CHAPTER 4

MY MAN

ONE DAY IN LATE summer before ninth grade, my father came into my bedroom. He proclaimed that I would attend the yeshiva around the corner. This announcement traveled from well beyond left field, far outside of the stadium.

I liked my public school. I had friends. We weren’t religious. I hadn’t had a bar mitzvah. We ate bacon every Saturday morning. Attending Jewish parochial school lay nowhere on my horizon.

“Why?” I asked my father, appalled.

“The Rebbe told me I should send you,” he said.

“The Rebbe?” I mused.

“The Kobliner Rebbe, Reb Dovid Schmeltzer, the greatest spiritual leader of our time. I attend his classes for Jewish mailmen Tuesday afternoons after I finish my mail route. A bunch of us from all over Brooklyn meet at the Kobliner Center. He’s terrific.”

“That’s why you’ve been coming home late on Tuesdays?”

“Yes. He’s brilliant. He brings us to the light.”

“Light? What light?” I surmised this had nothing to do with AC or DC current or bulb wattage.

“The Light, Nicky,” he said, and I could hear the capital L. “The Light God placed in the world on the first day of Creation, the light our foggy minds cannot see without help.”

Now, understand, my father practiced a respectable trade. His livelihood put food on the table, paid the mortgage, and enabled much else. But nothing in his work or background suggested the hint of an interest in spiritual matters. That he took this class stunned me. My father, a man who spent his days walking the neighborhoods delivering bills, love letters, and unwanted adverts, had become a religious fanatic. I became the first victim of his fanaticism.

As if he read my mind, he added, “Don’t worry, Nicky. I haven’t become some nutjob and entered into a cult, God forbid. I just heard from some of the guys that he did this, the Rebbe, teaching Jewish mailmen. He runs a class for Jewish cops, too.”

I must have looked skeptical—my father going to Hebrew school for grownups. He said, “When Uncle Teddie died last year, it hurt the family bad. Ted and I were real close. You know that.”

My mother’s brother, Teddie Hurvitz, died in a car accident on the Long Island Expressway. Sixty years old with a wife and two sons. His death devastated everyone.

“It bored a hole inside me and I wanted to know.”

“Know what, Dad?”

“I don’t know. Why did something like that happened to such a good man? Something like that.”

“And the Rebbe talks about this stuff?”

“And more.”

Just before he came into my room, I had been sitting at my desk meditating on my newly discovered primary interest in life—whether girls liked me. One in particular. I had my eye on Priscilla Liebowitz, on her wire-rimmed glasses, her long, straight, auburn hair and a new pair of breasts she had mysteriously grown that summer. This interest led to a growing curiosity in erections, one of which I’d been entertaining the moment my father came to speak with me. Fortunately, he knocked.

“Dad,” I said, trying to absorb this news and my father’s desire I go to a yeshiva. “I miss him too. Really. But this is not a good idea.”

Do they have girls in yeshiva? Do yeshiva girls have breasts?

“The Rebbe guessed you’d say that.”

This Rebbe had never seen Priscilla, with or without her breasts.

My father sat on my bed and leaned toward me. “He understands. Very insightful, this rebbe.”

Insightful as a stone.

With a keen look in his eye I’d never observed, my father said, “You don’t know the half of it, Nicky.”

Neither do you, Dad, I thought, the wilting beneath my boxers now complete. I glanced at my pants, making certain I had pulled up my zipper. “Before this is over, I suspect I’m going to know the whole of it,” I said.

My libido rebelled at this decision. I’ll flee to Philly and live with my mother’s cousin. Priscilla could come with me.

“The Rebbe told me you needed to study the Torah.”

The Torah? Yes, I’d heard of the Torah. What Jew living in Brooklyn hadn’t?

“Okay, then. Buy me one of them and I’ll read it if that’ll make you happy, Dad. Can’t be any harder than Huckleberry Finn.”

“It’s not that simple. Believe me, I’ve seen how deep and wide the Torah is.”

