1. This Southern woman I used to love used to love to put peanuts in her Coke. Maybe she still does. She liked boiled peanuts best, but she couldn’t find boiled peanuts where we lived, which was in the Northeast, what they call the Northeast Corridor of the United States, so she settled for salted. The Southern woman said that putting peanuts in her Coke was not just what she loved, but was an activity loved by many equally in the American South.

It was, like, a peculiar institution.

 

2. What does this have to do with Goering’s List? We’re getting there. Be patient. I have, I believe, uncovered the secret of Goering’s List, its cause, its meaning. I’ll give you a hint: the secret of Goering’s List has something to do with Göring’s list.

 

3. Meanwhile please do not be so quick to judge the Southern woman, or, for that matter, me, the Northeastern American Jew, who chose, out of well over a hundred titles for use in this exciting occasion, this project of international scope in which people have been invited by a person in Melbourne named Ronnie Scott to compose stories and songs and comics based on the spines pasted to a fake bookshelf, the only book whose title had the name of a Nazi in it. Because Goering or Göring, it still spells Nazi, doesn’t it? And bar mitzvah or no bar mitzvah, I’m still a Jew, at least in the sense that I’ve been called “Kike”, got beat up several times in grade school for being Jewish, had my photograph taken by a magazine called Heeb, and once experienced some really subtle and delicious Jew-baiting at dinner with the Southern woman’s family. Besides, had I lived in other, earlier times, my name could conceivably be on a list of Jews listed for some awful, or even wonderful, fate. It could be on a list like that right now.

But probably not.

Doesn’t this all make me Jewish? Probably not.

So why did I pick Goering’s List? Did I think I could make something clever or funny out of a bunch of tired, old Nazi comedy tropes?

Do I feel guilty about something?

And was there any way I wasn’t going to employ the tired, old device of a list for this international occasion?

Was I going to steer clear of that tropey old thing?

It’s tough to say.

Also, not to change the subject, but have you got a good fix on Göring? Maybe I’m taking it for granted. You probably have a passing knowledge of the major Nazis. You probably have some passing knowledge of your Hitler, your Goebbels, your Himmler, your Eichmann, your Heydrich. You’ve seen the movies, the Nazi cavalcade, the whole creepy, pockmarked, brutal, sentimental, banality-of-evil gang. Göring, he’s the fat Nazi. The fighter ace Nazi. The commander-of-the-Luftwaffe Nazi. The morphine-addict Nazi. The drunken-orgy-on-the-bearskin-rug-beside-the-roaring-fire-in-the-Bavarian-hunting-lodge Nazi. The aristocratic Nazi with the embarrassingly gaudy uniforms Nazi. Göring was second-in-command to Hitler. He was once kicked out of grade school for defending his Jewish godfather. I read this on Wikipedia.

Göring had a brother and this brother also had a list.

We’ll get to that. As soon as I get to Wikipedia again.

 

4. I guess the main point of this piece, not that there is a main point, except for my increasing anxiety about disappointing Ronnie Scott from Melbourne, is that when it comes to history, the peanuts are already in the Coke, as the true story of Goering’s List, which I am presently trying to fictionalise from the title of a real novel that appears on a spine pasted to a fake bookshelf, fictionalise for a person named Ronnie Scott in Melbourne, Australia, a city of great and at the same time absolutely no importance to me, will, it is my deepest wish, attest.

 

5. I rarely make lists. Not even grocery lists. I’m too proud. If it’s important, I figure, I’ll remember it. But I never remember.

 

6. The Southern woman’s family was really quite nice. I dreamed up the bad stuff. Or let’s just say I dreamed it. Write a dream, writing teachers tell us, lose a reader. Maybe, I reply, but you do avoid a lawsuit.

 

7. Full disclosure: I am married to an Australian citizen who is not Ronnie Scott. I am married to an Australian citizen who was raised in the United Kingdom and the United States and is really only technically Australian. Still, my wife’s mother and father live in and around Melbourne. Her uncles and aunts and cousins live in and around Melbourne. I have been to their houses. I have never seen a fake bookshelf in any of them.

 

8. A little backstory, or background, or what we in the storytelling biz call backfuzz: Goering’s List was the title of a thriller by J.C. Pollock published in 1995. Here is a succinct plot summary from Kirkus Reviews, which specialises in succinct plot summaries (and often cutting judgments) for the publishing and bookselling communities in the United States: “A tough-as-nails Delta Force vet who freelances for the CIA teams up with a Mossad lovely to hunt down a ruthless terrorist known only as Dieter in a twisty, to-the-ends-of-the-earth technothriller from Pollock (Threat Case, 1991; Payback, 1989, etc.).”

