The Friend I Never Called

 I steal names. You should know this, first of all, if you want to be friends with me (or friends of friends, or one-night drinking buddies, or if you just wanna ask me about my weird hair). If you have a good name, or a strange name, or a musical name, I might swipe it and stick it in a story.

Alexandra Blitman didn’t just have a name that stuck in my head like a song, but she was a person who did. She was the first person I knew who played cello — before her, the only actual cellist I knew about was the Slovakian cellist in the James Bond movie The Living Daylights, which my dad let me see with him when I was 9.

So I’m writing a story about a kid named Alex who’s a boy, and his best-friend-who-he-maybe-has-a-crush-on, also named Alix, who’s a girl, and I used real-life Alex’s name. Two strong trochees that might rhyme even though they mostly don’t. And Alex herself — she’s one of these people I always meant to keep up with and never did, and the few times I searched her nothing came up.

Then, last night, this did.

I tell stories for a living, and know that each is more than its headline. But Alexandra Blitman’s feels different:

I met her when we were kids, and we graduated from middle and high school together. We weren’t close, but we were friendly. Alex was friendly with everyone, though — a bright, free spirit whose genuine enthusiasm for life drew all of us to her, the straight arrows and the skaters and the jocks and everyone in between.

She died March 7, days after overdosing on heroin. She was 38.

**

Most of my friends, I don’t deserve to call friends. Most of the people I’d like to be friends with, I don’t even talk to. They seem like such magical people, with magical little worlds, and I’d hate to disrupt that with my stammery bad-haired self.

When you know someone even a little bit, they’re limitless. We see tiny glimpses of other people, two-second .gifs of a ten-hour series. Those people we think are our best friends, we’re only with them for a fraction of their lives.

And those people we barely know, we don’t even know how much we don’t know about them.

Alex and I were never part of the same social circle, although we were in orchestra together — Alex was the only cello, and I was a horrible second violinist who sat all the way back at the end of the section, even as an eighth-grader. I thought I would’ve gotten promoted maybe, just out of charity, except that Mr. Meyers was brutal and honest. When Alex played, he had none of the overwhelming praise he saved for Ashley Wilkes who played oboe or Lori Pay, the concertmistress, but she always hit her notes, and that made him proud.

We got along. I probably had a crush on her, but I had a crush on anyone who deigned to talk to me in those days of pimples and squeaky violin solos. More, I always just wanted to be her friend. She seemed like she’d be a good friend. Our lives converged, and then diverged, when she got in an accident with my best friend Patrick. He was trapped in a halo for the next three years, and she emerged relatively unscathed, and maybe I felt guilty being friends with her after that, or felt that I shouldn’t. Or maybe we just had different groups of friends. The Patrick business overshadowed everything, governed most of my social interactions over the next few years (my mom racked up hundreds of miles driving me to the hospitals where they reconstructed his spine). A few years ago I wrote a little book about it and this is one of the things I said about her:

In another life, we could have been sisters or maybe best friends, hiding out at each other’s houses, tumbling into bed and telling each other everything. In this world we were lunchmates, and we shared that with a tableful of other kids. I don’t remember how it first happened, whether she asked if she could sit at our table or if Patrick and I took our seats unobtrusively at the far end of the bench, sliding closer each day, having similar conversations about the same things until one day they finally converged. Pam’s conversational strengths were classical music, cartoons on TV, and what other people were really thinking.

(I changed her name to Pam. Patrick’s name isn’t really Patrick, either. Maybe I just save people’s names for what they sound like they should be doing, or for what I wish they would be doing?)

I should not be surprised, right? The opioid epidemic is everywhere. It’s hitting all kinds of people. According to the articles, this is kind of person Alex was:

She worked as a therapist with women and children in crisis, kids who were being raised amid abuse and addiction. It was hard work, emotionally taxing, and Alex often internalized it.

Alex loved the beach and the mountains. She was forever dancing, listening to and talking about music — everything from trance to Tori Amos, classical to Alicia Keys.

“You’d be walking through the mall and she’d see someone and say, ‘He looks like a really interesting character. I want to meet him,’ ” Sarah said. And she did.

Alex was an original — quirky and complicated, restless and gifted. Her parents didn’t give her a middle name at birth, but Alex declared one for herself, Victoria. She liked the way it sounded, cool and feminine. She started spelling her own name Alecks, just to be original.

**

I don’t want to quote the whole article — every little paragraph of it is another little treasure — although, maybe, I do. I didn’t know her that well. Some of the people the reporter spoke to, I vaguely knew (most of them, I knew as the kids on the other side of the classroom, the ones who were either way cooler than me, or not as cool as me, depending on how you felt about Dungeons & Dragons as a way to spend a Saturday night). The only one I knew was Alex, and I barely knew her.

