Saturday Night with the Reverend

 

“G-d needs us to believe in Him,” Rev. Vince extols us, “just like you need someone to believe in you.”

Just as the music drops in, he one-ups himself: “Just like I need you to believe in me,” and on the turn of a dime, he’s no longer preaching, he’s singing, he’s giving us deep-throated growls and can-you-say-hallelujahs.

We are in a biker bar called the Black Coffin, and we have been brought here by my summer landlord, Yoily, a Hasid in dress at least. Tonight, though, he is getting down with a Venus de Milo-like woman of some sort of island extraction — an island that could be any island in the world, really — just about five feet tall and at least that in diameter.

But that doesn’t make him any less of a Hasid, in his own estimation at least. Four shots in, he’s spending most of my month’s rent on the nicest whisky in the house, and it’s loosening him up.

Not that he needed any loosening. I remember once in a lecture being told by a rabbi that we wear the clothes we wear, black pants white shirt, as a sort of uniform, to keep us in line and to keep us from acting immodest or unbecoming. When you look like a Jew, you act like a Jew. For Yoily, who goes to the dance clubs almost every night, these clothes free him from any sort of social norm or expectation. Those clothes, that hair, he’s basically an alien. People assume he’s either a dangerous sex pervert or a kid who’s run away, Amish-style, for a single strange night in the town, looking for a crazy adventure in that American Graffiti vein, or maybe just in that The Hangover vein, he’ll have a dance, do some drugs, have a ’70s-music-filled-montage, have a half-awake conversation with a girl whom in a different state of consciousness he might have shared a kiss or something more, rolled into bed at 5:00 in the morning only to awake a few hours later, a little tired and beleaguered but ready to lapse back into his normal life.

But, no: This is Yoily. He’s never gonna wake up.

He dances harder. The woman gives a loud whoop, so showy and flamboyant it feels like she’s faking, but so fake it’s real. Yoily whoops back, even louder, even realer, and he grabs a piece of her stomach. I turn away, embarrassed to be a part of it, embarrassed to be there at all.

**

It’s been a cool night, a hot night. One of those wild summers in Brooklyn where by day the sidewalks are hot enough to give you first-degree burns and you find yourself checking with strangers on the street if they’ve had enough water. At midnight the air is still bubbling over 100. The people in the bar are sweating and thirsty, it makes them drink more, which makes them wilder still.

Rev. Vince feels it. He feeds off it, hungry for energy. He bangs the keys twice as hard, forcing the drummer to play twice as fast. The band can barely keep up.

The audience is having no problem, though. Our feet can stomp in time with whatever Rev. Vince plays. We need him as much as he needs us.

Tonight he plays fierce, sharp staccato chords at the high end and low end of his organ, one song after another. Then finally, he breaks so fast the rest of his band is thrown off track. The bass is still shaking, the unwilling bassist having struck one note after the rest of the band pulled to a stop, and the string trembles with the weight of every ear in the room.

Then he speaks. His voice is the only thing in our ears, the only sound in the universe.

“How you all doin’ tonight?”

The answer is a single lusty many-voiced yell.

“I can feel the L-rd here, can you feel Him?”

Harder cheers, louder cheers. Hands in the air, we are pouring ourselves into him.

“We gotta praise His name, give Him whatever we have! If you got spirit, give Him some spirit. If you got happiness, you got to share that happiness. Even if you got money, you gotta spread it around. You go on and tell me, is anybody here rich?”

A lone bro whistles from the back. A few heads turn toward us, to the Jews, but nobody says anything. In the rest of the bar it is utterly silent, except for the Rev.

“Hey friends, I’m not pokin’ fun at anyone. There’s no need to be ashamed. Whatever you are, that’s the way the L-rd made you. And the L-rd’s got gifts for all of us. Some of us are smart. Some are wise. Some are physically gifted — gifted in the face or the body,” he reaches down, hands cupping the overhanging bottom curvature of his own stomach to jiggle his own, and here the band starts to play again, soft, like the very instruments are whispering, “others are skilled with their words, or their charm, or even their music.”

His hands sink to the keys of the organ, and he jumps back in, and his voice climbs ever louder.

“So friends, what I’m askin’ is, who’s ready to accept G-d’s gifts? Who wants to be rich?”

