by Amy Sohn
Though my first few shifts solitary were a nightmare, I’d finally gotten the hang of all the basics and was learning how not to dive down under the bar when customers came in, but I still hadn’t gotten the hang of fending off assholes. At least half a dozen guys propositioned me each shift, with varying degrees of shame and subtlety—middle-aged married men who insisted they just wanted to buy me dinner, fresh-out-of-college boys looking for a Mrs. Robinson, thirtysomething yuppies looking to turn me from a barmaid to a wife. “What time do you get off?” or “All the men in here are jerks. You need to be with someone who can protect you.” It didn’t matter what I wore or whether I remembered their drinks, if I wore my hair down or gave them lip. It wasn’t me they liked so much as the erotic appeal of the bar. It was like being a stripper except the pay was worse.
My looks fall somewhere on the spectrum from cute to pretty, but the guys that have said I’m beautiful said it weightily, like they wanted to be rewarded for their creativity of thought. I’m five-six, which is tall for a Jewish girl, I have a decent rack, 36D, and my butt is a slightly smaller version of J.Lo’s—not as round but ample enough to catch the eye of an ass man. I have green eyes and curly dark brown hair down to my shoulders, and though it has on occasion been called pre-Raphaelite, if I don’t put any product in I look like the bastard love child of Rosanne Rosannadanna and Marc Bolan.
“Rachel?” a voice called from down the bar. I was gritting my teeth, trying to figure out how another customer had learned my name, when I saw that it was Joey Yatrakis, this theaterfuck I knew from Wes. He looked good—generic, too skinny, and Caesar cut—but good. I went over and hugged him.
“I’m so confused,” Joey said as he pulled away. “I thought you were a rabbi.”
“It didn’t work out.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t feel comfortable as a messenger of God.”
“That’s deep,” he said. He’d been a stoner at Wesleyan and evidently the New York theater world hadn’t reformed him. “But isn’t bartending a little badass for a former rabbi?”
“I’m questioning a lot of things in my life right now,” I said with a shrug. “So do you live in the neighborhood?”
“No, my girlfriend does. I was on my way to the train and I saw your sign for margaritas.”
“You want one?” I said. “It’s one of the few drinks I do well.” I mixed him one with orange juice, the way Caitlin had taught me—and though he tried to pay me I waved off his money. Since he seemed relatively chipper I decided to broach the most dangerous topic you can ask a New York City actor: “Are you in anything now?”
“Yeah!” he said. “I got cast in this play by Hank Powell. It’s called The History of the Pencil.”
“Hank Powell wrote a play?” I said. “Isn’t film to theater the wrong direction?”
“He says he believes in downward trajectories.”
“That’s so Powell,” I said. “What’s it about?”
“A suicidal writer who’s losing his mind and money.”
“Is it autobiographical?”
“What do you think? Everything Powell writes is autobiographical.”
“What’s he like? As crazy as all his characters?”
“Crazier. He reads you like a book. It’s like he can see into your soul. But he’s got his own drama going on all the time too. He’s half gypsy, half schizo.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” I said. “Powell knows people. How old is he?”
“Fifty-one.”
“Really? I assumed he was younger.” All the characters in Powell’s movies were in their early thirties, and though he had been writing and directing for fourteen years it never struck me that he had to age, even if his protagonists didn’t.
“What does he look like?”
“Mustache. Black hair.”
“Is he hot?”
“I’m a guy!” Joey was young but old-school and hadn’t yet realized that in this century a man could comment on another man’s attractiveness without being branded a fegeleh.
“Come on,” I said. “You gotta give me something.”
He thought for a second and said, “For a middle-aged guy he’s in pretty good shape.”
I decided he resembled a more rotund Gabriel Byrne, funny-looking but with an innate sexiness that shone through in spite of his girth. “Is he married?”
“Divorced.” It figured. The men who write women well can never get it together with them in life. “We close Sunday. Afterwards there’s a cast party in a loft near the theater. You can come if you want. My girlfriend was supposed to be my date, but we’re going through a trial separation.”
