The Lost Rabbi

In the restaurant there was one long counter. I’d say forty or forty-five feet in length, with worn and creaking revolving stools , the vinyl seats discoloured and ripped by the aimless rotating of misshapen asses. An early working title for that story had been “Misshapen Asses,” but I had discarded it. I liked to sit on the last stool, where I could have the best view of the activity in the restaurant. It was a favourite haunt for alkies and junkies and those with not such firm purpose in life. It would have been easy to set an episode of The Twilight Zone in that restaurant, and I considered it a gold mine for my imagination to dwell in. Flies roamed the air, often landing to consume a crumb or some spilled liquid. Sometimes the flies strolled along the counter as though it was their leisurely day in the countryside. Only a few of the more finicky customers bothered to chase them away. An odd-looking waiter-cook-philosopher occasionally went the entire length of the counter with a wet cloth to keep things clean, but he always managed to leave the surface messier. The waiter could catch flies in midair, though, a talent that did provide a certain amusement. In the story I was working on, I had the waiter put the flies into a large jar he kept by the coffee maker. In those days, I sometimes leaned toward the grotesque or surreal in my writing, but that’s how I saw that indecipherable world when I was twenty-two. It was up to me, I believed, to make my world convincing and exciting for readers. In the story I called the waiter the Brazen Fly-Catcher. Everyone in the story had a nickname. Nicknames and disguises and aliases, I found them so irresistible back then. This must be the prototype for all the eateries in Hell, I wrote in my notebook, at first taken by the vivid image, then crossing it out. I had to learn to be more disciplined as a writer.

“What ya want to poison yerself on t’day?” the waiter asked me, proudly displaying a face that had taken too many punches. He claimed to have been a boxer when he was younger and liked to tell me that he had defeated more than his share of niggers. I never heard him make that odious boast with any blacks around.

I replied to the waiter shyly—I was hardly as outgoing or witty in person as I was in my mind—“Cheeseburger with the works, please. And a cup of coffee with double cream and a little sugar.”

“Cream and sugar in front of yer nose, buddy,” the waiter said with a gruffness that I discovered wasn’t unusual in this neighbourhood. He clapped an unwary fly into oblivion and tossed it to the floor. “Pay when served,” he told me.

I had gone through the same scene at least ten times before. A strange formality always surrounded the ordering of my food. Rituals, I had come to realize, were indispensable for mental survival in New York City. It was as if the waiter forgot me from visit to visit. In a couple of minutes a slab of meat that inconclusively resembled a hamburger was placed before me on a plate that looked like it had been washed in grease. Beautiful. Bring on the still-life artists, I thought. The coffee looked forbidding, but I paid my bill and began eating my lunch, trying not to look at what I was ingesting. I imagined I was eating one of my mother’s cheeseburgers deluxe, served with lots of vegetables and love, as she was fond of saying. I hadn’t been eating well lately, but I believed it was good for my writing. I wouldn’t have minded a mild, curable case of TB if I could have been guaranteed it would have made me a good writer.

Between cautious bites of cheeseburger and hesitant sips of coffee I jotted down in my notebook descriptions of what I was observing, tinkering with a line here and there. I wanted the physical setting to be recorded precisely. Verisimilitude was a word I adored in those days, along with the word passion. My imagination, I trusted, would fill in the rest. I had been able to complete a hundred-page notebook every two or three weeks in New York City. If I could only get some stories published—one story!—everything would be worth it.

While I was writing, travelling through my world of verisimilitude, passion and imagination, an old man, his face wrinkled into disfigurement, only a few countable grey hairs left on his heat, sat down next to me and ordered a cup of tea and some crackers, pay when served. He placed a copy of the Jewish Daily Forward on the counter and I recalled how my grandfather used to read that newspaper to me, telling me time and again that the best Yiddish writers wrote for the Forward.

The old man started mumbling to himself, causing me to turn my head in his direction every so often. I had seen this old man before but had never sat this close to him. Interspersed within the senile rambling and foreign phrases were some distinct English words describing a small town in Poland before the Second World War began. I started to think that the old man might just make an intriguing secondary character in my story, with some imaginative additions. Maybe I would make him an old rabbi who had drifted into an inhospitable America. I could have a humorous flashback scene set on Ellis Island with the old man trying to communicate with a drunken immigration official. For my story, I decided to call the old man next to me the Lost Rabbi.

Just before I was ready to get up from my stool and embark on my daily literary wandering, four teenagers walked into the restaurant together. You didn’t need to be a trained police detective to see they were looking for trouble. “Paskudnyaks,” my grandfather would have called them right away: “filthy bums” would have been my father’s comment.

The four teenagers strutted back and forth along the length of the counter, inspecting the customers. The old man, my newly named Lost Rabbi, called out the word “meshuggeners” as two of the teenagers passed him. All four came to where the old man was sitting and stood around him, a prolonged menace in their stances.

“Hi, ugly man,” the tallest of the boys said, snapping his fingers as he slowly uttered each word. “What’s cookin’, ugly man?”

Two of the other boys, one wearing orange-rimmed sunglasses and the other with a thick, flower-shaped scar n his cheek, began whistling in the old man’s ears as the tall one continued his abusive monologue. The fourth boy, a cast on his right arm, looked around the restaurant and sneered at customers as if he were auditioning for the scariest role in a vampire movie. His teeth, I noticed, looked like they belonged to someone well into decrepitude. I couldn’t understand what was happening but I was too frightened to move or investigate. This was not the window in my room through which I could observe the worst depravity and not feel threatened. At the counter, I sat staring into my empty cup and listening to what was going on next to me. I would write in my notebook later. I wasn’t sure if this would be part of my current story or a new one. The juxtaposition of the swaggering punks and the shrivelled old man seemed to have the makings of a gripping little piece on its own. I thought of a title for the story even before I had a worked-out plot or outline: “City Burials.” Titles always came easily to me.

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