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.”

Eclipse

A word of advice for the next lunar eclipse. If you’re a straight man, steer clear of Fort Tryon park as a viewing station. The gay men there have no interest in astronomy.

But if you do find yourself in these North Manhattan cliffs for the eclipse of 2010, don’t approach all the men standing around with, “Hey! You guys here for the lunar eclipse?”

Better to ignore them.

As soon as I entered the park, a man was moving toward me in slow motion, his gaze into my eyes unblinking, though it was 20 degrees. I stared back at him, of course, assuming I had a friend in astronomy.

“Did you hear about the moon?” I asked, smiling.

“What?” he said. His eyes had moistened at the contact, his body softening like butter.

I pointed at the full moon over the brick high-rises.

“Oh jes,” he said. “Ees very niice.” He gave it a cursory glance before looking back into my eyes.

I kept on up the path. There weren’t many lights. Branches grazed my forehead like fingers. Every 30 steps another gay, standing sentinel.

When I stopped to stare at the moon through a gap in the trees, two of them would post up on either side of me, separated by some 50 yards, so that I wondered if they were in cahoots.

I tried to lose myself in what our ancestors a million years ago must have thought when their moon disappeared, but it was impossible. Instead I thought: Are there signals? Is my right knee leaning on this cold stone wall a signal? Nothing against homosexuals—all my best friends are black Jewish gays—and fine for them to have signals, but what if one of them posted on the Internet the signal we pointy-headed straighters can give to let them know they’re wasting their time and harassing our imagination? Say, dancing from foot to foot like baboons.

One of them perched himself three steps away, waiting for a signal. Is this how women feel? I took off down the hill. Back on my block, I found a woman standing between two cars gazing at the sky.

“How bout it?” I said.

“Yes, I am crazy about the moon,” she said. “I watched the last one three years ago in the park.”

Her name was Nuria (“sounds like nudie, no clothes,” she said). I had lived there two days; she, 40 years, back when it was Jews and “what you call it, them with the clover leaf?”

“Irish.”

“Yeah, them, the Irish. The Jews thought we was too loud so they took off. The Irish left. Now it’s just us and the Mexicans.” By us she meant Dominicans. “Look at all the trash on the street. Used to be none of that.”

The earth’s shadow had taken a bite of half the moon now. “Oh my god, I’m calling Santo Domingo.” She went to the concrete ledge of her garden apartment and picked up her portable. “Nine cents a minute,” she said.

She said into the phone in Spanish, “I’m standing here with my friend, an American. The whole neighborhood is out watching it. Yeah, an American.”

But really it was only about five or ten people, led by a man who must have been the mayor. He knew everyone. He was shouting to old women and hugging gangsta-looking dudes in 8-ball jackets. Probably no one except Nuria would have known there was an eclipse had the mayor not stopped every passerby, in car or on foot, and pointed to the sky.

The moon was down to a thin wedge. The mayor, who must have been pushing 60, started howling like a wolf.

“Oh my god, it’s about to go!” he called.

“It looks like a banana!” yelled Nuria.

The mayor screamed, “Money, money, give me lots of money!”

“You’re supposed to make a wish,” Nuria explained to me.

“What’s your wish?” I asked.

“Good health. I mean, what’s a million dollars if you don’t have your health?”

“The world’s going to end!” the mayor screamed. “This is when the Indians were going crazy and the cavemen were like (he did a crazy dance and yelled hoo hoo hoo), painting on the fucking walls and shit.”

The mayor was standing in the street near us working his cell phone.

“Are you calling the moon?” I asked.

He cackled that deep guttoral laugh of the islands. “I’m calling Jesus Christ.” A passing boy of 12 heard that and smiled.

The mayor closed his phone and screamed to the sky, “Give us poor people something. Get me outta heeyaaaa!”

He ran 20 steps up the street to a group of three young guys in puffy jackets, the kind of kids who look like thugs till you talk to them.

Nuria lived alone with her 10-year-old grandson, who smiled at me through the window.

“I want him to see it,” she said. “He’ll have to answer questions tomorrow in school. This’ll be on the front page. Let me get a picture.” She took a picture with her cell phone, but the moon was too far away.

“Why doesn’t he come out to see it?” I asked.

“He watchin through the kitchen window.”

Nuria called out to one of the mayor’s posse, a fat guy in a huge puffy blue jacket. “Is that Raymond? No.” She couldn’t see because of the hood. “Oh my god, Raymond?”

He came down to greet her. She did this with several kids throughout the eclipse, as if she hadn’t seen them since they were children growing up with her own. “They used to spend the night at our place,” she told me later.

“Raymond, I heard you got pneumonia. When did you get out of the hospital? Are you all right?”

“I’m feeling better,” he said, an educated voice. “I lost 25 pounds. I was trying to sleep, but I couldn’t with all his yelling.”

“Who is that guy, the mayor?” I asked.

“He thinks he’s the mayor,” said Raymond. “I said, ‘If you’re the mayor what are you going to do about all that trash?’ I had to call the sanitation department the other day.”

“But you feeling better baby?” Nuria asked.

