[part one] of a spontaneous encore to the 'Life of Socrates' [quartet]
If anything saved my life in later years, if anything made me feel healthy and put-together, it was my relationship with Dov Ber Shlomchick; simply compare my life to his, and Socrates felt like a lucky and rich man. Anybody seemed healthy compared to him! When Socrates got released from detention at Daytop he was enticed by Abba, unpredictably but convincingly, to take advantage of yet another program—albeit of another sort—called Birthright Israel/Taglit. Open to all college-age persons with at least one provable Jewish parent, it was funded by two Jewish-American philanthropists, Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt. Everything was covered for the students on the trip: roundtrip plane ticket, hotels, tour guides, security. In 2005, the year I should have been graduating from college, I did a ‘secular’ trip with people from the New York City metro tristate area, with an organization, a so-called ‘trip organizer’, called Oranim. We all met at the airport. I was very much the quiet kid in the corner. I was still on probation, and had received special permission to leave the country for this special occasion. On the plane, all the young men ordered beers, got up from their seats and mingled amongst each other. On probation and brainwashed and threatened by Daytop, I abstained. I did however sit next to a pretty young Jewess whose parents were Russian immigrants to America. In the future, she became a Russo-American immigrant to Israel, where she married an assimilated Israeli Yemenite (Tmini to be politically correct). When we arrived in Israel,—my first time ever—it was snowing in Jerusalem. We toured the old city. Our group consisted of two busloads of people. Out of everybody, one person stood out. This is because this person, on a secular Birthright trip, was dressed in the black suit and black hat of a Lubavitcher. He had curly, dusty brown hair. He was loud and outgoing, but in a different way than the ‘frat bros’ who made up much of the group. For one thing, he wasn’t nearly as funny. His nature seemed abrasive, insolent. Like Eyal, he was a bear of a man. On the bus—a very large coach bus—he handed the bus driver a CD to play through the vehicle’s sound system. It was Shake off the Dust…Arise (2004) by the Hasidic reggae sensation, Matisyahu. It was the first time Socrates had heard the music, probably like everyone else on the bus. The music was great. It was just weird that he insisted on playing it for everyone over the bus’ sound system. Socrates did not talk to Dov Ber much. He didn’t seem to have personal, one-on-one conversations with people, but instead talked at, not with, the group as a whole. Like performing in character. Puerile and slightly deranged, one day, sitting in the back of the bus he made a joke about the Holocaust which some of the women found inappropriate and highly offensive. They admonished him and instead of apologizing or merely withdrawing, he argued with the women! Socrates went home, back to New Congregation or the apartment on the Upper East Side, once the 10 days were over. Dov Ber had ‘extended’ his trip, meaning that he would stay in Israel longer. After the trip, Socrates stayed in touch with some of the souls he met. There was a rumor Dov Ber had been arrested and detained in Israel for stoning Arabs in Jerusalem. He slipped onto my Facebook friends list, when Facebook was invented, but I went many years without seeing him or hearing from him. Why would Soc ever make his acquaintance again?
The first week I started studying at Hadar HaTorah in Brooklyn, I was having lunch down in the basement of the seminary one day, and I heard a strange voice I honestly couldn’t place:
‘Soc! What’s up?’
At first I didn’t recognize him, but then I said, ‘Dov Ber! How long has it been?’
‘Since Birthright, dude.’
‘That was almost 10 years ago.’
‘What are you doing right now?
‘Eating my lunch.’
‘I mean after.’
‘Nothing. I have class but I don’t have to go.’
‘You want to smoke?’
‘Sure.’
We went out of the yeshiva and he led me to his family van. It was a bit of a mess and there were child seats in the back.
‘I went to jail,’ he said.
‘That sucks,’ I said, playing down the awkwardness I was feeling. ‘For what?’
