Holocaust Survivor Brings Me Three Slices of Cheese

Again this morning I heard some shuffling in the hallway. I hoped it was Eisenberg. I cracked my door and there she was across the hall, standing in her doorway. I went over and her dentures were out and she sprayed me with wet chunks of bread.

Within a few words, it became clear I was wrong about her accent yesterday. It was German.

"Are you German?" I asked, trying not to gag from the stench spewing from her apartment.

"Yes, I'm from Kastl," she said. "We had nice parks there, nice gardens. Nice Nazis." She raised her eyebrows. The white chunks she had rained onto my legs were burning little holes in my pants.

"Nazis?" I asked. I peeked over her shoulder, amazed that four cats could make such a fetor.

"I lost 21 relatives to the Nazis," she said.

"How did you survive?"

"Luck. Just luck. Everyone loved us in our town. My mother had this personality. Viennese, we called it. Singing, dancing. My father died of pneumonia. She found another man who brought her here in '44, on the condition that he marry her when they arrived, so that's how we came here in '44. I was 14, and I said, 'I will marry him, not you.' But by the time I was 16, I was no longer interested; I said, 'I need a younger man who can dance.' He married my mother and he became my real father."

One of her tuxedo cats had walked into my apartment. "You'll never get rid of him," she said. I called him back and as I petted him, she said, "I hope it doesn't repeat. It seems every ten or twenty years, people need to hate. The Bible and the Ten Commandments and everything disappears. It happened here with the blacks."

She told me to call her Isla and reminded me that she'd worked at Saks Fifth Avenue for three decades and that we should go shopping together with her 30 percent discount.

She waved goodbye to me, though we were three feet apart. "In my language, we say, 'Shalom.' It means 'peace, happiness,' everything."

"Shalom," I said.

"And if you ever need anything, you need some sugar, just ring my buzzer," she said.

A few minutes later, my buzzer sounded, the first time in three weeks here I have heard it. It was Isla. She had a plastic lid offering three plastic-wrapped slices of cheese.

"For lunch," she said. "I need the plate back but keep the cheese for yourself."

I thanked her and took the cheese and handed her back the plate. My door was closed when I heard her voice again. I opened it, and she said, "Don't eat white bread."

"Excuse me?"

"Don't eat white bread. It's nothing, empty. There's no nutrition in it. Wheat, rye, pumpernickel, that's good."

"Shalom," I said.

The cheese sits on my table. I probably won't eat it, but I will keep it for awhile and try to find someone to give it to, and I'll remember the feast this was in other times.

The Kids Have Gone Crazy

This bachelor life is killing me. It' 1:43 a.m. and I'm too hungry to sleep. I am sitting down to a meal of the only food in the apartment: a plate of lettuce, a bowl of plain yoghurt with one dollop of blueberry jam (all-natural) and one dollop of apricot jam (all-natural), and three tofu ice cream sandwiches. And I'm excited about this meal.

I will play Scrabulous with friends flung about the country, from Kansas to California, secretly glowing from a 185-point word I threw down the other day ("shrunken").

This morning I finally resolved to call the police to tell them that someone must have died in the apartment across the hall. The smell is that bad. It floods my apartment when I open the door. You can smell it in the elevator and down the stairs. The only person to have visited me here screamed "Oh God!"

Whenever I press the buzzer to complain, there is no sign of life. But today I heard someone out in the hall, so I cracked my door open. There she was, the culprit. An 85-year-old Jewish woman with perhaps a Russian accent. She waved at me so warmly, smiling hugely, that I could not complain. Instead I went up and shook her hand.

Two of her four cats came to the door, both wearing tuxedoes, like little doormen. (How could four cats smell so incredibly bad?) I asked the woman, Eisenberg, how she was doing. "So-so," she said, then brightened at the sight of the mailman. "Now we can check our mail in five minutes."

She was like a little girl, this woman, bright and smiling. "I worked at Saks Fifth Avenue for 35 years," she said. Then she whispered, "I still get a 30 percent discount, if you need anything."

Then a woman, maybe 50, approached. Who was this, the maid? Please, someone to clean.

But it was clear from their familiarity that they were mother and daughter, though mother-daughter relationships seem to have a complexity that is beyond me.

Eisenberg was standing in the doorway, and her face turned to stone as she glared at her daughter squeezing past.

"Fuck you," said the daughter under her breath.

"Fuck you," said the mother. "Come on in, it's your apartment!"

"Yeah, my apartment," said the daughter.

Eisenberg turned back to me and smiled again: "Have a good one!"


I decided to walk down to my writers group meeting, though it was 50 blocks away. Belly full of Chinese, backpack full of poems, I was lost in thought, but that never lasts long in New York. Approaching me was a group of teenage kids sprinting. I looked for the laughter, but there was none. They circled a kid, threw him on the ground and began kicking him and punching him. His pants came down and his caramel ass was bare to the world. A girl's voice beside me said, "Why are they doing this?"

