[part three] of a spontaneous encore to the 'Life of Socrates' [quartet]
…and hands each one a paper tab of acid. I took mine in ecstatic gratitude; ecstatic, especially, when about 20 minutes after placing the paper on my tongue, I began to feel the effect. I began to trip. I was so happy! Being homeless was pushed out of my mind and I was having a good old time. Aaron told us to get together and he led the way, the small group of young, tripping Hasidic Jews through the streets to the synagogue, where they were celebrating something or another, or so it seemed under the influence of the psychedelic and I could have sworn we marched right up to him and had a one-on-one with the Rebbe. The ghost of the Rebbe, that is. On the way home, I was seeing the ghosts of religious families, slaughtered in the war, machine-gunned by Nazis, young families. But no, they weren’t actually ghosts. They were robots, Israeli robots, based on Jews who once really lived in Poland, or White Russia.
But I didn’t spend every night at Aaron Ackerbary’s. In fact, most nights, being homeless in Crown Heights, I spent sleeping on the benches inside and outside in the courtyard of 770. I felt more innocent this way; more innocent, but not more holy. Drugs were holy, after all, to me. But the synagogue was the more innocent of my two options for spending the nights (which weren’t actually legal options, just where I had to end up, actually getting tossed-out all the time).
One Saturday night, I drank too much green apple-flavored vodka at a young rabbi friend’s and smoked something that I was warned was ‘not pot’. The intoxication was delayed, but came on as powerful as a freight train. I stumbled home to the synagogue at two a.m., crying aloud my delusions and when I made it inside, I had to vomit. It came out violently, all over the toilet seat and floor. I passed out on the dirty bathroom tiles in a puddle of my own filth. Next thing I know, I’m in an ambulance. I was unconscious for the rest of the night and I awoke in the morning on a bed in the emergency room, in agony. The acute pain of severe nausea is not a laughing matter! I was gagging myself with two fingers and dry heaving, but I couldn’t make the nausea go away. The nurse came in, dressed in red scrubs and she looked serious.
‘Where do you live?’ she asked.
‘At the synagogue,’ I replied in a surreptitiously furtive way, not wanting to divulge anything about Aaron the drug dealer.
‘You’ve got to leave,’ she stated, without a hint of mercy in her voice.
‘I don’t know how to get home.’
‘Ask the cops on your way out. Now, leave, or I’m getting security.’
‘Isn’t there something you can do for the nausea?’
‘Go home and get some rest.’
‘I don’t have a home.’
‘Get!’ She looked down at her paging device, turned on her heels, and left the bedside, leaving the curtain open behind her.
I tried sniffing my way back home through the still-unfamiliar streets of vast and ancient Brooklyn. I was wobbling, zigzagging, still partially intoxicated, grasping my stomach, hunched over in pain. The people moved away from me as I made my way down the sidewalk. They looked at me like I was a pathetic junkie. Perhaps I was. Finally, I made it to a Dunkin’ Donuts where I went into the bathroom and slept on the dirty floor, thankfully without any interruptions, until the nausea subsided. When I felt strong enough, I ordered a coffee, like I always take it at Dunkin’—cream and sugar, and the hot liquid felt good in my stomach.
Some weeks later, I had gone some 72 hours without any sleep. My mind was in pain and it was early on Friday morning. The village was getting ready for Shabbat. I took a couple of Tylenol PMs and washed it down with a little airline-size bottle of whiskey. I went to the mikvah to wash up before my chemically-induced slumber and slumber came over me too soon! I passed out naked; floating, thankfully face-up, in the very warm, almost hot water. The first man to come down the stairs found me and pulled me out of the bath. They called the paramedics and I was rushed, unconscious again, to the hospital. This time I was awoken by a pretty young woman in a pantsuit. I was back in the emergency room, this time in a different hospital. She handed me a clipboard and spoke kindly. She convinced me to sign the form on the clipboard, committing me to the psychiatric ward. On my third day on the ward, Mother came to visit, all the way from Arizona. I sent her away and shouted, ‘You’re not my mother!’ I was having delusions that indeed she was a stepmother and that Dad had killed my birth mom. Placed her on her knees, blindfolded, hands tied behind her back, shot in the back of the head, execution style, an honor killing—in memory of Nam, now die like Charlie! My birth mom, you see, was none other than the legendary singer from the Jefferson Airplane, Grace Slick. And now she was dead, dead, dead. Mother came back the next day for another try at a reunion, and this time reality had set in. We played Monopoly and I won. When I was released from my first stint in a psychiatric ward, I flew with Mother back to Arizona where I stayed for about a third of a year. I discovered, around this time, that I had lost all the hair in the center of my head. Like my grandfathers before me, I was finally bald. Was it the stress of having no job, no woman and nowhere even to live?
That was the second time I was homeless. The first time culminated in me being sent away to detention for 18 months. When I was unreachable and my parents were out of ideas, the court had a plan for me. Both times, I was drowning in my undiagnosed mental illness. Substance abuse, yes. I only needed to hit rock bottom to get some kind of privileges back.