[part one] of a spontaneous encore to the 'Life of Socrates' [quartet]
I wanted to sue the Parents. Cut everything from the finalization of the divorce agreement three ways. I tried recording the session to secretly play back for a lawyer, but got caught by the doctor switching the device ‘on’ and ‘off’ and was subsequently warned that my doing so was ‘illegal’. When it was my turn to talk, I mentioned Dad’s marital infidelity and he snapped. He began cursing and hollering and stormed out of the office, cutting the session short. He angrily flew through the hall, I on his heels, trying unsuccessfully to mollify him; Mother, quietly after me. He was taking out a cigar by the time we got to the elevator, which the three of us shared.
‘Dad, I don’t have any money,’ I said calmly.
No response.
‘Dad…’
No response. My voice began to quiver.
‘Dad, can you please loan me something small?’ The elevator doors opened and we walked out in the same order as we walked in.
‘Dad…’ I was starting to break down.
‘No,’ was the (predictably) niggardly reply from Father. He was standing outside the hospital doors, struggling to light his cigar in the wind.
My crying was becoming out of control. I got on my knees and bellowed, the tears streaming down my face: ‘Father! Please!’ But I wasn’t begging him for a $100 bill or even a $20. I was begging him for something different, something more. Something he never could give me and felt that he didn’t owe me, but that I required. This was in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of Manhattan and the people walking by were stopping to stare. I was so loud with my wailing and begging, you could have heard me across the street, over the noise of the traffic. Walking, panicking over falling into homelessness again, and frustrated with my Father, and furious with my creator, I flew through the Manhattan streets. I saw a short, brunette, slightly tan complexion, in a sundress maybe bearing a floral print. She looked very familiar. Could she be? She looked just like Shoshanna (her photos online, that is). So I went up to this Jewish-looking woman and asked her, ‘Excuse me, are you Shoshanna Goldberg?’ She said, ‘yes.’ I couldn’t believe it. ‘I’m Scott, from Jdate!’ I cried in a way so as to accidentally reveal that at this time I wasn’t mentally stable at all. That is to say, my voice sounded strange in my head; it must have sounded strange to her. I leaned over to embrace her with a sweaty hug and she allowed it. This was surprising because, I noticed, she wore an engagement ring on her finger. The hug was inappropriate, must have been against the rules of her apparent—and she eventually told me for a fact—betrothal, but the surprise was so overwhelming, I couldn’t help myself.
‘Well, nice to meet you,’ I said.
‘And to you too,’ she responded.
And that was it; we parted ways, never to speak again, never to see one another. One day, a year or two later, I read in an Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz, while hanging out at the synagogue, on my cell phone, that she had graduated the program she was in, part of a small and competitive class, and landed a job as one of the rabbis at a Reconstructionist synagogue. There was a great picture of her receiving her certificate of ordination, accompanying the article. Married, ordained and actually working, her life was successful. I felt a little jealous. I was off my medication.
Back to the day of the intervention: the scene outside the hospital: Impervious, Dad never gave in. Mother didn’t give me any money either but took me to the supermarket and bought me some staples. The supermarket was in Manhattan and I traveled back to Brooklyn alone on the train that night, carrying bags of groceries. And by ‘groceries’ I mean bread, peanut butter and jelly, and maybe, maybe some orange juice. I was penniless, but I still had the apartment. When Dad had granted me amnesty for my erstwhile recalcitrance, he gifted me a gold Hebrew ‘chai’ necklace his father had gifted him. When I returned from the failed intervention and he wouldn’t loan me anything, I sold the necklace.
‘It’s old.’ I told the old Jew at the shop back in Crown Heights. ‘It was my grandfather’s.’
‘Uh-huh,’ the man was gazing into a microscope.
‘Well, I don’t care much about sentimentality. How much can I get for it?’
‘Vun hundred dallass,’ he said definitively, not looking up from his work table.
‘Are you going to sell it?’ I asked, hoping, deep down, that I’d have, down the line, a chance to reclaim the heirloom.
‘Smelt et down for ze gelt,’ he said.