“So, then you go to yeshiva, and I’ll deliver the mail.”

Perhaps Priscilla’s house was on his route.

“Nicky, I’ve decided. You have to go.”

And so, I wilted. As did my erection.

On the first day of eighth grade, I joined my new classmates at the Yeshiva of Midwood for lunch. The room hummed with noise and commotion as friends who hadn’t seen one another all summer had their first free moment to catch up and chatter, replete with tales of discovered sexuality.

I was wretched. Everyone else was in sync with the knowledge and rituals of Orthodox Judaism. The boys’ yarmulkes were knitted by their moms or grandmas with their names embroidered on them in Hebrew and sat just right on their heads, held down by metal clips. My black cloth beanie, stolen years before from a synagogue, kept sliding down my head and into my eyes or onto the floor. All the boys sported tsitsit, ritual fringes emerging from a garment boys wore. They’d all mastered Hebrew slang and jargon. I knew shalom.

I sat alone at a table that seated eight, staring morosely at my peanut butter sandwich, praying for invisibility, and straightaway realized no one saw me anyway. I had no old friends to boast to about how I pawed this breast or touched that crotch in the woods at camp that summer. No one acknowledged my existence. I received not even a token nod of recognition that I, too, walked planet Earth.

I wished an alien from a very distant world would pull me out of there with a magic beam and take me far away for them to learn about the tragic life of an earthling teenager.

Amid this dark fantasy, a tall, pudgy and clunky guy wearing an enormous bright-blue yarmulke with a white Star of David on it dropped his ass next to me. He clutched a green sack as big as a garbage bag and wore a smile so radiant you could have roasted chicken on it.

“Bet you’re new here, too, aren’t you?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I answered. “How’d you know?”

“Jesus Christ, man, it’s written all over your face.”

I looked at him. “I feel like crap,” I said. “I’m a complete stranger here. I don’t know a word of Hebrew. I have no idea what the hell the rabbis are talking about. What am I doing here? I’d rather be on my way to Mars.”

He gave me that smile again. “That’s a lot of don’ts, man.” He paused and scanned the room imperiously. In that one gesture, he declared his invulnerability to teenage angst. He pulled his chair closer to me. In a conspiratorial whisper, he said something unforgettable.

“Look, I’m about to teach you something that’ll change your life.” He paused, took a breath, leaned closer still. “Here it is. Fuck it, man, just fuck it. That’s all. Just fuck it. It’s all trash. All of it.”

“All of what?” I asked.

“It, man, it. All of it.” As I absorbed this wisdom, he reached into that lunch bag and withdrew a thick sandwich. He unwrapped it and gobbled each half down in four mammoth bites in what seemed like seconds. I looked at his lunch.

He was ingesting a ham and cheese on rye.

The chutzpah, the astonishing nerve he showed by bringing that treyf, that unkosher, meal, within the walls of a yeshiva cafeteria, to eat it in the presence of the other students and our teachers—this was staggering. I nodded in shock and admiration at this gesture of rebellion against the heavens so powerful that I had to catch my breath, as I am sure did the angels above.

My man.

I heaved my peanut butter sandwich into a garbage pail. “You got another one of those?” I asked. And damned if he didn’t produce another ham and cheese out of his bag just as big and treyf as the other. He slid it my way.

“Go to town, man,” he said. And I devoured that sandwich like a starving man just rescued from a desert island.

He pulled out a third one, unwrapped it and took a bite in the middle. In the midst of decimating it, he ceased chewing and looked me in the eye. With a mouth filled with food and mustard on his cheeks, he said, “Oh yeah, name’s Shmulie Shimmer.” And he offered me a hand thick as a gorilla’s.

“Nicky,” I said, attempting to crush his hand in return.

We hung together for the rest of the day, the rest of the year, and the rest of our time at the Yeshiva of Midwood, five academic years. We were inseparable until just before graduation. Then our relationship ceased forever.