Leaving Behind The Smell Of Your House

 

The writer David Sacks said, when you move to a new place, the first thing you should do is record what it smells like. Smell is the weakest sense in our conscious memory, but smell is also the deepest, most sensory-specific memory we have, the only one of the five senses that wasn’t damaged in the Garden of Eden. The nose is connected to the Hebrew letter vav, the connecting letter between this world and G-d’s world.

But in the everyday bustle of life, scents have the least hold on us. When you settle in that new place, smell is the first thing you stop noticing.

There are so many things I want to remember about my grandmom. The smells of her house, kamish bread and blintzes, the warm fuzz of the fresh carpet that was so amazingly fluffier than our carpet at home, which was great for playing with toys on — my sister and I always wanted to take our toys there. Friday mornings when my grandparents came to our house to walk us to school, or whenever they came over, we ran down the stairs to show them our toys.

Later, instead of showing toys, we told stories. She was a great listener. She was the best listener. If we didn’t tell her about a project we did at school or an episode we watched of a TV show, it didn’t really happen.

She was more a listener than a talker. In those first years, I remember my grandfather much more vividly than her — her sitting beside him, her agreeing with him, her showing me the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer he’d assembled while he was sleeping from working there all night. She loved him so completely. All of us she loved completely. When you were in the room with her, she paid attention to you like you were the only person in the world. She was more a listener than a talker.

But she was an entertainer. When she did get a zinger, it always zung. A doctor in the nursing home asked if those were really her teeth — “They better be,” she said, “I paid for them myself.” Even when she complained, it was magical. They played The Doors on the oldies station, the lead singer saying “Light my fire” over and over again at the end, and she swatted the air with her hand, “Oh, just light his fire already!”

She found the humor in every situation. When someone asked what she thought of my poems, her only complaint was, does he have to curse so much? And when I did my first show ever, she was there, in the front row, clapping harder than anyone. I apologized to her, sorry there’s so many curses, Grandmom. She turned around and said to the audience, I’m older than you are, you think I’ve never heard those words before?

She was so adaptable. When my cousin started calling her “G,” she took to it. She really owned it. But her world was the things she knew, the places she was comfortable.

She was raised by her parents, and also by her sisters, the youngest of three girls. And she was raised by the neighborhood, too, growing up in a corner store, back when everybody went to corner stores, working there from when she was a young girl, falling asleep in the back groom on two chairs pushed together because even back then, she was crafty.

I like to think she learned from the best qualities of everyone, that’s how she got to be so good. But she had her safe spaces, the places she was comfortable. She never left Philadelphia, but to her, Philadelphia was the world. She had her gang of girls, the same friends who terrorized the Gingham House, the Country Club, and every other restaurant in Northeast Philly for way over 50 years. They drove themselves. They took the bus. Their kids drove them. They took ParaTransit. “Not many of us still around,” my grandmom said sadly, one day, eight, maybe nine years before they finally stopped going at it.

When she finally moved from the house my father and uncle had grown up in, the house that I, my sister, and my cousins had grown up in, having our first sleepovers, breaking our first Yom Kippur fasts from the pizza shop on the corner, toting home cheese crackers and loose potato chips in ziplock goody bags, to an apartment building down the boulevard, my father and uncle measured the distance between her couches, the height of the paintings and needlepoints hanging on the walls, so the move would be painless and her new place would be just right.

And it was. They took care of her, and she never stopped taking care of them.

She was able to do less. She cooked less, and it must have frustrated her, who knew every inch of her kitchen and whose career was to care for her family. But she kept at it, pushed herself when she could, made schnecken less and frozen dinners more, but never stopped. Sometimes when we visited she was watching TV, sitting on the parking-lot porch, listening to one of the CDs from the single tray of CDs she owned. “I got to keep busy,” she’d say. Smells are the first thing to fade. I don’t want to lose these memories, any of them. I want to be back in there, back inside them, and not here, not today, not this.

She lost her husband, my grandpop, 26 years ago, the winter before my bar mitzvah, a lifetime. But she kept going. She filled the space of our void, she spent another lifetime. One of the first times she met my wife, she offered to cook for us. Whatever you like, my grandmom told her. My wife said, no, whatever you like. And so the three of us sat at her kitchen table having hot borscht and potatoes. The smells, the stories. She never told much about herself. The Old World wasn’t Europe, it was West Philadelphia, born and raised, and the story of her childhood was working in an office and asking her boss, “When are you gonna hire some single guys?” — until the day Bernie Roth showed up for work.