I said, ‘adank’, took the crisp $100 bill and with that, went out of the store, making my way to the grocery store or restaurant, with the income, to buy supper.
One day, confused, exhausted, scared, and heart-broken, humiliated, I wandered into an open, empty synagogue way out on the outskirts of Crown Heights, across the street from the local police precinct. This is on the very short and strictly residential Malbone Street, which was once a normal-sized, functioning street, until in the early 20th century, New York City’s deadliest subway accident ever in history, created a change on Crown Heights’ street grid. I hit the ground before the ark where the Torah is kept. I lay on my side, curled up in the fetal position, bawling, the tears flowing down my cheeks; I could taste the salt on my tongue. I was making those crying noises like I couldn’t help it, and it had been many long years since I had cried this hard. I was interrupted by the sound of somebody else in the synagogue; if not a rabbi then probably the shamesh. He must have heard my crying, because he entered the sanctuary and said, ‘you can’t be in here.’ I heeded his directive, and walked out of the shul wiping my tears and doing that weird hiccup thing that usually happens to children when they are crying to an extreme. The tantrum of tears felt good. I felt like god heard me; that a holy spirit was with me. I let Hashem into my heart; I wasn’t alone, I knew it, His presence was palpable to me. Just that torrent of tears; and momentary lifelessness and listlessness.
There was a business acquaintance of Dad’s who was an Orthodox Jew. Dad introduced me to her and her daughter, noticing that I, in these days fresh from my 18-month suspended sentence spent in behavioral rehabilitation in Bridgeport, Connecticut, had shown a proclivity to Judaism; and supposing I’d get a lot out of making their acquaintance. This woman brought me to her house in Teaneck, New Jersey for the Sabbath, and I met the entire family. I socialized with her daughter. She—they, became a spiritual influence who partly inspired my moving to Israel. I emailed her—the mother, Dad’s business acquaintance—from the apartment in Crown Heights. I was seeking advice. It had been several years since we had last talked. ‘What now? Now that I have returned from Israel where her religious path has failed me?’ A bridge collapsed under the weight of a mental breakdown. In the back of my mind I knew that she had slept with my Father, and embarrassed, her daughter realized it, too. Are the Orthodox just a bunch of conscientious-objection hypocrites? Or, are they simply human? I guess it was a let down, and a loss of innocence to know that Orthodox Jews who would promulgate their religion and lifestyle to a freshly recovered secular soul, were, after all, human and not angels.
‘Can you come to Crown Heights?’ I wrote.
‘No, Scott,’ she responded as if my idea was ludicrous. ‘I’ll meet you for lunch near my office.’ As if, obviously, that would be more reasonable.
‘Where is that?’
She sent me an address in lower Manhattan.
‘So, you’re living in Crown Heights…’she said thinking aloud.
The two of us were seated outside at a kosher restaurant where she had ordered me a slice of pizza.
‘I can’t find a job and I’m out of money. Dad won’t help me.’
I slid a check I received for my writing from the magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, across the table so she could see I was trying but that it was impossible. The check was only for $100. Perhaps it was for slightly more than that. I didn’t say anything. She looked and didn’t say anything; don’t know whether she comprehended my inference. She just looked at me and said, ‘Go to Hadar HaTorah on Eastern Parkway and ask for Rabbi Brecht.’
Yeshiva Kol Yaakov Yehuda Hadar HaTorah Rabbinical Seminary is located right in the center of the Hasidic neighborhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn; about a mile’s walk from my one-bedroom, unfurnished, but affordable apartment. It was summertime when I went to the office. The man working at the desk had a white beard and large, round features carved into pallid skin. Pallid, but with a hue that suggested before he went grey, he was ginger. He wore a short-sleeved oxford of pure white and the material was blowing from the fan set on the table. He wore the standard solid black skullcap on his big old fontanel. His black hat was resting on the desk beside a small mess of papers.
‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘I’m looking for Rabbi Brecht.’
‘He’s not around.’
‘I am looking for him because a friend sent me here. I just got back from Israel and I am completely broke. I totally regret leaving and I don’t know what to do.’