Fortunately, the punches were, shall we say, pre-female-boxing-era girl punches, and the kicks looked designed to prove a point rather than inflict pain. Still, I wondered what my role as an adult here was. I easily could have stepped in and scattered everyone, but I did nothing. I had no idea what was going on. A few more kids showed up and suddenly one group of ten kids was chasing ten other kids, and I was chasing all 20 to see what happened.

Every block or so, somebody would get thrown down on the ground, roughed up, then they'd sprint another block and it would happen to someone else. Bottles were smashing on the sidewalk. I couldn't keep straight what the sides were; there were no uniforms. Half the kids seemed to be holding guns in the fronts of their pants, but then I realized they were just holding up their baggy jeans. Some of the kids' voices hadn't even changed.

We got to Broadway, and there it happened again in front of a supermarket. This time it was two kids flinging ineffectual punches at each other on the ground, while ten or so kids surrounded them. Bottles were still smashing, though I didn't see them hit anyone. Now there were about 20 people watching from all corners of Broadway. People in a diner watched through the window. A man on his cell phone said, "I don't care what you do, just get here now. We need police. The kids have gone crazy, they're smashing bottles."

A 20-year-old guy appeared on the sidewalk beside me with a baseball bat. He and his friend discussed getting backup.

A plane passed silently, passengers oblivious to this life. I thought of Lou Reed's "Dirty Boulevard." The kid dreaming, "fly fly away."

But what has changed in me,
what longing for life born,
and when, that I no longer
see these scenes from the eyes
of the quiet kid on the sidelines
who once was me, dreading these
moments and these people
and the eternal possibility
of his own humiliation,
or even from the head
of the kid who lay bare-assed
and throttled by five
in front of all the street,
bottles smashing around him,
as in a country of strife,
before his voice had changed?

Why is the image that sticks
today the gang that won,
as they backpedaled home
to the east side, unable
to keep their feet on the ground,
bursting out of their skins
with it, exultant arms to the sky,
and why is the feeling that,
while I have experienced
a lot in this long life,
I have not felt it all,
a feeling like jealousy.

world records

It's not every day one can look in the mirror and say, "Today I broke a world record. Or at least tied one."

I got up and even before coffee started making the omelette. The oil and onions and garlic and cherry tomatoes and cheese were all ready to go. All we needed were the eggs. The first egg I slammed a little too hard against the edge of the frying pan. Somehow the entire egg slid out underneath the pan, cooking nicely around the flame, and in shock I dropped the entire shell into the pan.

See future blog post on my record of standing on one leg with eyes closed. But this is the unbreakable record I may be remembered for, highest-percentage-of-shell-in-the-pan.

This is the way it's gone this week on Bogardus Place. I was making coffee in my socks when I felt the unmistakeable slicing-through-flesh-of-the-foot feeling that can only mean one thing: glass shard. But no! When I dropped to my knees to first take off my sock and watch the blood seeping from the ball of my right foot and then find the perpetrator, I saw that it was nothing else than a grain of rice. Hardened by perhaps years of neglect by the prior occupants of this apartment, this grain of rice had lodged itself between the floorboards and formed a dagger there waiting for the unshod foot.

Is this another world record? Surely someone else out there has been cut by a grain of rice. Letters, please.

With a Little Help

There is a man who sings in the subways with the voice of an angel. Sometimes when I’m descending the stairs after midnight at 14th St. and 6th Ave., I hear the sound floating up from fifty paces down the platform. His grey hair is pulled back in a ponytail. He brings back to life the songs you’re tired of from teenage radio. “Wonderful Tonight,” except this isn’t karaoke, this is someone feeling it.

For years, I’ve wanted to talk to him, to find out how a man with a voice like that got stuck here in the bowels of the dragon, the walls of its throat dripping a green fluid with a plink plink during his pauses. His bell-like voice getting drowned by the sudden screeching of a train and the drunken Williamsburg-bound hipsters stumbling through the doors.

There are times I have to walk away from him, lest I embarrass myself with tears in a city that does its crying behind apartment walls. Last night as I approached it was “Homeward Bound,” and he sang “my love lies waiting, silently for me,” and there were probably times when that was true for him as it was for me for so long. I was in luck; the song was ending as I sat down, so I didn’t have to think about it.

A young, pretty girl sitting on the bench with her back to him reached back and handed him a buck. I’ve seen this happen before; he always tries to flirt with the girls, occasionally even ending a song prematurely to that end. But like the others, she just wanted to hear his music. There was a beaten look to his face, an unwashed look to his hair. I could never understand how what surely must have been a hard life had taken no detectably toll on this voice. Listen to him hit those high notes perfectly.

