Saturday, December 29, 2007

Revolution in the Bronx

By Raanan Geberer
Originally published in "Soundings" magazine, City Island, N.Y.

For weeks, something had been building up at the Bronx High School of Science. The various organizations – the High School Student Union, the Radial Student Union, the underground newspaper crew, the moderate Vietnam Moratorium committee and the militant New Mobilization – were constantly agitated. At least once a day, someone interrupted classes, yelling, "There’s a meeting going on in the auditorium!" the majority of students, kids like myself who weren’t affiliated with anything except maybe the school yearbook, the biology club, the handball team or the lunchroom squad, waited anxiously to see what happened The leaders of the official students government were waiting too. As for the supporters of the Vietnam War, or President Nixon, they could be counted on one hand.

So when the news of Cambodia and Kent State reached the school, the organizers were ready. Someone captured the bell system and rang bells at random, interrupting classes. In front of the school, long-haired kids handed out leaflets announcing a student strike for the next day, with a meeting in the auditorium called for 3:30. And the strike wouldn’t be limited to Science either – the goal was to shut down every high school in the North Bronx.

As the day progressed, kids talked to each other. Even the most traditional kids, jocks like Astoria Steve or Washington Heights Glen, who just went to school to attend classes and went right back to their neighborhoods to play basketball at the local Y, even they were persuaded to stick around for the big meeting.

In the auditorium the crowd was overflowing, with some of the sympathetic younger teachers attending too. Underground newspapers and leaflets of every description circulated, including the High School Student Union’s "10 Non-Negotiable Demands" and the Black Student Union’s own demand. Most of the Black students were conspicuously separate, sitting in the very back of the room, chanting, "Beep Beep, Bang Bang, Ungawa, Black Power!"

"Why don’t you join us here!" yelled one of the representatives o of the Steering Committee on stage. "We don’t trust you," one of the Black student yelled back. Nevertheless, they finally agreed to join in the action.

The big day came. We met in front of the school, then marched to DeWitt Clinton, yelling, "ON STRIKE, SHUT IT DOWN!" Normally I was afraid of the tough DeWitt Clinton kids, who were known to attack Science students who ventured too close to their all-male academy. But this time the Clintonians, except for a few Irish kids who mumbled maliciously about "the faggots," greeted us enthusiastically. They yelled, "ON STRIKE, SHUT IT DOWN," and rushed out of the school. The same scene was repeated at Walton, at Evander Childs, at Columbus. Accustomed to being constantly bossed around by parents and teachers, we jammed the streets in ecstasy, not quite believing in our own power. I thought this might be a good time to talk to girls, but as always, I didn’t know how to begin. The extraordinary events still wouldn’t’ cure my shyness.

At the head of the crowed, big-breasted, red-haired Betty Feinstein was making a fiery speech about "the power structure" and how you couldn’t trust cops and reporters, even if a few happened to be nice guys. I idolized her, wrote secret songs about her, but I knew that my chances of getting involved with her were zero, even after three years of sitting in the same classes with her. She was always surrounded by that haughty Manhattan clique with their talk about the Museum of Modern Art and Fellini films and Herbert Marcuse. And for some reason, these kids were always the most radical ones in the school. Maybe because they didn’t have to worry about their parents constantly yelling about heir coming home after 10 o’clock or playing loud music; their parents were off skiing in the Alps or sitting in their box seats at Lincoln Center.

"Let’s go to the recruiting station!" The crew spread through the youthful crowed. The Army and Navy recruiting stations, on opposite sites of Fordham Road, just across form Alexander’s, had been a fixture for as long as anyone could remember. Nobody cared about them one way or the other, except for those unlucky souls who allowed themselves to be recruited. Now, however, these nondescript concrete pillboxes took on a new meaning. They were symbols of THE MILITARY, THE ESTABLISHMENT, THE STATE! People turned around and headed toward Fordham.

"I’m tired," Mario DellaFortuna, a tall kid in my English class, told me. A fellow West Bronxite, Mario was the class clown – he actually had run for treasurer on the slogan, "The Money in the School Treasury Should Give Me a Nice Trip to California."

"Wanna take a bus?" I asked. "Whoever heard of revolutionaries taking a bus?" he retorted. We both laughed.

As we walked down pastoral Pelham Parkway, Betty Feinstein yelled, "Down With Spiro and Dick!’

"What’s the matter, babe?" A Columbus greaser type piped up. "Don’t you like dick?"

"That’s a sexist remark!" she yelled, marching resolutely onward. A group toward the rear of the demonstration started chanting, "One, two , three, four, we don’t want your fucking’ war!" I winced. I considered myself part of the youth culture. But at the same time, I was too terrified of my puritanical parents to be totally comfortable with this type of language. At home, if I even said "god damn it!" to my mother, my father would grab me by the lapels and throw me across the room.

A smaller group, closer to the fore, singsonged, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win!" This, too, made m uncomfortable. Opposing U.S. government policy was one thing, openly supporting a communist movement, one that once in power would most certainly establish what Mr. Harrison in Social Studies called a "totalitarian dictatorship," was something else. The fact that I considered myself a vague type of democratic socialist always made things difficult for me in that many of those who called themselves "socialists," to my way of thinking, didn’t believe in democracy. Finally someone started yelling, "Stop the War Now" Here at last was a slogan that I, and everyone else, could support. One by one, all the marchers took up the chant, "Stop the War Now!"

At the recruiting stations the police surprisingly let us demonstrate on the plaza as long as we let the employees enter and exit unimpeded. After most of the adult passers-by ignored us in favor of whatever was on sale at Alexanders’, and the uniformed recruiters kept working at their desks, many of us became confused. The demonstration began to break up. A number of us, including Mario DellaFortuna and I, marched down to NYU’s Bronx campus, but the students there had already left to join their compatriots at the downtown campus.

Kids started walking to the subway, but I went into an old-fashioned candy store on Burnside Avenue to order a vanilla egg cream. I sat down on one of the movable stools between a cab driver going over the day’s receipts and an elderly Jewish man reading the Tug-Morgen Journal. As I waited for the egg cream, I absentmindedly spun myself around in a circle.

"Hey," the bald guy behind the counter asked the cab driver. "How do you like them demonstrators?"

"Fuhgedaboudit!" the cab driver answered. "I was stuck in my cab a half hour on the FDR Drive because of those kids. If they think Nixon and Kissinger are gonna listen to them, they must be crazy!"

"Yeah," the bald guy answered, nodding his head in agreement. "Them guys should be doin’ their homework. Hey, whaddya think about Seaver starring for the Mets against Los Angeles tomorrow. Wonder what does to the point spread?’

I felt a rush of affection for these people. As a local history buff, I felt it was extremely important to save the rapidly disappearing old ethnic neighborhoods, especially the old Jewish neighborhoods, in the Bronx and their way of life. But how could you have both this and the hippie thing too? Back at school, the radicals, most of them Jews like myself, only seemed to care about the Blacks and Puerto Ricans in the ghettoes and the oppressed peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America. They consigned everyone else to the status of oppressors. But weren’t people like the ones in this store part of the working class, too? Or did the radical leaders even know or care that people like this existed?

After the demonstrations died down, there was some talk in the newspapers that the Board of Ed would have to postpone graduation a month or more. But somehow the teachers made up the lost time, the Regents exams were given and graduations were held on schedule. Outside the Loew’s Paradise Theater, more than a thousand kids, at least the student body, wore black armbands, and I was one of them. About 10 or so members of a Maoist group wore red armbands, and a few anarchists, my goddess Betty Feinstein among them, sported some symbol I didn’t’ recognize. Mario carried a false big nose and moustache in his pocket, planning to slip it on when his name was called, but an alert teacher noticed it an confiscated it.

After thet ceremonies and speeches, the giving out of awards, none of which I or anyone I knew won, and the popping of flash bulbs, the new graduates and their families walked to the local restaurants, to Jahn’s, to Krum’s and to Deli City, where Mario and I ventured. The parents vied with each other to order to the fanciest, most expensive dishes on the menu. Then Mario cracked everyone up by saying," I think I’ll get 10 hot dogs!"

And so, I graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, confident att within 10 years marijuana would be perfectly legal, nobody would wear suits and ties to work, all required courses in high schools and colleges would be abolished, and 16-year-olds would be able to vote. I’m still waiting.

Monday, December 24, 2007

Antigua (one-act play)