“I DO!” shrills a voice next to me, and two white-sleeved arms shoot in the air and it’s Yoily, throwing his head back, tossing his beard into the air, shrieking with wild abandon.

The music tumbles back into full force and Yoily starts to dance, and then so does everyone else, and in the moment it’s forgotten by all concerned. Only it’s not forgotten by Yoily, who was a good deal less drunk that night than I’d thought, or maybe he’d just never stopped being drunk, because Wednesday next the big lottery winner gets called, enough cash to never work another day in your life, and not only has Yoily actually had the forethought to buy a lottery ticket, he’s got all six matching numbers.

Now, there’s such a thing as coincidence in this world. G-d stopped sending us prophets, and there’s no longer a Temple to bring the holy offerings, so we got to make do with what we do. G-d’s Hand is still at it, but in a concealed way, and you don’t often see miracles granted as obvious as Yoily.

Right away he stopped going out at night. Started wearing his black hat again, never being seen without a jacket, or outside the neighborhood, or in bars, Least of all a bar where a licensed minister plays organ every Tuesday night.

Once I passed him on the street, asked him about it. He scowled and couldn’t say Rev. Vince’s name without spitting. “That goy?” he said. “All he wants to do is turn Yidden into sinners, one forbidden dance at a time.”

But on Shabbos I wound up at his house — since the lottery, he’d given himself to buying tons of food from the store, paying a shiksa to prepare it all, and inviting over whatever single or divorced or displaced men to feast with a good hot lunch. He’d had too much to drink, or not enough. And he threw a sweaty arm around me and told me why he’d stopped following the rest of us to Rev. Vince.

“I’d be back there in a second if I hadn’t won,” he said to me, his voice warm and cavelike in my ear. “What he did was, he took away the uncertainty. If all you need to do to believe is to get handed a miracle, what good does it do? I wouldn’t have to believe on my own, I wouldn’t have to shout and cheer and scream like an animal, I wouldn’t dance with the fat shiksas because I’d know that G-d was right there, ready to throw a lightning bolt in my face. The second you don’t need to believe anymore, what are you? You’re an angel. You’re a robot. All you do is G-d’s work, because there’s nothing else you can do.”

He says more, but I don’t hear it, because he unfixes his arm from my shoulders and slinks off, still talking. I don’t need to hear it. I don’t want to. I’ve still got my Saturday night dances, and I wouldn’t trade them for the world.

 

The Rev. Vince is loosely, but not entirely, modeled after Reverend Vince Anderson & the Love Choir. You should think of it as fan fiction. You can find out about the real one here and listen to here and, whoa!, he has live shows every Monday night here. We should go.

Cooking with the Anarchist Kosher Cookbook

Like the allusory joke of its title, Maxwell Bauman’s collection of short stories The Anarchist Kosher Cookbook has a very limited audience—a niche within a niche, that limited number of beautiful people who will have at least a passing familiarity with both The Anarchist Cookbook, the perpetually-Xeroxed manual of homemade explosive devices for domestic uprisings, and the sub-genre of cookbooks that do not merely contain kosher recipes, and certainly bear only the most passing resemblance to the miniature culinary museums-on-paper put out by Yotam Ottolenghi and his ilk, but echo more the haimishe delights and misspellings of Spice & Spirit and The Molly Goldberg Cookbook and The Famous Jewish Cookbook — that is, those garishly-printed 1970s volumes that regard jello as an all-purpose ingredient and expound on the myriad ways that tuna fish can be turned into salad.

In other words: Maxwell Bauman, don’t expect this book to become the next Da Vinci Code.

But a few weeks ago, the comedian Moshe Kasher posted a tweet that was just as niche: “Martin Buber’s personal pronouns are I/Thou,” summoning the intersection of those at the forefront of the evolution of nonbinary queer grammar and post-WWII Jewish theological philosophy, and I watched in pleased surprise as the numbers of hearts and retweets circulated higher and higher. Maybe there’s still few enough of us weird Jews to warrant a manifesto, but there’s also enough to cling to these tiny sporadic appearances in the overlap of people who are really into Judaism and really into oddness — enough, at least, to deserve a book like The Anarchist Kosher Cookbook, and to will Maxwell Bauman into existence.