Are we drawn to death because it reminds us of ourselves? Is it what these people meant to us, or didn’t mean to us, or because we’re hitching a ride on their final journey, wanting to claim some of the glory of it for ourselves, or some of the pain, to use it to define us, to make ourselves martyrs so other people feel sorry for us, so they feel jealous of us, because we have touched a piece of the infinity of this person that can no longer be touched? I read that, when someone dies who knows you, a tiny part of yourself dies along with them, the things you shared with them that you didn’t share with anybody else, the way they experienced you, which no one else will ever have the exact same experience.

If that’s the case, Alex barely took any of me when she died. And the parts of her — the microscopic, insurmountable parts of her I carried — are contained more in that article than anything I can write.

You know how I said that, even when you barely know someone, you don’t even know what you don’t know about them? I just want to tell you about the person who wrote the article. In middle school, she was one of those cooler than/not-as-cool-as people. We were definitely friendly and definitely not friends. Maybe she wore shirts with sports teams on them and I scoffed at her. Maybe I wore shirts with sports teams on them, hoping people didn’t think less of me because I was in camouflage.

Let me tell you what she does today. She’s a reporter for the Philly Inquirer. She’s won a Pulitzer. She’s a reporter — she uses the paper as a platform to show how public schools are fighting dropouts and raising prodigies and how a ghetto school went a year without fights. I think of what she’s doing and I tremble. I feel reverent. I think of the once-a-month phone calls I make to my state senator, the stories I write that try to make people laugh — it’s necessary, I know, but with the few people I make feel a little better, I wish I could figure out how to do as much straight-up good with my life as her.

Is that hubris? Chutzpah? A wish to touch more other lives, and my own basic egocentrism? Or is it that same feeling we get when people we know die, wanting to absorb their life’s glory into our own?

It is neither, I think. Maybe I’m wrong. Or maybe it’s covetousness — the kind we talk about in the Bible, the kind that’s not I wish I had that but how can I get one too, the kind where we see greatness and it inspires us to do great things. It’s been eons since I’ve talked to a stranger but maybe I should. It’s been forever since I’ve put on Tori Amos, since I’ve listened to music that made me dance without thinking about it. Our long winter is over. Maybe I should.

 

photo by Bostankorkulugu

Sympathy Pains for the Speaker’s Stand

I wrote a new poem! Go here to read the whole thing. Usually I write (well, usually I try to write) on paper, because I take more time with each word, the physical effort of it. Today I had too much to do, and I just opened the posting screen and let the poem all fall out. I knew exactly the image that it should have, but by now (January 2021, still a week after the Capitol insurrection) we're all sick of that image. A little creative Googling, and I found this. Felt right. And just enough of a twist on the original image. (I tried to find a source for it, but couldn't. Whoever created it, fait accompli.)

Anyway, here's the poem.

I’ve been drinking soup out of mugs in the morning
calling it coffee
stretching my mouth wider so that
nobody notices the noodles

These days I feel so sorry for the world
everyone is upset about a faraway foreign government
being overthrown in Washington
I’m just like, at least it’s not your family

This morning my flavor of coffee is my own anxiety
and I’m blowin’ on it right now cause it’s too hot
Needing the simple on/off switch of caffeine
while everything else is too unreliable

Feels a little too much like an abandoned store
at the end of an apocalypse, mobs of moms and incels
ransacking baseball bats and canned vegetables
while I’m patiently waiting in a line that never advances

Me, I’m nothing
selfless self-important something stuck on the way to salvation
trying to feel the pain of the universe
and drown out my own while I’m at it
Me I’m nothing          and I like it that way

Monument Valley, a poem

Tonight I just wanted to sleep alone
each touch of skin and furtive blanket movement

nails across the blackboard 
of my sleep.

Sometimes I pray because I don’t know what else to do
then drive myself crazy till sunset.

Freed prisoners will commit a crime
to return to the solace of jail.

I’ve been listening to music by dead people
hoping to set their souls at ease

though it might be because there’s nothing
I want to listen to.

Tonight I am having trouble surrendering
to the night, my body quaking 

with each wave of thought, unable to disconnect
from the maelstrom of my head

How I wish for something diagnosable
The ability to put a limit to my problems, say this is it

draw a box around them
then step outside it

G-d just seems to never want tonight to end
I open the blinds to the field of unblinking stars

Wondering what happens if I start walking among them
and don’t stop till I reach what comes next


______
Image from page 138 of The call of the stars; a popular introduction to a knowledge of the starry skies with their romance and legend (1919)

There Is Always a Graffiti Maker

This is part of a story I've been writing for, yikes, way longer than it should have taken me. If you want, you can read from the beginning, or just start here.

