Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde

by Rebecca Dana

  For months, beginning that Friday, I wrote almost exclusively about wronged women. I did none of this out of sympathy or because it brought me deep satisfaction, but because it was good for “clicks.” These stories begat television appearances, which begat more stories in this vein, until I was fully consumed on what I began to call the “jilted-lady beat.” It’s not a perfect place to be, the jilted-lady beat. It doesn’t soothe the soul. But it was a means to an end. In the short term, that end was to be a productive, functioning member of the world again. In the longer view, the end was murkier, and so I avoided the longer view.

  At the frenzied peak of jilted-lady season, I began going to the Boom Boom Room, a self-consciously decadent, exclusive nightclub on the top floor of a new hotel called the Standard. Boom Boom—or Booms or Le Boom—was a soaring space, yellow lit and dark, vaulted eighteen stories above Manhattan, with wide leather banquettes poured like thick caramel into semiprivate nooks. The front door was covered in soft beige leather and the blond-colored carpeting was spread like batter on the floor. There were two fireplaces in the far corners of the room, and it was hot inside, dizzying. Boom Boom was a warp zone, except instead of throwing you back into another era, it dropped you into a coffee table book about nightlife in New York, with carefully chosen pictures from big nights at Studio 54, Max’s Kansas City, the old Don Hill’s. There wasn’t an original experience to be had at Boom, but you could pretty enjoyably imitate a fabulous scene from the past, like being on a “nightclub” ride at a Disney theme park. That wasn’t Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall lounging in the corner, but it was Marc Jacobs and his boyfriend, Lorenzo Martone, in pretty much the same languid pose. Instead of Rick Hilton there was Nicky Hilton, instead of Ivana Trump there was Ivanka. Madonna still occasionally stopped by. One night Chris Noth, the actor who played Mr. Big in Sex and the City, crammed into the elevator car next to me and we rode up side by side, surrounded by his entourage. Sometimes you come so close to your childhood vision of happiness that you can smell it. In my experience, it almost always smells like a cologne strip in a glossy magazine.

  I clicked up to Boom on python stilettos for the first time ever a few weeks after Thanksgiving, flanked by girlfriends, determined to shed a skin. An old Michael Jackson song was playing, loud, when we got there, and as I took my first step onto the plush carpet, the club closed like a padded cell around me. Everywhere there were shiny skinny girls in miniskirts, their hair pony-straight and glossy. With them in clusters were boys in jackets and jeans, with the carefully mussed look of the young and well-to-do. It used to be people, even rich people, looked different. But now, in New York, we’ve cracked the code. We know the workouts to make you skinny, the chemicals for your hair, the medicines for your skin and the clothes for your figure. Now all girls are hot and all boys are cool. It’s Memory Game, only instead of rabbis, everyone looks like a Hilton sister.

  We didn’t even make it to the bar before a handsome dark-haired stranger came up and said hello. He knew one of my girlfriends. He kissed me on the cheek and told me his name was—whatever. What was my name? he asked—whatever. We talked like this in the loud club for no more than a minute—“[Something]?” “[Unrelated]”—like people shouting through pillows. Then he grabbed my hand and said, “Come.” I’m not really a girl to whom men just say “come.” I’m more of a girl to whom men say things like “Wow, you’re tall,” or “What did you say your name was again?” But he said “Come” and so I followed, following his deep voice into the dark center of the club. We ended up in a hallway lined with mirrors, which picked up light from some untraceable source and sent it pinging around, glinting off the specks of mica in the black marble floor. The mirrors turned out to be bathroom doors. We went in one. The far wall of the tiny bathroom was a three-foot-wide window stretching all the way from the polished black floor up fourteen feet to the mirrored ceiling. The window looked north over Manhattan, over the Hudson and up along the west side of the city, across the low brick brownstones of the Village and Chelsea, to the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building and the skyscrapers of midtown. You could see New Jersey too. You could almost see stars.

