Woody Allen on Madoff...

Shouts & Murmurs: Tails of Manhattan: Humor: The New Yorker
Tails of Manhattan

by Woody Allen
March 30, 2009

Two weeks ago, Abe Moscowitz dropped dead of a heart attack and was
reincarnated as a lobster. Trapped off the coast of Maine, he was
shipped to Manhattan and dumped into a tank at a posh Upper East Side
seafood restaurant. In the tank there were several other lobsters, one
of whom recognized him. "Abe, is that you?" the creature asked, his
antennae perking up.

"Who's that? Who's talking to me?" Moscowitz said, still dazed by the
mystical slam-bang postmortem that had transmogrified him into a
crustacean.

"It's me, Moe Silverman," the other lobster said.

"O.M.G.!" Moscowitz piped, recognizing the voice of an old gin-rummy
colleague. "What's going on?"

"We're reborn," Moe explained. "As a couple of two-pounders."

"Lobsters? This is how I wind up after leading a just life? In a tank on
Third Avenue?"

"The Lord works in strange ways," Moe Silverman explained. "Take Phil
Pinchuck. The man keeled over with an aneurysm, he's now a hamster. All
day, running at the stupid wheel. For years he was a Yale professor. My
point is he's gotten to like the wheel. He pedals and pedals, running
nowhere, but he smiles."

Moscowitz did not like his new condition at all. Why should a decent
citizen like himself, a dentist, a mensch who deserved to relive life as
a soaring eagle or ensconced in the lap of some sexy socialite getting
his fur stroked, come back ignominiously as an entree on a menu? It was
his cruel fate to be delicious, to turn up as Today's Special, along
with a baked potato and dessert. This led to a discussion by the two
lobsters of the mysteries of existence, of religion, and how capricious
the universe was, when someone like Sol Drazin, a schlemiel they knew
from the catering business, came back after a fatal stroke as a stud
horse impregnating cute little thoroughbred fillies for high fees.
Feeling sorry for himself and angry, Moscowitz swam about, unable to buy
into Silverman's Buddha-like resignation over the prospect of being
served thermidor.

At that moment, who walked into the restaurant and sits down at a nearby
table but Bernie Madoff. If Moscowitz had been bitter and agitated
before, now he gasped as his tail started churning the water like an
Evinrude.

"I don't believe this," he said, pressing his little black peepers to
the glass walls. "That goniff who should be doing time, chopping rocks,
making license plates, somehow slipped out of his apartment confinement
and he's treating himself to a shore dinner."

"Clock the ice on his immortal beloved," Moe observed, scanning Mrs.
M.'s rings and bracelets.

Moscowitz fought back his acid reflux, a condition that had followed him
from his former life. "He's the reason I'm here," he said, riled to a
fever pitch.

"Tell me about it," Moe Silverman said. "I played golf with the man in
Florida, which incidentally he'll move the ball with his foot if you're
not watching."

"Each month I got a statement from him," Moscowitz ranted. "I knew such
numbers looked too good to be kosher, and when I joked to him how it
sounded like a Ponzi scheme he choked on his kugel. I had to do the
Heimlich maneuver. Finally, after all that high living, it comes out he
was a fraud and my net worth was bupkes. P.S., I had a myocardial
infarction that registered at the oceanography lab in Tokyo."

"With me he played it coy," Silverman said, instinctively frisking his
carapace for a Xanax. "He told me at first he had no room for another
investor. The more he put me off, the more I wanted in. I had him to
dinner, and because he liked Rosalee's blintzes he promised me the next
opening would be mine. The day I found out he could handle my account I
was so thrilled I cut my wife's head out of our wedding photo and put
his in. When I learned I was broke, I committed suicide by jumping off
the roof of our golf club in Palm Beach. I had to wait half an hour to
jump, I was twelfth in line."

At this moment, the captain escorted Madoff to the lobster tank, where
the unctuous sharpie analyzed the assorted saltwater candidates for
potential succulence and pointed to Moscowitz and Silverman. An obliging
smile played on the captain?s face as he summoned a waiter to extract
the pair from the tank.

"This is the last straw!" Moscowitz cried, bracing himself for the
consummate outrage. "To swindle me out of my life's savings and then to
nosh me in butter sauce! What kind of universe is this?"

Moscowitz and Silverman, their ire reaching cosmic dimensions, rocked
the tank to and fro until it toppled off its table, smashing its glass
walls and flooding the hexagonal-tile floor. Heads turned as the alarmed
captain looked on in stunned disbelief. Bent on vengeance, the two
lobsters scuttled swiftly after Madoff. They reached his table in an
instant, and Silverman went for his ankle. Moscowitz, summoning the
strength of a madman, leaped from the floor and with one giant pincer
took firm hold of Madoff's nose. Screaming with pain, the gray-haired
con artist hopped from the chair as Silverman strangled his instep with
both claws. Patrons could not believe their eyes as they recognized
Madoff, and began to cheer the lobsters.

"This is for the widows and charities!" yelled Moscowitz. "Thanks to
you, Hatikvah Hospital is now a skating rink!"

Madoff, unable to free himself from the two Atlantic denizens, bolted
from the restaurant and fled yelping into traffic. When Moscowitz
tightened his viselike grip on his septum and Silverman tore through his
shoe, they persuaded the oily scammer to plead guilty and apologize for
his monumental hustle.

By the end of the day, Madoff was in Lenox Hill Hospital, awash in welts
and abrasions. The two renegade main courses, their rage slaked, had
just enough strength left to flop away into the cold, deep waters of
Sheepshead Bay, where, if I'm not mistaken, Moscowitz lives to this day
with Yetta Belkin, whom he recognized from shopping at Fairway. In life
she had always resembled a flounder, and after her fatal plane crash she
came back as one.