Witz

by Joshua Cohen

  Today?

  What does it say, what does it say, give it here…

  …Happy Birthday, you happy now?

  Suspicious.

  B takes leave of the Orientals, helping to lock and shutter the restaurant behind its grate of shuddering metal…they’ll be closed all day Monday, Dim Sum says in parting, we’ll figure it out, everything works out in the end; he bows then, scraping—are you sure you don’t want any takeout, just asking, we have a little suey left, last chance as he lifts himself…25% discount now that we’re old friends, in observance of your auspicious occasion?

  To walk Himself wherever weathered, dry again, to drop no drip; B’s board halved, hung around His neck alongside a cross of chalk, what’s left that in the wind goes click against then clack again with every older step.

  Oneyearold in Year One, today being the age of the world; there’s only a week left until the anniversary of its creation decreated, the destruction that’s made possible our miraculous rebirth. After Israelien, 1 A.I.—let it stand for that for which He falls. In a window, the sweeping glass of a going Broome Street concern selling religious paraphernalia (siddurim, tallisim, tefillin, Get Your Mezuzah Examined—No Commitment Free Of Charge), He takes in His reflection: His hair, once so moppishly light now darkly thinning, His glasses wrecked their earpieces lost held on only by the scrunch of His nose, wrinkled, His face old already, lined as if one of His mother’s lists for Wanda, his mouth a severely windreddened check marking all for off and finished, the milk and bread brains and that nose, a sack of potatoes. As for His form, it’s as fat as ever, forming fatter; waisted down His skirts His foreskin still occupied with its genethliacal growth and shed, cyclical and constant. He’s still in that old housecoat of His mother’s, her perpetual maternitywear, secondhanded but lacking pockets, then a mitten for the lefthand, a glove unfingered for the right. They hold the keys to residences untold, duplicated triplicates, with the alarmcodes combinatorials of His name, 18 18 18, B-E-N=21. He knows the routes to every safehouse, their attic and stagey trapdoor hides, Mitteltown nests and outerburrows…the homes of previous owners, masters otherwise known to Him as hosts when they’re treating and kind now summering in the winter of freedom if just to say they’ve done their part (He has all the key-chains, too, swag from Garden interests found among the trash—they’re loose; He hasn’t found the time in which to get attached). Under the housecoat but over the thermals designer from the dumpster, that Shabbos skirt, its ruffle ripped, tucked into His socks, sapped of their dressy dark from His shvitzy stray, stuffed with addresses to zips: pages ripped from phonebooks halved, revised, crumpled then crammed into His shoes for insulation (the heels made flats, pumps deflated), He’s shod in wads, too, of other people’s mail—a heatingbill from where, gas and electric invoices, then urgent warnings to Register, unofficial promises confirmed by governmental threats, the latest moon’s issue of a tznius periodical, homiletical home, lifestyle, or feminine hygienic (on negiah, on niddah), subscribed to in support of the yeshiva of a nephew; New Year’s greetingcards fallen from sukkah walls, and a lacy, stiffs-tocked invitation to a bris He’s missed, not His; a pidyon’s a redemption…feet are worn and numb, toes ten dreams of feeling. Despite, He stoops low against the wind down the street, littered with tattered fliers.

  UNAF Must Register By Date Of Anniversary By Order Of The Mayor, is what they say, if you’re interested or scared.

  Minding His feet and the papers flying about them like miniature lost tablecloths, or napkins, unsated souls, the ghosts of uninvited guests, B steps from the sidewalk and into the street, directly into the bleating progress of a flock of sheep crossing against the signal who knew still even worked: wool over His eyes, they’re herding way above the posted limit; their shepherd’s laughing kindly, then through his teeth whistles them together, his happy tune to harmonize with the bells that tinkle from their collars; he nods at B as he passes from the rear, then waggles behind him his staff in gentle remonstrance. B makes it out of their way only to sputter gutterside, stuck with all manner of those papers gathered, wet, stands dumbly as the sheep schlep on, grazing at sidewalks’ planters and wrecked meridians, the trafficislands unlit, no passing vehicles to worry either, as they disappear Uptown and toward the tunnel then through it out to Joysey and its fields. He sets out to follow them Himself, a last straggler from the sewer to the middle of the road. Exactly which He isn’t sure, the stickler. As most of the streetsigns have been removed, their names moneychanged to protect the not so innocent, new signs not yet nailed and hammered down…bureaucracy’s overtaking everything, with offices closed or slow to respond, addressed so far out in the Bronx who can ever get to them by day. B raises His head to the poletops freshly flagged, then steps a foot down into a pail brimming full with paste.

