Deutsche
"by" David Brizer

* Editor's note: My father discovered these papers in an abandoned building on the city's Upper West Side. Dad, a former purveyor of quality meats, ran a cabinet-sized butcher shop, The Quality Meat Market, for well over forty years. The shop itself was festooned with memorabilia, leavings, with trinkets and other booty plucked by hand from the deserted residences of the recently deceased. I imagine he had an 'in' with various superintendants, bellmen, porters and other imperial types who ran these monolithic dwellings. These buildings were the ocean liners of Gotham, riding the ribbons of macadam and cobblestone that crisscrossed the town. Dad's store was a whacked out melange of paintings, object trouves, and prime cuts. He declared these papers (see below) to be absolutely without value. He gave them to me. I kept them, a kind of torpor-inspiring token from my emotionally remote but garbage-plundering dad.

What can be said about this strange sheaf, this veritable feuilleton of Deutschiana? I do not know the real Deutsch. Nor do I know the correct spelling of his name. His surname-was it Sol?Hector? Julius? Felix?-is equally open to conjecture. The document you will find to be brief yet erratic in the extreme, skipping as it does from one cultural epoch to another in the blink of an eye. The narrative flits across history as though this figure Deutsch, this archetype of the demonic, had been truly pandemic, omnipresent across all cultures and epochs. Again, I do not know what to make of the various corruptions of the surname, of the numerous transliterations and-let's face it-outright misspellings of 'Deutsch.'

The unanswered questions are legion. I submit this curious document to the scrutiny of time, to the lasting judgment of history, and to the critical eye and greater wisdom of the reader.

David Brizer
P.O. Box 42
Westport, CT 06880
February, 2003

*

1. After poisoning himself with hard candy, Deutsche is admitted to hospital. He asks to be placed in the refectory. Diagnosis: irritable bowel. Following this he becomes known as 'The Colorectal Cheops.'

2. Sol & his brother Hector Deutschhe publish 'The Effect of Prolonged Water Closet Incubation on Human Spermatic Nucleoprotein' (Warsaw) despite a confidence-shattering rejection from Springer-Verlag S.A.

3. Felix Deutsch, after being hectored by his brothers, goes national, promoting 'The Medically Supervised Practice of Deutschiana.' The latter is a form of mercy killing in which a medical barber takes on the role of executioner.

4. Three months Djeutssche traipsed, up and down, proclaiming to any who would listen that the Grand Concourse was the lost kingdom of Atlantis-and that it was also his precious Zuyder-Zee.

5. Felix Deutsche on onanism: "Every time I touch myself, somewhere in the world a child goes hungry."

6. Duetssche now begins a series of feverish negotations with Colonel Thigpen regarding, in particular, the disposition of two shiploads of blunderbus. Mignon, whom Deuttsche had previously considered the raison d'etre, the veritable fount of his worldly and spiritual well-being, reacts by removing herself to the hinterland of spavined monads from where she came. Deutschhe, as artless as his now departed Mignon is sexless, actively embraces telescopy, hoping to substitute mastery of the brass-jacketed duo-lensed device for the caress of his one-eyed [former] mistress. A donnybrook ensues. Then a lucid interval, "Djeutsche in Hjolland…"

7. In his Veterinary Metaphysics, Deutsche champions the notion that social order among the nutria is infinitely more vexatious than its humankind equivalent. His historical debt to Brillat-Savarin is transparent. Deutsche probably spent many hours picking the brains of the latter during a concordat attended by the two in the public gardens of The Hague. Nineteenth century Holland provided a unique and fitting locale for this outrageous example of pan-syndicalist academic theft.

8. Duetsche's decision to wear a different colored sock on each foot not only flew directly in the face of convention, but was a lasting and searing indictment of the moral opprobrium of his time.

9. Deutsshe's misadventures with one Rex Kang, importer, dipsomaniac, chandler, and purveyor of fine inks are apocryphal. The Kang imbroglio represents yet another scandalous better-to-be-forgotten chapter in the checkered and besmirched palimpsest of Deutschze's life.

10. Julius Deutsche on Passion: "The extremes of human experience are solely realized within the lonely perimeter of the shipping clerk's desk." [Deutsche labored for many years at a major metropolitan ink company. A man of few words, he declined ordinary chat, preferring to articulate the occasional maxim or aphorism whenever a chance encounter with a co-worker called for a remark.]

11. Blind to his surroundings, Deutsche fancied himself waxing grandiloquent in the court of Metternich.

12. from The Handbook of Avian Psychiatry, (Deutsche et al, Springer-Verlag, 1899?): "...on occasion the little creatures become quite neurotic, and/or exhibit signs of severe nervous exhaustion. We are aware of only two definitive remedies: the buzzcocks should be lavished with extreme loving-kindness; alternatively, they must be immediately killed with grape-shot or bb's..."

© David Brizer