“That’s too bad.”
“No it isn’t. I can never have a girlfriend when I’m working. Too many stimuli for me to handle. So are you single?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
“Don’t tell Powell,” he said, shaking his head. “He’s a devil with the women.”
“Really?” I said, wondering what to wear.
Hank Powell was the nation’s most prolific indie auteur, the neo-Cassavetes, the Queens Godard. His first film was the seminal Leon and Ruth (1989) and since then he’d made eight others, all brilliant in different ways. He cast big-name stars before they were stars and shot on mini-budgets on the streets of Little Italy, Hell’s Kitchen, and Jackson Heights, Queens, where he grew up. He wrote and directed all of them himself, and though none made a ton at the box office he had a devoted following of art-house hipsters like me who felt he was the last shining god of character-driven cinema.
I had seen Leon and Ruth in eighth grade on a date at Cobble Hill Cinemas with a guy named Colin Anderson who didn’t appreciate me. He was in my class at Packer Collegiate, the private school I went to till ninth, and he was a shining squash star, nationally ranked. We had tried to get into an Australian thriller but it was sold out so we saw the Powell instead. It starred a then-unknown Julia Roberts and Don Cheadle and was about a waitress in love with a guy who had just gotten drafted for Vietnam. Right when Leon and Ruth were having the tearful good-bye that put Hank Powell on the map of indie cin forever, Colin whispered, “Would you consider blowing me?”
“I’m trying to watch the movie here,” I said.
“How about a hand job?” he said.
From that night on I saw Powell films the night they came out—at the Quad, or Cinema Village, with no popcorn and no date. Each was written like a highly stylized stream-of-consciousness id with long monologues where the characters addressed the camera in highly poetic terms about their relationship to God and the soul. Lydia’s Chest Wound (Annette Bening, Steve Buscemi) was about a down-and-out female taxi driver with a bee-bee lodged in her left areola; Knock for Greenberg told the tale of a hermetic landlord (Ron Silver), cold to the world until he had an aortic aneurysm and got nursed back to health by a Puerto Rican nurse (Rosanna Arquette with dyed-black hair); and Difficult Women (Lena Olin, Michael Imperioli) was about a Latvian cocktail waitress in love with a low-level Russian Jewish mafioso. All of his women characters were fierce and tough and I loved how he got them so well.
In the mid-nineties he branched out into book writing—there was the collection Powell: Six Screenplays and a book of poetry, Scratchiti, that had Beat aspirations but was as static and pretentious as his movies weren’t, and a horrendous coming-of-age novel, The Stoop Sitter, which I’d bought for a buck at the Strand. I prayed the play would be better than the books.
The Guido down the bar beckoned me for a refill and I told Joey I’d be back in a minute. As I mixed it I got a head rush and not just from the shaking. For the first time in months things were looking up. I was going to meet Hank Powell.
THE next night I went to meet my parents at Banania, a French restaurant, to celebrate my dad’s fifty-fifth birthday. I had lived eight blocks from them since I graduated college, and saw them on a weekly basis. I couldn’t help it: proximity makes elusiveness harder to justify. I am of that small breed of br
ownstone Brooklyn seventies kids who were born into a neighborhood that twenty years later happens to be experiencing a hipster influx. We holdovers are in a difficult bind. While our small-town peers spend their lives trying to get as far away from home as possible, we have a double motivation to stay: placating our parents and taking advantage of the cheap rent. Cobble Hill is a lot like Grover’s Corners. It’s tedious and repetitive, but it has a hold.
Though I didn’t like to admit it in mixed company, I was one of the few twentysomethings I knew who actually liked spending time with their parents. I was always the center of attention and they always got the check. They could be annoying sometimes, prying even, but they listened when I talked and now that I could drink with them we’d sometimes laugh for hours. It was like those magnets you see on lesbian refrigerators: “The more people I meet the more I like my cat.” That was how I felt about my mom and dad.