By Raanan Geberer

TIME: Present
SCENE: A hospital room. There are two beds (if this is un-economical, cots will do). The two main protagonists wear hospital gowns.
CHARACTERS:
MIGUEL, Young Hispanic man, could be anywhere from 25-45. Has a can of Nutrament in his bed and a magazine. Very thin.
STEVE: Young Jewish man, same age range. Has an asthma inhaler, also a magazine.
FEMALE NURSE
SCENE BEGINS as Steve is reading his magazine, Miguel is sleeping. Miguel wakes up, drinks a little from the Nutrament. Steve takes a puff from the asthma inhaler.
MIGUEL (staring at Steve): Hey! You're new! When did you get here, man?
STEVE: They just put me here an hour ago. I was in another room, but they switched me here because the other guy was elderly, they felt he needed his own room.
MIGUEL (sighing): Yeah, it's a bitch, man. My name's Miguel.
STEVE: Mine's Steve. This is like an introduction at a summer camp!
MIGUEL (laughs): You got that right! You have asthma?
STEVE: Yeah, I had an attack three days ago--I couldn't breathe. I feel better now, but the doctors wanna keep me another day. How did you know?
MIGUEL: I saw the inhaler. My brother takes it, too. Me, I got a leg infection.
STEVE: Really?
MIGUEL: Yeah, it's not healing, and I got a big cut in my leg. I first got the infection about a month ago, and they took me to the VA hospital. Don't ever go to a VA hospital--they're bullshit. They cut my leg open because they wanted to take out the infection, they said it would heal fast. They didn't listen when I said I was HIV-positive--I used to be an IV drug user, I started using when I was in the Army and I fell in the wrong people.
STEVE: Where were you? Iraq?
MIGUEL: No, man, I was in Germany, in the early '90s. I had it good there--I was living off the base, I had a roommate, this Black tech sergeant from Louisiana, we used to par-ty! Everyone knew our apartment because that's where the party was! But anyway, back to the infection, so it wasn't healing and the pus was dripping out. I was even at my part-time job at my uncle's, he's a travel agent, man, and the pus was dripping from my leg when I was walking around the office. So I went back to that VA hospital twice, and I said, hey, I want you to put some kind of flap on top of the cut so it would heal faster, but their doctors said no. Thank God, someone told me about this hospital. Seems OK. (Takes a swig of Nutrament).
STEVE: Hey, my wife's coming over with a basket of fruit in an hour. You want some?
MIGUEL: Yeah, man, that would be really nice.
STEVE: She's bringing some soda, too.
MIGUEL: Well, you know, man, all I've been drinking is this Nutrament. They're trying to get my weight back up. I'm only 96 pounds right now!
STEVE: Oh, God.
MIGUEL: Yeah, but, I'm gonna make it. Soon as my leg heals I'm gonna try to get my old job back with the State Insurance Fund, and maybe work for my uncle on the side. He can get me great deals on travel, man! I really wanna go to Antigua! You been to Antigua!
STEVE: No, I've never been to the Caribbean. Last summer, me and my wife went to Italy--to Rome, Milan, Venice...
MIGUEL: Yeah, one of these days, I'm gonna have to get over there too! But my dream, my dream has always been going to Antigua! The sand is pure white, the water is so blue...I was born in Cuba and I can't go back there, at least for now. But I'm definitely going to Antigua! Imagine, me, on the beach, with these beautiful chicks ... Wait a minute! I gotta go to the bathroom. (Gets up with great difficulty, hobbles over to the bathroom. STEVE takes his asthma inhaler, starts reading his magazine.)
From offstage you hear MIGUEL cry "Nurse, nurse!" and the sound of a bell or buzzer. Then, a minute or two later, you see the NURSE drag Miguel back to the bed with difficulty, Miguel can hardly walk.
NURSE: Okay, Mister Ramirez. From now on, maybe you should buzz us before you go to the bathroom, so we can get someone to help you! You really should save your strength!
MIGUEL: Thanks! (NURSE exits). (To Steve): Yeah, sometimes I don't even have the strength to walk to the bathroom. Hey, you live around here?
STEVE: Yeah, I live in the co-op on West 26th Street, near 8th Avenue.
MIGUEL: I live in Brooklyn.
STEVE (excited): Hey, I'm from Brooklyn, too. Matter of fact, just before I got married, I moved back to the Bronx for two years, I lived in a two-family house on Avenue K.
MIGUEL (more excited): I just moved around there myself! Got a new apartment, Ocean Parkway and Avenue M! You're Jewish, right?
STEVE (warily): Yeah. Why?
MIGUEL: Oh, just 'cause there's a lot of Jewish people around where I am. Hey, I studied Judaism. I took a course in the Talmud! I tried to investigate all the different religions, Buddhism too! Since I been HIV-positive, I've been on a spiritual path, man!
STEVE (impressed): That's great! I took a course in the Talmud myself. You know, some of my Jewish friends thought I was a weirdo for being interested in this stuff!
MIGUEL: Well, those people aren't cool! Anyway, the apartment! When I move into a new place, I don't mess around. I stripped the floors, put on wood panels, had them sanded and waxed, cost me six hundred dollars! Got these wicker chairs, then I got these huge plants, you call them ficus trees! And I got this great couch, from Jennifer Convertibles!
STEVE: I'm not into furniture myself. My wife's always trying to get me to buy new furniture. I'd rather spend what little money I have on stuff like a new CD player, computer.
MIGUEL: Hey, I love that stuff, too! Anyway, the place I lived in before, in East Flatbush, the neighborhood was getting bad! There was this kid, I saw him hanging out in front of this garage, trying to steal cars. So I told my friend not to park his car in that garage. So I guess my friend told the wrong person, 'cause this kid, you know, he started hassling me, he asks if I'm a cop or if I'm gonna tell the cops. So I finally convince him that I'm not a cop, but I know he and his crew are watching me, because they know my sister's a cop! Who needs that shit! I'm glad I'm outta there!
STEVE coughs, takes his inhaler.
MIGUEL: Hey, man, you gotta be careful!
STEVE: Oh, it's OK! You should have seen me when I came in here! (laughs to himself).
NURSE walks in, carrying paper cup, goes over to Miguel's bed.
NURSE: Mr. Ramirez, the doctors are very concerned that your leg isn't healing fast enough. They think the infection still hasn't gone away. Tomorrow morning, we're going to put you in your own special room, and you're gonna have to be in an oxygen tent. We'll come for you in the morning. Now I gotta talk to Mr. Rothstein. (goes over to STEVE's bed). Time for your asthma medication, Mr. Rothstein (hands Steve the paper cup, Steve drinks from it, or pretends to). Okay, I'll be back at 11 o'clock! (Leaves).
MIGUEL: Hey, ain't that a bitch! You mind if I turn off the light. I better get some sleep!
STEVE: OK, as long as I leave my light on. You know, my wife's coming every minute.
MIGUEL: Sure. That's cool! Hey, I was once engaged, but she broke it off after I became HIV-positive! Hey, what are you gonna do! Listen, I hope I run into you when I get better! After this leg heals, I'm gonna start working in my uncle's travel agency again, gonna go on that trip to Antigua! It's beautiful there, man, in Antigua...
THE END

Saturday, December 22, 2007

A Vindictive GIuliani Should Not Be President

By Raanan Geberer
Originally Published in Brooklyn Eagle

“You are devoting your life to weasels! You must be mentally sick!” So said then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on his radio show to a caller who had protested the city’s decision to prohibit people to keep ferrets as house pets.
Another time, when a different caller complained that the mayor had appointed too many employees of “white-shoe law firms” to important positions, Giuliani replied, “Let me give you another point of view other than the Marxist class concept you are using.” (This columnist doesn’t believe “Marxist” is a dirty word, by the way, but that’s another story).
Much of the country as a whole is familiar with Giuliani only as the Hero of 9/11, the Time Magazine man of the year from 2001. Although there has been controversy about Giuliani’s role in responding to the 9/11 disaster, we’ll leave that alone – for the time being. Instead, we’ll examine the pre-9/11 Rudy Giuliani, meaning the Giuliani whom New Yorkers knew for most of his tenure as mayor.
And when we look at the statements he made above, and other actions of his, we’ll leave no doubt that he would be a terrible president.
Yes, Giuliani was a very good federal prosecutor, successfully taking on the Mafia and other gangsters. And yes, Giuliani was dedicated to fighting crime once he became mayor. Yes, the murder rate kept falling throughout his mayoralty. But, as Joe Conason pointed out in Salon magazine http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2007/11/16/giuliani_kerik/, crime in the city started to fall three years before Rudy took office, and indeed went on a downswing nationally, not only in New York. And also, look what happened to the guy who was actually responsible for many of these anti-crime strategies: Police Commissioner Bill Bratton.
Giuliani basically forced Bratton out of office, and at least one report said that one of the reasons is that Bratton, in his press releases, didn’t give the mayor the credit for these innovations and didn’t always start off his speeches with praise for the mayor.
Now, let’s look at the community gardens issue. Reportedly because some protesters at his second inauguration held up signs saying “Save the Community Gardens,” shortly afterward Giuliani announced a policy of selling off the city’s several hundred city-owned community gardens, which were basically empty lots where the city had allowed community groups to establish green spaces. He maintained that the city needed the spots for housing, but when critics countered that there were hundreds of other empty lots that could be used for development, he remained adamant. It took Bette Midler and her well-heeled organization to buy up about half of the gardens and save them for the neighbors’ enjoyment.
And what about then-Councilman Steve DiBrienza? Steve angered Giuliani by voting against an administration-sponsored bill on homeless shelters. So, in return, Giuliani tried to evict several non-profit agencies – including one serving the mentally ill and another for toddlers and their parents – from a city-owned building in DiBrienza’s district. The attempted failed, but the incident bore out the picture of a petty, vindictive man.
Finally, let’s not forget Giuliani’s much-remarked-upon insensitivity toward minorities. When he became mayor, he beefed up the NYPD Street Crime Unit and gave them wide powers. Many police abuses followed. When Patrick Dorismond, a security guard, was killed by an undercover police officer during a drug sting outside a Manhattan bar, what did the Giuliani administration do? They released Dorimond’s arrest record.
And last but not least, if Giuliani was so pro-police, why did he constantly fight against giving them raises?
Giuliani as president would be a disaster. He very well might respond to another 9/11 by declaring martial law, and might deliberately pick fights with rogue nations such as Iran and North Korea with disastrous results.
Once upon a time, there was another mayor who was also known for his sarcasm, his fondness for wealthy real estate developers and his insensitivity toward minorities. His name was Ed Koch. And even Koch, when he wrote a book about Giuliani, called it “Nasty Man.”
That in itself would tell you something.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Two Parties