‘I pushed my wife,’ he said as he put the car into drive and rolled out of the parking spot. I cleared my throat, trying to feel comfortable despite my present company. I knew it must have been something a little more severe than a mere ‘push’. He opened a compartment in the center consul and pulled out a bag of weed and a one-hitter. After we smoked he asked me:
‘What are you doing for Shabbos?’
‘I really don’t know yet. I guess I’ll be at Hadar HaTorah.’
‘Screw that,’ he said, ‘do you want to come over?’
‘Okay,’ I acquiesced.
That Friday, Socrates met Dov Ber in his usual synagogue, right by his apartment. He was wearing a black suit, black hat and black kapota. They prayed Mincha and Kabbalat Shabbat. Then, the Maariv service; and retreated back to his apartment where his wife was waiting for them. She didn’t talk to the Hassidic-couple’s Shabbos guest at all. She was shy and ornery, as battered women might be. We sang ‘Shalom Aleichem’ but not ‘Eshet Chayil’. The two began bickering instantly, as soon as he entered the apartment. For dinner she served a cold slab of salmon. (It is an extra point in heaven to eat red meat on Friday night). They argued more. They argued non-stop. Soc thanked them for dinner and excused himself when he couldn’t take any more.
Only a few short weeks went by without seeing Dov Ber. One spring night, after a long day of learning at Hadar HaTorah, I bought a couple of cold pint bottles of beer and went over to their apartment. He drank his beer, but didn’t seem to really appreciate it. (It seemed like he was scared of alcohol, of the effects, of what he knew it brought out in him). The two were at each other’s throats. I justified my being there by telling myself I was a domestic peacekeeper: ‘Shalom in the Home’. But, this relationship was broken beyond salvaging. At one point, Dov Ber lunged at his wife and twisted her arm around her back.
‘Ow! Dov Ber, you’re hurting me!’
‘Shut up! Shut up bitch! I’ll kill you Chava! Shut up!’
They had two children; daughters, who were living in a foster home. Dov Ber told me how determined he was to ‘get them back’. He felt he had been dealt an injustice by the judge and the social workers who had taken his babies out of the home. He said he was going to sue them all, and he listed an unsightly sum to sue for. He was grandiose, with delusions of grandeur, that is; a real looney-toon, out of touch with the world, with human reality. That night, Dov Ber invited me to accompany the two of them, him and his wife, to the Ohel. Located in Queens, the Ohel is a giant Jewish cemetery where the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and his wife, the Rebbetzin Chaya Mushka Schneerson are buried. The final Rebbe’s father-in-law, Josef Yitzchak Schneerson, is also buried there beside the previous Rebbetzin, his wife. Hasidim flock there to worship. They write notes and leave it on the tombstones, as if it were the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. For some, it is even holier. American Hasidim can be crazy and anti-Zionist, at times. At times, militantly-Zionist, to an embarrassing and maybe dangerous, loud-mouthed degree, and leaves you questioning, ‘if you’re such a Zionist, why not move to Israel?’ After all, that’s what I—Socrates Cooper-Cohen—did at once after 9/11, and then the incarceration in Bridgeport: Daytop. Less talk, more action. You can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk? Easier said than done, perhaps; but it is not what someone says, it’s what they do. Get with the program: move to Zion!
On the way to the Ohel, Dov Ber was yelling and cursing at his wife. She was crying and begging him to stop. He was driving like a maniac, riding the tail of the car just ahead of us. He pulled out his one-hitter and started smoking in the van, in front of his battered wife. He also smoked cigarettes in the car. When we got back to Brooklyn, I slept over their apartment on the couch. I wasn’t enjoying myself in Dov Ber’s company, but the worn-in leather couch beat the hell out of the wooden benches in the shul, where there was zero privacy, and that was my only other reality.