‘Uh-huh. So what do you want from us?’
‘I want to learn here. I’ve learned in Israel and I want to continue my Jewish learning, at least,’ I said.
‘You can fill out an application online on the website,’ he informed me.
It was true. I wanted to learn there even though I didn’t have a black hat and beard. I also—and maybe this was salient—wanted to rebel against Father by further embracing religion which was anathema to him.
‘Can I just stick around for a few classes?’ I asked. I was dreading the endless hours I was forced to spend alone; locked out of any kind of a healthy institution.
‘I don’t see how that would be possible.’ The man’s name was Yitzhak, and was he rigid: hard and cold as stone. Like the Letter of the Law, for Christ’s sake; he was like Shylock.
‘Please…’
‘I’m really sorry. I can’t help you,’ he said.
I began to cry. Whimpering now, I said, ‘What harm will I do? Can’t you just give me a chance?’ I wasn’t embarrassed to be crying, even though, despite the scene in front of the hospital, the scene inside of the strange synagogue, this wasn’t in my nature. The emotional episode felt good. ‘Crying can only help my case,’ I thought. They were tears of fear and exhaustion, I admit that, but still things could have been worse. I thought about people who cry often, and for no good reason. When it isn’t even a symptom of any mental illness diagnosis. I wonder if it still feels good to cry, when you cry that often. I wiped the tears from my eyes and took a big wet sniff, wiped my nose with my sleeve. He looked long and hard at me. Suddenly his eyebrow slightly lifted and he looked kind and said, ‘Okay.’
‘Okay?’
‘Okay.’ He stressed the syllables as if to say, ‘Now leave before I change my mind.’ But he didn’t say that. He didn’t say anything.
I never met Rabbi Brecht. Not one-on-one. I didn’t need to; had all I wanted at Hadar HaTorah. Hours spent off the street, interesting Hebrew texts to study, people to talk to; three meals a day. One of the rabbis took a liking to me, Rabbi Worczberg, and this made all the difference. For a year, I slept in my apartment on the old, dirty couch and early in the morning, would walk the mile or so to class and do it all over. I didn’t need money. I’d just beg for my cigarette money on the Jewish side of the corner, and I smoked cheap hand-rolled tobacco. My beard grew long. I even bought a black Borsalino hat off some kid. There were two synagogues inside the seminary, the main room, where I learned and prayed the most and the ‘Persian shul’. The two rooms were adjacent. In the mornings, I went to Rabbi Worczberg’s class on the Chassidus of the Rebbe. We read it in a very simple Hebrew, I think it was translated from the original Yiddish, which was how Rabbi Goldberg taught them in the next room. (Or could it be that the last Rebbe’s Hebrew writing was that much more unsophisticated than the Alter Rebbe’s?) Shacharis, or morning prayers followed, where I’d don my tefillin which I had purchased in the Israeli town of Kfar Saba. All day, and over night, I left my tefillin on the table at the spot where I always prayed. One day, they went missing, never to turn up again. I told Rabbi Worczberg, and he lent me another pair. (Eventually, that pair too, went missing from the synagogue at 770 Eastern Parkway). After breakfast, I’d go back to Rabbi Worczberg’s classroom and we learned, for the first hour, the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides. For the second half of this class, we’d do a page of Talmud. Then we would break to review the Talmud lesson in groups or individually. Lunch happened at some point; as did Mincha—afternoon prayers. Then I went to a class with another rabbi on the Five Books of Moses. After dinner, was Maariv, or evening prayers, followed by a class in Tanya (1797)—a book of Chassidus written by the Alter Rebbe. We’d usually study more after this, reviewing some more Chassidus in small study groups into the night. On Thursday evenings, instead of Tanya, we’d have a class on the study of Moshiach, eat herring, crackers and hummus, sing songs and tell Hasidic tales. Chassidus, is like neo-kabbalistic, philosophical, and Mosaic legalese, all intertwined.