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In Flagstaff we checked the mileage, realized Albuquerque was only four and a half hours away. That was basically less than 2 movies. That was a tiny slice of our days. We had the longest days, didn’t we?, especially waking up early, the sun shoving through the sheer curtains in the motel room, having forgotten to smush the normal curtains closed.

Not that it mattered, because Joey kept us on schedule anyway. Joey was our matron, our den mother, our sheep dog and our shepherd and our team coach all in one: landing on top of me in the morning, then bounding over to Elyse’s bed, slopping his tongue over our faces and digging his nose into our armpits and reminding us in great amounts of glorious slobbery slime that it was time for his morning walk.

I loved walking Joey. He was no higher than my waist, but strong, always with a determination and a clear direction. Later that year, in summer, once I had made it to the East Coast and moved in with an Orthodox aspiring hip-hop DJ in a warehouse deep in Hasidic Williamsburg, I would learn from rendezvouses with kids in pizza places and kosher markets that Hasidic kids, by and large, dreaded dogs. The families had so many kids that there was no money to have pets, and no space. It puzzled me so, since the only way I managed to get up in time for morning prayers was Joey. Caring for a dog was so much like being a religious Jew: this constant presence, nagging but righteously demanding, diverting your attention away from the ego and reminding you of the miracle of Creation and the demands of a higher power.

We circled back to the row of crystal shops. They were slowly opening up, one by one, like heavy eyelids rustling up motivation after a heavy sleep. The first we entered was almost a clothes boutique for crystals, a well-dressed if slightly ’80s-looking woman who inquired what we were looking for, which colors or styles or what we wanted to correct in our lives. “Just browsing,” I half-muttered, half-swallowed up, those instincts honed in me since teenagerhood of being in stores solely to have somewhere to be, never any interest in actually buying something. To my surprise, Elyse said, quick and guilelessly, “I’m looking for a love spell.”

“Sure, I can show you our love potions section,” said the woman, taking us down an aisle whose shelves were sparsely populated — or was it generously spread out? — with caterpillar-like crystals crawling their way across stone, gorgeously smooth stones the softly postuled shape of breasts, with a breastlike incline and curve, with intensely spiny knifelike undersides full of sharp crystal.

“Now, are we looking for a gift for a lover, or a spell to arouse the interests of someone who hasn’t yet fallen under your thrall?”

“A gift,” said Elyse coyly.

They narrowed it down to two: a darkly spiraling purple cone and a sort of cotton candy pinkish-white bowl-shaped structure. Both were distinctly more femme than anything I’d identify with Elyse, and it made me wonder about this trip, this mysterious endpoint of hers, who she might be and what sort of life might lie after these few weeks for Elyse, for Joey.

She settled on the purple cone. The woman boxed it up, and sinking into the pillowing tissue paper it looked like Darth Vader’s evil castle tucked inside a nest of peaceful clouds. As we walked by the other stores, we couldn’t avoid window-shopping, or second-guess window-shopping, which is what you do when you’ve already bought what you set out to buy but you can’t help thinking, was it the right choice, and what if, and would they take returns. I caught sight of the proprietor of one other establishment, a hippie woman in a long flowing skirt with her hair tied in a dangling thin cloth, skin the color of the desert sand, watching me as I watched her. I had on a baseball cap over my yarmulke and I couldn’t help thinking, does she know I’m Jewish? And then, is she?

I asked Elyse if she wanted to stop anywhere. She said no, and we kept walking.

We hung out in a park with gorgeously sinister graffiti tags and waited for the people who’d made them to pass by. The town had a newspaper filled with punk-band ads and snarky personal essays, but no cool kids, no outcasts, barely anyone on the street. We lay in the grass all afternoon while Joey went wild trying to scratch his belly with his nose. It didn’t work, and we didn’t find anyone. We didn’t know who we were looking for, but once they showed up, we’d be able to tell.

The town was heating up, and the sun was just starting to lick the horizon, when we thought of dinner, and of the road. Joey stretched in the grass. Elyse checked the time.

“Uh, Matt,” she said. “If we stop for dinner, we aren’t going to get there till eleven thirty.”

I checked my watch. Sure enough: the day had gone, and what felt like early evening in this temperate desert town would long ago have been nightfall anywhere else.

We grabbed fast food (her: actual McDonald’s, me: peanut butter and a loaf of bread from the mini mart where we got gas), ate in the outdoor seating, then hit the road. We were both from the East Coast before this, but had spent so long living in California that the existence of other states seemed like a tease. When we passed a sign saying we’d entered New Mexico it felt like an event. And when we realized it was still a good number of hours till Albuquerque, the next city on our agenda, we slowed down and started giving the icons on the highway exits more serious attention.

Soon, we realized that was not the optimal plan. I dug out a AAA manual and started flipping pages. The only motel we could find didn’t allow pets. “It’s only an icon on a page in an old book,” I suggested. “Maybe they do in real life.”