I’m going to reprint the book’s table of contents here, partly just so you can appreciate it:

• When the Bush Burns
• The Messiah in New York
• You’ve Lost that L’chaim Feeling
• The Leviathan Blues
• The Anarchist Kosher Cookbook
• Baphomitzvah

Partly, it’s that his combination of deviously clever puns and intermixing lingos — Baphomitzvah, for example (and if you didn’t know), portmanteaus the demonic celestial Baphomet with the time-honored Jewish ritual of Bar Mitzvahs, or, in the case of this story, a b’nai mitzvah. As we see the first sparkle of the demonic creature’s existence, the repeated snubbings and the heightening impending revenge of the titular bas mitzvah girl, we see both tropes of stories rearing their heads: the ugly-girl horror-story narrative, in which our likeable but socially-spurned antiheroine comes into contact with satanic powers, claims them for her own, then wreaks a mirrored havoc on the community and town who have wreaked a similar sort of havoc on her. To put this on top of the modern secular bar mitzvah narrative isn’t subversive, it just makes sense — but it works, and it works so joyously well.

That’s a lot of the joy of The Anarchist Kosher Cookbook. Substituting a golem for homemade molotov cocktails in the title story is a no-brainer, but the story’s power comes from the effortlessness of the twin narratives. Yes, Emma Goldman and Abbie Hoffman were Jewish and pillars of countercultural uprisings, but much of their personal journeys lay in ignoring or minimizing their background and/or affiliation. In the title story, he embraces it. The language of revolution is weaponized not by youngsters and upstarts and in spite of their Judaism, but by elderly rabbis and bubbes, and because of it — and by those youngsters and upstarts who claim that tradition.

The mixing occasionally has mixed results. I first encountered this book at an indie-books conference held in one of those sports arena-size conference halls with a million aisles and people swarming them like an ant farm. If you know anything about me, you can picture our first encounter: me catching sight of the cover typography, then actually reading the title, eyes popping out of head, body popping out of skin, &tc. To paraphrase Moshe Kasher’s tweet, I was pretty sure the audience for the title was me.

I read the first page of the first story, “When the Bush Burns,” and I was in weird Jewish heaven. Forgive me (and, by extension, Maxwell), but it’s raunchy.

I curled up and pulled the covers over my head, but the light was much stronger under the sheets. I opened my eyes to discover bright orange flames flickering out the edges of my panties.

“Good morning, Beth,” said the fire.

I screamed and kicked off the sheets.

“What’s wrong?” my husband called from the kitchen.

“My pussy’s on fire!”

“I’ll get you some cranberry juice,” he said.

It works on so many levels, right? Geez, I was into this. But the story devolves into — minor spoilers in this paragraph — the couple’s inability to conceive, and the work of a G-dly miracle/satanic imp/odd vaginal trickster to get her to hook up with the sketchy, overly willing rabbi of their synagogue. The story felt like it started promising Talmudic deconstruction and ended as a MAD magazine take on what a page of Talmud would look like, but without the sly evenhanded irony of a MAD article. At a few other places in the collection, Bauman makes a few errors/assumptions/missteps with regards to historical or cultural accuracy, especially when dipping into his Hasidic caricatures, which at other times in my life I’d get annoyed at or offended by — but this collection is meant to offend, good-naturedly, and for the annoyance part, I’ll just say that nothing’s too egregious, and probably could have used a little more research/asking questions, but it all really does seem to be coming from a good place.

And then there’s “The Leviathan Blues.” This story. I could write an entire other essay about this story, and how much I loved it, and how much it disturbed me — not about the character of G-d in the story, but about our entire notion of G-d as an almighty arbiter of our lives, as a storyteller in the most evil and poetic way, as Someone who’s looking out for everyone in the world, and because of this makes some decisions that are, at best, direly sad.

I don’t want to give too much of it away, but you know the story of the Leviathan, right? When G-d created the world, G-d made the Leviathan, a sea monster bigger than all other animals, and soon realized that they would fill up the sea and the Earth and there would be no room for other creatures. So G-d had to uncreate it. Anyway, this story takes that particular story and expands it, and it really does bear the fruit of a bit of research, or of digging into the several stories on this aggadic cryptozoid, but the story’s most successful technique, I think, is its simple way lingering on every moment, filling it with detail and thought.

It still has Bauman’s irreverence and his humor, it still has that cruelty and irony, but it fills the pages with the Leviathan’s pain and rage the way the Leviathan fills the sea. It’s graceful, it’s tragic, and it makes all of us who aren’t majestic, lonely sea monsters see a little more just how big, and how small, the world can be.

