. It happened in Coney Island when Jack took me on the Parachute ride. I always thought it was the parrot shoot ride, and I was scared to death. In his own way, Uncle Jack tried to comfort me. I remember his muscular arm around my shoulders, his right hand patting me as the parachute began its slow, upward climb. Years later, I would remember that right hand, the chute fanning over the dizzying drop below like a billowing white cloud, and the, the ocean turning upside down, the rides, the wonder wheel, and the cyclone spying on us all the way down. Descending breathless, we rode with Uncle Jack’s fingers tightening the grip. He was giggling, his dark hat somehow stayed on his head. He talked with a high pitched, slight lisp.
“Bobby, you like thisss?”
Each finger danced toward me, as if he were pressing keys on a typewriter. Much later, I’d tried to imagine him squeezing the trigger. The gun, the recoil, and a lone animal, leaping to get off another shot:
“You killed my preshident, you rat.”
I imagined him thinking about some unknown dark deed in his near future as he played on me and we soared together through the clouds of his giggle and dancing fingers on the Coney Island parrot shoot jump.
In that way, I became somehow linked to the sad story of a triumvirate of assassination conspiracy theory. But I thought about that only after you were born.

During the years before you came, I never made a conscious connection. Through high school, college, I never knew that Jack Ruby and my uncle were one and the same.
I must have been dreaming through the sixties, the seventies. You see, I swear I never made the connection because I never knew Uncle Jack had gone and changed his name, and later when I saw film footage, I only had some vague recollections. There was that familiar pose; that smile, even the menacing nostrils of the gun shooter and the man I knew who bullied the patrons at the Garden. But I couldn’t put it all together, and my father would not allow any questions.
When Jack Ruby shot Oswald, our family went not only into mourning but to hiding from that very day. We shut out our memories like a plague or dark spirit. The angel of death had passed our way. My parents thought they were protecting me and I did the same for you, Ruby. But I now know that I robbed you of your heritage and your right to seek the truth. Was that Ruby just another madman, a lone gunman? Or were the streams of visitors, the Seth Kanter’s or the Belzer’s or the hundreds who profited from conspiracy theories right, those Fuller Brush men and the like? Can I in G-d’s name say I know? How could I claim that without being branded a charlatan like the rest? Money is money and I’m a snake oil salesman with a hot name.
So, Jack Ruby had my name and was my uncle, so? What do you have to say that’s different to add to the dialogue in any way? Just an old seventy-eight, not even one of his neat hats, a record of Deacon L.J. Bates who’s another fake name, and a hole in that—there’s nothing here—except for that photograph of Howdy Doody.