 

9. The list in J.C. Pollock’s Goering’s List is a list Hermann Göring kept of all the rich Nazis and Nazi collaborators to whom he sold precious stolen art. Years after the war, a rogue Stasi agent finds the list and tracks down the people on it, kills them, retrieves the art, sells it on the black market, and uses the money to finance a Red Army Faction revival. This is his big black-and-red plan anyway. The Delta guy and the “Mossad lovely” may have something to say about it.

 

10. Here’s what Kirkus Reviews once wrote about one of my books: “More marijuana moonbeams from reefer-brained Lipsyte…”

 

11. The rest was not so kind.

 

12. Dude, the Northeast Corridor is like a gigantic hallway.

 

13. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, but he did not know any better, except that he did, but not really, except that he should have, but how can we judge? How can we make such cutting judgments out of context?

 

14. It seems there is another list I should have mentioned. Perhaps I should have mentioned it sooner. I don’t know why I didn’t. This is a delicate operation. It is a delicate kind of weaving. You have to know which thread to introduce, and when. But I keep forgetting which thread, when. I am too proud, and then I forget. Maybe I should make a list, like the one I should have mentioned, the one maintained by Oskar Schindler, yes, that Schindler, the one made so famous, firstly, by, yes, an Australian, named Keneally, and then, secondly, made even more famous by a Northeastern and Southwestern American Jew named Spielberg. So it all weaves together, even as it feels to be unraveling. Weaves together and unravels. Peculiar.

 

15. This, what I’m about to tell you, what could almost be the kicker, I’m not making this up. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Yes, I too am wary of the statement, “You couldn’t make this stuff up.” I am both wary and skeptical when people say, “No, really, you couldn’t make this stuff up.” Of course you could make this stuff up. Or that stuff. The stuff those other people are talking about. But this stuff, you could not make this stuff up, and I am not making this stuff up. This stuff is true, not even based on true, real-life events, just true, as in Wikipedia-true.

Hermann Göring had a younger brother named Albert. Albert hated the Nazis. He hated the Nazis and he saved some Jews and even some Germans who also hated the Nazis. How did he save them?

That’s right! With a list!

 

16. Also this: Once, on a visit to Melbourne, shooting the shit, as they say in the Northeast Corridor, with my Australian mother-in-law, I remarked upon all the bats that had lately infested the Royal Botanic Gardens, how scary it was when they all took flight. “Yes,” she said, “It’s like the dawn raid of the Luftwaffe!”

 

17. Known only as Dieter.

 

18. That wasn’t the first bad review I got from Kirkus Reviews. Kirkus Reviews has always had it in for me. Most writers I know think Kirkus Reviews has it in for them, but in my case it’s true. Or maybe it’s not Kirkus Reviews so much as just one guy there who has it in for me. He must be the sole author of all three nasty anonymous reviews I’ve received from Kirkus Reviews. And he’s probably not even really an employee of Kirkus Reviews, or The Nielsen Company, which owns Kirkus Reviews. He’s just the guy who hates me, the guy they call in to hurt me. But he doesn’t get health insurance, and even I believe he should get health insurance.

 

19. Which is perhaps another way of saying the Southern woman liked anal sex in the shower with the shower turned off and her anus off-limits. She had a dog named Shoah.

 

20. When my wife, the technical Australian, gave birth to our son, we argued about whether the boy should be circumcised. My father, who is Jewish, said maybe it would be a good idea not to circumcise him. The boy, my father argued, might someday find himself in a situation, some situation of the utmost horror, where people are making men drop their pants to see whether these men have been cut in the Jewish manner, to see which men get put on a list for bad things to happen to them.

“A foreskin could save his life,” my father said.

But what if, I thought to myself, they are making men drop their pants to see who gets to get on a different list, a list you’d maybe want your name on, like a list of really fun people who are going to be invited to a fantastic party where the only price of admission is a willingness to partake of free liquor and drugs and receive a mandatory minimum amount of physical and emotional pleasuring? You never know. Stranger things have happened. It’s just a matter of context. The only problem is you can’t make this stuff up.

My son’s name, by the way, is Marijuana Moonbeam Lipsyte.

 

21. Look, we don’t have a lot of time left. We ran out of time a long time ago. When they are in the Coke for more than it should take to drink the Coke, the peanuts soften, disintegrate. They are like a ticking time bomb except they are actually peanuts soaking in a carbonated beverage. So here’s the secret to Göring’s list, as promised, as promised to Ronnie Scott and everybody else: It was because he was so fucking fat. The weight put him off-balance. That’s why Göring had the list.