By Raanan Geberer

One Monday morning in 1994, I got a call from Danny Klein. I was surprised but pleased. Danny was a member of an amateur rock band I had played in 15 years beforehand. Although I’d occasionally seen him at parties, I hadn’t known that he’d lived near me for the past three years until I met him on the train the week beforehand. I hoped I could become friendly with him--I felt a little out of place on Kings Highway amid the insular Orthodox Jewish families, the clannish senior citizens, and the new Russian immigrants. When I moved into the area--one of the few safe neighborhoods in Brooklyn I could afford--I took that Transit Authority's word that it was 35 minutes from lower Manhattan by subway. Too late, I learned that it was more like 65 minutes.
"Rob," he said, "some of us '70s burnouts are having a Christmas party at my apartment in Sheepshead Bay next Friday night, and you're invited. A lot of the people from Park Slope and from Manhattan are coming, too. Some interesting artistic and metaphysical types are sure to be there."
"It sounds interesting, but some guys at my job are having another party earlier that night. What time does it start?"
"It starts at 9 in the morning, but runs from until about 2 in the morning," he answered. I told him I thought I could make it. Mike and Tommy's party in Carroll Gardens would end early--they lived in a two-family house, and their landlord didn't like late-night parties. From there, I could swing down to Coney Island on the F train, cross over to the D train, and take the D up to Sheepshead Bay. "Give me the address," I inquired.
"It's at 969 Emmons Avenue, five blocks from the subway, past Captain Walter's bar, Apartment 4B. We have a terrace overlooking the bay. If you have any problems, call 889-4695. See you."
* * *
At about 8 o'clock on Friday, I arrived at Mike and Tommy's in Carroll Gardens. Mike was an ad salesman for the community newspaper chain I worked for; Tommy drove the delivery van. For the past week, Tommy had been bragging about the dishes he'd been cooking--baked ziti, meat pies, stuffed peppers, cheese sticks. And he had a full bar, too. I vowed to try to control myself, but I knew that sooner or later, I would pig out.
I rang the bell, and Mike, a perpetually nervous, balding little guy with dark hair and beady eyes, opened the door. "Rob. How the hell ya doin', babe?" "OK. Where do I put my coat?" "Inna first bedroom off the hall!" After I put my coat down on the bed, I entered the living room, which was adorned with Christmas decorations and black velvet paintings of Billy Joel, Elvis and other rock stars. Muzak-like versions of Christmas songs like "Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow" played on the CD player.
On the couch were Concetta, the education reporter, and her boyfriend; Lizette the bookkeeper and her husband; and Mike and his girlfriend Kathleen, a heavy-set nursing student he’d met at his weekend job behind the bar at O’Donnell’s. Sitting in armchairs were Tommy, clownish as always, unshaven with his big stomach hanging out of his shirt; Basil, the elderly movie and theater columnist, long rumored to be gay; and Reginald, our crime reporter and the company's only black employee. I went over to the object of my desire--the food table--and proceeded to eat.
"Hey, Tommy," I asked, "what's in those meat pies."
He shrugged his shoulders. "Beef."
"Oh, okay." I wasn't strictly kosher by any means, but at least I was trying to avoid eating pork, which wasn't easy given my gluttony. Tommy sensed my motives and started laughing.
"Oh, no, Rob's trying to be a fuckin’ Jew again! Hey, you look like Moses with that beard!"
"How do you know what Moses looked like? How do you know there was even such a person as Moses?"
"Hey, I seen the movie! `The 10 Commandments'!"
I laughed halfheartedly. I didn't want to antagonize him--it wasn't worth it. On my way back to the couch I bumped into Mike.
"Mike," I asked, trying to be as tactful as possible, "did those black velvet paintings come with the apartment?"
"Hey, whaddya talking about?" he bristled. "Those are my paintings! Doncha know I got good taste?"
I poured myself a vodka and cranberry juice and sat down next to Lizette, who was showing Concetta photos of her two kids. Soon, I found myself pouring another.
"Hey Rob," Tommy asked, burping. "Is that your third drink?"
"Second."
"Oh boy!" he laughed gleefully, rubbing his hands together. "I'm gonna get you drunk, then I'll drag you down to the basement and rape you!" Nobody paid much attention to Tommy; it was just his retrograde sense of humor.
To avoid Tommy, I turned to Mike. "Did you get an ad from Celeste Bernstein?" I asked. Celeste Bernstein was vice president of First Brooklyn Bank, and a tough person to deal with. "That f---- hoor!" he exploded. "We thought we had her for a full-page ad for six issues, then she changes her mind and buys only a quarter-page ad, for $420."
Abruptly, Mike turned the TV on and reminded everyone that it was time for the Tyson fight, something I had completely forgotten about. I wasn't a boxing fan, but I was curious to see how long Buster Mathis, whoever he was, would last against Tyson. Mathis kept Tyson at bay by keeping his head down and butting into him, but no one was really surprised when Tyson finally knocked him out in the third round. Out of growing boredom, I grabbed a can of beer.
"Let me tell you," said Reginald in his West Indian accent. "The guy for Tyson to watch is Bruno."
"Naah, naah," responded Mike, waving his hand. "Holyfield's the one they're building up to."
"I envy that fuckin’ guy Mathis," Tommy said. "He gets $700,000 just to be knocked around by Tyson for a few rounds."
"Yeah, but Tyson got $10 million!"
Mike got up and was about to put in the Christmas CD again when the girls screamed that they wanted to hear something more lively. "Chicks!" he protested. "They always got something ta' say!" But he obligingly put on Hootie and the Blowfish. Kathleen got up and started dancing, snapping her fingers. Concetta and her boyfriend kissed and cuddled on the couch.
I looked at my watch. It was 10 to 10. Time to go. I went to the bedroom and put my coat on. "Hey, babe," Mike said, "you had a few drinks. You sure you'll be OK?" "Yeah, I'll be all right," I replied. As I headed out the door, I heard Tommy yelling, "Ooh! I'm gonna drag you into the alley and molest you! I got a big sausage for you, babe!"
I may have been a little wobbly, and it was four long blocks to the subway, but you were safe in Carroll Gardens as long as you were white, preferably Italian-American. Why the neighborhood tough guys hadn't bothered Reginald, God only knew. The bitterly cold winter air made my asthma act up, and I had to use my inhaler a few times. Soon, however, I was on the F train, and on my way to Sheepshead Bay.
* * *
While the party at Mike and Tommy's was small and intimate, the one at Danny Klein's was a mob scene. Danny shared the apartment with his 14-year-old son, and it looked like separate parties were going on in almost every room. In the living room, people gyrated to a tape of the Grateful Dead. In Danny's bedroom, people sat around talking about religion, politics and anything else. In the kitchen, people were preparing an enormous pot of vegetarian stew, with lentils, mushroom, tofu and broccoli. Only Danny's son's bedroom was spared: he didn't want to risk anyone ruining his computer.
Danny, a rotund, bearded guy whose blond hair was beginning to gray, took me around and introduced me to some of the people. "That guy over there, he's a Gnostic Christian," he said, "and this one, he's a Kabbalist, he just came back from Jerusalem. And that woman sitting in the chair, she's the head of a coven of witches!" These people were a little too kooky for me, but still, I liked them--they were alive, the music was alive, their ideas were alive, unlike the scene at Mike and Tommy's.
I noticed a few people who I already knew. Chief among them were Ronni, a woman known for her crazy clothes, and Little Fox, her American Indian boyfriend. Ronni was in the living room, dancing up a storm. She wore a headband of tiny colored electric lights that flashed on and off, a long skirt of a type that I hadn't seen since I was high school in the early ‘70s, and a button saying "Reality Is a Crutch." She wasn't beautiful in the conventional sense, but something about her was very sensuous and appealing.
Seeing Ronni got me excited so, as usual, I began to look around for available women. And, as usual, there weren't any. They were either too aloof or too old or too unattractive or too neurotic. Some of these women hadn't had boyfriends in 10 years. Maybe they had gotten too used to socializing in groups; maybe they had just given up. Once again, it was food, here I come.
In the kitchen, presiding over the cooking, was Little Fox, a dark, stocky guy. "How's it going?" I asked. "If you want to help, help," he growled. "Otherwise, we got work to do!" I never liked Little Fox. A friend once told me that he was cruel to Ronni and manipulated her by some kind of mind control. A few years before, I had a couple of furtive lunch dates with Ronni where she told me of her disappointment with Little Fox, especially the fact that he refused to look for a full-time job. Nothing, however, came of these encounters.
Back in the living room, I ran into Danny again. "Joel, this is my girlfriend, Alba," he said, motioning toward a thin, aging redhead. "She's from Alaska! Alba, this is Joel. He's the managing editor of two community newspapers in Downtown Brooklyn." "Oh, wow!" she exclaimed.
I hated when people made a big deal over my job. It sounded impressive, and I did have a lot of freedom, but the job didn't pay much–my company didn't even have health insurance until two months ago. I had written a series of freelance articles for Newsday and had hoped to join their staff, but they folded their New York edition earlier in the year. The whole journalism field was hopeless. I was, however, a smashing success compared to most of the people here, many of whom worked as office temps, paralegals, sales clerks, substitute teachers–if they worked at all. Half of them had psychiatric histories. To them, however, this wasn't important--what was important was their music, their poetry, their "spiritual quest." If they were happy living in fifth-floor walk-up apartments or with their elderly parents, who was I to judge? I wished I could find people who were as creative and full of energy as them but were more successful, so that I might learn something from them. But even if I did, they might not want me. I remembered what the poet Charles Bukowski wrote: "Everywhere I went, the strong avoided me, the weak and the sick flocked to me." Looked like things were the same for me.
"Joel," Alba said, "I don't know you, but I see you're distraught, unhappy. You fall short of your goals. Isn't that true?"
"Yes," I admitted.
"Come with me to the bedroom. There's something I want to show you," she motioned.
When I was in my teens, if a guy and a girl went to the bedroom during a party, they went to " make out." But Alba clearly had something else in mind. She pointed to a small altar in the corner of the room. "We're NSA Buddhists," she said, "and when we chant, we say, `Nam yoho rengey kyo.' Try it! It's the best way!"
"I don't know," I objected. "There are many ways to reach spiritual fulfillment. What about Zen?"
"I've tried them all! One hour of chanting is worth a week of Zen! Come on! You can do it!"
"Nam yoho rengey kyo," I unenthusiastically mumbled. Then I walked back to the bedroom. The music had stopped, and in its place, everyone was listening intently to a tape of Goldie. Goldie, a recently-deceased spiritual leader, had prophesied that the New York metropolitan area would soon be engulfed by a flood. She encouraged followers to purchase land upstate--land owned by Goldie or her associates.
"I was so depressed last month that I couldn't even leave my house for a month," I heard Ronni tell a friend, "but listening to Goldie really helped me!"
I wandered back into the kitchen. Little Fox had finished cooking his stew, and I grabbed a plate and started eating. He took out his guitar and started singing:
"Friends will walk in harmony
And lovers will walk in the sun
Contentment will reign everywhere
When the Age of Light has begun!"
I winced; in its own way, this song was as bad as Mike and Tommy's black velvet paintings. Al, a tall, lanky guy who was also part of this crowd, took out his flute and started playing along. Little Fox scowled. "I don't like people playing with me unless they know my songs," he barked. "They have complicated chord changes! If you don't know it, you'll just screw it up!"
From past experience, I knew he'd be at it all night, whether people wanted to listen or not. I had an idea. I went over to Ronni in the living room and asked her to go out to the terrace. She eagerly followed. Surely, no one would follow us there in this winter weather. There, overlooking the fishing boats and seafood restaurants of Sheepshead Bay, I embraced her. I ran my hands over her body, her beautiful breasts. She smiled. Without a word, we walked back into the living room.
I thought about the irony of my life. Two parties, two completely different lifestyles, but the same Brooklyn.