In the spring, Rabbi Worczberg invited me to accompany the school to a bungalow village in the Catskills for a summer of Torah learning. I went. One day he called me over to the screened-in porch outside his one-room bunk and said, ‘When we get back to Brooklyn, you’ll move into the dormitory.’ He stated this rather matter-of-factly. ‘Well,’ I thought to myself, ‘no argument here.’ The rest of the summer went alright except when my bunkmate reported to the rabbi that I was masturbating.
‘Were you masturbating?’ asked Rabbi Worczberg in the morning, after the daily Chassidus learning.
‘No!’ I shook my head, stomped my foot in helpless denial. I felt ashamed. I knew it was wrong: masturbating in the same room as another man; but to plead my case, my eyes were shut and I was fantasizing about sex with a naked woman; a specific naked woman. Causing myself to feel good killed the trauma of sleeping in the same room as another man, which brought me back to the painful days at the homeless shelter in Westport, where I urinated all over myself in my sleep. Looking back on it, it was a defense-mechanism. I blame it on PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder).
When the seminary returned to Brooklyn in late summer, I moved in along with them. It was the middle of the night and I was unable to sleep in my dorm room (insomnia is one of the symptoms of mania). I bought a cheap bottle of non-kosher, blackberry brandy on the corner and walked a few doors down Eastern Parkway to 770. It must have been midnight when I got there. I dozed off on one of the benches. The synagogue was mostly empty except for me, nearest to the front doors, and a group of young Israeli students, drinking vodka, singing and telling Hasidic stories—having a Farbrengen of their own. Suddenly a man barged in, lifted a large serrated blade and ran for the group of Hasidic youths. He must have not seen me because I was supine with my long coat over me like a blanket, covering my head. I paused for a moment in shock, then, I charged out the doors to where the NYPD Mobile Unit is stationed, permanently. I banged on the door.
‘He’s in there! <swallow> He’s got a knife! Help!’
There was a pause of some 20 precious seconds. The one cop who was on duty came out the door of the blue and white trailer and I rephrased:
‘There’s someone in there with a knife! He’s trying to kill us!’
The short, young, blonde-haired officer took a pistol from his holster or the desk and followed me. When we got to the steps of the synagogue, a kid was laying at the entrance, in a pool of blood. The cop glanced at him for a split second without taking any action, and rushed in the doors. When we got inside, it was clear what was happening. Now the man with the knife was on the other side of the room. A table was overturned. He had been chasing another student.
‘Drop the knife!’ The officer was pointing his pistol at the perp.
The perp halted in place, panting and staring down the barrel of the gun.
‘Drop the knife!’
Time seemed to be frozen.
‘I said drop the fucking knife! Do it now!’
I was standing next to the cop and realized I might be distracting him, so I went back out the doors to where there were now Jewish EMS workers attending to the bloody mess outside. I didn’t think the kid would make it, but I watched them rush him into the ambulance. I went back inside, and while I was still passing through the entrance I heard a gunshot. I went inside to see. The man with the knife had hit the floor. He flopped around some, then lay still. EMS workers rushed in and tried to revive him. He had been shot in the chest. The synagogue at 770 Eastern Parkway instantly became a zoo that night. All the detectives, beat cops, and Fire Department EMS workers. All the journalists obnoxiously gathered around; and the residents of Crown Heights who had heard the commotion, awoke from their slumber and came outside into the early winter night to view the scene. The Jewish victim was stabbed in the side of the neck. He survived. The perpetrator died. A detective approached me and asked if I was the one who initially called the cop. I said ‘yes’. He told me he needed to ‘round up the witnesses for statements’. I got in a police van with the Israeli students. One was covered in blood. He had been cradling his friend, the one who got stabbed, until the first-responders showed up. Before this, he was fighting off the terrorist with a desk. The kid was a hero. We got to the precinct and went upstairs to the detectives’ office. There was a translator there for the Israeli students. I was the only one who spoke fluent English. It was embarrassing, I wished I, like my Israeli partners, spoke fluent Hebrew as well, just to communicate with the young, formidable translator, called at home in the middle of the night, because he’s employed by the NYPD. I gave my statement. I went outside and took another swig of blackberry brandy. It felt good to drink in front of the police station. When the sun came up, I went to leave, and on my way out was stopped by a very young journalist, standing outside the precinct.