"Jackie, but Famous," and how you can read it right now

I'm really proud to have a new short story in Prime Number Magazine. Here's the beginning of it, and the rest is right after that little link on the bottom. It's kind of about the last real person still left in New York City.

Jackie, but Famous

Jackie had been running for the train, the 6:02 out of the city, convinced she was going to miss it, but also convinced that, with the correct combination of actions—magical gestures, glances at good luck omens like doves and not evil ones like pigeons, not stepping on any cracks in the pavement—she might still be able to make it. She wasn’t going to make it. The elevator took forever to come. The stoplights were against her. Traffic was still too heavy to safely run across. She walked fast, arms stiff, cutting through the air to her sides. She passed the length of one parked car, then another. The street was still too busy.

<< keep reading >>

The Fox in the Ruins

There was a fox in the ruins that morning.

Yosh spotted it first in the corner of his eye, a blur of red and teeth. He recognized it immediately. He had read about foxes in books.

His father, however, had laughed when he’d seen it, and ripped off his holo to see better. “A fox!” he cried, almost jubilant. “That’s remarkable. I never thought I’d see one of those again.”

“Aren’t they dangerous?” Yosh asked, moving closer to his father. For the most part, the ruins were abandoned, but he often thought he saw movements coming from the million layered shadows that seemed to lurk in every corner, especially as the day grew short.

“They were, a long time ago,” his father said. “They might still be now. But we’re dangerous, too.”

He stopped to turn over what might be a large tin of food, or even a refridge, but it was an empty husk, crumbling to pieces between his fingers.

“It’s a good sign for other reasons, Yosh. If there are foxes, that means that there’s food. And if that poor animal’s still alive, she’s probably more afraid of us than we are of her. We’ll give her more trouble than we’re worth. But, foxes! This is sure to be news back in the enclave.”

He pulled himself over a pile of rubble and through a smashed-out hole in the wall. Yosh, scampering up the pile, followed him. He took one last lingering glance behind himself before disappearing into the building. The fox was staring back at them, perched atop a mound of collapsed bricks and fraying metal, as if daring them to give chase. After a long moment of stillness, its ears pitched forward and its nose in the air—during which Yosh was afraid it might lunge into action, teeth bared—the fox gave a tired yawn, its tongue lolling out, and trotted down the far side of the heap of trash.

It was almost sad, Yosh thought. The fox looked so royal, so clean and deadly. It should be out in a meadow, running at top speeds. And it, like them, was reduced to poking around the ruins.

Still, Yosh’s father had laughed. And his father knew more than anyone else in Zebulon, the enclave where they lived. That was why he was first appointed Scavenger. He was almost as wise as the Ones Who Watch. Yosh trusted his father more than anything—and so he had to believe that, for one reason or another, there was something good about seeing that fox. Maybe his father was laughing because he knew the fox had no chance, that Yosh and his father would find any food before she would. Or maybe he was laughing because the fox was still alive, and she’d made it this long…and maybe, just maybe, Yosh and his father and the rest of Zebulon would make it, too.

Yosh took one last glance over his shoulder at the mound of trash. The fox was long gone…and, he realized, he should probably get going, too.

*

Most days, Yosh spent his time running alone around the shelter and in the bush on the outskirts of Zebulon. Sometimes his father brought him outside the enclave, past the bush, looking for new holes to venture into and digging them a little bit deeper, trying to find out if anyone had reached the bottom yet, or if there was still something of value to be unearthed.

Yosh’s father Scavenged nearly every day in the outer reaches of the enclave. Most people rarely ventured outside of their tiny shelters, scared or suspicious of the world outside, but exploring the world outside Zebulon was Yosh’s father’s job. He was the Scavenger. He knew exactly what to look for, and he was big and strong enough to carry it back to the enclave, whether it was food, blankets, a TV or something else, and make sure it was divided fairly among the people. Sometimes there was a disagreement, or a scuffle, but as soon as Yosh’s father noticed, it ended. The people respected him.

This, Yosh knew, was a different way of saying they were scared of him.