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Rosalie

By Raanan Geberer
First Published in `Wings' Magazine

It was May 1974. I was on the bus coming back to New York City from the State University at Albany. As always, the ride was an excruciatingly long, boring four hours. In my three years at college, I must have taken this bus at least 40 times. Also as usual, I started looking around for someone to talk to. There were always college-age kids to talk to. There might even be a girl.
Hearing loud laughter, I looked in back of me. Three kids—a tall, long-haired guy in a Syracuse sweatshirt with movie-star looks and two tall blonde girls with tight pants and revealing T-shirts—were talking. The boy talked loudly and overconfidently over the din of the motor, and the girls smiled at him. He was talking about George Harrison and Rod Stewart. I looked at him with hostility. Why should girls admire such a loud, aggressive person and ignore a shy, nervous guy like myself without giving me a chance?, I wondered for the thousandth time. "And then I did some work as a backup pianist for Elton John," the guy said. Oh come on, I thought to myself, give me a break! Elton John is a piano player!
Reluctantly conceding that the girls were totally enthralled with the ersatz piano player, I looked around the bus for someone else. Two rows in front of me, I noticed a short, chubby, very buxom girl with long, chestnut-brown hair, a hippie-type peasant blouse and a long denim skirt. She was reading a copy of "Remembrance of Things Past." She looked shy but intense, much more my speed than the two blonde girls. I counted to three, got my courage up, left my seat, stooped over to avoid the bus's low ceiling, and moved to the seat next to her.
"Hi," I said to her, "I'm Steve, from SUNY Albany. I see you're reading `Remembrance of Things Past.' She looked up, and with a nervous expression in her eyes, said hello in a low, tentative voice. She went back to reading her book. But 5 minutes later, she introduced herself, and little by little, we got into a conversation. Her name was Rosalie Rosenberg, and was a sophomore at Plattsburgh, a year younger than me. That is, she had been a sophomore until January, when she decided to drop out for awhile and take some time off to travel. She was going to her mother's house in Long Beach, but probably would leave as soon as possible to do some more traveling.
"But you can call me: I'll probably be home by next month," she said, handing me a folded-up piece of paper with her name and two phone numbers. "The first is our regular apartment in Flushing, but the second is our summer house in Long Beach, where I'll probably be."
She smiled, and went back to her book. Soon, the bus was going over the George Washington Bridge. I got off right afterward, at the Uptown Port Authority terminal on 178th Street; Rosalie stayed on to go the main bus terminal downtown. All the way home from the terminal, I felt elated: I hadn't gone out with anyone for more than a year.
I called next week. "I'm sorry, I don't know where she is. She was here for two days and left," said a woman I assumed to be her mother, in a curt, businesslike voice and a hint of a British accent. I called again in two weeks, and received the same reply. I began to worry -- maybe she was dead. I called a third time the last week of June. And this time, Rosalie answered the phone.
"Oh, I just got in two days ago," she told me. "I was back at Plattsburgh for awhile, visiting my friend whom I haven't seen in a long time." I talked to her a little more and made a date for that Saturday at 1 o'clock. "You just take the Long Island Railroad to Long Beach—it's about six dollars and runs every half hour—and take the West End bus about 12 blocks until you reach Susquehanna Street, and we're at 88 Susquehanna. It's not the greatest part of town—we don't have much money, but mother says since we're educated, we just say we're `Temporarily without funds,'" she said with laugh.
"Oh," she added, "I work in one of those little booths at the entrance to the beach on weekday mornings during the summer, so I can get you onto the beach for free." I was deliriously happy.
A few days later, I went out to Long Beach and took the little bus. The town wasn't like any of the suburban towns where my college friends lived. A block away, on the boardwalk, I glimpsed a small amusement park with a Ferris wheel. The houses were made of stucco, like in Miami Beach. On every other block, there was a rundown old hotel that had been turned into a nursing home. As I headed west, the houses got smaller and shabbier. Here and there, they were interrupted by sandy, empty lots that seemed like extensions of the beach.
When I saw Susquehanna Street, I turned left into a row of tiny wooden one-story houses that were more like bungalows. Soon, I found number 88. It looked pretty beat up and obviously hadn't been painted in quite a few years. But a small, well-tended garden of forsythias, petunias and roses livened the scene considerably. I saw the name "Rosenberg" painted onto the door in gothic lettering.
I knocked on the door. A small, thin woman with gray hair answered. "I'm Steve Rothstein, Rosalie's friend," I mumbled, embarrassed. "Rosalie," the woman cried out, without smiling, and then vanished into the rear of the house. Through another door, Rosalie entered, smiling, wearing an all-denim outfit. "I hope you got here OK," she said. "Come, I'll give you the grand tour."
I looked about the living room. There were several dusty bookcases of dog-eared books. Most were 20th-century English and American novels. Against the far wall stood an old upright piano with several keys missing. Alongside the piano, a clarinet.
Rosalie then led me into her room. It was very tiny and Spartan--there was very little there except for Rosalie's single bed, a small bookcase containing her schoolbooks and a violin leaning against the wall. A table held an ancient portable mono record player that had a picture of two kids Lindy-hopping, the girl with a pony tail, and the words "rock and roll." Rosalie's few records were in a cardboard box nearby, and I sneaked a look. They were either classical or stuff like Joan Baez, Judy Collins or Joni Mitchell--no rock except for one Beatles album and one Wings album. "Oh, you're looking at the records," Rosalie said, giggling. "That needle hasn't been changed in 10 years!"
Rosalie told me a little about the family. She had a brother at Yale law school; he rarely spoke to or came to see Rosalie and their mother. Her mother, born in Belgium, was a music teacher. Her father, who was born in England, died in a car accident when Rosalie was 6.
"I remember how he used to call me," she said.. "He said, Ro-sie! Ro-sie!" She stared into space.
Suddenly, she became cheerful. "Okay," she said. "Let's go to the beach." We took our bags, and walked to the boardwalk.
Approaching the nearest booth, Rosalie just flashed her badge, and in we went. We changed clothes at the bathhouse. I was impressed with the cleanliness of the beach compared to the city beaches and, most of all, the gigantic waves. For the next three hours we went into the waves, lay in the sun, and talked. At the end, I even got the courage to put my arm around Rosalie, and she just smiled coyly. After we changed back into our street clothes, we took a walk on the boardwalk, hand in hand. If only those guys from school could see me now, I thought happily.
Soon, I was going out there every weekend. Usually, I returned the same day that I came, although once I slept over on a little cot in the living room. And starting the next week, we started playing around. It was easy because her mother frequently was absent for hours--she, too, worked at one of the beach entry booths. Rosalie would strip to the waist, revealing her gigantic breasts, which I loved, and her protruding stomach, which I didn't. But she wouldn't let me make love to her. As a matter of fact, she rarely let me kiss her on the lips. "I have to save something for the man I eventually love," she explained. I would have to meet one of the few girls that are still like this, I said to myself.
Once she let me lie next to her naked after I promised I wouldn't have sex with her, but it made her so nervous that we didn't repeat the experiment. Still, it was pleasant to lie next to her half-clothed on the sandy bed. And my friends back in the city thought I was screwing her, which was something. They only met her once, when I took her to a party at Angelo's house in the East Bronx. She slept over on the living room couch at my parents' Inwood apartment, but we didn't do anything because my parents were there. She got along well with my friends, although she seemed not to have any friends of her own other than the one at Plattsburgh.
I knew she didn't like rock music, but I thought she might like jazz, so I bought my Lester Young album and my Charlie Christian album one day. "Euuh!" Rosalie exclaimed when she heard them. "Listen to them, slurring those notes. I can play better than that!" Still, she liked it when I played rock or jazz on the beat-up piano. "You know, you're really a different person when you start to play," she said. "Your eyes light up...." My playing inspired Rosalie's creative urge as well. "Yesterday, I picked up my violin for the first time in four years and started playing Mozart," she said. "Mother was pleased."
Most of the time, we didn't do much but hang around the beach. There just wasn't that much to do on the West End of Long Beach. A few times, we went to one of the Italian restaurants near the railroad station. Another time, we went to an antique store a few blocks away. Rosalie's neighborhood was so bereft of commerce that there was only one food store: the "Three Neapolitan Brothers" fruit and grocery store on the next block. The noisy old refrigerator barely kept the soda cold, but the peaches were so ripe and soft.
The second week in August, Rosalie looked at me and said, "You look like someone who masturbates a lot," she said. "What?" I asked. "Yeah," she said. "You have those dark circles under your eyes, just like someone who masturbates a lot." I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing.
The next week, as we were making out, Rosalie suddenly said, "I don't really care for you." "What?" I said, surprised more than anything else. "I mean," she said, "that if I'm going to get really involved with a man, I fantasize someone from a top-rated school, like Harvard or Columbia, tall, blond, preferably not Jewish. I'm only half Jewish, you know."
I was so stunned that I couldn't find the words to reply, but from that time on, I became somewhat less keen on Rosalie, although I continued to go out there. The last weekend of the season, she said to me, "You know, mother thinks you're just using me to get to the beach." By then, there was some truth to what she said.
Soon after that, I went up back up to Albany. Rosalie had decided not to go back to Plattsburgh—she would enroll at Hunter College in Manhattan while living with her mother in their regular Flushing apartment.
I developed a case of unrequited love for another girl up at school, but I didn't completely forget Rosalie. In early October, I called her from school. She had missed some deadlines, so she ended up enrolling for only one course at Hunter and, as she put it, "Hanging out with my mother most of the time." I began to worry about her.
When I came home for Thanksgiving, I made a date to see her. We met near Hunter College. While we were walking through Midtown, she pointed to a car. "Look," she said, "this car is as big in the back as it is in the front. Are the cars in New York bigger in the back than the cars in Long Island?" Again, I was so shocked I could give no answer.
I called her again during Christmas vacation. This time, her mother answered. "I'm sorry," she said, "but Rosalie has run into some problems, and has checked into the Vanderbilt psychiatric institution and can't be disturbed. I'll tell her you called." She hung up. Six months later, I called to see if Rosalie was back. She was, but she merely mumbled something unintelligible and hung up.
* * *
It was 10 years later. I was working at two part-time newspaper jobs, trying to make ends meet. One Sunday, one of the papers, the Jewish Standard, sent me out to Long Beach to cover an event involving Russian Jews at the Long Beach YMHA. After the event ended, I decided to walk west to take a look at the Rosenberg house. I wasn't sure whether I even wanted to try and see Rosalie. Her number was no longer listed. Then again, maybe she was no longer living with her mother, maybe she had moved out, even gotten married. I didn't know if I could take her or her mother's hostility. But I was curious.
In Long Beach, signs of gentrification were everywhere. Posters advertised space in a new mini-mall on the site of the old amusement park. Co-op apartment buildings had sprouted up in two empty lots. But I still wasn't prepared for what I saw when I turned onto Susquehanna Street. The Rosenberg house was boarded up with a "For Sale" sign, and its once-tidy garden was overgrown with weeds.
Oh well, I thought, dismayed. I might as well get a Coke. I started walking toward the Three Neapolitan Brothers. But when I got there, it wasn't--a beauty salon with a pink stucco facade stood in its place.
I waved to a 14- or 15-year-old boy who was passing by. "Hey," I asked, "you know what happened to the Three Neapolitan Brothers?"
The kid turned toward me. "Where have you been?" he answered. "That burned down years ago!"