We got there and there was an even bigger sign on the door. But the place looked so picturesque, it seemed a cruel lie. It was one of those motels where the doors had pastel colors and different numbers. The office was in its own cabin, wooden with a triangle roof, built into the side of a cliff. We sat in the car and debated whether to go in and ask, not say anything and try to sneak Joey in, or keep driving. Driving was out of the question. It was late, we were tired, and there were no buildings at all on the horizon, let alone a motel with vacant rooms.

Inside it was homely. Red velvet curtains. Framed family photos. The woman at the desk looked like a Golden Girl, her hair plastic and symmetrical, sweetly wrinkled jowls of cheeks. Her voice was the sweetest thing, and I would swear she knitted her sweater herself. She gave us a look when Elyse said two beds — we were getting used to that — and when she walked away, I whispered to Elyse, “Let’s just ask.”

Elyse looked on the verge of agreeing with me. Right before the woman returned, she hissed to me, sidelong, without making eye contact, “Just don’t.”

“Here are your keys,” said the woman, slipping them across.

“Thanks,” I said. “We’ll just get the bags and unpack.”

On the way out the door, I said to Elyse, “What’s wrong?”

“That,” she nodded across the counter at the wall.

There, in the center of dozens of family photos, was one with a more elaborate frame, gold, with gilt covering and a sort of genuflectable position. It was of President George W. Bush, and it was autographed. Bush, of course, had been on the radio all week, a vote on gay marriage was up, he was promising to reject it. His rejection, as we drove deeper and deeper into the country, and left the ocean farther and farther behind, was celebrated more and more, and its implications were darker and darker.

The woman at the counter, apparently resolved to our cohabitational weirdness, offered up a gentle wave as we left. I went into the car, slung a suitcase over my shoulder and held another at my side. Elyse quietly, quietly cuddled Joey against her, kept pace with me, and together, we slipped into the room.

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The Beauty of Being Disappointing

Last night we were one week and five days into the seven-week, seven-day cycle of counting the omer, our contemporary verbal gesture toward the ancient pentecostal offering of a sheaf of ripe grain with a sacrifice immediately following the commencement of the grain harvest and the First Fruits festival (that smart-sounding text lifted unapologetically from Wikipedia).

Anyway, if you don’t know: each night, starting on the second night of Passover, going till the eve of the Feast of Weeks, we count, out loud, the number of the night. Each one represents a combination of kabbalistic emanations. Each one can heal a different part of your soul. And the theory is, after 49 days, you’ll heal your whole self. And each night, as long as you haven’t missed a day, you say a blessing.

The past few years, in spite of my normal everyday forgetfulness — or perhaps because of it — I’ve been exceedingly vigilant about counting omer, every night, with a blessing. The past few years (oh, hey, maybe it’s already up to the past several years) I’ve made it all the way to Day 49. I’ve signed up for alerts from both Chabad.org and MyZmanim.

And this year — in spite of my vigilance of the past few years, or perhaps because of it — I screwed up.

On the very second night.

It was Shabbos. It was the dead center of a three-day yontif, without electricity or internet or text alerts or friends or walking to shul or the grouchy guys in the back of the shul.* It was a little bit of a personal whirlwind, and a little personally tempestuous.

Look, I’ve been through much worse — including kid-related incidents and accidents; including kid-related pishing accidents; including kid-related pishing accidents in the middle of evening prayers — and I still managed to get the night’s count in.

But this year, the seder became an all-consuming tsunami. How am I going to get all this stuff done? am I going to order food from a caterer, when usually we make everything by hand, down to ketchup and chips? how can I afford it? do they not do delivery? can a taxi pick it up? how do I bridge the distance between the store, who will only bring the order to the door, and the taxi driver, who will load it into the car but won’t go to the door? what are we going to do for a three-day period of no electricity, video chats, or Hamilton dance parties?

It was so stressful. It was so wonderful. It was so intense that after the seders, there was nothing to do but sink into the sad silence of aloneness, reading too much and waiting for the books to talk back to me, trying to suck meaning out of Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s The Particulars of Rapture because it’s the closest I have to a dvar Torah, I was trying to ignore my thoughts, my obsessions, my brain in overdrive.

And, I guess, also ignoring that overlap of the rational mind and the free-associative where I ask myself at some point each day, have you counted yet? And then course-correct when I haven’t.

Sometimes I forget to count until the next morning. Occasionally, I forget until later that day. This is the first time in a long time that I’d forgotten, not yet back into the rhythm of things, into any rhythm in these chaotic times where nothing is normal, until the entire next day.