But it didn’t hurt that right after I graduated Wes the neighborhood took off. The hipster influx began in 1996, when a guy named Alan Harding opened a restaurant on Smith Street called Patois, and the honkeys started coming out to play. Within a year a dozen more restaurants, yoga centers, craft shops, and clothing boutiques had sprung up, and within five years realtors were advertising apartments as “just steps from Restaurant Row.” Parents bought their babies onesies that proclaimed “bklyn” and “718” like they were all down with the posse when in truth there was no posse left to be down with; all the Puerto Ricans had long ago sold their religious article shops and hightailed it back to the island.
I arrived at Banania ten minutes late, but my parents weren’t there yet. A snot-nosed toddler in a booster seat at the next table was wailing at the top of his lungs as his mom wiped his nose with a napkin. One of the downsides of living in Cobble Hill is that the whole hood’s a maternity ward. A waiter came over to my table—tan, shaved head, French accent. One of the upsides of living in Cobble Hill is that there are so many hot waiters. He asked if I wanted “someseen to drink” and I ordered the most expensive glass of white wine, since my parents were paying.
As I was sipping it something caught my eye on the wall by the bar. It was this weird decoration: a racist caricature of a dark-skinned black man, or Turk, it was hard to tell. He wore a red fez and was drinking from a teacup, smiling gleefully with bright lips and gleaming white teeth. It was so offensive it made Aunt Jemima look like high art. Banania was a French-owned restaurant and I figured the coon-on-the-wall was their idea of cute. Frogs aren’t just backward; they’re backward with pride.
The waiter brought my wine and my parents ambled through the door. “What took so long?” I said.
“Sorry, sorry,” said my mom. They sat down noisily, their faces flushed and eager to see me. They always look like that when I’m around. Sometimes I feel like I’m their drug of choice.
My dad had a salt-and-pepper beard, square 1970s-style glasses, and the worst fashion sensibility known to mankind. He worked in computers at Bear Stearns. My mom was the kind of semiliberal that bought hemp drawstring pants without being fully aware that she was wearing marijuana. She taught second grade at PS 41 in the Village. They listened to Arlo Guthrie and thought Garrison Keillor was the Messiah, and though they looked younger than they were, they both had guts and moved more slowly than they used to.
“What took so long?” I said.
“Dad was looking for his glasses,” my mom said.
His face flushed and he spun his head in anger. “If you didn’t feel the need to do spring cleaning in every season,” he said, “I’d have some idea where my things were.” He always got mad at her for throwing stuff out even though his side of the bedroom always looked like a tornado hit it, which to me was proof that she left it alone.
I put my present on the table. “Happy birthday, Dad.”
He gave me a big smile, a hundred and eighty degrees opposite of the scowl he had just shown her, turned the box over, and ripped it open with venom. “Wow!” he said. “What a great present!” He says that every time, no matter what I buy him. I felt good about this year’s gift, though—a pair of black biking gloves and a little electronic timer that attached to the handlebar. Over the summer he’d gotten into biking around Brooklyn on little-known paths, and he was always calling obscenely early on weekends, hounding me to join him.
“You put that on your bike and you can see how fast you’re going,” I said.
“I know!” he said. “It’s exactly what I need.” He put his hand into one glove even though it was still attached to the other one. “Don’t I look cool?” My mom rolled her eyes but he didn’t notice.
“So how’s Roxy?” he said.
“We had a little adventure last week,” I said. “This transvestite excon from the projects came in and got in my face.”
“Did he hurt you?” said my dad.
“She tried to. She said she didn’t like the look of me and took a swing but Jasper pulled her off me and eighty-sixed her.” Jasper was a heavy six-and-a-half-
foot-tall gaffer from Minnesota who came in almost every night and worked as my unofficial bouncer.
“I wish you weren’t working so close to the projects,” my mom said.
“Most of the PJ guys are actually pretty cool,” I said. “Stuff like that hardly ever happens.”
My dad looked off to the side, all furrowed brow and grave. He had not been handling my new career well. In a matter of months his only child, his pride and joy, had gone from woman of the cloth to woman of the washcloth.