Thursday, December 13, 2007

The Old Buildings Man

By Raanan Geberer
(Formerly Published in "Wings")

He had lived in the neighborhood, on Cruger Avenue near Burke in
the Bronx, since anyone could remember. No one knew exactly how old
he was. Some said 60, some said 70. He told people he had once been
a jazz musician, and had played with Xavier Cugat's and Woody
Herman's bands, although there was no way of really knowing. The
only people who were seen entering or leaving his house were two or
three odd-looking individuals whom he called his music students.
But he did have a hobby. He was a connoisseur of the old 1920s and
1930s apartment buildings in the neighborhood. Most of the
inhabitants of this area had walked these streets for years without
ever realizing the patterns in the bricks, the stone decorations,
the lintels above the windows, the elaborately tiled floors in the
lobbies. But the Old Buildings Man knew each one by heart. Strange,
most people couldn't wait to save enough money to move out of these
buildings to the suburbs or to more prestigious neighborhoods, and
here was the Old Buildings Man, cherishing them as though they were
the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
He would often sit on the steps outside his basement apartment--which
was not in one of these glorious buildings, but in a plain-looking
three-family house built in the mid-'60s--and talk to children
passing by. New parents who moved in the neighborhood were a little
wary of him, but those who had lived here for awhile had long learned
that the Old Buildings Man was harmless.
"Look at those crazy gargoyles on the top floor!" he would tell a
group of youngsters who would pause near him on their way from
school. "Some builder must have put them there as, like, a secret
message to make sure cool people would move in! And you see that in
the back, you see that alley over there, that old faded sign for
Jacob Goldberg's Hat Store? Like, that was when all the men wore
those old felt, wide brimmed hats! Like Bogart, Cagney! What a
crazy style, Jack!"
Sometimes he talked about the names above the buildings' doorways,
names that had been initially used to attract tenants way back
when, but had soon been forgotten. "Hudson Gables! Boy, what does
that conjure up? Some far-out sailing ship, like the Vikings,
cruising up that river; oh, just a few miles west of here! And
those dudes, they're climbing up the masthead, blowin' those horns!
That's something else!"
Yes, those old buildings were his pride and joy. "You see that six-
story orange brick building over there? See those rusty old
fixtures on the roof? Well, before you had washing machines and
dryers in the basement, that's where they'd bring the clothes to
dry. Can you imagine one of those oldtime women in some kind of
funky house dress, maybe wearing curlers, going up to the roof just
like Alice in the HONEYMOONERS, and wheelin' the clothesline in,
reading some kind of movie magazine about Clark Gable or James
Cagney? Those old buildings have so much soul!" And even though the
kids had no idea what he was talking about, his enthusiasm,
something about his tone of voice, attracted them.
Years passed. The neighborhood became a little more neglected. The
man's beloved old apartment houses became rundown--front doors
jammed open, graffiti on the ground floor, mailboxes that had been
broken into, elevators that didn't work half the time. The music
students stopped coming. The children stopped talking to him. There
had been just too many incidents in the neighborhood, and their
parents told them not to talk to any older person they didn't know.
One day, a short circuit in the Old Buildings Man's ancient
electric heater caused a fire in his apartment. Almost everything
he had was destroyed. "My sheet music! My records!" he wailed. The
owner upstairs offered his sympathy, but he was secretly glad--now
he could evict the Old Buildings Man and find a new tenant who
would pay twice the rent. For the time being, the Old Buildings Man
had to move to a shelter.

When the social service agency came and went through the apartment,
they were able to salvage one thing--a yellowed photo of the Old
Buildings Man, much younger, holding a trombone and standing with
the other members of what looked like a Latin jazz band.
"Mr. Talarico, you must have some relatives somewhere?" the social
worker persisted.
"All I know is one sister out in Rockaway, and I haven't spoken to
her for 20 years! She's a pain in the ass!" the old man complained
angrily!
"Do you belong to a church?"
"Are you kidding? If I started to confess, even the priest would
throw me out!"
The social worker sighed. She had a lot of work to do. Finally, it
turned out that the old man's doctor had a cousin in Sheepshead
Bay, Brooklyn, who owned a two-family house. The previous tenant
had gotten married, and the cousin said she would be delighted to
have the Old Buildings Man as a tenant.
"Sheepshead Bay? I haven't been out there since I played a wedding
at the Manhattan Beach Jewish Center back in '63. Um...do they have
old buildings there?"
"Definitely! They have lots of old buildings there! And many senior
citizens, too!"
A few month later, on a bench outside a row of two-family houses in
Sheepshead Bay, an old man in his mid-80s was talking to two
similarly elderly Russian immigrants about a corner apartment
house:
"Dig, these details really mean something! You see that design of
a fish, right over the doorway? That's to symbolize the fact that
the building's right on the bay! Man, when these white-brick
apartment buildings were built in the '30s with those elevators and
those big lobbies and those steps going down into the living rooms,
that was the living end! I tell you..."

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Song of the Conquerors

By Raanan Geberer
(originally published on polseguera.com)