I looked Dov Ber up online. I didn’t find anything about the arrest for pushing his wife, there was however an article about another arrest made upstate, when he exposed himself in his hands, sitting in his car, to a strange woman in a parking lot. The article said he ran from his car trying to avoid arrest. I found another article from the local tristate area network news website, about how he and his wife had ‘kidnapped’ their own children during a visit, overseen by the foster system, and was driving them beyond state lines; an amber alert had apparently been sent out. It was clear to me that Dov Ber’s life was moving in a negative direction, and that’s an understatement; but he seemed to acquire more and more benefits as he rolled along. First he got a sweet little black kitten and a cute dog which he named, ‘Yalla’. One time I came over, Dov Ber was in the bathroom giving the dog a bath, I was seated outside. I heard the dog yelp. I knew it had burned its nerves, that Dov Ber had used boiling hot water on the poor pooch. It disturbed me so much, I left the apartment. Later that night, I discovered my backpack was missing. In it, I had an ‘award letter’—a very important document—from the Social Security Administration. I began to panic. I didn’t know what I would do, were I to lose the letter. In my mind, Dov Ber and his wife took on devilish appearances. ‘Did they steal my bag?’ I got to their apartment, rang the buzzer, went up the stairs, knocked on the door, was let in, and I asked if I had left my bag there. They answered in the negative. I looked around a little, just in case; then left. The paranoia, panic, the anxiety, was taking over my whole mind and body. I walked up to a cop in front of 770 and started whining to him, almost in tears, saying, ‘I lost the letter from Social Security and as a result, I’m finished. Also, I probably lost it as a result of being stoned,’ I was telling the police officer this, ‘and if my mother finds out, again, I’m cooked!’ The officer called over the Jewish EMS workers, ‘Hatzolah’, and they put me in the ambulance, laid out on the stretcher. I asked, while riding in the ambulance, if we could stop so I could smoke a cigarette. They stopped the ambulance and pushed the stretcher out. I was strapped down, laying on the gurney, smoking a cig under the summer moon, in the midst of a severe panic attack. They rushed me, and I only had time to smoke about three-quarters of the hand-rolled cigarette. I spent about three hours in the emergency room; until the psychiatrist-on-duty came out to assess me. He asked me a few questions, and then agreed that it would be okay to be released. When I got back to Crown Heights, I went into 770 and there I found, on the back of a bench, in the middle of the room, my backpack. The mail from the Social Security Administration was still there. But the scripture I had been carrying with me was gone. Divine Providence in Chassidus or Hasidic Yiddishkeit is known as: ‘hashgacha protit’.
Another time, I saw Dov Ber get angry when the dog pissed inside the apartment and he kicked Yalla, good and hard, again it yelped, then whined. All of this and I still came back. There was something I was drawn to in him. Maybe the shock of his behavior and his lifestyle attracted me, but only as a spectator. There was the time he invited me to go to an illicit drugs festival; I passed. And there was that time, was it New Year’s Eve? When he said, ‘Would you come with me to ride the subway and grope people?’ Again, I passed. Only out of a desire to be shocked, somewhat sadistically sickened, did I stick around him. It got to the point where you’d actually root for your friend to get in trouble and then laugh, probably. After all, his wife Chava stuck with him despite all his bullshit and abuse. He traded in his van and got a red SUV. I was jealous of that, too. He acquired cannabis seeds, grow-lights and an aquarium for small fish, and began to successfully grow his own weed in the bedroom of the apartment. I was jealous of that. I discovered he was a talented greenthumb. This blew my mind. It was a plentiful, high quality yield and he sold me some. One time, I came over to borrow a book from his bookshelf, it was that psychology, philosophic self-help classic by Dr. Viktor E. Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist, philosopher and Jewish Holocaust survivor, entitled, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946-1959), for an abstract I was writing as a preproposal for doctoral studies in Holocaust Literature (which never worked out), and he had some shake left from one of his plants and he sold me something like two grams of green shake for 20 bucks. Walking around outside, the baggy of weed fell out of my pocket and I lost it. Before he was growing it, though, Dov Ber was always good about sharing what he had, keeping everyone stoned.