Sometimes Yosh accompanied his father on his trips. They’d never gone too far away from the enclave. But you didn’t need to go far, his father said—just outside its borders, where the light of the Everlasting Fire could no longer reach, there were literally thousands of bunkers. Most of them were in ruins, having been picked over tens of times over again by marauders, bandits, and innocent people with growling stomachs, but virtually every empty shelter still contained something of value for Yosh’s father to carry home. Perhaps the contents of a metal shelf had been left, fallen behind a pantry against a crumbling wall, or sometimes it was tins of food. The marauders and bandits didn’t always know how to open them, but, said Yosh’s father with a twinkle in his eye, marauders and bandits didn’t have all of Zebulon depending on them.

“What about the other enclaves?” Yosh asked, lingering to sift through a hill of dirt and broken things, while he was out with his father one day.

“What other enclaves?” his father said quickly—and then he added, “Don’t dig through there, Yosh. I’ve torn up that stack a dozen times.”

“Well,” said Yosh, “surely there are other enclaves, right? Or else the Ones Who Watch would have nothing else to watch.”

The Ones Who Watch were a group of elders who swept through Yosh’s father’s enclave every full moon, on the night of the mootfire. They came to bring news of the greater world, to settle disputes, to survey what Yosh’s father had collected and to take a small share, usually nothing more than food for the next stage of their journey. The people in the enclave tolerated them, and made jokes and rude remarks when they weren’t around, but Yosh’s father always kept his silence. “They earn their keep,” was all he said.

It occurred to Yosh that his father thought of the Ones Who Watch much the same as the rest of the enclave thought of him: with equal measures admiration and fear.

Yosh’s father gave a laugh. It was brief and purposeful, just like everything else he did. “The Ones Who Watch will always have something to watch,” he said. “That is their business, and they make it so they will always be in business. Get your arm out of that crack, please, Yosh. I need some help with this refridge.”

Yosh’s arm was halfway down a crack in the cement trail outside. The trails had once been fixed in even, square sections, laid flat along the rows of shelters, but had long ago been ruptured and broken. Most of the squares were split into several jagged sections. Yosh had a theory that underneath them was a whole other city, identical to this one but for a subterranean roof instead of sky, and all the shelters there were fresh and unplundered, just like in the World That Was. If he reached far enough, Yosh thought he might uncover a pathway. As yet, Yosh was still not able to reach far enough.

“Sorry, Dad,” he called, withdrawing his arm. “I thought I saw some cans of tomato paste in there.”

He gave a glance inside the doorway, to where his father was already wandering, to see whether he would react. Tomato paste was in great demand. Yosh’s father used it, along with some other cans and kernels of food, to fashion something he called pizza—and when he made it, he made it in great quantity, and the whole enclave celebrated.

He laughed again. It was shorter, this time.

“You’re a funny little storyteller, Yosh,” he called out through the doorway. “I don’t know what you think you saw, but I’m sure it wasn’t that. Here, come inside and help me with this. There’s enough blankets here to clothe half the urchins in…”

He broke off suddenly. Yosh struggled to his feet, abandoning the crack for good, and ran inside to see what had silenced his father.

There was indeed a good supply of clothes—fresh and untouched, several drawers’ worth. It was the kind of reward they rarely found anymore, definitely not this close to their enclave. Clean, untouched and valuable.

The drawers sat behind Yosh’s father’s back, all but ignored now. He stood at a desk, staring in awe at a small silver globe, dirty and old, with flecks of rust adorning its crown.

Yosh didn’t want to sound immature, but he didn’t see what value an object like that could hold. It might be metal, but it wasn’t even a solid plank. It could barely help to barricade his sister’s ant farm, let alone their house.

“What is it?” he asked scornfully. “Some kind of food? Another device from the World That Was?”

“Not at all,” said his father, raising it up. Yosh could see that it wasn’t a globe at all. The metal shape only went down halfway on one side, then stopped in a sharp rim. It was more like a hat. Yosh’s father’s fingers danced along its rim appreciatively.

“I remember this well—as a matter of fact, it’s still plugged in. Here, Yosh. Think of a memory. Any memory.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Yosh. Or he started to, but he broke off as soon as the force of the machine hit him.

And then he was no longer alone in his mind.

Last Purim, I Gave You My Heart

 

That year for Purim you dressed up as a hooker. I was a goy. In the movie Mean Girls there was that Halloween scene that basically posited the entire holiday as an excuse to get slutty without taking responsibility for it — a girl in a nothing sort of dress pointing at mouse ears and saying, Duh, I’m a mouse — but Purim is a much deeper way of doing the same thing, of letting our inner demons out and allowing them to wreak havoc on our external selves. Or maybe they already were, and we were just acknowledging it.