The first few days, post-blessing, my count felt supremely ineffectual. Like, since I’d forgotten to heal that one particular aspect of myself (it was the kindness of stringency, dammit! Maybe if I’d gotten the kindness of stringency down, I would’ve been able to get through the 47 subsequent gates!), all the other healings are closed off to me. I spent a day and a half feeling crushed, a bombed-out feeling of squashed-ness that comes to me entirely too often these days, like when the list of mourners at my synagogue is a dozen people long instead of one or two, or when my tefillin were stolen — this idea that there was something I was supposed to be doing, something I both needed to do and was simultaneously unable to do.

Or the things I should’ve done at my desk the last day of work before quarantine, before we knew what the world would turn into. Or the ways I’ve rephrased saying things in my head a million times, or the ways I’ve tried to redo things, or undo things, that are now irrevocably done. There are the things in our lives we can control, the things we can’t, and the things we could have, and we didn’t, and now we just have to suck it up and make it better, deal with all the shtuss that’s being flung at us and treat each piece as peacefully as we can.

I can still count. I do still count, once a day, usually during prayers, sometimes not till after. I don’t say a blessing.** And it feels like I’ve lost that potentiality, that mitzvah I could have fulfilled, and could still be fulfilling right now, a moment that’s forever gone, like a saccharine meme of a butterfly darting away from fumbling fingers.

On the other hand, it’s a gift — a gift of a different sort. I know there’s no way I’ll complete my 49-piece set. But now each day I count is a fractured mitzvah that I’m still trying to give wings to, an imperfect beauty that I hope is still beautiful. Last year, each night I counted sefira was a rung on an ever-increasingly delicate ladder, and somehow, miraculously, I made it all the way to the top.

This year, knowing I’ve already failed, each rung can be its own journey. Beauty, glory, victory, kingship — each of these sefiros is both simultaneously un-understandable to me and eminently observable, like a giant dragonfly I’ve been chasing, who’s gotten away, whose shadow now falls over me in completeness. Or who buzzes in front of me, and I can see each vibration of its body, each tremor of its wings. I can appreciate it in a way that I never could have if I was trying to catch it.

I wish I hadn’t missed the count. I hope next year I’ll be able to remember each night — I also hope, by the way, that we can all actually be around other humans on Passover, and that we’re all healthy, and that we spend it with the people we’re meant to. For this year, however, I know we’re in exile, and with the taste of that bitterness in my mouth, I’ll try to do each day’s count as its own flawed worship. A worship that might not be quite worthy of a blessing, but still is what G-d wants me to be doing, but still is all that I can do.

__
* — I feel completely at liberty to complain about the grouchy guys in the back of the shul, as I have of late, in my middle-aged complacency, become one of those very same grouchy guys.
** — Actually, according to the Komarna Rebbe (and according to my friend Alan), I can still count with a blessing. But according to most authorities, including the ones I hold by, I can’t.

It's a Whole Spiel launch party!

Hey! My story "Find the River" is about to be published in the collection It's a Whole Spiel, alongside luminaries like Alex London and David Levithan and Mayim Bialik. Hopefully I'll be able to share an excerpt soon! But if you're around NYC on Sept. 17, you can hear a whole bunch of us get out our pre-Tishrei rage at Books of Wonder. It's free!

Sweater Dog

This is Madcap Review #10, and herewith are two poems of mine that are published therein.

Sweater Dog Brings Himself Joy

The happiest tiny dog
is kicking up dirt in his sweater

His paws don’t scratch much grass
but tiny shitlike flakes snow all over

The only mess he can make
so delightfully constipated

Here's the poem on their site. It really happened! One morning I was walking to work and this enormously tiny weiner dog was frolicking in the freshly unsnowed grass, kicking it up all over the place. It felt like he couldn't get it out and was just using the dirt as a substitute to make him feel better about himself. The owner wasn't looking at all. The dog stopped and looked straight at me. I think we shared a moment. I hope he felt better about himself.

They also published another poem of mine, My Jesus Fear. Really, you might want to just go and read the whole dang issue, which has a weirdly labyrinthine clickthrough pattern and is really strange and enjoyable, and has a great deal of good, freaky art.

All hail Zuby Nehty, guardians of Weird Music forever 🤘

Today I wrote about the odyssey of the second (and first) times I saw Zuby Nehty, one of my favorite bands. In the story, I describe them as "Operation Ivy meets They Might Be Giants," which I realize is a bit of an insider name-drop. (I try to avoid mentioning too many obscure bands, unless of course I'm writing about them, since some reviewers complained when Goldbergs came out that I was too punk-rock with my band knowledge. But here, I think it's ok.)

This happened almost 20 years ago, and I'm startled I remember this much. As with all nonfiction, I'm nervous that it means more to me than it ever could mean to anyone else. But that's why I'm sharing it, I guess. Here's how I found out about Zuby Nehty, and part of why I love them so much.