When Socrates was kicked out of Hadar HaTorah, homeless and having a breakdown, he moved to Arizona with Mother for three or four months. He’d gaze from time to time at Facebook to see what his old Brooklyn posse were up to. It was via this medium which he found out Dov Ber and his wife had had another baby; a third daughter. The child, as far as I know, was removed from the home and the parents, immediately. When Socrates got back from Arizona, back to Crown Heights, Dov Ber was one of the first people he visited. It’s not that he loved him. It’s just that he needed to do some socializing with somebody in the neighborhood, after having been gone for so long, and he didn’t know where anybody else was; also of course, he wanted to smoke some pot. He finally got divorced shortly thereafter. Dov Ber kept the apartment and his ex-wife had to move out. Another thing that made me jealous, and is a mystery to me, is how this unemployed father of three had the means to get in his car and take a long road trip cross-country by himself. In Colorado, he legally bought marijuana at a dispensary. And in Arizona, he legally bought an assault rifle. When he got home, he showed it off to everyone. He showed it to Socrates, and Soc picked it up. Felt it with his hands; pulled the trigger and fired the unloaded weapon once, pointing it at the wall. He hadn’t handled a gun since his five-day training camp with the Israel Defense Forces. He showed me all of the accessories he bought for it: special cobalt blue steel-tipped bullets, a red laser scope for aiming at your target. He even said he had ordered a silencer. I didn’t know what the gun was for. And really didn’t understand where he got all of this disposable money from. I hate guns, and it didn’t impress or interest me. What interested me was, just what did he need an assault rifle for? Was he that crazy? Was it for his attempt at the act? If it’s not just for show, it better be for the former; because I didn’t want to know about anything else.
We were all hanging out at a certain synagogue that summer, a very young congregation. One of us who was hanging out was homeless. Dov Ber, crazy as he was, was always generous to me, as I mentioned, and he always displayed a degree of succor, and in keeping with his better traits, offered this homeless kid his apartment to rest up in.
‘I just got divorced,’ he said, ‘so the apartment’s empty. You can sleep in my daughters’ room or on the couch.’
The next day I saw the homeless kid come limping down the street with bandages on his head.
‘What the fuck happened to you?’ I asked.
‘Dov Ber beat me up,’ he said.
‘Why? What happened?’ I asked.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ he responded, ‘I deserved it.’
‘Well, where’s Dov Ber?’ I asked.
‘He’s in jail.’
‘Jail?’
‘Yeah, Riker’s Island, I think.’
‘What’d he do?’
‘Assault,’ was the response, ‘he assaulted me with a bat, plus I told the police about his gun.’
‘Why the hell’d you do that?’
‘Because,’ he said, ‘he was trying to kill me. See?’ he peeled back the bandage from his head, exposing some black and crusty dried blood.
Three days later Dov Ber was back out. He came right back to the synagogue and met up with all the young people.
‘How’d you get let out?’ I wanted to know.
‘Some rabbi paid my bail,’ he said. ‘Come over, I want to show you something.’
‘Okay, sure.’
I followed him home through the streets of Crown Heights. When we got to his building we walked up the one flight of stairs to his apartment, and when we crossed the threshold, I saw that the place had been absolutely ransacked by the cops during their raid. The furniture was all on its side, the cushions and papers, and everything else lying around anywhere inside this little apartment was strewn on the ground. There was broken glass all over the kitchen floor. The books, each and every one of them, were turned upside down. The doors to the refrigerator were left open, Yalla was at the pound and the cat didn’t have any food—(I ended up feeding it for him). One of the last times I saw Dov Ber, he had just shown up late to the synagogue one Saturday morning. His gentile girlfriend was sleeping in his bed, back at his apartment. He ate a piece of bread and someone made a comment to him along the lines of, ‘Aren’t you going to say a blessing on that bread?’
‘Fuck you. Shut up,’ was his response, as usual. He wasn’t good with women or authorities. He especially wasn’t good with laws. He wasn’t good in general.
