I Laugh at Stupid Things

I don’t know when I started laughing at everything. I used to be cool, I swear. There was just a moment, maybe shortly after I moved to Los Angeles, when I went from being stoic and smart — the kind of person who nodded at jokes rather than laughing at them, not because you didn’t like them but because you did, to show that you were thinking about this clever quip, really internalizing it, rather than just laughing at it and reacting to it and letting it roll away — and started being the cerebral equivalent of a tickle monster.

I watched Hotel Transylvania 2 yesterday. The ending montage was a collusion of monsters — ’50s-style Frankenstein’s monster and his beehive girlfriend boppin’, two mummies doing the Walk Like an Egyptian dance, the one human guy doing bad hip-hop dance moves in an imagistic echo of being the only white guy at a party, and then, of course, the werewolf couple, revealed by a camera zoom-out to be surrounded by a litter of 20 puppies, all of which they inexplicably brought to a dance club — I was cracking up the entire time. I was an embarrassment to my 7-year-old. I was an embarrassment to my three-year-old.

“Papa, I can’t hear the talking in the movie,” she scolded. There was no talking. She just wanted me to stop.

Have you seen it? It’s so delightfully stupid. I have come to appreciate delightfully stupid. I’m pretty sure, if there’s a Netflix specialized queue for delightful stupidity, I’ve wheeled through it more than once.

In San Francisco all my friends were writers, and in L.A. they were all actors. Everyone was an actor. The writers were actors, the producers were actors, and the actors were especially actors, acting all the time. Anything anyone said to you was like an audience suggestion during an improv comedy show. How are you? I just had the craziest day, let me tell you about buying a Snickers bar at the convenience store, it was the most traumatic thing ever. 

I used to be stoic, standing around with funny people, some of them had been on TV, some of them had followings, Twitter fans they didn’t know, all of them saying the funniest things ever, things that rolled out of their mouths once and never be repeated, and I’d just stand around, nod and not laugh. Maybe add a line of my own if I was feeling up to it, something not quite as funny and not quite as lasting, but usually not that — I loved those moments, their fleeting perfection, I wanted them to stay untouched.

I was perfect then. I used to think G-d was my girlfriend, sending me these unreal miraculous moments, sharing them with me in my perpetual aloneness. Because everyone I knew was already couples, I wasn’t because I was orthodox and, who was I kidding, because I was weird, who’d ever want to go out with me? But G-d did. We’d be shooting each other magic eyes across the room, enchanted as all hell by our conversational partners, but, of course, not laughing. That would be our shared night.

I chase these memories. Some nights I still go out, not with the same people but with the same conviction, the same desperate search to abandon my history and narrow all my complicated thoughts down to something pure and simple and easy. I have stopped drinking so much, and I’d like to say it’s because I’m more health-conscious and protective of my liver but it’s mostly because beer makes me tired, whisky makes me asleep.

The past is way more overwhelming than the present, and that, at least partially, is a relief. I don’t need much present. I used to be able to churn out stories, then pick them up a week later and they felt like things that had happened to me long ago, kindergarten friends you run into at the mall, do I know you from somewhere? Now it takes me a month to write a short story. I stop. I gaze off. I imagine all the possible ways it could go, all the possible things I could do to these characters, these kids, my babies. And then I think about it for a while, and then I choose one.

Maybe it’s me being more serious. Maybe it’s me being more sensitive. Maybe I’m still as clueless as ever, as I always have been. But maybe — and this is what I’m holding onto, this is where I’m putting my money down — maybe I’m better at being clueless than I used to be.

Don’t Let the Haters Drag You Down

Here’s a song for Donald Trump after getting his hand swatted by Melania. And it’s for Melania, too, for the days that you just have to swat someone. This is for the Trump haters, and the Trump voters, and the people who are sick of it and the people who just can’t get enough. I want to say, I have been there, I have been all those people, and to all of you I just want to say: I am with you.

I’ve been in a weird mood lately. A cross between frustrated and full of rage, where I can’t decide if I want to radically change the world or walk away from it or start my own society or just give up on other people altogether and stay home for the rest of my life. And now — if you please — snarl with me, and give the air in front of you a punch, and press play, and keep reading after the song starts.

Today on the train, a woman whose appearance and subway stop suggested she was well-off climbed onto the train, asked if I could give her my seat because her leg was hurting. I gallantly surrendered my seat — and I probably would’ve volunteered to, too, if I’d been paying attention instead of trying to write the short story that would’ve gone up instead of this post. Gallantly at the time, at least. I spent half the ride watching her on her stupid 1000-dollar luxury phone playing a Candy Crush clone that probably withered away both our minds and thinking about how, if I was seated and had gravity on my side, I’d probably be writing something that was more coherent and blissful and maybe that could turn into a book I could sell for a million dollars. Or at least 1000 dollars, enough to afford one of those phones (although I wouldn’t buy a phone, I’d buy a room full of Legos instead) and some nice clothes (not ostentatious ones, but ones that made me feel a little bit better about myself) and finally take a week off from work.

And halfway through the ride, I was like, you know what? You just wasted half an hour of writing time kvetching to yourself about things you can’t change anyway.

And I wrote. Oh, believe me, I wrote.

(Not this post, and not a short story I can finish on a single train ride, but something I’m into, something that might turn into something real.)

Today I got into an Internet fight. It had nothing to do with me. A few weeks ago I’d gotten a stupid letter from a Jewish website, the Forward, saying they loved my writing and they wanted me to write for them. The editor, Sharon Gitelle, got my site’s name wrong and the subject matter wrong and it was pretty apparent she’d never actually looked at the site. And when a friend (ahem, co-editor) of mine pounced on the Forward, I did too. And it wasn’t even on my own behalf! I used to freelance, I know it’s crazy hard to sell stories every day, I get super mad when places that could pay writers aren’t paying them! This isn’t just kvetching. This is RIGHTEOUS ANGER ON BEHALF OF OTHERS.

Although the truth is, after the first volley it was like listening to the same song over and over again. (Here’s a new song. It will make you feel peaceful. Save it for after Shavuos if you hold that way.) I made my point. There are so many other points I could follow it up with. But do I really need to spend the most creative and dynamic parts of my life hammering down a point when it’s already solidly lodged in the firmament?

One of the best things about becoming religious was accepting the idea of bittul, or nullification. I’m not more important than the universe around me. G-d has a plan, and sometimes the best thing I can do is let go and let the plan carry me, and not be so damn obstinate and try to fight it. In the moment, the battle feels like everything. It feels like the only way I can make it to the next minute of my life is to completely win this one. I’ve been reading tweets maniacally before sleep, waiting for news about Trump, for someone to confess, or for someone to figure out just what the answer is to all this Russia stuff.

But I’ve been waiting 25 years to find out the end of Twin Peaks, too, and one way or another, I made it this far without my brain bursting open. I learned to get along. I found other stories. I wrote a few of my own along the way.

I take back the first thing I said. That song about the haters and the bastards, it’s not for those angry people — it’s not even for me when I’m angry. It’s not a thrashing song, it’s a ska song. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen people dance to ska music (okay, the anthropological term is skanking) but it’s basically hopping up and down and throwing your arms back and forth like you’re skiing and it’s not you dancing, it’s letting your body dance you.

Rebbe Nachman says that one of the tricks played by our spiritual exile is to make us think that exile is the only place that exists. That there aren’t other worlds, better lives, new experiences waiting for us, that nothing happens after death, that there isn’t anything left to surprise us. It’s been a while since I’ve been well and truly caught by surprise. But I’d like to think I still can be — not just by stuff that makes me angry, but by stuff that makes me see magic.

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.