A Concert at the End of Prague

For a year I lived in Prague. I was living deep in the middle of my own thoughts, desperately wanting to find my own inner Kafka, kind of suspecting that even Kafka didn’t really want to find his inner Kafka. Eastern Europe appealed to me, part because of its historical Judaism, part because it was just so damn vampiric.

I signed up for a study-abroad program — because my American school didn’t have a program available in the country, I enrolled directly in the Czech foreign-student program. Several students from another program were on my flight, a more lavish American program, staying in dorms that faintly resembled hotel rooms. We were housed in the more modest Czech student dorms, a fake-wooden-paneled Communist affair with mattresses stuffed with sawdust and a single receptionist posted at the door — the same blank-faced woman sat there, day and night — who did not know, or steadfastly refused, to speak English.

We were a motley crew: a handful of Americans, one or two representatives from an assortment of European countries, and several Finns. Weirdly, they all were Czechophiliacs, knowledgeable in both the country’s history and its contemporary culture, as though a whole gang of the coolest kids in Helsinki’s premier art school all climbed on a plane one day and, to their mutual surprise, found that they’d all bought tickets for the same place. 

{read more}

A bissel Shtisel for your morning

I have a new poem on Hevria and I hope you like it. Without overtly intending to, it covers my 3 big themes: the human relationship with the Divine, imposter syndrome, and public transportation.



In the exiled world, Jews have
phone calls and Facebook to keep up
with yontifs and life events

In New York I come up empty. A funeral across
Boro Park, streets shut off, Hasidim rend clothes
and scream to Shomayim. In Manhattan

I heard nothing. I davened mincha
between meetings, prayed to my food and
nobody caught it but me and G-d.

[ keep reading ]

G-d's Little Obstacle Course

I wrote this poem a while ago, but wasn't really sure what to do with it. One of those things that seemed too cheesy to non-religious people and too heretical to religious people. But necessity is the evil stepmother of creativity, and I had a post due for Hevria, which -- inspired? no, demanded -- that this poem and I get to know each other better.

My Slow-burning Obsession with Steven Mnuchin

This is a weird one. Sometimes I'll start thinking about Steven Mnuchin and get so mad. Other times he just seems like a paradigm of all that is weird about the Trump administration -- not wrong (although that, too) but weird -- how Trump mocked Hillary for her Goldman Sachs connections and then dragged this guy into the White House, the portfolio of movies he's invested in, including (but not limited to) The Lego Movie, the Thomas Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice, and Mad Max: Fury Road, and the way his wife invites rubbernecking, Asma al-Assad style.

But most of all it's this picture, and the accompanying tweet by Christopher Ingraham that seemed so sad and poetic and weirdly hopeful, that made me want to write this poem, and which I sampled for the last two verses. There it is. My confession of love. Steven Mnuchin, I hope you're happy. Now please take care of this country.


With enough money
Steven believes
you can change minds

The way his name slips by
in the credits for Avengers
and The Lego Movie

to show his old bullies
whatever they wanted
to do to him, it backfired

Steven marks his territory
like a bulldog on a Sunday outing

The United States, Steven says
is the greatest country
to invest in

and we are his investment
Steven shouldn’t be this happy in life
but somehow figured it out

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How to Offend the Jews

Gotta tell you, most of my posts on Hevria don't get much mileage in terms of feedback -- that's mostly for Elad and his political ilk (politilk?) -- but this was the exception. Posted this and, the next time I checked Facebook (I've been staying off Facebook for the most part, because Russians), I got this rebuke from someone who, I'm not sure if they're Jewish or not, but her name is Hana Grossman:

As a mentor and editor, I always tell writers to just ignore this stuff. Your job is to create; your power is in creativity; and while dialogue might come out of it, some people are just there to troll. (Ms. Grossman, I will try not to assume but instead create a likely fictional reality, didn't even make it to the first line of my poem.)

As a writer, though, that shit dives straight under my skin. So I wrote back:

I'm sorry you feel that way. I hope you actually got to read the poem. I try not to tell people what a poem is about - I think it limits the poem's power - but I don't really think it's about how I (or anyone) sees non-Jews at all; I think it's about the struggle between wanting to follow halacha, or Jewish laws, and wanting to live autonomously by your own rules.

by the way, I'm not really on facebook much, but if you'd like to talk further, here's my email.

Anyway, you should read it. Let me know if you're offended please!

There Are Such Goyim in the World

I love how goyim hug
so perfectly freaking friendly
like the only reason they’re not married
is, why waste all that time at a party?

They eat food from anywhere
and eat the same amount of food all week.
They jump out of bed and straight

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The Rebbe in the Basement

New York, Upper East Side: “Are you here to see the Rebbe?” someone asks, a guy I haven’t seen in maybe a decade, shouting over five or six heads in the two or three feet of space between us.