It wasn’t till recently that she started talking about going down the shore, a group of girls and a few couples, with boys…there were so many Grandmoms. Inside the corner store, a whole family. Inside her neighborhood, a universe. I wish I could’ve seen her on the Boardwalk, eyes shining, as excited about each new thing as she was about the art projects I showed her. I knew her for 38 and a half years and it still wasn’t enough.

In the end we are babylike, unable to care for ourselves, struggling to talk, stumbling through a twilight of memories. Her loss of speech mirrored her great-grandchildren’s discovery of it, and even when she couldn’t remember their names, she still basked in the delight of them. Their grandparents, their parents, freaked out at the chaos and mayhem they brought to the nursing home. But she loved it.

Many times she refused to eat, but even within that she provided for us — “I can’t eat another bite,” she said, oblivious to the food not being my fundamentalist standard of kosher, and no one’s standard of vegetarian, and chopped into infant-size bits. All she wanted was for us to be taken care of, for us to be happy. To encourage her to eat, my parents brought her single-serving bags of pretzels and potato chips, goody bags of her own. She turned around and gave them to the kids.

She did make us happy. Even when she couldn’t remember our names, even when her speech lost everything but its bare essence — Who you? Who am I? Where I am? — she seemed more concerned with the loss of our names than the loss of her own, as though, if there were only one name between us, she would have given it to any of us gladly.

In Judaism, every mitzvah we do for the deceased is called chesed shel emes, true kindness, because we do it knowing it can never be repaid. Grandmom’s whole life was chesed shel emes. They say children can never love their parents as much as parents love children, and now I know that to be true. You showed me it’s true. I wish I could show you how much I love you, and I wish I could show you how much I miss you right now.

 

Contributions in Ida Roth’s memory may be made, according to her wishes, to Kosher Meals on Wheels.

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.

Ice Palace

 

She wears gloves to protect herself from the world. No: she wears gloves to protect the world from her. Elbow-length gloves, smooth and sleek and cold, the kind that clam to her skin like they’re skin itself, tighter than skin, like skin without all the defects. They are impossibly smooth, the kind of smooth a real body will never be. When people look at her they see the gloves, they don’t see her. They don’t want to.

Touch is dangerous. Skin on skin is like heart to heart, heat to heat, a little too real to let anyone feel. She keeps herself wrapped up like a castle. She is wise, brilliantly bright, thinking the kind of thoughts that would scare her subjects, that her subjects could never fathom. Does that make her better than they are? If anything it makes her worse. This tension unbecoming to a queen, just as she is becoming queen. How can she hold her kingdom together if she’s ready to fall apart herself? She is their rock of stability and she is an unstable avalanche. She is their brain and she cannot stand to think half the things she thinks. She is their fire and she is frozen.

The wise ones who came before her found different ways to deal. A rabbi on the run from Romans buried himself in a cave for twelve years, up to his chin, spread out books before him, unground himself when he needed to turn a page. Another queen before her fasted for forty days before confronting the king her husband with the news that he had just unwittingly signed her death warrant. She waited until she was perfect. She waited till there was nothing in herself but herself.

If she does that, she fears there will be nothing left. She was always a peckish eater, too careful with every bite, too reserved with the idea of sharing herself, even with her own plate. She never shared secrets. Her own sister, hammering at her door, when she wanted nothing more than to fling it wide open. But what kind of sister would she be if she forced her own inadequacies on the people she loved? What kind of queen, on the childish emo wish to satisfy her own shortcomings, makes life worse for her own country?

And so she keeps it to herself. Conceal, don’t feel. She hides her pain inside — just like we all do, only she didn’t know that. Not back then. Just as we all do, she thought she was the only one.

Until one day it breaks out. The inside turns inside out, the concealed is revealed, the pain that hurt her for so long escapes and explodes, the daggers reverse, the monster she has always feared is the monster she becomes. Since she was a girl she’s reviewed worst-case scenarios, trying not to be this thing, learning all the horrible things that would happen if she didn’t take care of herself, if she let herself slip this far.

She’s spent her whole life learning the horrible things that happen when you turn into a monster. Of course she knows how to become one.