You in a nothing dress of your own, brief and red, as true as it was a lie, beneath it you were covered neck-to-toes in body stockings and I could still see every curve that your body had. I wore khakis, a polo shirt, a baseball cap. All night I made jokes about my golf club membership and making America great again. In my hand I carried a McDonald’s takeout bag.

When wine goes in, secrets go out. We got so drunk that our desire poured out of our mouths and eyes and flooded the floor between us. Then we passed that barrier, stumbled into it more like, and got so drunk that we were too unable to do anything about it. At one point we were drunk enough to be seductive, but then we were too drunk to be anything but honest, and the truths poured out: how you came to New York because you couldn’t breathe, you made it sound to your family that this was the place to be religious but in truth it was the only place big enough so that you could hide from being religious. Why was I here? Just being here felt like its own achievement. Now that I had gotten here, I had nothing else to gain.

We started by complimenting each other, drawing each other close. When we were close enough, when all the walls had come down, we started insulting each other. You’re a poseur and a cynic. You’re a hypocrite, you’re sending yourself to Gehennom. Why do we do anything? I’d been carrying around my grease-soaked bag, offering soggy fries to everyone at the party. They took them, assuming the bag was just a prop. It wasn’t. How many people had I inflicted with sins tonight? None, I’d just let them do it to themselves, there was no such thing as sin in the first place.

You’re a monster, you told me. I thought you didn’t believe in any of this, I said. I don’t, you said, but I still appreciate the beauty of cluelessness, I think what they’re doing is amazing.

I think what we could be doing is amazing, I said. Coming closer.

You moved away, she left me alone.

In the morning, still in the same clothes, I stopped at Denny’s and bought a Grand Slam breakfast to go. Next door was a liquor shop and I spent some time there too. I’d promised my sister I’d take care of her kids. Might as well come down to their intellectual capacity.

Their parents dispatched them after a moment’s conversation, more eager to dump them than they were to make small talk with my sister’s Weird Single Brother. And so I found myself being dragged through synagogue, one walnut-sized hand clasped to each of mine, seeing the world in an entirely new light.

The girls expressed delight in my newly febrile consciousness. They showed me their costumes and they showed me all the candy they’d secured so far. One was a mermaid and one was a ninja. I made the point that if she were really a mermaid, she’d have to hop everywhere. “See?” the other sister, the older sister, demanded, “that’s exactly what I said.”

Oops. I wanted to fit in, not declare war. Then the mermaid sister turned to the ninja sister and said, “Well ninjas aren’t supposed to wear skirts,” and I instantly felt moved to defend the girl, in spite of my recent cynicism, I don’t know why.

“Actually,” I said, putting on my most adult of voices — bear in mind I was drunk, I probably sounded something less than authoritative — “female ninjas would probably do just fine in skirts, I mean ninjas are trained to beat people up no matter what they’re wearing, and besides in feudal Japan it was a mark of royalty for men to wear skirts. Or dresses.” I swallowed. Just coming up with the grammar for that sentence halfway knocked me out.

They traded glances as if they were way out of my league. I offered them stuff from my takeaway bag, but one look at it and they both retched. “We have candy,” the mermaid sister informed me pointedly, and “What are you supposed to be, anyway?” demanded the ninja sister, and I could tell I’d lost her sympathy, too.

I didn’t have a good answer, so they took me around to meet their friends. The synagogue was a maze. Especially underneath, on the basement floor. There seemed to be kids everywhere, all without the lack of guidance of an adult. As soon as we seemed to have arrived, the girls promptly took their distance from me, making sure they were close enough so I wouldn’t have to run after them but far enough so they could pretend they didn’t know who I was.

I lost no time in starting to talk to the other kids there.

ME, to girl in wedding dress: Oh, you’re a bride.
GIRL, annoyed: I’m a rocket scientist. Except today I’m getting married.

ME: What are you supposed to be? Should I even guess?
TINY KID: If you haven’t watched the most recent season, there’s no way to explain it.
Stomps off.

