The Lost Rabbi

Writer-in-Residence, that’s me. Clown-in-Captivity is more like it. I have to drink a little more booze before each creative-writing class, but that’s the way it goes: liquid stamina and I’m propped up to face success and adoration. Booze or no booze, I don’t want to go into that classroom today. I don’t want to hear another sweet-faced or clear-eyed student ask me how to write, what one has to do to become a successful writer. Write about what you fart, I said at the last class, and apologized. I apologize much too easily after I’ve been drinking. The kid just wanted to know the secret to achieving literary immortality. I knew what I had to do, but I can’t tell a classroom of innocent Canadian students to go to some foreign city they know nothing about and see how close they can come to getting themselves killed. I’ll never be able to write overly exuberant prose again like in those days. That’s good. But I’ll never feel that way either. That curiosity, eagerness, passion. Damn it, I have all the confidence and discipline a writer needs. I’ve got seven novels under my belt and a sizeable advance cheque in my wallet for my next book. Big crappy deal!

After class, if I make it through class, I should go see my two teenage children, observe their curiosity, eagerness and passion, but then I’ll have to listen to my ex-wife tell me that I drink immoderately and don’t take enough chances with my writing anymore. I need exactly one more drink to visit her ,than I require to entire my creative-writing class: an uncomplicated spiritual formula. She certainly liked when I told her how I wrote my first published story,  My dear forever lover, now former lover, fell in love with me that night, halfway, she used to tell me, through the story about my first published story. How I had wanted to be a writer in those days. And now I’m a Writer-in-Residence, Clown-in-Captivity, wanting back the passion I had when I was twenty-two and wrote my first published story. I have everything today, everything except the feelings and dreams that drove me to write in the first place, twenty-six years ago.

In those days—1965, to be exact—I had no telephone. I had no television set. I did have an abundance of insects though. I wasn’t certain if they were cockroaches or not, but I didn’t want to know. I preferred to call them my Kafka dung beetles. Next door I had a prostitute who brought her clients to her room. I could hear them as though they were right on top of me. I liked to type along with the love-making noises. I guess it beat listening to seminars on the development of nineteenth-century Canadian literature. That Kafka dung-beetle life was the one I wanted, more or less. Three months before, I had quit the graduate program in English at the University of Toronto, forfeited my scholarship without regret, and started to create my literary life south of the Canadian border. When I left for New York City my mother cried as though I were jumping headfirst into my own coffin. My father said he would help me with money whenever I needed some.

I settled into a routine in New York City quickly. Day after day I wandered among the packaged filth and purchasable gratification. I studied the street people, the shadows who could kill or rape or dissolve themselves after a lifetime of suffocation and invisibility. At night I locked myself in my room and wrote or observed the world out my window. I was afraid of the night. In New York City I learned to be afraid. On my second night in that endless city I met a beautiful woman who talked about opera with an erudition that matched any of my past professors. But she wasn’t embedded only in the intellectual: she performed imitations of the greatest sopranos on both sides of the Atlantic while we strolled up and down the streets. In Toronto I might have been embarrassed but in New York City no one knew me. I was guarding my anonymity so I could remain free. Her energy and singing and charming fearlessness seduced me, and we went to her apartment. Great student of life that I was, I kissed her for nearly fifteen minutes before I discovered my first lesson in the deceptions of the city. Hell, I knew there were transvestites in Toronto, I’d seen them parading around at night, but I was never fooled, not by a Toronto transvestite. After my discovery, the singing no longer enchanted me. I ran from the singer’s apartment, wondering how I could be so blind.

I marked that episode down to experience, after all I was in New York City to observe and learn. While my capacity for learning might be called into question, I observed with a passion. Passion was my favourite word in those days, and to me passion and writing were inseparable. I even saw a murder in New York City, or at least I heard the screams and later saw the body lying on the sidewalk. I had never seen anything so unreal, like a staged photograph in a textbook about crime. I was the third person on the scene. Soon I became trapped in the crowd and afternoon entertainment. Fortunately, I felt it when some man started to pick my pocket and slapped his hand away. Another big-city lesson: stay alert. I tried to understand the corpse, to reconstruct a life I had viewed only in death. Tray as I would, I couldn’t write a story about that murder. Or the operatic transvestite. Not that death was a subject I was afraid to tackle. The year before I had written what I considered to be a good story about my maternal grandfather’s death, but that was different. Yet even in that story, I had to admit, I dealt only with my grandfather’s uncomplaining, stoical dying in the lakeside cottage my parents had bought for his retirement. I didn’t know how to write about his concentration camp years, despite all the stories he had told me when I was a boy and couldn’t stop asking him questions. Even in New York City I was having a hard time translating my experiences into fiction. I was in love with the idea of New York City and being a writer, but something was missing. I speculated that my involvement with the ways of the city was incomplete.

Dark corridors hidden away from the sun, where the inhabitants were abandoned by the world: that was how I described the tough area I liked to wander about and had my cheap room in. God, the degenerates and losers who must have lived in my room before me. A hideout of criminals, a sanctuary for the maddened, who knows, but I had no shortage of colourful descriptions in those days. It has been my dream to live like that, not to fear squalor, removed from family and friends, answerable to no one by myself and my creativity. Why I associated creativity with squalor, I have never satisfactorily understood. My current apartment, in downtown Toronto, s spotless and everything in it fastidiously arranged and cared for.

Twenty-two years old and ensnarled in my own idealism, I vowed not to return to Canada until I had a minimum of five short stories published. I had written more than a dozen during my undergrad days but nothing I could get published. I believed that the story I had been working on since my arrival in New York City would be my big breakthrough. I had even written part of it in the restaurant a block away, which I was using as the setting for the story. As a young writer I felt that I had to submerge—or should I say, drown—myself in the atmosphere.

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