It’s a crowded, windowless basement, deep in a part of Manhattan I never expected to find myself in. I got off the subway near the 59th Street Bridge, which may have been where Simon & Garfunkel hung out 50 years ago but now is just a neat mess of shiny apartment buildings, most decked out with holly for the season with a few darkened windows where there’s probably Jews hiding.

My teacher from yeshiva, Leibish, who’s just taken over from the tzaddik Sholom Brodt, was speaking. A band I really like was arranged to play. I had a work event late; I’d be in the city anyway, and I’d been a little antisocial lately but my best friend in town was moving to Texas so I might as well force myself to stay out a bit, right?

The apartment on the invite was dead. The doorman looked at me askew, but I told him the number and he called up once — no answer — but he tried again and he said into the phone, “Niccolo, someone named Matthue to see you?”

Now, when you’re not just Jewish but Orthodox, and not just Orthodox but into weird hippie mystical occult stuff, there aren’t too many people with names like Niccolo. There aren’t many Matthues, either, and I recognized the name as one I’d heard in Crown Heights, one Purim several years back, when he asked what kind of Hasid I was and I said Biala Ostrova and he literally fell on the floor in surprise because he was, too, and there aren’t too many of us in the world. The joke is, most Hasidic rebbes show up with a carful of followers; in Biala, you get a follower and a car full of rebbes.

He tells the concierge, the class is somewhere else, and it’s a cold night so I don’t blame him for staying home but I say, “Could you tell him Matthue says hi?” and the guy looks at me like, what are you, in fifth grade, and asks if I just want to talk. I take the phone, hungering for that little bit of connection, and he says, “Good to hear you, brother, I’ll see you in a few minutes, right?” and I figure I’ve misread the situation and I figure I’d better take the address and start walking.

It’s 18 blocks and an avenue or two. I’ve been out of Manhattan nights so long the numbers don’t naked any sense to me and I don’t know whether the walk is normal or ridiculous, but it’s to see Leibish, which is worth a little sacrifice. Along the way I pass diners, old men in jeff caps walking tiny dogs, single people crying or laughing into phones, and it’s so cold you can’t tell which and maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe a hundred years ago I would’ve stopped to ask if they were okay, but tonight I’m already an hour late, I’m no longer good with people, I’m not looking for adventures, just a way to get home as early as possible — I have to be up for the kids — and I don’t know where I’m going, and it occurs to me that the new address has no apartment number, an impossibility in this neighborhood.

I walk there, and I walk past it, and there on the basement door is the number of the place. The plaque says BOMA and there’s no windows, but there is singing, and I go in.

The room is packed. A wall of tall potted plants separates men from women. There are guys with long beards and guys with no beards, guys in black and white and guys in crosshatched business shirts, guys with empty plates, guys still stuffing their faces. The smell of kugel hangs rich in the air, this bubbling hot pudding of pulverized potatoes and onions and oil, and it’s the most addictive thing in the world, like French fries mixed with cocaine, and a whole mosh pit separates me from the kitchen, but getting some is the furthest thing from my mind.

Leibish is talking.

He’s gray now. His beard is an upside-down Afro, his payos are frizzy antennae plugged into another world, and his voice has not aged a day, that half-singing, half-whispering voice like he’s always about to tell you a secret.

“The yud in G-d’s name, the י, is infinity. The black part of the letter is just a dot, it’s almost all white. The next letter hay, the ה, is the space we have to make for G-d in this world, not the world of infinity, but how we harness that infinity and constrict it and bring it into our lives. Like, this world is nothing! You can’t take it too seriously! Here, I’m going to tell you a joke. Let me think of a joke.”

This is what I crossed the city for. It’s already 9 p.m., I’m barely going to stay here an hour, but if all I get is this moment of Leibish and his Torah, that’s all I need, that’s what I was meant to be here for.

He speaks, and he speaks for a while, and then we move into the basement apartment next door, where the band is setting up. Someone hands Leibish his saxophone and it sort of swings around his body. He contorts into it, like Coltrane, like a baby spooning its mother. And maybe this is the time I get up and start thinking about the potato kugel upstairs? Except I’m probably volunteering to help move stuff. Carrying the microphone stands like harpoons, swinging two chairs on each hip almost like I know what I’m doing. Down the stairs, back up again.

“Are you here to see the Rebbe?”

I forget his name. Someone I haven’t seen in a decade. The place is even more packed, if that’s possible. The Rebbe? Which rebbe? I didn’t even have to ask. I knew which rebbe.

“Which rebbe?”

I asked anyway. These days, I think, I am too much hay with not enough yud, all contraction and no infinity. I get done what needs to get done. It’s getting late. Bedtime is calling.

“The holy Ostrova Biala Rebbe! You know him, don’t you?”