ME, to kid in a Hawaiian shirt as tacky as my own failed costume: What are you supposed to be?
KID: I’m Australian.
He draws from the pocket of his Bermuda shorts a knife at least 2 feet long and suitable for carving human remains into teriyaki.

I was useless. I had failed at life. I had always told myself — and by “always” I mean it just popped into my drunk-and-Rubik’s-Cube-scrambled brain at that moment and that scrambled brain had grabbed onto it and hugged it like G-d’s own truth — that if adults thought you were nuts, that might mean you’re a genius, but if kids don’t understand you then you’re just a sorry excuse for being human. And I was.

I went upstairs and left the place — please don’t think I abandoned those kids, it’s just that they both seemed to be pretty responsible and street-savvy people, and I barely had the mental fortitude to be able to count — and sat down on the steps, my head between my knees and the bag of food between my ankles. It was open, creased to hell, the top of it wrinkled from my repeated clasping and unclasping, swinging it around all morning.

The top unfolded and the smell hit me, all the smells together, maple syrup, melted butter, the peppery wince of hash browns, the fried grain of pancake batter, the meaty fatness of bacon. Individually I should love all these things, but at that moment they all writhed and combined in my nose and it felt like I was actually seeing them blended together in my intestine. I pictured offering it to you, last night — I pictured you, our conversation, our moments of warring theologies given up with the shrug of a moment, a screw-it-all, a let’s-go-and-grab-a-bite. I pictured that and I knew I could not, would not eat this, not now, not ever — not just the bacon, any of it.

I picked it up and pulled it back over my head. I was not rejecting this bacon for G-d, even in my tattered haze I knew that much — but I was rejecting it, and I was sending G-d something. I don’t know what it was. It was the breakfast combo, the whole enchilada, flying out of the bag, flying everywhere, streaking in bright garish colors across the clean blue sky, thrown by the most Christian-lookin’ man on the synagogue steps, both it and me only headed G-d knows where.

Make Your Story Make You Bleed

When you write a story, make it about you. Even if it’s about the shidduch crisis. Even if it’s about the Baal Shem Tov. Start with something that means something to you — a statement, a feeling — and let the story grow from there.

A lot of writing classes will tell you to show, don’t tell. That’s good advice, but it isn’t all true. Telling can be a great tool. But in order to tell the audience what you’re thinking or how you’re feeling, you need to take us through the steps of your experiencing this.

And that’s a lot more easily experienced by telling your reader where you were at one point — not just saying you were, say, a college dropout who refused to eat any food aside from bacon, but describing why bacon was so important to you, telling us in detail how each stick was as long as your hand and had little bumpy ridges and ghostly shivers of white fat, and how the reason you ate so much of it was that your college was Porgsley’s School of Pig-Thumpin’ and they gave it free to all the students, and not only does it conjure memories of happier times, but you sneak onto campus and get free bacon and it’s the only time you ever see all your old friends.

Then — and only then — are we prepared to hear about how you gave it all up to be kosher.

We, as frum writers, as Jewish writers, or just as writers who are somewhat preoccupied with issues of faith and belief, are especially susceptible to epiphany. I saw the light! G-d spoke to me!

It’s such a tempting idea, this sudden mental switch or a realization-from-on-high that affects you in a way that makes you stop in your tracks so fast that dust clouds rise around your ankles, and then — for reasons that are often hard to explain and sometimes so totally otherworldly that you can barely explain them to yourself, let alone write a story about them for other people — you’re a different person than you were before.

That’s the essence of a story. Or, it’s very close to being the essence of a story. What’s missing from your revelation is the story itself.

**

Remember The Matrix? Remember when Keanu said “whoa” a lot, and then Morpheus explained to him for like 20 minutes that all of humanity is living in little electric aquariums and the machines took over and we’ve forgotten what it’s like to rebel….and, my friends, that is a good freaking way to tell.

But The Matrix also made the telling itself into a story. Instead of just saying that there was a war between people and robots and people are sleeping through their lives and they don’t realize it, the filmmakers told it as a process. First the situation was this. Then this happened. Then, here’s another element that complicates it. They explained the situation like building a building, telling one step at a time…and then, before you know it, you’ve got a whole freakin’ skyscraper of a story.

**

Stories don’t have to be about somebody changing. That’s not where the energy of a story comes from — the energy comes from tension, from the moment just before whatever’s going to happen, happens. Sometimes it will happen. Dorothy rescues the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, Moses tells Pharaoh to Let My People Go.