‘Hi,’ she said, ‘did you see what happened at 770 last night?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Can I take a statement from you for the New York Times?’ she asked.
‘You don’t work for the Times!’ I told her.
She was taken aback. She took out a laminated badge that said ‘Press: New York Times’.
‘See?’ she said, ‘I work for the Times.’
‘I don’t believe it. That thing’s fake.’ I insisted.
‘Okay,’ she shrugged, exasperated, ‘whatever.’
As I began to walk back to Hadar HaTorah it started to rain. I got wet and the conversation with the journalist stuck in my mind. I began to regret it. ‘I could have had my name in the Times,’ I thought. When I got back and told the rabbi, ‘I just got back from the police station. I saw what happened last night,’ he didn’t seem affected at all. The news trucks stayed parked on Eastern Parkway for the remainder of the day. Black Lives Matter showed up—congregated amongst the penguin suits in front of the synagogue—to protest the police killing.
I had discovered a new way to get high. I’d go for long walks alone throughout greater Crown Heights. And what I discovered is that people smoke a lot of weed in Brooklyn. The ground is always littered with leftover joints, spliffs and blunts strewn on the pavement. I put the shit to my lips and lit the stub and the one or two puffs would get me feeling instantly…spiritual. I was high. But there was a holy presence there; as if I had made an oblation. My tolerance for the drug was sensitive from the years I eschewed it, in Israel. I bought a ‘one-hitter’ or ‘bat’. This is a little metal pipe disguised as a cigarette. I’d unroll the marijuana butts and put the stuff into the bowl and smoke. This took the edge off during my second year at Hadar HaTorah. It assuaged the symptoms and other aspects of my then-untreated mental illness. Not having any money, any friends (who weren’t from the yeshiva), missing my life in Israel; missing my other past lives, incommunicado with family. I needed a drug. I was not really an alcoholic (yet, not quite a teetotaler), didn’t really have the stomach for it. Finding the stuff loose on the ground, and small quantities of it at a time, reduced the risk of getting caught. Plus, it was free. No, it was not sanitary, but it still felt safe.
One Saturday morning, I went to the Shabbat morning service for maybe a half-hour. It was Rosh Chodesh—the beginning of the month. I stuck around long enough to read the entire book of Psalms, as is the custom, and then I left. I lit a cigarette when I was out of view of the Jewish neighborhood. When you leave the shtetl, the faces change; the smells, the language, the colors; it’s like a different country. I was walking along, scanning the ground for leftover green gold, when a middle-aged Black police officer stopped me.
‘Hey you,’
‘Who, me?’ I said genuinely surprised.
‘Yeah, you. What are you doing?’ the cop asked.
‘I—I’m just going for a walk, officer.’ Static and voices played from his walkie-talkie. I immediately got nervous.
‘Alright, there. Spread your legs.’ As he said that, he kicked my feet apart. ‘Lift your arms.’ He proceeded to conduct a body search. To this day, I don’t know what gave him the right. The days of ‘Stop-and-Frisk’ in this city were over, or so I thought. Now this is ironic, because on Shabbat, you are forbidden by rabbinical law to carry anything in your pocket. This is a sub-law of the law that says it is forbidden to carry on Shabbat outside of an eruv. In Crown Heights, as is famously known to all: there is no eruv. The cop felt from my ankles up to my ass, slid out my wallet, checked it and slid it back in. The streets were crowded. People were staring. ‘Stupid Jew!’ they must have been thinking. He felt my left pocket and pulled out my lighter and pouch of tobacco. He searched it and when he was satisfied, put it back in my pocket. My right pocket had the one-hitter.
‘What is this?’ he asked, pointing to it.
I was getting more nervous, but my hope was not lost. ‘That’s just—just a tobacco pipe, officer.’
‘What are you smoking with this?’ he asked.