  Schm…

  uck,

  Schm…

  endrick,

  Schmo schlemiel schlub schmegegge…these two posterboychicks call them, they’re yelling at Him hobbling, brandishing their rollers in His face while calling Him these other names, their tongues too young to know from: Mutteringmamzer, Nogoodnik, who knows what worse, me, I couldn’t say…trying new epithets on for fit of mouth, a spit. B steadies again, hauls His foot out from the paste, pries Himself away from their pursuit, fast but fat and older—Uptown, He thinks, and sopping; apparently, the direction the two posterboychicks had just worked down from:

  All Males Must Maintain Yarmulke Upon Penalty Of Law,

  All Females Must Maintain Hat Kerchief Or Wig Upon Penalty Of Law…

  Welcome to the ghetto. Here, a world frozen not as much in time as in time past, amid the mud, down in the dreck. Now, all will know what to expect and, too, what is expected of them. Upon Penalty of Law not further specified, though, as a minyan of elderly uniformed officers, Unaffiliated Patrol, an allvolunteer, geriatrically vigilante Downtown unit of Metro Gestapo, stumble their beats, using nightsticks as crutches; their Law reigns supreme…over the old cemetery down at Chacham Square, the smichas of seminaries north, up past the mikvehs, the shuls and shtibls, yeshivas and, nu, you want the guidebook’s spiel: the Ed Alliance (197 E. Broadway), the Hanky Street Settlement and the Amalgamated Dwellings, the Yarmulkowsky Bank Building (TK admission price), the Klutzker Brotherly Aid Association (open Mon. & Wed. 9–5), which you might remember from, hymn…stores discount and department, the factory outlet tours for matzah and wine, with not even them leavening such ferment: Closed Saturday, Convenient to All Public Transportation, 72 years in the business, with beds and bedding and rentals, jewelry, umbrellas and gloves one flight up, free alterations on premises, the dramatic look in fine footwear, bootery to the most discriminating of four continents, to name just a few…up to the foot laid bare of the Williamsburg Bridge—B making His way west and Uptown in an attempt at losing His chase, He’s speechless, obviously, with mouth agape, stump hanging, but with His head held high to more notices, papered, stapled, glued, these up on lampposts, pasted over the display windows, slopped to scroll across doors:

  UNAF Must Remain At Home Saturday–Friday Sundown To Sunup Upon Penalty Of Law,

  Electricity And Gas Will Be Made Unavailable On The Sabbath Sundown Friday–Sundown Saturday,

  Happy Birthday, Reb Israelien—the conversion is complete.