I sat beside the girl so I could hear him play. Good, a happy song. “With a Little Help from my Friends.” The girl was tapping her foot and staring at a weekly paper. An old hippie couple just descended started to dance. I knew from hearing snippets of his speech that he talked with a gruff New York accent, yet he sang like the well-born this city smiles upon.

“Do you believe in love at first sight? Yes I’m certain that it happens all the time.” Who has a voice this sweet? Lennon? Garfunkel? It could convince even girls to believe in things like love at first sight. I looked at the girl. Not bad. Yet I was too tired for games.

Usually he saves his voice with shortcuts, but here he went all out for the last note of the song. He belted out “friends” as if something was riding on it, stretching it out for ages. Finished for the night, he dropped to his knees and started counting his ones. He glanced up to see if the girl was seeing him be so mercenary, then went back to counting.

“Get home safe everybody,” he said as the Williamsburg train pulled up. I was going the other way, to 8th Avenue. The girl looked at me firmly and smiled. I tried to muster a smile back but it came out a wince.

For the first time, the singer and I were alone. We looked at each other, but no one said anything. Finally, I said, “You really nailed that last song.”

He smiled. “The worse I feel, the better I sound,” he said.

“Did you ever sing with a group?” I asked.

“Man, I’ve done everything in this business except have a hit record. I’ve seen it all, done it all.” New York accent, rec-uhd and awl. “But things are terrible now. I hate doin’ this. It’s the only way I can survive. I don’t even have a place to stay now.”

“Where do you stay?” I asked.

“Sometimes a church. Sometimes no place at all.” He stood and peered down the track. “Jump in front of a train is what I should do. End it all.”

I wanted to say something encouraging, but nothing came to mind. The rumble of my train appeared in the soundscape. I said, “With a voice like yours, you should be...” but I couldn’t think of how to finish it, and I don’t think he heard me anyway.

What can you say in parting to a gifted homeless suicidal man? “Good luck,” I said, before turning to the train door.

He looked at me and said, “It’s too bad you’re not...” and I lost the last word. Was it the name of some rich guy who would save him? Bill Gates? No, it sounded like one word. David? Who’s David? A record producer? It’s too bad I’m not who? I rode the train mulling over silly thoughts of how I might save this angel, silly thoughts I knew I would pursue.

Five Buck Cut

I was looking for my first paid haircut in a long time. For years, I had gotten free haircuts, from everyone from girlfriends to a guy named Lars in the basement of a Copenhagen commune. Newly resettled in New York with no girlfriend, it was time.

I ducked into a warehouse-looking barbershop in Williamsburg. It was filled with young men with bedhead. Ah, the perfect place for a man who doesn’t care what his hair looks like.

“How much for a haircut?” I asked.

“Well,” said a hairdresser affronted by the boldness of my question. “They start at sixty dollars,” said a hairdresser.

“Sixty!” I blurted, spinning and walking out.

So where goes a man who really doesn’t care about his hair? Someone mentioned that there are these barber academies sprinkled around the city, where you can pay $5 for a haircut from student barbers. This I had to see to believe.

I found one on West 29th Street in Chelsea. You go to a booth, like at a car service, put down your five bucks to get your name on the list, come back in 20 minutes and you’re up.

My guy was Igor, a 25-year-old from Ukraine.

“Everyone thinks you’re a queer in this line of work,” he said. He had lost any trace of a Ukrainian accent and had adopted the local hit-man patois. “But I don’t care, you know what I’m sayin’?”

He had tried some college but dropped out, much to the consternation of his parents.
I learned all this because Igor delivered the longest haircut of my life.

After 45 minutes, he was still snipping, hair by hair. I got a haircut in India on a sidewalk behind a post office that included a head massage, and it didn’t take this long. In the mountains of Morocco I got a haircut that included a very careful shave with a straight razor and a ten-minute lathering process and it didn’t take this long. Ihor wanted to get it just right.

He said he was delighted to finally be cutting straight hair, if I knew what he meant. When it wasn’t dangerous, I looked around and saw mostly black customers. “This is the first straight head I’ve cut in four weeks,” he said.

In seventh grade I was terrified of haircuts. I had one that had them yelling “Dorothy Hamill” in the hallways. After another, bangs with my ears poking out, they yelled “Damien,” the devil child from The Omen. But I just didn’t care anymore.

When Igor had finally finished, he spent several minutes showing me his work from every angle, I just didn’t care. The fact that I had paid five bucks was what I cared about. I tipped Igor 40 percent—two dollars.

But something was bothering him. He pushed me back in the chair and kept snipping a hair here, a hair there. “I don’t know,” he said. “Honestly I think you looked a lot better when you walked in here.”