And sometimes it doesn’t happen. When Joseph’s brothers come to him, they tell him there’s a famine, they need his help — the whole time they’re begging him for food, we aren’t thinking, Is Joseph going to feed them? We’re thinking, Is Joseph going to reveal his true identity? When he sends them away, with the troubling mission of bringing back his brother, the tension mounts. The question is still, is Joseph going to disclose the truth, but now it becomes, Is he going to tell his brothers the truth AND what the hell does he need his baby brother Benjamin for?

Stories within stories.

But if every story were about a character changing, they’d be predictable. They’d be boring. Sometimes stories do get that way. We know this as readers. Instead of thinking, is the main character going to realize he’s wicked and have a change of heart, we’re thinking, when’s he going to get to the change of heart and make everything better already.

Recognize that feeling? That’s called boring.

To keep the reader on her toes — and, even more importantly, to keep ourselves on our toes — nothing can be predictable. We need to keep ourselves guessing.

At this point, you’re probably saying, duh, Matthue, all you do is watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and read books, your life is more fiction than nonfiction, how do you build character moments in my True Real-Life Personal Essay? Well, it’s true that you’re probably not as exciting as Buffy,* but that doesn’t mean anything. I forget who first said this, but there are some people who can tell a story of walking to the corner store to buy bread and make it more tense and emotional than your mother dying, and there are some people who can talk about their mothers dying and it sounds as boring as going to the corner store.

When you start to write, set your boundaries. Tell your audience what’s at stake. If it’s a blind date, tell us about every date you’ve been on before. Is this your first? That raises the stakes even more. Tell us your dream date as a child, tell us all the ways that this date is nothing like that — for worse or maybe for better. If it’s about your kid waking you up in the middle of the night, tell us how desperately you’re craving sleep, how bad the day has been, or how good, or how you haven’t seen them at all. If it’s a story about being hungry in the middle of the night, tell us about what you ate that day, or didn’t eat that day. Tell us how much you love, say, chocolate-covered Bamba. Tell us how it’s the last packet and you and your parent/child/wife/roommate are fighting over it (or if they’re asleep, tell us how bad they’ll kill you if you eat it). Look for tension. We’re in galus, the world of exile — tension is really not that hard to find. It’s everywhere.

And if there are problems, embrace them. There’s a rule that I’m making up as I write this that says that the sadder or crazier or weirder you look on paper, the more awesome you are in real life. There’s a reason Tom Cruise is okay with getting beat up horribly in his movies, or that Woody Allen always makes himself look pathetic (well, don’t use Woody Allen as a barometer). You’re the hero. Make yourself vulnerable. Make stuff happen to you. As far down as you push yourself as a character, that’s how far you can rise up your story.

Impurim

San Francisco, for all that city's rent chaos and interweb madness, still has one of the most productive, experimental, and lovably dysfunctional writers' communities in the world. In the top echelon is Sherilyn Connelly, gothic princess, writer of unrestrained imagination, and (according to this woman at the post office last year) a dead ringer for Daryl Hannah in Blade Runner.

And she's got about as much to do with Judaism as a polar bear.

Anyway: color me surprised when Sherilyn sends me an email linking to a new story she's written called "Impurim" that's basically a cover version of the Megillah. For all her ignorance of Judaism (she introduces the story by saying, "I had never even heard of Purim when the Beyt Tikkun Synagogue asked me to write and perform a revisionist version of The Magillah, the Book of Esther from the Bible") she does remarkably well on the tone and beats of the story, down to the tongue-in-cheekness rubbing right up against an almost holy tone of unholiness -- I don't know; I could make lots of cracks about how the most qualified person Beyt Tikkun could find to perform at their Purim function isn't even Jewish, but they knew what they were doing. This is good.

It all started when word spread that King Achashverosh was looking for a new queen. The details about what happened to Vashti, the old queen, were a little vague. Some said she'd been killed. Others swore she'd been banished, or ran away. A few people insisted that she'd never existed in the first place, and that the search was going to result in yet another imaginary queen. Achashverosh was known to be something of an odd bird, so that wouldn't have been much of a surprise.

KEEP READING

Did I mention that Vashti has become a recurring character in her short stories? Consider this a request for more.

Crossposted on MyJewishLearning