  B heads through the night up Broadway, is it, then around the Park with its Temple left as if a basement resurgent: partially finished, which, as it’s been said, is also partially unfinished, being renovated again…up toward what He thinks, they have to be, more open, quieter streets, these avenues widely silent: once upon a time, the richest slice of town, the morsel choicest and chosen, that’s if you had the money and right referrals, today full of poor, filled with pauperings, it’s galling, how destitute, such shammeses to shame, wheedling beadles sidestepping copulating dogs, bloated goats grazing on leaflets, munching notices by lamplight…O these perpetually rushing, stamstammstammering menschs in their mandated yarmulkes held down against the gu
sts, hurrying, always schurrying, home to their womenfolk, to the luxury apartments and penthouses they’d been assigned or had bought outright on the fiftyyear forgiven mortgage that their women’d just finished redecorating for them and their families (everincreasing, raised roofward toward the gulls, stolen for consumption, cooked then garnished with their rent), in the latest style known to privation: bedclothes hung from fireescapes, disastrous pianos converted to bins of trash having fallings out with windows…these menschs with the faces of entire families themselves, of women and infants—save their hair…for what—wombred and honeyglowing, illuminated from within, the abyssal shine of their ancient eyes, disgusting. Sinking. Perpetually deep in the One True Depth, they traipse through the Broadway snowbanks, their beards and sidelocks flapping, getting tangled with the beards and locks of other menschs just passing in the opposite direction, Uptown for an audience in the court of a rabbi holding an opinion that’s dialectically opposed to an opinion held by the rabbi the others are heading Downtown now to meet; two students coming around the corner, tied up, how they’re tripped to ice…many not yet used to wearing these yarmulkes (but they’re trying, they assure you, they have to), with the thin, governmentissued scraps threatening to fly away at every turn of street and wind, with tassels rustling they stoop to snitch their remnants from the sewers, slap palmfuls soaked and dirty down onto their skulls again, frumiliar—in a ruached rush to make in time the shiur of Rabbi Avraham Ben Shmuelbob Johnson III, shlit”a, the son of Reb Samuel Johnson II, z”l…or else Rav Billybob (Mendy) Mendelssohn’s tisch, or that of the Ramjohn he’s known as, the Ranjim, to glean a pesher from that posek, the son of Baba Wawa, a soothsayer and local benevolent personality, her tongue the hottest ticket in town: dynasties hewn like smoke from wintered air…the Old Traditionalists among us upholding amid all else and the pillars of the universe, the furriest shtremiels, pointy thin spodiks and rounded kolpiks, peaked kashkets, not to forget the littlest kutchmas and shlyapkas stacked six high, in felt and in velvet, rabbit and beaver, and these worn without any discipline, without any notion that what’s worn atop the head once marked the origin if not the allegiance of the head and its body grossly garbed below. Everything done wrongly: newly minted Mogilevichs rubbing shoulders pricking elbows with Mogelescus, makes no sense, knock knees, Newmans friends with Neumanns, Ostrovitch married off to Ostrowicz who knew but nu (and the more unpronounceable or unspellable the name, the higher the price the bride commanded, her family and the shadchan, too), it’s the mouth under all that matters, the bated breaths of these liverlickers adhering, the garlicky followers of Rabbi Onions, who’d been buried to grow famous from a grave, the word rooted up in shrouds from a bulbous beard. How with every scent and clarinety cymbalon song in the world they’re blasting the newest rebbe on the block whoever he is or thinks he is or might be with question after question, all these questions, though, in the end the same…which is the nature of the Depth, the depth of the Depth, hymn, how many feet of fall today, and what’s the forecast for tomorrow, you’re such a big shot ba’al teshuva? America your streets are paved with cold, a black year in your ear, in your mouth, only the dreck fallen, frozenover: horses up to their haunches in potholes heretically unprophesized, whinnying for a bullet between the senseless eyes; oxen ensnared in the hidden stumble—a guttergrating or sewerlid removed as a servingplate, or to provide the pit of an outdoor fire—their shankbones jutting from their flesh, with crows and doves to perch thereupon and cluck sweet liturgy to the clattering of pots beaten attentively with pans…the sounds and the cooking smell, oy, of a vagrant’s ritually poisoned cat.

  And their kinder, O their kinder the males of them, at least, how they trop their lessons home with them from cheder, from yeshiva, nusach for the nest, these boychicks smart and quick on their flocking ways, feathered in dark blurs of breeches and gartel: such promising issue of their womenfolk, hear yourselves be praised…O their women, these not much more than girls they are, here netted, wigged, and kerchiefed, wrangled into unbecoming floral prints, their enormous encampment tented of many formless, filthy skirts; perpetually knocked up, they’re trudging homeward, too, with new recipes in their heads, for all the new mouths in their stomachs: kinder, babies, new boys and girls of the covenant already, gestating girls pregnant themselves with already pregnant girls who in turn will sustain their pregnant issue unto the infinite eternal, one can only hope: women with pregnant guts, but also with pregnant paps, daughters eligible already secreted within each nippled sac, and suckling from within, waiting only to be born into the Law, into birthing themselves…dark forms rising like steam from the muck of the street, oily, pubic, as if smoke but thicker, a viciously rank viscous glopping, dim how they ooze themselves up from out of the churning melt, the burbling flow of downtrodden ice: they’re people, God they’re people, wiping from their eyes, noses, and mouths, their mouth massed, that metropolitan amnio ick; without umbilicus any of them as they’ve been born anew to nothing…now with two hands around each leg tugging once, twice, to free themselves from the secular mire, then looselimbed and with muddy vacant faces how they stagger themselves on ahead, deadeyed, they grom onward to swarm Him, on the way abducting from the surrounding freeze any icicles at hand, grabbing stones from the gutter, grubbingup left wood from scaffolds abandoned and hunks of asphalt the failure of public works with which to attack Him—a pogrom in progress, gevalt!