  I was dressed in my shortest possible dress, tsnius be damned, and in that moment, I was nothing under my clothes. Not a journalist, not a New Yorker, no one’s girlfriend, nothing. I pressed my nose against the cold window and felt the whole slick, smooth, black shining whirl of the club melt away behind me. The noise melted and the people melted and the path that brought me there melted. Amnesia set in, and for a moment I floated alone over everything. There was no work and no loss, no holidays and no Tiger Woods. No youth and no striving. No point and also no need for one. There was only this girl in her dress and the blinking lights below. Just me and the city: barest bones.

  The nameless stranger produced a tiny bag of cocaine.

  “I’ve never done this before,” I said.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  The thing I noticed was that it smelled like lilacs.

  When the impulse to feel something, anything, rubs up against the impulse to feel nothing at all, that internal friction creates a kind of warmth. I looked up into the bathroom mirror, deep into my own eyes, and the only thought that entered my head was that my mascara looked spectacular.

  “Smile,” he said in his butterscotch voice, and thinking he was being sweet, I smiled my loveliest smile, playing Edie Sedgwick at Max’s Kansas City, playing the part of a girl to whom strangers at fancy nightclubs say things like “Come.” He smiled back. Then he licked his finger, dunked it into the bag of blow, ran it along my gumline, and said, “There. That’ll make you feel a little numb.”

  Chosen People

  It was the first night of Hanukkah, two weeks before Christmas, dead in the middle of the dreaded holiday season. I emerged from the subway in Crown Heights at seven o’clock, singing Lily Allen.

  You’re not big, you’re not clever.…

  Not big whatsoever.

  It’s a song about ditching a man with a small penis and no money. It filled me with old-fashioned Hanukkah cheer.

  The first thing I noticed when I stepped into the frigid air was that, in my absence, Crown Heights had been struck by a daring act of vandalism. Someone, sly devil, had snuck around in broad daylight and spray-painted over a giant advertisement for It’s Complicated, a forthcoming Nancy Meyers movie starring Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin and Meryl Streep. On the poster, Streep was pictured in bed with Baldwin. It showed Streep and Baldwin naked under the covers, his arm behind her neck, in a dreamy, postcoital pose. His chest was visible—hair, nipples, everything—but only her shoulders were. The strap of a satin camisole dangled low on one arm, presumably displaced by vigorous lovemaking. The vandal, displaying an uncommon bias, had painted over every inch of the angelic Streep, blotting out flesh, camisole, disheveled hair, squinty maternal grin. Swarthy Baldwin was left untouched. At a dinner months hence, some of the younger members of the Lubavitch community would chuckle and shake their heads at the presumed perpetrator: damned tsnius police.

  Looking up from Baldwin’s furry clavicle, I noticed another disturbance in the sleepy nighttime rhythms of the ’chood. The usual phalanx of mitzvah tanks scattered around had exploded in number. The streets were clogged with RVs, minivans and rusted-out Volvo station wagons, double-parked as far as the eye could see. Each had a plastic menorah with candle-shaped lightbulbs affixed to the roof and signs wishing everyone a happy Hanukkah. Many had a laminated banner taped to the front bumper, which said “The Time for Your Redemption Is Now!” I stood on Eastern Parkway and watched as the Hasidim piled into their makeshift mitzvah tanks, strapped their children into car seats, held the passenger doors open for their wives, revved up the sputtering engines and pulled out one by one into a parade. It was chilly after the sun went down, but all those fake candles threw off a holiday heat. The Hanukkah brigade would spend the next few hours driving around Manhattan and the outer boroughs, passing out Hanukk
ah candles and cheap aluminum menorahs to anyone who looked like a Jew and shouting good wishes to anyone who would listen. As I walked home, the cars whizzed by me, and I watched the blur of their signs like a cable news ticker:

  “The Time for Your Redemption Is Now!”

  …“Redemption Is Now!”