That’s one way to say it. When I was in Israel, pulled there by a new wife and father-in-law whose motives I had yet to completely grok, I resented Israel for not being San Francisco. Then I started in the yeshiva where Leibish taught, and at night one of my teachers would take me to the office of the Ostrova Biala Rebbe, where we waited for hours for him to repeat our names over and over again, give us advice for love and jobs and friends and art, pray with us, and pinch our cheeks with a grip that was alarmingly firm.

“He’s here? In New York?”

“In this apartment, in the back room.”

I ran to the back room. The door was shut, of course. In front of it was Niccolo, who had stood back up since the last time we met. “Is the Rebbe here?” I gasped out, breathless.

He told me he was. He told me I could see him. He told me there was just one person in line, just as a short Israeli woman left, together with her interpreter, and half a dozen people leaped from all corners of the apartment to bum rush the door.

Niccolo stepped in. He had all the decorum and reserve of a documentary moderator. “Now, who has an appointment,” he said, “and who just wants a blessing?”

A blessing seemed like the 10-items-or-less express lane. I would take a blessing. That’s all I really wanted, right? To be blessed.

We waited. The quickie blessings seemed not to be so quick. In the meantime, the as-yet-unblessed of us hung out outside, talking, trading stories, figuring out where we knew each other from. I freaked. My friend Hillel, who when we used to hang out were both Kafka nerds and now he’s in charge of a whole school, hundreds of kids’ minds being formed by him, talked me down. “Don’t prepare things to ask about or things you want to tell him,” he said. “Just let it happen.”

“Be the hay,” I agreed.

It was my time, and I went in. Niccolo, who I realized somewhere in the waiting was actually the conductor of this whole operation, the concert that was still going downstairs and the Rebbe and his stalkers, stayed inside. In part of my aforementioned freakout, I remembered in a rush that the Rebbe only spoke Hebrew, and then I remembered that I spoke no Hebrew.

And then we were face to face.

I’m not going to tell you what we talked about. I will tell you that he said shehechiyanu, the prayer that you say on special occasions, when he saw me. I’ll tell you that he made me say my family’s names, including all my kids’ ridiculously long full Hebrew names, and he said “is that it?” when I was finished. We talked for two minutes. We talked for an eternity. We laughed a lot, and I can’t remember at all why we were laughing.

He said something that made Niccolo and I both jump up and down. He didn’t pinch my face, but he slapped my cheek, several times, hard, and I literally lost my balance. (Full disclosure: I’d been up since 6, and blowing on me might have made me lose my balance at that point.) He said one thing that was totally unexpected, that I’d only been thinking about for a day or two, and when he said it he looked surprised and turned to Niccolo. Niccolo didn’t look surprised at all. “Rebbe, of course you knew,” he said.

And then I left, and then I stumbled to the subway. I’d only taken a few steps when I remembered that, in the waiting room, someone had told me to look outside the door. “The Rebbe’s not the first wise person to have a minyan here,” he’d said. I looked, and this is what I saw.

I never expected to be on the Upper East Side. But I guess G-d has plans for us all, even those ghosty areas of Manhattan.

Stubby Teeth: a new short story

My story Stubby Teeth was just published in Barzakh Magazine. I'm honored to be in its pages.

So the story is a response to something my

professor Josh Henkin told our class when I was a cocky first-semester grad student at Brooklyn College. He said (and I'm paraphrasing, and he said it better) that it's impossible to write a story from the point of view of an inanimate object, a pet, or a small child, because stories are based on characters being able to act on their own, and a good story is all about your characters taking agency.

Well, I was young and eager and full of chutzpah. I was also a young father, underslept and full of conviction that not only did babies have agency, they were running my whole damn life. I went home and, right away, started writing this story.

I hope you like it.

Stubby Teeth

His mother was gone, and she had never been gone before. And now he was in a very big room with a very big woman who was not his mother, and several toys, and a smattering of other kids, and no mother. The walls were white. There were no windows, and no mother. He screamed.

The scream lasted several minutes, until he had run completely out of breath. He rubbed his stubby teeth together while he gathered the oxygen for more.

A pair of woman’s hands—long fingers, chubby knuckles—sandwiched him, his back and his stomach. They rubbed and rubbed, and though he tried to squirm out of their tractor-beam pull and fight the rhythmic alternation of palms and fingertips, those large hands with their pod-like palms, steady and insistent, and their confident beat lulled him into complacency. Just why was he agitated, again? He no longer remembered.

The woman spoke to him, slow and warm. Gradually, he realized that she wasn’t trying to communicate a specific meaning or directive, as his mother did when she spoke, but rather to give a sort of human background noise, like music during his mother’s yoga or television when he was supposed to not talk to her, a meaningless string of syllables as she guided him to an area of the room with one thick oceanic carpet, on top of which sat a gaggle, a small herd, of other humans, small humans.

Read the rest

(Barzakh's cover by Mali Fischer.)