And when it happens, she knows just what to do. Locks herself away. Not just mentally this time, but physically. She erects walls, she imposes sanctions on the world. Her powers are out of control, but only by shedding this control can they truly serve her. This world is a veil of lies, and she is the only truth. Or maybe the world is the truth and she’s just had enough of it.

She is free. This emptiness fills her, she is warmed by the lack of warmth. She doesn’t mind the horror because she knows it so well and it comforts her. It’s the only real thing, only thing she knows is true. Her ice palace she fills with stories. It’s big enough tow ander forever without ever finding herself. And if she ever runs out of corridors and crannies, she can always make more. This is the advantage to her madness: by embracing it, she gives it the strength to keep going.

The rabbi in the cave dug himself out and went wandering. The queen, to save herself, told the king her secret. The king could not undo his decree — the death sentence still must be carried out, or at least attempted — but he loaned her the entirety of his armies to defend her. There was a war, and thousands died, but she was saved. And their jobs, anyway, were to be killed.

And the rabbi? He came to the forest to a farm, found a farmer tending to his crops. Aghast that anyone could spend so much time away from wisdom, he shot flames from his eyes — of course his studies  had taught him to shoot flames from his eyes — and incinerated the farmer to cinders. A voice rang out from the heavens, told him that if this was what he’d learned from learning, than he hadn’t learned a thing. He withdrew to the cave for one more year, started from nothing.

She doesn’t have nothing but she has enough. Before she used her powers they welled up inside her and created a mighty mountain. Now that they’re free she wonders what is left inside, with them on the outside what is she? She strides through the icicle halls, the halls she knows like the back of her head. Every step is one she has taken ten thousand times before, every twist and turn is expected. She misses the unexpected. She misses the unknown. She needs the variables of conformism, the messy normality which she knows she is not a part of, the sameness that keeps her different.

She turns to the east where the sun is blasting its weak first rays, the morning off to an ineffectual start. there is no way it can melt this castle, she knows that as well as she knows anything. But with that sun comes morning, the waking time for ordinary people who don’t stay up all night. They will wake. They will see, in the distance, her ice palace. And they will be scared.

But one of those people, she trusts, will be her sister. She will come, and she will meet her, and she will not understand, and she will not know what to do.

And that, she thinks, will be enough.

 

 

Image from Ice Castles.

I Wrote a Book and I'm Giving It to You

So, um, this suddenly exists in the world.

It's weird when you've worked on something for years without anyone else knowing about it, and now you can. You can get it free by going right here. 

I hope you like it. 

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.

Pray Loud

Yankel, who used to be Jack, got kicked out of his last club on a Tuesday night. He wasn’t acting rowdy, not nearly as rowdy as the night when Nail and Anarchia brought the homemade volcano to the Dismemberment Plan concert, not even as crazy as the Godheadsilo show where he’d jumped from the balcony into the audience below. It wasn’t a 21+ show — not that that had mattered for quite a few years now. He even had I.D.

It was the bouncer. He was a big shaved-head guy of indeterminate ethnicity, his face like a Disney gargoyle’s face frozen with a piece of sharp metal hanging out of it. The guy did have the metal, a whole row of hoops erupting out of his lower lip. He looked like every James Bond henchman at once.

He was doing a sweep of the crowd, making sure nobody was up to no good. It’s the hardest part of these shows, Yankel knew from experience. Over the years he’d worked both sides of the table. The guy passed over the guys with piercings sharper than knives, passed over the pot-huddle in the corner. And he stopped in front of Yankel.

Yankel pretended not to notice him. It worked every bit as well as it did when he was 16.

The guy gave him a shrug, crossed his arms. It wasn’t a fierce arm-crossing. It was just to show Yankel that he wasn’t impressed.

“What are you doin’ here, man?”

Yankel leaned forward.

“I’m sorry?” He cocked an ear. Maybe he’d misheard? “What is the problem, sir?”

He’d always been polite, no matter what else he had going on. He respected these guys. It was hard being paid to constantly be about to fight and never fighting.

The guy undid his arms. One of his hands he waved at Yankel. Vaguely at first, fanning the air around him, then zeroing in on his belly — his white shirt, his black vest, the stripes of his over-the-shirt tzitzis that his potbelly poked out like a family camper.

