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The greying February sky pierced through the kitchen window
as Sol Greenberg trudged in from another night’s sleep. It was 6:30 AM on a Tuesday morning and it
was time to start again.
Sol carefully removed the bag of Folger’s Premium Roast from
its Ziplocked compartment and scooped out two calculated spoonfuls of the mix,
emptying it into the decrepit coffee maker.
The coffee maker shook and buzzed as it always did when Sol flipped it
on, but he didn’t mind it. In fact he
was comforted by it. The Farberware from
Sears had sat on Sol’s counter for the last thirty-four years and Sol had
always been a man who found relief in continuity. Besides, it made coffee, he understood its
quirks; why should he pay another $37.83 when this one was working just
fine? Sol had never understood the
frivolity of today’s youth.
He glanced over to the desk in the corner of the kitchen where
we wrote letters and paid the bills.
That ugly machine was there somewhere, under his books and the pile of
photographs that he had managed to get his son to mail him.
“Dad, I can send you pictures so much easier through e-mail if
you’d just let me set it up for you,” Sol’s son had told him.
“What? I should need
to spend half the day on this television-typewriter set just for to see
pictures of my grandchildren?” Sol had responded, “Make an old man happy and
mail them to him.”
His son had persisted and stubbornly bought Sol this laptop
machine, promising to help me with the e-mail, but he never came over. He never came over for anything. And what, now the vakacta thing just sits in on
the desk gathering dust and Sol has to beg his own son—his own flesh and blood—just
walk his two strong legs all the way over to the mail box to send him his photos. How horrible Sol was to ask this of his son. Oi vey.
Sol was just about to turn on the radio when he was violently
flung into the kitchen table by the sheer force of a mammoth crash
outside. If not for the table Sol would
have fallen to the floor and who knows how long he would have been down there? It wasn’t as though visitors were just
pouring through the door to see Sol every day.
A week later maybe Sol's son calls him and Sol would get to hear his son's message about how the family was doing fine and maybe they’d get a chance to
drive up and see him at Passover and then they could find Sol on the kitchen floor
with the rats gnawing on him!
But fortunately, the table had caught Sol and he was
fine. But what about this crash outside? Probably those neighbor boys with their
fireworks again.
“If there’s another dead cat on my lawn,” thought Sol, “if
its insides are exploded all across my stoop again, I’m going to march right up
to those parents and tell them how to discipline those children. I will do this.”
Sol opened the kitchen door and stepped outside, prepared to
avoid the cat insides, but was confused to find no cat guts on his stoop. It made him even sourer to be proven wrong. Clearly, this was some prank pulled by those
neighbor boys.
Sol suddenly noticed smoke billowing from the corner of his
fence. Aha! Those little schmucks had set Sol’s fence on
fire! Those good-for-nothing parents
would replace every board that their good-for-nothing boys had damaged!
Sol quickly ambled over to the fence and was surprised again
to find that he was wrong, and again, Sol found himself grumpier because
of it. The smoke was not from a burning
fence post, but rather from a little green rock that was somehow buried deep against
his fence. The rock was actually
illuminated, emitting a low green halo around it.
“What, this? This rock is what has pushed me over and is
making all this fuss now?” thought Sol, “And why should those boys dig such a
hole for this and not even want to fill it in?”
These questions plagued Sol and to investigate further he
gingerly knelt down to inspect the green rock. Oi his back! His good knee flush to the lawn, Sol plunged his hand into the hole and
grasped the stone.
Instantly, upon first touch of the rock, Sol felt a pain
shoot through his entire body. But it
was more than just pain. It was also
energy. Energy as Sol had never felt
before, not even as a young man. Sol
could feel it expanding through him; the more it hurt, the more power he
felt. It was incredible.
A dizziness overtook Sol and he suddenly felt as though he
was watching himself from outside of his body.
His brittle, hunched frame was morphing into a muscle-bound Adonis. And what more, he was green. Green as that first car he had bought from
Harold Murray over on 42nd Street, you know the one.
His shirt torn asunder and his glasses flung out into the
yard, Sol found himself standing ten feet high, dripping with muscles, and
unable to put two thoughts together. The
immense weight of this power was crushing Sol’s brain. Sol was not himself. He was something else, something more.
Yes, this much was clear to Sol, for whatever reasons, in
whatever ways, Sol had become… Jew Hulk!
 |
| Jew Hulk say, "Why you no doctor yet?" |
To Be Continued...
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