Josh glanced at his watch. It was a Rolex, one of the few relics of the comfortable life in the former United States, along with his pipe, his clarinet and his biology book, that he’d taken with him when he came to this remote corner of the world in search of a new life.
Four o' clock. It would be three more hours to go until the fighting started. At least he and his troops wouldn't have to go far to take up their positions--the enemy was right inside this old waterfront warehouse building, two flights down.
That's more or less the way things had been since the Java Convention of 2018 confined fighting to indoor locations at night. There had been just too many civilian casualties, and after thousands of years of warfare, the nations of the world just got fed up and decided to do something about it.
Now, there weren't even any nations in at least half of the world, just the two shifting alliances--the Force of Honor, our side, and the Confederacy of Twelve, their side. Unlike the nations of the 20th century, which controlled their populations through ideology, religion or nationalism, neither alliance had any ideology to speak of. Instead, they recruited members through neighborhood loyalty, village loyalty, family loyalty. Everyone knew that they made their money from the sale of drugs and of human organs for transplants.
Josh looked around the room. Sandbags had been set up around all the windows. His troops had no uniforms--some had worn the same dirty old clothes for two, three weeks. Some slept, some played cards, some listened to radios, some played with miniature computer gameboards. Zoltan and Kika slept on mats on the floor. Alan Goldberg was reading a copy of the Tibetan book of the Dead. I guess that's an appropriate choice for a man who might die at any second, Josh thought to himself.
The one thing none of the troops were doing was eating. The last rations of edible food ran out yesterday—the United Nations truck was a week late now. The same truck was supposed to take out the garbage, so the room was permeated with the sickening smell of half-eaten, rotting food.Josh's troops were from all over the place--from Hungary, Syria, Egypt, Cyprus, Greece, Sicily, the reconstituted Khazar empire in Baku. They all ended up here after the massive population shifts that took place at the end of the last war. A few even hailed from right here in Bosnia, where the whole thing started.
Oh God, he thought to himself. Caribou is pacing the floor again! "God damn it!" said Caribou, a short, stocky man who had served with Josh as an observer in Iceland a few years ago. "Those bums! Who do they think we are! I'll kill them all! God damn it!"Well, Josh thought to himself, sighing, they're my troops, and it's my responsibility to entertain them.
Josh clapped his hands. everyone looked up at him.
"Hey, everybody, I have an idea," he said. "let's play a game. This is a poetry game." Josh grabbed some pieces of paper from his notebook and started writing some words on them. "These are emotions--love, hate, disgust, despair, hatred, laughter. I'm going to put them on the floor," he said, placing each one on a different area of the floor. "Now all of you take turns. You have to close your eyes until you feel yourself landing on a piece of paper. Then you have to open your eyes and make up a short poem about that emotion. okay?" The guys and girls eagerly nodded--anything to break up the waiting.
"Okay! who wants to go first?"Caribou stepped forward immediately. After he volunteered, the ice was broken and the troops began to lighten up. Josh congratulated himself on this idea--he had once seen some neo-hippie types playing this game in Golden Gate Park.Suddenly, the mood was shattered by a knock on the door. The troops froze.
"Who is it?" yelled Bucharest Joe.
"It's Mike!," said a voice from the other end. Everybody relaxed immediately. Mike was the unit's scout, and one of its most trusted men. Josh opened the door to see Mike, a rotund, white-haired man who looked much older than his real age of 43, breathing heavily. "What's going on?" he asked with concern."There's a wounded man on the stairs between the second and third floors. He's one of them--the Confederacy of Twelve--was cleaning his gun when it happened," Mike said hastily.
"Wanna carry him back to his own lines?"
Josh thought for awhile. He looked at his watch. Still two hours to go. According to U.N. rules, they couldn't start shooting until then. However, five years of being in the forces told him that you couldn't trust anybody. But he knew that Manuel personally was an honorable man, as Shakespeare would have said, and that Manuel's troops would do what he told them to do.He turned to Josh.
"Let's go for it," he said. "But if they start shooting, we leave him there and run for it. Our lives are more important than his."
Josh was halfway to the door when Mike tried to block him. "Josh," he pleaded, "let me go. As the leader, you're too valuable. I'm a scout, remember? I know my way around."
Josh shook his head. "As the leader, I'm responsible for everything that goes on here, and it's my duty to go," he said.
"Well...OK," Mike said hesitatingly. "But I'll go with you."
They both exited the door and started descending the cinder-block stairway of this former museum building, Mike leading and Josh following. They knew every step might be their last. An asthmatic, Mike sweated and breathed heavily, and at one point had to stop to take his UN-issued marijuana inhaler. The smell of urine was everywhere. "Reminds me of Co-Op City in New York, where my grandmother used to live," Josh thought as he gazed at the generations of graffiti on the wall and the broken, long-obsolete fluorescent lights on the ceiling.Half a flight down, they saw the guy, clutching at his stomach, bleeding and groaning. Josh took the guy's arms, Mike his legs. They carried him down the stairs, blood dripping onto the floor and onto their clothes.
They reached the Confederacy's headquarters and knocked on the door. "Who's there?" a voice from the other side of the door cried out."Josh and Mike from upstairs," Josh cried out. "One of your men wounded himself cleaning his gun on the stairway. We've got him right here. Please let us in."There was a long silence. Then the door opened. Josh and Mike brought the guy in. Almost as soon as they entered, two of the Confederacy guys took the wounded man away from them and whisked him into an Ultrasonic Healing Booth at the other end of the room. In a few minutes, the machine began to emit a pink light and a soft hum. It's nice that these guys can get a hold of this new medical technology, Josh thought, bitterly remembering the painful stomach infection he had to suffer through in Iceland.
Josh and Mike looked around. The Confederate fighters, both male and female, were lounging around, listening to music, playing board games, reading, waiting for the hour of combat. In other words, the scene was more or less the same as in the Force of Honor headquarters, except for the fact that the Confederates all wore spotless, olive-green uniforms.A door opened from an inner office, and Manuel, a short, dark, man with a moustache, came out smiling, reaching to shake Josh's and Mike's hands. Manuel was a former Bolivian soccer star who had fallen into disgrace because of his involvement with a drug cartel. Then, he threw in his luck with the Confederacy of Twelve. He motioned toward the Ultrasonic Healing Booth. "He'll be all right in a day or so," he said, with only a hint of a Latin American accent, "although it may be a week before he can fight again. Won't you two come into my office?
"Without a word, Josh and Mike followed Manuel. They couldn't believe what they saw. Manuel had decorated his office with wood paneling, a glass-topped mahogany desk and plush red chairs. On the wall were portraits of the Confederacy's long-deceased founders, the Texas oilman. Bobby Lee Prescott, Russian Admiral Vladimir Roschenko, and the Imam Abdullah al-Husseini from Saudi Arabia. But what interested Mike and Josh most was a working solar-powered coffee machine, together with a tray of bread, rolls and cookies, on the desk.
"What's going on?" Mike asked with a trace of anger. "We haven't gotten any deliveries in days." "Well, you must understand," Manuel said, smiling, "We have our connections. But why don't you sit down?" He poured two cups of coffee, adding milk from a small refrigerator behind the desk. "Why don't you sit down and eat?" Josh took little sips of coffee, and carefully removed the crusts from the rolls before he bit into them. Mike gulped down the coffee and stuffed himself with bread like there was no tomorrow."
Ah," Manuel said, lighting up a cigar, "it is truly unfortunate that I would have two meet two such distinguished gentlemen as yourselves in such circumstances. After the war, I invite you both to the new, expanded Confederacy of Twelve as my guests!" He puffed away. Too bad they don’t have any pipe tobacco, Josh reflected, on guard all the while for any sudden moves.
Josh and Mike both finished. Mike wiped his mouth with his sleeve while Josh looked at his watch. "Time to go," he said to Manuel."Aha! Very well. I'll escort you to the door," said the Bolivian, getting up. "Ah, war! Even the great writers like Hemingway, Stephen Crane, Tolstoy, Remarque haven't been able to fathom it," he exclaimed as Josh and Mike exited and went back up to their own base.
Josh and Mike entered their headquarters and sat down. Josh looked at his watch. Six-thirty. Just another half hour before another night's round of fighting began. He looked around at his troops. An hour or two from now, some of them would probably be dead. Caribou was pacing back and forth again, yelling "God damn it!" Josh just let him be.
In another corner of the room, three of the guys were harmonizing a song from the last century:"
Under the boardwalk
"Down by the sea
"On a blanket with my baby
"That's where I'll be."
Ever since he had joined the Force of Honor, escaping from a hysterical, depressed wife who lost jobs, screamed and threw things constantly, Josh had constantly volunteered for the hottest spots--Iceland, Zimbabwe, Israel-Palestine, and now Bosnia, where it all began. And still, this waiting was the worst, worse than actual combat. Even if they won the battle, was that any solution? Rumor had it that the U.N. had recently approved the old railway terminal as a fighting site. And if that was the case, you could be sure Josh's company would be sent there next.
Bitterly, Josh recalled the "Song of the Conquerors" that they had taught to him in the training camp:in Berkeley:
"We are the Force of Honor,
"Conquering everything in our way,
"Our voices ring over the countryside,
"We herald a brand new day!
"What if he died? He could just imagine what his obituary would say: “He survived two years in Iceland, but he couldn’t survive three months in Bosnia.” My God! Maybe he could run away, take refuge up in the countryside. There was still time. He could even make everything up to his wife. He couldn’t believe that even now, in the year 2047, mankind hadn’t thought of another way to resolve its differences than war. The last thing he wanted to be was a war hero, to inspire other unfortunate young men and women to suffer and die in the same way.
Wait a minute! He pushed these thoughts away. He was a leader, responsible to his men and women. Besides, if he ever found his way back to San Francisco, he would be immediately shot as a traitor, since the rump United States government based in Denver wasn't very friendly to the Force of Honor.
He looked at his watch. Seven o'clock. Time to go. He breathed deeply. He called the troops over. "Okay," he said to everybody. "Me, Mike and Bucharest Joe will go halfway down the stairs. Then, when the shooting starts, everyone else follow. Tonight, I think we're gonna at least push them down to the second floor, and we hope down to the first floor! Now, are we gonna do it?" "Yeah!" Full of enthusiasm, the trio then opened the door and silently tiptoed halfway down the stairs. But for this first time since the battle began, the Confederacy fighters weren't there waiting for them. Had they, sensing defeat, vacated the building? Or was it a trap? For years, rumors had been floating around that the Confederacy was perfecting invisibility technology. Had that time finally come?
Josh turned to the other guys. "I'm going down to take a look," he said. He slinked down the stairs as quietly as possible, keeping close to the wall.
And then, 20 years spent overcoming a youthful exposure to radiation poisoning, a summer cross-country trip, three years of marriage, four years of teaching high school biology, and five years spent in exotic places throughout the world all came to an end in one second.

Monday, December 10, 2007

Pulling Mussels from the Shell

By Raanan Geberer

Walking down Boylston Street, Josh and Minerva Rothman headed to a party to hear Marvin Stippleman speak in a rare Boston appearance. Marvin Stippleman was a former radical student leader who had a spiritual revelation, became a Conservative rabbi, and sought to balance prophetic Judaism with political liberalism. He was disliked by both Orthodox Jews and secular leftists, but his magazine Vay'hi Ohr, or "Let There be Light," was read by many influential people in the academic and social work communities. He was one of Minerva's heroes. While Josh was cynical about public figures in general, he nevertheless agreed with at least 80 percent of Stippleman's ideas.
The block they were walking down possessed one aristocratic old 1920s building after another. Mysterious buildings with castle-like turrets, courtyards, ornate lobbies, giant rooms with high ceilings. Suddenly, Josh flashed on another party he had gone to on another part of Boylston Street in another old building, equally mysterious and romantic. It was, of course, one of Celeste Bernstein's parties. He had thought that after all these years, he had finally put Celeste behind him. But he couldn't help becoming swept with emotion. He started crying.
"You're crying! What's wrong?"
"Oh, nothing. The air is bad--my allergies. I should take a Benadryl later on."
They kept walking, and she took his hand because of the cold. He remembered Celeste taking his arm as they crossed the bridge, kissing every few seconds, and he cried again. He visualized going up on that ancient elevator and seeing Celeste, her father and her younger brother. He remembered making love with her in a tent on that trip to New Mexico. She had talked with him about feminism, about visiting a commune, about how she might get a new diaphragm without her father finding out. He remembered her warm smile, her beautiful red hair, the big pots of spaghetti she used to cook, the way she played with her pet dachshund, the way her father scolded her in his Hungarian accent. He even remembered the nickname she made up for him, her boyfriend: "The Leopard."
He remembered all of these things. Yet, they were hidden through a mist, through a haze of 25 years, like the relics of some long-forgotten civilization.
"Oh, look, there's Mindy's car! Maybe she could drive us home!"
"Oh, come on, Minerva! Can't we take the "T"? Surely the meeting will end before the trains stop running!"
"I keep telling you, look how infrequently the trains run at night! You just can't face that fact because you're such a transit buff! Who else would have subway maps from 20 different cities?"