  Hang down our neck of the shtetl weeping your putz off goddamn that ain’t recht…slumming down here with yr schmutz face and yr schlock grace who the futz u think u is—two menschs hanging on a corner, decently inconspicuous, passable, I’d say: they’re disguised appropriately, in yarmulkes to rekels and fingering a fidget at the hang of their false hair, that’s no crime, but they’re flashing photographs, too, which is lately if not yet verboten then frowned upon in this neighborhood, the side Upper West; our pogromists spit on them on their ways after greater quarry…women throw at them rocks of hardened potatoes from windows smoked open, the balconies of last century’s grand palaces, the highrises, coops and condos of the high sixties we’re talking. It seems to be a searchparty. He’ll take any kind of party today. Headed up by, I know it’s dark out but still it’s Hamm, it has to be, and Gelt with him, wagging his tush, scraping his knees on the blacktop ice; on the pavement overturned, ransacked, hoof and heeltossed, searching now underneath the idling carriages, every species of conveyance, the hitched yellow rides, a hacking flash of moon onduty…every cart made cab waiting to head anywhere with the meter fared out upon the drivers’ fingers, no—then lifts these udders hanging heavy with milk, brushes drecky tails out of the way, what’s he thinking I’d be hiding there, puckered deep in filth?

  B bundles into a shadow, a way without lamplight newly signed as Aynredenish Alley, which is the ample, lined with stall fall of 72nd west of Broadway toward the river and waits, gasps, hands under His armpits to keep warmth in the freeze up from the Hudson’s slice; a woman approaches Him huddled against a mound of piled trash, panting a bubble to pop from His stubwound mouth as glass shatters crystalline and cool in the distance, too near…a plump girl too antshuldikt mir fat and old for the slight skirt and horsey haltertop she’s working in, propositioning Him with too much eyeliner, too, and tears, a psht she asks for tzedakah; you’re on the make, I’ll hide you, she’s saying, all I’m asking is a zuz or two for my trouble.

  B ignores her, she snarls, and then He shoos her, not trusting ever and so she spits on Him, asks are you who I think you are, answers herself, you can’t be…He thinks that’s what though He can’t understand her, and so she reverts, we’re translating along the lines of, where’s His rachmones, and your yarmulke, you Unaffiliated schlump, why aren’t you indoors, spits again, don’t make me report you—better make yourself scarce…

  It’s My Birthday, is what I chalk on my board then hand it to her and refusing, again she spits on my shoes, by what calendar, she wants to know, then wipes her mouth with my mother’s low hem�
��you believe the nerve of such people, this chutzpah I can’t quite pronounce? me standing alone and unwanted for life in this street newly named amid bags and crates of grandopening trash, bannered and bunted homilies of yesterday’s business become scraps to be thrown to the, not even the dogs anymore but their old owners, the people…Amsterdam’s strays ranging west from the Park and nearing, coming closer with prey’s every scent that makes it in on the wind, their ravenous howls only an appeasement of memory, hollow prayers, appetite’s psalms. As the mob passes Him by up Broadway, other young menschs flood in on Him with consummating fires burning in their eyes, new baums and bergs, fresh steins and sterns, not intent on a ravage of a physical nature but on a savagery subtler, namely conversion, which is worse as it’s mental and emotional and physical, too, generational, perpetrated not only on you but on your kinder to come, each to hand Him bound sheaves of mimeographed brochures, and more leaflets, fliers, pamphlets, Redemption for Dummies one’s called, Abridged Kashrut another, a sheet outlining the laws pertaining to pamphletmaking, to flieruse and marital duties, what so and so has had to say about ziz or zat regarding and what, I’m supposed to do what with them, besides take them cordially, accept their enthusiasm, fervor it’s wasteful, then stuff their words into my shoes to speak their succor to the hurt of my feet, suck a wart. They leave Him with handshakes and a complimentary yarmulke emblazoned with the info for a shtiblach He’s apparently promised to attend if not this Shabbos then the next (and, they’re almost forgetting themselves, have you lain yet today, tallis, tefillin), also with late warnings against a mob reportedly in the area, and after any Unaffiliated—grumbling, unhappy with any unapproved incursions into their territory the upper west-most, it’s all ours down to Riverside Drive. We’re peaceful around here, we don’t take kindly to how they do it Downtown.