[part two] of a spontaneous encore to the 'Life of Socrates' [quartet]
Afraid now of the hot streets, I began doing my getting-high-routine in my bedroom at the yeshiva. Blowing the smoke out the hole in the wall by the head of the bed where a window replacement or perhaps air conditioning unit had once been torn from its place. One night as I was smoking, a knock came at the door. I didn’t respond; pretended to be away. I knew they smelled the weed. I hadn’t even bothered to put a towel underneath the door to prevent the smoke from getting out. But I was in freefall. I didn’t care. Next day, Yitzhak called me to his office and told me I had ‘until the first of May to vacate the premises’. The bottom had finally dropped out. And I had no one but myself to blame. Or I could have blamed it on society’s ridiculous standards; or my then-recent diagnosis of ‘bipolar’. Whatever it was, it meant I was homeless again.
I couldn’t—I wouldn’t call Mother. I didn’t panic, I had about a month left at the seminary and I spent it going to classes and not worrying about the near future—impending doom. When May rolled around with its Cherry Blossoms outside the windows of the study hall, I stashed my suitcase of clothes underneath the dormitory stairwell, took my shoulder bag with my laptop and leather-bound journal to the bench and began to write a third-person, fictionalized memoir (I called it Life of Socrates and published some of it in serial form, occasionally, to my blog in the online newspaper, Times of Israel.) I was going to classes at the yeshiva even after I was evicted from the dormitory. Then, when the summer came and they were headed off to the Catskills (‘The Borscht Belt’), one of the young students whom I had scored weed for, left the stash with me. I had a whole eighth of an ounce of fresh cannabis to smoke there on the bench, while I wrote the text in less than a week, which came to over 100 pages. I got an email from Mother: ‘Yitzhak says you were smoking pot.’ I didn’t respond. How did she even know who Yitzhak was?
When I ate, I took my two daily meals in the basement dining room of a different yeshiva and spent my nights inside the synagogue at 770 Eastern Parkway, where the action had happened months prior. Where the lights are always on and the door is never locked; where if you show up on time in the morning, and really all day long, you can have a free cup of coffee or tea; where the Lubavitcher Rebbe and his father-in-law once presided. Sometimes in the morning, a large Israeli rabbi with a black beard would slam his hand down on the wooden bench beside my head and shout at me to wake up. ‘Vake up! Theez is not bedvroom!’ I spent my days begging for tzedakah on the steps of the synagogue where many beggars loiter and I usually did quite well.