When I was growing up, our synagogue in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn Rodeph Shalom, had been the center of my family’s life. My dad was on the religious school committee, my mom helped with fund-raisers, and I was pretty much the star student from the moment I entered in first grade till the final youth group Shul-In in twelfth. In tenth grade I was elected president of Brooklyn Rodeph Shalom Temple Youth (which, unbeknownst to the rabbi, we nick-named BReaSTY since every female member wore a D cup or bigger). In college I ran WesJAC, the Wesleyan Jewish Action Committee, and I went to services every Friday night, even when the only other attendants besides me were the homeless woman who came for the free wine and an overweight guy named Zeke Shnayerson who had eczema all over his hands.
After I graduated I took a job at a nonprofit in midtown called the Jewish Culture Foundation, where I helped Jewish film festivals secure funding, ran conferences for Jewish museums, and organized retreats for Jewish artists. But after four years of getting intimately acquainted with the bureaucratic politics of nonprofit institutions, I decided to do what I knew I always would: become a rabbi.
I got into the Rabbinic College of Reform Judaism the first time I applied. (Everyone called it RCRJ, or Rick-Ridge, because the only thing leadership-oriented Jews love more than God is acronyms.) My dad was so ecstatic when I got my acceptance letter that he got a custom-made T-shirt that said “BLESS ME—I’M A RABBI’S DAD” on the front and “SHE AIN’T BAD-LOOKING, EITHER” on the back, in big, felt block letters. Wherever we went he’d tell people I was going to be a rabbi—cab drivers, waiters, the Lubavitchers over at Court Street Stationers, anyone. My mom gabbed about it with all her friends and colleagues, delighting in the fact that I’d still be living in the hood since RCRJ was in the Village, and before I even started classes she asked whether I thought this might mean they’d get front-row seating at High Holy Day services.
So it wasn’t a surprise that when I dropped out after just a semester and a half they hit the roof. My father kept saying, “Shouldn’t you give it more time?” and, “If you stayed I’m certain you’d see things that would make you feel as full of faith and optimistic as the hospital made you depressed!” My mom would begin sentences with “When you go back to school…” instead of “If,” and I’d always scream and correct her. They’d quieted down about it for the past couple weeks but evidently they hadn’t put it to bed completely.
“I don’t see why you have to stay at the bar,” my dad said,
frowning. “I was browsing through the Forward classifieds and I saw an opening for religious educator at Central Synagogue.”
“I don’t want to teach Hebrew school!”
“Leave her alone,” my mom said. “This is just a temporary thing. To tide her over until she figures out what to do next.”
“Did I ask you?” said my dad. “Did I say your name?” They’d been bickering like this a lot lately. I had no idea my job insecurity could be so bad for my parents’ marriage.
“I don’t think you should be giving her grief about her career,” she spat. “Especially when—”
“Especially when what?” he shot back.
“Especially when she’s only just reentered the job market.”
I knew something else was going on. “What are you guys talking about?” I said.
“Nothing,” my dad said. If he didn’t want to talk about something there was nothing you could do to make him. “I just don’t understand why you won’t go back to school. They’d take you back in a heartbeat! Tell them you went temporarily insane from the radiation at Memorial!”
“Maybe you should talk to some of your old friends from school,” my mom said. David might have some insight. Have you talked to him since you left?”
David Peres was a redheaded cantorial student with whom I’d had a brief affair, and like a moron I had made the mistake of introducing him to my parents after just one month. Naturally they fell head over heels. The problem was, I never did, and when I dumped him shortly thereafter because I knew I’d never love him, they went ballistic.
“No, I haven’t talked to him,” I said, “and I don’t plan to either.”
“Maybe he could talk some sense into you!” my dad said. “You didn’t realize what a good thing you had there!”
My mom shot him a look like he should calm down. “Have you given any thought to what you might want to do with your life?” she asked, trying to sound nonconfrontational. They always did good cop, bad cop.