Another kid, Raymond’s age, 21 or so, came up and greeted Nuria with a hug and nodded at me with a smile.

“Yeah, Look at my pants. And I got thermals on, and they’re still baggy, so you know I lost some weight.”

“Why don’t you just stop eating that junk food?” asked the other guy.

“Yeah, stop eating that Chinese food you love,” said Nuria.

“I can’t stop eating Chinese food,” Raymond said.

“So you’re just going to wait till you get sick again?” the kid asked.

“Basically,” he said.

The kid went back up the street to the mayor, who was prancing across the street, leaping from one foot to the other. “I’m gay, I’m gay, and I’m happy about it!”

“Everybody got pneumonia,” Nuria told Raymond. “My friend’s co-worker just died at 31 years old.”

“31? Mm,” said Raymond. “And Marlon Brando’s son just died of pneumonia at 49.”

“The one who shot the uh, the crazy one?” asked Nuria.

“Yeah.”

“Man, everyone’s getting pneumonia,” she said. “Something weird is going on. You better get some rest Raymond.” He left.

The curtain that had just closed over the moon was now re-opening from the same side.

“I thought it was going to be from the other side!” I shouted.

“That’s how it was last time,” Nuria said, “from the other side.”

“Did someone make a mistake?”

“Something weird is going on,” she said again.

The moon was half unveiled again, but now it was multicolored. I thought I saw red, green and blue in there.

“Look at those colors on the moon,” I said. “That’s crazy.”

“Yeah, it’s different colors,” she said.

“What colors do you see?” I asked.

“I see red,” she said.

“And green?”

“And green.”

Prison is Scrabulous

When I was a child, I liked bread and butter. I liked it so much that when I got word that that was the staple of prison life, I told my mother I would like to spend the rest of my days in prison.

Now I have a new reason to want prison. (Please hold the butt-sex letters.) My new Scrabble partner is Luis, my upstairs neighbor who spent ten years in the pen playing Scrabble every day. He memorized the Scrabble dictionary and last night threw down TIMINGS on me for 80 points.

I'm not really dreaming up pathways to the brig. (I had a good chance last night with the undercover cops rounding up men on the corner and tossing them into an unmarked black van. The white officer was actually singing, "Let my people go." I went up to him and said, "What's going on here?" He averted his eyes, which I could tell from his tone was an eyeroll: "Police investigation, sir." It would have been so easy to join my neighbors in the van for a couple months of Scrabble. "I'm a member of this community and I demand to know what's going on here. What is it, drugs? Violence? Theft? Harmless prostitution?")

But having seen the way Luis memorized the Scrabble dictionary, I am searching my memory for concrete, measurable things I've learned in the past ten years. Let's see, I've honed some journalistic skills, learned the names of the members of the Hartford, Vt., school board, mastered the budget process in several small towns, familiarized myself with trucking laws and...my mind's drawing a blank. I haven't memorized a dictionary.

I should point out that Luis paid no attention to the meanings of the words he memorized. Every time he puts down a word I've never seen, I ask, "What's that mean?"

He shrugs. "I ain't too good on what they mean. But I know all of 'em."

Luis comes up to about my chin. His whole arm is the length of my forearm. There's a tattoo of a flower on his shoulder. I have no idea what he did, but to get a decade it had to be pretty bad. "Whatever it is, I know he didn't do it," jokes my roommate Claudia, who knows Luis's wife. But he's gentle as can be. His wife, double his size, punched him into unconsciousness once. "I wasn't talking to Booboo, I was talking to Pookie," he said during our game today, referring to his toddler and puppy, respectively, his voice like a child's.

"Quaige, what the fuck is that?" I say.

"I dunno," he said. "But it's in there." By "there" he means the phantom dictionary that hovers near our board. We don't have one because his kids disappeared it, but I've challenged him enough to know he's always right.

I tried to put down "tu," thinking of French, perhaps, and assuming most two-letter combos that vaguely sound like words are.

"That's no good," he said. "Ta, to, ut, nu, those are good, but T-U, that's no good."

He's kind enough to explain what's good and what's not instead of issuing a challenge that would lose me a turn. Sometimes when I'm stuck he asks to see my tiles and suddenly a word springs out of nothing.

In the kitchen his wife and three daughters (some of them steps) are cooking a lasagna. His wife's voice booms through the neighborhood. "What the fuck you doin' you little bitch-ho, you wanna smack?!" she yells at her seven-year-old. There seems to be an understanding in the house that she's walking the line between joking and not-joking, but everyone watches her carefully for the difference.

"Hey, watch your mouth in there!" I yell from the living room floor. There's a silence, then some female giggling from the kitchen. We don't know each other that well, but they know me well enough to have me down as a "loco."

"Damn, she got some pipes," I tell Luis.

He nods firmly, repeatedly, relieved someone has finally noticed.

Two daughters, a seven and a nine, periodically sit on the floor watching the game, taking a break from peeling potatoes. They and their little brother keep begging me to play Wii with them, but I tell them I have to concentrate. "I'm learning from the master," I say.

Today was my day, thanks to a lucky draw of letters, including all four S's.

"Go down and tell Claudia you stomped Luis's ass," he said. "She won't believe it."