“You, man. It’s no problem, I ain’t kicking you out — but it’s you, man, what’s somebody like you doing here?”

Most nights Yankel didn’t come to these things alone. He brought friends, he found buddies. The few guys still in town from the old days, or someone from the forums. Yankel worked in computers, on the days when business was slow, he still logged onto the chat boards, eavesdropped on what people were saying about the bands he liked, which new bands were like them, lobbing insults at each other for musical taste, avatar use, lyrical quotes in their signatures. Yankel was brief and to the point. He tried never to insult people. His avatar was a gray profile. He didn’t have enemies. No friends, really, but everyone was his ally.

Tonight, though, none of his conspirators could make it. He came alone. Watched the opening band alone. Bought a beer for him and for nobody else. Stood alone in the corner between acts, drinking it as a substitute for between-sets small talk.

“I just come for the music. I like this music.”

The guy wasn’t buying it.

“You people have your own music, man. You ain’t here to dance, you hear to look. Listen. You wanna hook up, there’s a bar across the street, this trance bar, you can rub up against all the girls you want to over there. Girls, boys, whatever you’re after. Maybe take off your little cap next time, dress a little more low key.”

“No, you don’t understand — this band, I got all their albums, I got everything.”

“That’s all I’m saying,” said the guy, hands up, backing away. “That’s all.”

Yankel didn’t have to leave. Yankel left anyway. He listened to the first two songs of the next band’s set, his favorite band from when he’d started coming to these places — but there was no point. It was so long ago. You could hear it in the music, the band’s passion just wasn’t there anymore.

**

He can hear the goings-on inside his house from down the block. The screams get louder as he gets close. They are tiny, breathless, pathetic. The most incredibly syncopated rhythmic cries, like some weird Norwegian or Icelandic art-rock sampling crew.

He climbs the stairs to his apartment, kicks snow off his boots, removes his coat and heads straight for the dark room in the rear.

At once he is confronted.

“Yankie, please, take her.” She thrusts the baby into his hands. The little thing sits there, tiny arms drooping over his huge hands. “She’s been nonstop since dinnertime. I can’t do it anymore, I can’t make her stop.”

For a moment the tiny thing is confused. Then it regains its motivation, starts screaming again, its entire face contorted into the wrinkles around one huge gaping void of a mouth. There aren’t even teeth. No creature in G-d’s great Earth has ever screamed so mightily, so forcefully, and yet still produced such an insignificant squeak.

The door shuts hard. From the other room he can hear a rustle in the closet, a shuffle, a sigh, the welcome sound that the Netflix makes. She is such a special woman, and so selfless. He is unworthy of her.

But what he’s really unworthy of is this baby. This tiny beautiful creature who he has somehow contributed to the existence of. Even as she cries he wants to hug her, to squeeze her tight and protect her from the world, to find anything in the exile of our lives that could possibly be good enough for her.

He rocks her. He jiggles her. He puts a lullaby on the tape player; he tries reciting to her from Psalms, which always seemed like a good idea. He tries everything. From the other room, a fresh theme song. The episode has ended. Another is starting.

“Ba, ba, baba,” he coos softly in her ear. “Ba, ba, baba. I wanna be sedated.”

The tickle of his voice on her earlobe only protracts the worldly anxiety. Her scream becomes an uproar. Her entire body shudders with every blow.

He has no choice but to match it.

“When we have nothing left to give,” he sings, “there’ll be no reason for us to live.” The music screeches with urgency, the backing music in his mind, and he sings, louder now, “We owe you nothing,” again, “We owe you nothing,” and now he’s really screaming out, “We owe you nothing, you have no control,” and “You are not what you own,” and all the lyrics are tumbling out of him now, all the words to all the songs, and he is roaring them at the walls, roaring them against the night, against the world of exile, against his entire life, and remarkably, miraculously, the louder he goes he is like an all-encompassing tsunami, he is nature sounds, he is every white noise at once, and her eyes flutter, maybe taken by surprise or maybe just amused, and her mouth exercises into shapes, an O, an O, a horizontal I, and he is consumed by everything and she snuggles contentedly into the warmth of his exploding chest and settles into a perfect sleep.

Image by Jon Pack, who was very amenable about my waking him up in the middle of the night and asking if I could use it. Find more of his stuff here, or you can acquire some of his work for yourself right here. Lyrics sampled from Fugazi and the Ramones.