Celeste had seemed so supporting and caring. When Josh went to live in the dorms at U. Mass., she wrote him long letters in which she divulged her deepest thoughts and feelings. She opened up a new world for him, so unlike the one he grew up in. In Josh's neck of the woods, if you weren't into sports, mass-market culture or making money, or if you showed any vulnerability at all, you were considered a "weirdo." Celeste took him to things that he didn't know existed, like improvisational comedy workshops, avant-garde poetry readings, political puppet theater—and was still willing to go for ice cream sodas at Bailey's.
But even then, Celeste displayed a kind of mad restlessness. She tried to coax him into having three-way sex with another girl; she wanted to run through the halls naked to "freak everybody out" on July 4; during a quarrel, she furtively arranged with a friend to screw a total stranger. Josh didn't recall exactly why he broke up with her, but it's likely that no matter what he did, her self-destructive pattern would have continued, he told himself. She got into trouble at the University of Vermont for printing a cartoon in the school newspaper showing Kissinger screwing President Ford in the ass; she changed majors frequently; she went to several colleges, eventually dropping out. She bragged about seducing her film professor, a man who had directed several well-known movies before he succumbed to alcoholism.
Josh and Celeste's occasional encounters became more and more strained--to him, it seemed like everyone who didn't agree with her extreme left-wing anarchist ideology was a "fascist pig" in her eyes. That irritated Josh--hadn't he had signed anti-Vietnam War petitions, worn a McGovern button to his high school graduation? Just because he was thinking of opening a record store, did that really make him an "exploiter" on the order of David Rockefeller? Increasingly, Celeste was becoming part of Josh's past, an old joke between him and his sister...
"Oh no! I forgot to bring the address! Well, I've been here several times before. This looks like the building. Yeah, this must be it!"
"What if it's not!"
"We'll just call, then."
"I just hope we can find a phone booth!"
When Josh was in his late twenties, Celeste invited him to her father's house for Thanksgiving, and they started dating casually again. He was ecstatic--he was sure he was going to marry her. He was so sure that he rejected the overtures of an overanxious temporary worker at the job who demanded to go to bed with him and promised that there would be no strings attached. He felt Celeste's problems would solve themselves. He still loved her, felt complete with her in a way that he didn't with anybody else. All the troubles he had with other girls seemed meaningless now.
She lived with a roommate on Chiswick Road then, near Brighton. On the second date, while they were walking down the street, she started shrieking, yelling nonsense syllables, and singing-off key at the top of her voice:
"We are in the halls of SHANGRI-LA! I am the EMPRESS! Ee-ee-ee-EE! I'm MARVELOUS! I'm TALL, I'm OFF THE WALL! Ee-ee-ee-EE! La la la, luh luh, luh..."
It reminded Josh of the time he was working at a summer job and some woman forgot to take her psychiatric medication. It frightened him--but he still loved Celeste.
On the third date, he timidly asked, in the most polite terms, whether they could spend the night together. She turned on him savagely. "How dare you ask him to sleep with you, just like that!" she screamed. "What do you think I am, a PIECE OF GARBAGE?" How could she say that to him, as if they had never had a relationship? Josh couldn't believe it. He cried and cried for days.
It was the right building. The apartment was packed; some people sat on the floor, others stood. Although this was nominally a Jewish function, there were many Christian clergymen in attendance--Josh found himself talking to a Rev. Darryl Washington from Roxbury, who was trying to organize some jazz fund-raisers for his church. Across the room, the Rev. Kim Chung Yee was conversing in a heavy Korean accent.
The room was lined with hundreds of books, serious works of literature, political science, philosophy, history, and its wall was decked with original oil paintings. Just so had been the Bernstein family's living room. Josh started crying again. Mindy, Minerva's friend with the car, came up to them.
"Hi, Minerva. What's new?"
"Oh, nothing, Josh had an argument with me here this morning because he erased one of my phone messages." She stroked my hair to reassure him that it wasn't serious.
"Josh, why are you crying?"
"My allergies are hitting me again. Must be the pollen."
Minerva suddenly flashed a wicked grin. "By the way, on the way here, he was talking about Celeste Bernstein. Can you believe it?"
"God, I haven't seen Celeste in ages," said Mindy. "The last time I saw her was in the supermarket--she lives somewhere in my neighborhood, in Brookline. She lost so much weight I thought she was anorexic! Her red hair had some gray showing! But she's still wearing those beautiful earrings, and those wonderful long skirts she made herself! Remember?"
Josh made up with Celeste a few years later, when they briefly found themselves both working for the Boston Housing Authority as management assistants. He didn't know what happened because he didn't work with her directly, but she pissed off a lot of people, both co-workers and tenants. They kept switching her from one unit to another, then fired her. Josh offered his sympathy, but she just mumbled about being the victim of a conspiracy. Over the next few years, Celeste switched jobs often. She fought with roommates and friends to such an extent that she, who used to have so many friends, now became a recluse.
After one roommate kicked her out because she was so messy, and also because she slept with the roommate's boyfriend, Celeste moved back with her father on Boylston Street. For a few months, she tried to live with her mother in North Adams, but that didn't work out either...
A third friend, Miriam Wexler, joined Josh and Minerva. "I overheard you talking about Celeste Bernstein," she said. "I know someone who knows her. She got into Scientology for a little while, but she's been away from that for a long time. She went back to school, to nursing school this time, and finished. She's been working at the same hospital for three years. She seems to have become a little more together, at least to some extent."
"Oh, I'm so glad," Mindy gushed. "Knowing Celeste Bernstein was always a trip, she used to get really furious at me for every little thing, but I never knew anyone with so much positive energy, so much of a life force, in spite of it all."
That was it! That was why she meant so much to him!
When Josh was in his mid-thirties she unexpectedly seduced him one night, and they began a new affair. What a grotesque parody of their first relationship it was! Her father had aged noticeably, had become silent and morose. Their living room, once vibrant with energy and full of interesting people, had become musty from years of neglect--to Josh, it seemed like a grave. Her father constantly yelled at her to clean up her bedroom, as if she were still 17.
Even the way Celeste initially came on to him appeared to Josh to be rehearsed, insincere. "I love you, Celeste Bernstein!" he exclaimed as he kissed her breasts, but she threw cold water on him by maintaining that romantic love was an "outdated concept"--to her, sex was merely "sensual pleasure." In the old days they had split everything; now, she insisted he pay all. She refused to even leave a tip. When they talked, it was mainly about the old days--anything else seemed pressured, contrived.
Josh wanted to marry her, but she just wanted to have children out of wedlock. He knew his conservative parents would never accept this. Indeed, his father threatened to disown him. Besides, with someone as volatile as Celeste, Josh reasoned, it would be best to have her tied down with a marriage certificate, to make sure she wouldn't run away at the first sign of any quarrel and take the kids with her. Maybe if they lived together Celeste's idea would be OK, but she refused to commit even to that.
When Josh told her some of his reservations, she became hostile, began to call him a jerk, an idiot's delight, a toad. In fifteen years, her conception of him had gone from "the artist who expresses my soul with his eyes" to a "toad."
Marvin Stippleman entered the room. He was tall, thin, soft spoken. The multicolored yarmulke he wore seemed out of place, his goatee was somewhat scraggly. But when he spoke, he emanated a kind of electricity that commanded everyone's attention--not unlike Celeste Bernstein--and everyone immediately stopped their conversation. He talked about his wife, a former Minnesota folk-rock singer, and her recent stay in the hospital. He talked about how distant the doctors were, how perfunctory the nurses were, how terrible the hospital food was. He talked about the lack of any activities for patients--no entertainment, no discussion groups, no yoga, meditation or prayer groups, no library of books or videos. He suggested that all medical students and hospital administrators be required to be play the part of patients for a week, so they could know what it's like....
Because of his devastating differences with Celeste, Josh decided to see her only once every two weekends, and maybe look for someone more compatible. Still, what he really hoped was that Celeste would change. He hoped "against all odds," as Phil Collins sang. She was like a wild horse, and he was going to tame her!
But he never did. The end for Josh Rothman and Celeste Bernstein came soon after she had another episode of wild, nonsensical shrieking and frenzied hilarity. Maybe he should have taken it as a warning, Josh would bitterly think years later. The week after her eruption, they were leaving a concert when he had an asthma attack. His acute symptoms soon went away, but he kept wheezing, having to take his inhaler every few minutes. He said as little as possible because his doctor told him not to talk in such circumstances. Josh was terrified that he would have to go to the emergency room like he had already gone a half-dozen times in the past year.
It was then that Celeste accused him of "going into hibernation," and declared that she was going home by herself. Josh couldn't believe she had so little attachment to him, so little consideration--this was worse than the "piece of garbage" episode! He finally lost his cool and started screaming: "FUCK YOU, CELESTE BERNSTEIN!"
He only saw her a few times after that, brief, uncomfortable encounters in the library, on a Green Line streetcar, at Filene's. For years, still obsessed with her and desperately hoping for a reconciliation, he sent her letters, cards, all unanswered.
Often, Josh would go over to his record player, put on old do-wopp ballads like the Dubs' "Don't Ask Me to Be Lonely," the Safaris' "Image of a Girl," the Jesters' "The Wind" and the Jive Five's "My True Story," think of Celeste, and, as the Jive Five sang, "cry, cry, cry." In view of their long-running quarrel over having children out of wedlock, it was interesting that neither Josh nor Celeste ended up having kids--in his case because Minerva was 10 years older than him. Poetic justice?
Now, Marvin Stippleman was talking about corporations. A corporation, he said, was kind of a public trust. Yet, corporations acted against the public interest when they polluted the environment, forced employees to work part-time or as temporaries without benefits, or manufactured products that were unsafe. What Stippleman was proposing was that the government review corporations' charters every 10 years or so, just like they reviewed the licenses of television stations. And irresponsible corporations could find their licenses revoked.
Abruptly, Stippleman stood up. He asked the people in the room to hold hands and join him in a nigun, a traditional, wordless Hasidic melody. He accompanied himself on an acoustic guitar
; Miriam Wexler joined in on flute. Josh found myself holding hands with Minerva on one side and the Rev. Kim Chung Yee on the other.
When they first met, Minerva would ask Josh: why did he constantly write to Celeste after the breakup, since she never responded? The answer was that he couldn't help himself. He'd walk around for days, thinking of Celeste, and then would get some new idea that he felt a burning need to express to her. Maybe this, he felt each time, would be the one thing that would move her. Every time he dropped the letter into the mailbox, he felt a sense of dread. Why she didn't have him arrested, he would never know! He called her a handful of times, but he made sure to call at times when he knew that no one would be home, then left a message. He didn't want to hear her screaming vile insults at him. That would have destroyed him totally.
Marvin Stippleman was talking again, making a joke about the old Kevin Costner movie, "A Perfect World," which Josh had seen during a brief stay in Israel years ago. A perfect world, he said, won't be here until the Messianic prophecies in the Bible are fulfilled. But until then, he continued, we are charged with trying to make this world better by good deeds and by righting injustice. In doing so, he said, we elevate ourselves to a higher level. The real sin of the men of Sodom, he said, was their inhospitality and lack of concern for the stranger, and for that they were destroyed. This concept that we can improve the world we find ourselves in and by doing so improve ourselves, he said, is what separated the ancient people of Israel from the other Mediterranean nations that surrounded them.
Listening, Josh wasn't sure he agreed with him. Didn't the ancient Greek philosophers go on and on about the ideal nation-state and how to achieve it? Anyway, what Stippleman said sounded interesting. Josh was particularly attentive to the fact that he mentioned, however briefly, the ancient Jewish concept of the Messiah. He was only half-kosher, didn't observe the Sabbath, but that was one thing he wholeheartedly believed in.
It wouldn't be until the Messianic era, Josh told himself, that Celeste Bernstein would once again be the young, beautiful and wonderful Celeste that he met so many years ago. Then, also, outdated concepts like jealousy and monogamy would be a thing of the past. That day might not come for thousands of years, and until then there was nothing he could do about it. Perhaps the purpose of this world is a challenge, to see how much as we do can given the severe limitations that are imposed on most of us.
After Stippelman's talk, someone put on a tape, and Josh heard the old Squeeze song, "Pulling Mussels from the Shell." The last time he and Minerva saw Stippleman, three years ago, the rabbi had talkedg about the ancient Kabbalistic doctrine of the shells, how the task of the holy person is to break down the "shells" of suspicion, insensitivity and hatred that cause people to commit harmful acts. Hadn't he, Josh, tried to free Celeste from her shell, to free her from her self-destructive lifestyle because he loved her? But he had failed. It must have been, he thought, because he himself was so imperfect, so full of selfish habits, of prejudices, of inconsistencies, of short-sightedness...
"Josh! Your shirt is out in the back!"
"God damn it! First you tell me my jacket has a stain on it, then you tell me I forgot to wash the dishes, then you tell me I forgot to save the phone message, then you tell me my shirt is out in the back! When will it stop?"
"But your shirt's still out in the back! You know, you remind me of my father, who was always reading his books and talking about philosophy. When my mother asked him about buying a new chair, he said he didn't want to be bothered with `mundane matters',"
"Yeah, you're right. I am a lot like that!" Josh laughed to himself.
Josh and Minerva left the apartment and took the "T" home. She began complaining about her back--she suffered from scoliosis to the extent that she wasn't able to work full-time any more.
"Listen," Josh said, "you know how you always complain that the mattress doesn't give you any support, how old it is? I'll buy a new extra-firm mattress tomorrow. That'll really help your back."
"Oh," she replied, "you're so nice." They turned off the light and went to sleep.