‘What? Well, I don’t have anything on me,’ I said in a cool panic. I was slurring my words slightly out of nervousness. I knew I didn’t answer the question directly, I was prevaricating. But no matter what, I wasn’t high, not even a little bit.
‘Is that for crack? Are you smoking crack?’ His questions were coming rapidly, too rapidly.
I said, ‘yes’. This cop was good, he used the Socratic Method on me well; must have learned it at the academy. I don’t know why I admitted to something that wasn’t even true, or why this cop was not hip enough to smell the pipe and identify it as marijuana paraphernalia. But you don’t expect a cop to be hip. I just wanted to hurry up and get on with it already, seal the deal, whatever that meant. Also, I was nervous, and when he said, ‘crack’, I thought of how I was finding weed in the cracks in the sidewalk. ‘Perhaps that’s what he meant?’
‘Put your hands behind your back.’ He snapped on big plastic cuffs, not ties like they use on protesters, mind you, but handcuffs, and did they hurt. We rode in a black, unmarked Ford. When I was being brought down to the holding cell through the precinct lobby, I heard a woman’s voice say facetiously, ‘Yeah they never do nothin’ wrong.’ I was wearing my Sabbath suit and surely she was referring to Jewish people in general. In the cell, I was joined by two or three other souls. I went to the bathroom. You have to ask the guards and they come and unlock the door. Then we were waiting to find out if we would be making it to night court. It had to do with the time of the arrest, whether we would be seeing the judge that day or the following morning. The news came in that we would not be making night court. After a few hours in the holding cell, new guards entered. The key made a loud jingle and the metal bars rattled as the door swung open, echoing against the cold stone walls. Each prisoner was handcuffed to one thick, large chain and we were led outside. It was dark now that the sun had set. A cigarette was lit by a guard and we were permitted one drag each. He just took it down the line, handing it to each man and then taking it away, handing it to the next guy. Nobody refused. We were put in a special prisoner transport van and we crossed the bridge into Manhattan. We arrived at a different police station. Or was it the basement of the courthouse? No, it was Central Booking! I had no idea what was happening. We were fingerprinted and photographed. The crowd of prisoners had quadrupled, at least, or so it seemed. This process took upwards of an hour and a half. Then we were put into another room with a glass wall. It was cold. The room was hardly big enough to accommodate all the prisoners. I tried sleeping on the ground. I had a hallucination that we were back out on the street smoking freely, strutting around with hoods on, for some reason. A guard brought in a box of sandwiches. I didn’t eat. I tried sleeping on the cold ground some more. And this is how I spent the night.
In the morning, we were awoken from our dazes and states of half sleep to file up and enter yet another cramped room. We waited for our names to be called to see the public defender. When they called my name and I went in to see her in a very small room, she shuffled some papers and said, ‘So, Krane, Scott. Cocaine paraphernalia, I see.’
‘It was for marijuana,’ I corrected her sharply.
‘What was?’
‘The pipe was for marijuana. I wasn’t smoking crack. I don’t smoke crack. I was smoking marijuana. I mean—usually, yes. But I wasn’t even smoking anything. I promise!’
‘Marijuana, you say?’
‘Yes!’
‘The pipe?’
‘That’s right. The officer didn’t even give me a chance to talk.’
‘In this event, the judge will probably toss out the case,’ she said, writing something down, then reshuffling her papers. ‘You can go.’
I went back to the room, packed wall-to-wall with tired prisoners. This time when they called your name, it was to finally see the judge. It must have only been an hour between when I spoke to the lawyer and when I made my entrance into the courtroom. There I sat, awaiting my docket to unfold. It was only about another hour before I was called to the front of the room to stand and face the judge. As the attorney had assured me, he threw the case away, under the condition that I would not get arrested for three months. The bust was frivolous. I walked out of that courtroom and through the lobby feeling like a free man. My wallet and, less importantly, pouch of tobacco was still down at the precinct with my subway pass in it, but the lady in the booth in lower Manhattan allowed me to ride the train back into Brooklyn for free. I arrived at Hadar HaTorah that morning in time for the first class of the day.