An argument ensued and Dov Ber threatened to stab a member of the synagogue—or was it the shamesh?—in the neck with a fork. They tried to throw him out. At first he wouldn’t leave. The police were called, and finally he split. The police showed up after he was out of sight and took a description and wrote a report. I wondered where Dov Ber was going. I knew he wasn’t going home. Not yet. So, I went down a block, a couple of doors down, and found him seated around another Kiddush table, this time in a very small prayer space. There was a curtain in place, dividing the dining table’s men from the women. Dov Ber opened the curtain to gaze at the women on the other side and the Israeli rabbi said angrily:
‘Vut you doing?’
Dov Ber ignored him and did it again. The rabbi got up from his seat and grabbed Dov Ber’s arm, trying to move him and throw him out.
‘Don’t fucking touch me!’ said Dov Ber.
‘You must to leave now,’ said the rabbi.
‘Don’t fucking touch me!’ Dov Ber said again, as the two of them scrambled and struggled to keep their balance while swinging off of one another, dosey-doe.
I heard Dov Ber died from a mutual rabbi friend’s Facebook page; a young rabbi. I googled ‘Dov Ber Shlomchick’ and along with the various newspaper stories from his rap sheet, was an obituary. I had to ask around to get the full story of how it happened, as it wasn’t included in the obituary. It felt embarrassing asking those kinds of questions about this kind of character. Our rabbi friend told me he had a heart attack. I was completely shocked and not shocked at all—all at the same time. What brings a man like this down, all the way down, finally? The soul (‘psyche’) that is too stubborn and possibly too wicked to hit rock bottom. What was he sticking around for on Earth? To commit crimes? To torture his family? I was only surprised that the act didn’t get him. But guys like him don’t think about the act. They don’t consider it. They are too selfish to be so selfish.
Moved, I wrote something of a eulogy and—and this was a mistake—posted it to Dov Ber’s Facebook page. His sister, whom I didn't even know existed, read it and got aggressive and angry towards me. She sent me a message, wondering how I had the ‘audacity to slander a dead man, and in front of his whole family, no less.’ Of course, what I wrote was not calumnious at all, just truth, and I didn’t think that his daughters would be reading his Facebook page anytime soon. And if they did—they were getting older—didn’t they have a right to know how their father lived? Why, it might happen, that they were in foster care? His sister threatened me with violence and began to slander Dov Ber’s ex-wife, Chava. Our rabbi friend got me on the phone and told me to take down the post. At first, I refused. But upon being more belligerent, Dov Ber’s sister, that is, and prodding from the rabbi, I finally took it down. When she messaged me another round of pugnacious rhetoric, after the eulogy was removed, I blocked her from my Facebook and complained to the administrator that she was ‘threatening me’.
I recognized Dov Ber’s mental illness present in his sister too. ‘Runs in the family, I guess…’ She must have been crazy as well; perhaps not as much a troublemaker, but with definite anger management issues, and a lack of social sophistication. Like me and the act, death was mercy for Dov Ber. It was mercy for him though he might not have admitted it in his day. He naturally expired.
I also, although this is presumptuous, think that it was mercy on his children and his ex-wife. For the real tragedy was his mental illness, the things he said and did while alive must have brought everybody down. Now, in death, they were free of the fetters that bound them to his evil.
You see, if ever there was a delinquent, Dov Ber was it. But he didn’t live in physical pain. He didn’t live behind bars. He didn’t live under a cardboard box or some sheets of newspaper. He was sort of rich, or better, very privileged. I was jealous of him; at times, very much so. Not of his mind, nor his soul, not of his power, or his powerful stature, but simply (and I’m somewhat ashamed to admit it) of his material wealth; his car and apartment, despite the fact that he never had to work; above all else, his ability to create life. I was envious; I was jealous; jealous that he died at 35-years-old, without having had to commit the act.