Sunday, December 9, 2007

The Slow Death of Dan Dinnerstein

By Raanan Geberer

I met Dan Dinnerstein at a party in 1982, when we were young, single guys in our late twenties. We had a lot in common: we were both were products of the New York State University system, we both came from the same neighborhood in the Bronx (although we hadn’t known each other there), and, at the time, we both lived in Washington Heights, me on 181st Street and Cabrini Boulevard, him at 192nd and Broadway. Soon, we started going to the Pinehurst Bar together in our spare time.
Dan was stocky and balding, wore glasses, and spoke in a high, thin voice. Years later, whenever my wife and I watched Seinfeld, one of us would always remark on how much he looked and talked like George Costanza. He had two interests: going to singles events almost endlessly in search of a possible mate, and New Age religious mysticism of every variety.
He put all his energy into both these activities. He went to all sorts of organized singles dances, discussions and dinners all over the five boroughs, eventually switching to the personals. I admired him for keeping at it, although he rarely had more than three or four dates with the same woman.
Whenever I saw Dan, he would go on and on: "When you put an ad in Newsday, you only get women from Long Island; when you put one in the New York Review of Books, you get only older women; when you put an ad in a local community weekly, you get only these dull, conventional, lower-middle-class types..."
After one of his dates rejected him, as almost all of them did sooner or later, Dan never expressed disappointment, but just dissected the situation intellectually: "Well, she’s a conventional upper-middle-class type, so she probably wants someone who makes at least $65,000 a year," or "I can tell she’s a social type, you know, plays tennis and all, so she probably wants an outgoing, upbeat person, not someone like me..." Truth be told, I was somewhat relived to hear these stories, because now I knew that there was someone who was even more unsuccessful with women than I was in those days.
At one point, Dan considered reading up on different countries so he could pretend to his prospective dates that he was well-traveled, but he never went through with it. Sometimes, he was so desperate that even after one of his would-be girlfriends turned him down, he called her phone number and hung up just to hear her voice.
Dan would also talk ad infinitum about his New Age interests. Eckankar, yoga, past lives, UFOs, meditation, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, numerology, the Bhagavad Gita, the Gnostic gospels, Edgar Cayce, Sufism – he took it all in. The only mysticism that he had little use for, it seemed, was Jewish mysticism, although he did have one or two obligatory books on the Kabbalah. Dan inevitably would drift over to his parents’ house on the High Holy Days, but the rest of the year, he belittled Judaism as being overly concerned about "the survival of the group" at the expense of intense spiritual experiences.
"Because the group was always low in number, the rabbis had to create a religion that was easily understood by 13-year-old shepherd boys," he explained. "But what I seek," he began to shout, in an uncharacteristic display of positive emotion, "is a connection to the divine, a union with the universe!"
With all his hip, trendy New Age interests, I got a kick out of the way Dan still kept up with his old Bronx buddies with whom he used to play touch football – "crude guys" (Dan’s own description) like Al the Accountant and Barry the Paramedic whose only real interests were watching sports on TV.
No conversation with Dan was complete without an amusing anecdote: "You know Al the Accountant? That crude guy who’s got a whole tape just of hockey fights? Well, I saw him last night. It seems that he went to a singles social in Fort Lee, and he tried to talk to a girl who had already rejected him three times...." He communicated with them mainly on the phone, seeing them in person only once every two or three years. Both he and they wanted to keep whatever free time they had for dates and singles events, Dan explained to me.
Dan continued in his familiar yet unhappy day-to-day routine for about 10 years. He might have done so endlessly until, one unlucky day, he injured his foot on a fence in Fort Tryon Park while trying to catch a ball that some kids had hit in his direction. A few days later, he injured his knee. Things went from bad to worse, and he began missing days at his job as an assistant manager for the city Housing Authority, a job that he’d held since his early twenties.
He manager was unsympathetic, and the Authority was preparing to hold a hearing with the intent of firing him. But Dan hired a lawyer and managed to get a disability pension from the job. Simultaneously, he started receiving Social Security disability. He was now getting two pensions, almost as much as his salary.
Unfortunately, he soon began pissing his money away-- he became as obsessed with curing himself of his injuries as he had earlier been with finding a girlfriend or finding the meaning of the universe. He went to five or six different therapists every week: an orthopedist, not one but two chiropractors, a Feldenkrais therapist, a psychic healer, a podiatrist. When a skeptical neighbor suggested his injuries might be psychosomatic, he promptly added a psychiatrist to the mix. It was all to no avail.
I remember visiting him at his tiny apartment. Not only did he limp when he walked, he wasn’t able to bend down, so he arranged an elaborate system of organizing his refrigerator. "Ron," he told me, "take the bottle of soda from the third shelf, and put it on the second shelf. Then, take the loaf of bread from the second shelf and put it on the top shelf." When his friends couldn’t come, Dan hired helpers, advertising for them on index cards he hung in the local grocery store. At least one of those helpers ripped him off.
After almost two years, a miracle happened—he got better! He didn’t have any problems walking or bending down. He never knew exactly which of the therapists had cured him, but he was happy just the same. He began to work again, although this time, it was only a part-time job in a bookstore. And he started talking computer courses at NYU with an objective of getting certified as a programmer. To celebrate all these new developments, he gave a little party and invited me, my wife, Al the Accountant, Barry the Paramedic, and a woman he’d met at his chiropractor’s office and who lived nearby.
That woman, Anna Kleinman, soon became his girlfriend, the first real girlfriend he’d had since his twenties. Anna was a tall, somewhat overweight, conservatively-dressed former schoolteacher who sang in a folk group. A few years older than him, she was a fellow veteran of the singles dance circuit. The fact that Anna was receiving a kind of disability other than the one he had – she was receiving psychiatric disability – didn’t bother him. Soon, they started seeing each other several times a week.
She even got Dan, whose tastes ran to classical and New Age music, to go to events given by her folk-music club at the Ethical Culture Society up in Riverdale. Only my wife struck a note of warning – she had a friend who knew Anna, and who told her that Anna had tried to commit suicide twice.
Sure enough, Dan and Anna’s affair came to a tragic end when Anna finally killed herself by jumping off her roof. It was obvious that Dan wasn’t the cause – after all, hadn’t she tried this before? Still, he became despondent. He received his computer programming certification, but aside from a temporary job with the city, was unable to find a position as a programmer.
He blamed the job market: "Things are so tight now that the companies won’t hire novice programmers, they just keep raiding each other for experienced programmers." He found another girlfriend, Tina, a secretary who lived with her parents in Sheepshead Bay – a perfect example of the "dull, conventional, lower-middle-class women" he used to complain about. That lasted only four months.
On top of it all, he re-injured himself when he accidentally banged his foot against the bathroom wall. Soon, his back, knee and leg pain returned. This time, there was no cure. His podiatrist told him that he would have to have a costly operation.
When I met him in a nearby restaurant, he finally let his guard down, speaking in a monotone and staring at the floor. "It’s all karma from past lifetimes," Dan said, near tears. "Sometimes the pain is so intense, I don’t know how I can go on much longer." He stopped taking care of his apartment, and the one time my wife and I came to see him together during this period, he had papers and magazines piled up almost to the ceiling. A mouse ran across the floor, and he didn’t even notice.
After 9/11, he announced that he wasn’t leaving his house unless it was absolutely necessary. He ordered takeout food from restaurants, and once again hired neighborhood youths to do errands such as going to the mailbox, shopping and taking out the trash. His brother up in Syracuse became alarmed, came down to see him and talked him into seeing his shrink again. It didn’t help.
I can’t say I was surprised when I got a call at work one Wednesday morning two years later. "Hello," a voice said at the other end of the phone, "Is this Ron Rothstein?"
"Yes…"
"This is Rabbi Golden, the Jewish chaplain at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. We found your name in Dan Dinnerstein’s address book. We’ve been unable to contact his brother so far…"
"Is he, um..?"
"Yes, he’s deceased. We’d like to come down and identify the body."
I hopped on the subway and rushed to the hospital, and it was definitely Dan. Rabbi Golden told me that, like Anna, Dan had jumped off the roof. Perhaps, inspired by her, he had wanted the two of them to be reunited. He’d actually survived for a few hours, but then suffered a massive heart attack and died. In the background, I heard a nurse talking to Dan’s brother on the phone. It was ironic that Dan had spent his final hours in the company of a rabbi rather than a Buddhist monk, a Sufi mystic or a psychic healer.
Dan’s possessions consisted of a few broken-down pieces of furniture; an eight-year-old laptop, which was immediately claimed by his brother; a video player; a CD/cassette player; a TV that barely worked; and hundreds of New Age, books, tapes, magazines and CDs, most of which were soon thrown in the trash by the building superintendent.
Well, Dan, I thought, you’ve finally achieved your goals: A connection to the divine, and a union with the universe.

Also published on the "Mister Beller's Neighborhood" web site.