  …“Is Now!”…“Now!”…“Now!”

  It was nearly eleven o’clock when Cosmo got home from jujitsu. Quietly, like a Hanukkah ninja, he moved one of the two red plastic kitchen chairs out into the living room and covered the top of the chair in tin foil. He placed a flimsy aluminum menorah on the chair’s seat and put two candles in: one for the first night of Hanukkah and one shammash, or head candle. He began to sing the blessings to himself in a low voice, trying not to disturb me in my room. I came out somewhere in the middle of this whispered observance and seeing it, burst into tears.

  We hadn’t really spoken much since Thanksgiving, except passing pleasantries. I’d apologized the next day for leaving him stranded at Allegra’s, and he’d said not to worry, that the turkey had been delicious. Occasionally he told me about jujitsu, asked if it was okay to wash his uniform in the tub, smoked cigarettes in the window or listened to me talk about work—empty, distancing things. I barely knew Cosmo at this point, but to get to know him was to acknowledge the reality of the situation. It was much easier to just put on pretty clothes and get high.

  But there are certain sense memories you cannot deny—less Proustian madeleines, more baseball bats to the face—and one of these, for me, is the smell of cheap candles burning down into a disposable menorah. This combined fire hazard and holy ritual of the contemporary American Jewish faith rockets me back to Hanukkahs of yore, to the fuzzy, cozy footie-pajamaed winter nights of my youth. Hanukkah is a great time to be a Jewish child, possibly the only time of year when other people actually wish they were Jews. In one version of the story (there are always multiple, contradictory versions of Jewish stories), Hanukkah commemorates the rededication of the second Holy Temple in Jerusalem, when a little bit of oil miraculously lasted eight days. On the spectrum of miracles, this strikes me as pretty minor, but for it, Jewish children get eight days of presents, so God bless. In my house as a kid, Hanukkah also meant a precious week of relative peace. My parents cooked latkes together, arguing about oil temperature over a hot stove, while I sat in the living room, shaking my gifts. It was the one time of year we reliably made a fire in the gas-log fireplace, my father holding out one long match and turning the metal key in the side of the chimney that brought the whole illusion to life. When I remember those days I remember them as if through a fog of latke grease and propane, the sepia tone for suburban Jews.

  We sang the blessings, all three of us, and then I got to pick one package and open it. There are few moments in life as good as the one right before you open a present. When else is anyone so hopeful and naïve? Even after you’ve gotten enough presents in life to know that whatever’s in the box is probably not as great as you want it to be, you never really stop hoping. Or I hope you don’t. The day someone hands me a present and I think meh is the day it’s all over. If life has wrung you so dry you can’t get excited about presents, forget about it.

  As a child, I was entranced by the unknown treasures that lay in wait, wrapped in last season’s discount Christmas paper, piled before the fake fireplace in our den. What unimaginable joys lurked within? Would the thing inside bounce or make noise or fly? Was it…battery operated? Battery-operated toys in my house were about as rare and precious as dry-clean-only clothes: infrequently gifted, judiciously used. Far likelier, for my Hanukkahs, were items I had casually deliberately mentioned I wanted during meanderings with my mother through Monroeville Mall. Would it be the cable-knit Abercrombie & Fitch sweater I’d been coveting (seventh grade), in the powder-blue color that I thought would go nicely with my eyes? Would it be a boom box (fourth grade) or the debut album by Ace of Base (fifth)? Or, oh God oh God, would it be the American Girl doll Molly, the one with the glasses, my American dream girl? (Second grade, and it would also be her school desk with the little pencils and notepads, so we could play “quiet nerds” together in my room.) Would it be a book? (Yes, every year it would be a book.)

  When I saw Cosmo whispering the Hanukkah blessings to himself, I shrank down into the twelve-year-old with the freshly unwrapped powder-blue sweater that matches her eyes, for whom this solitude would have been the gravest, deepest offense. You simply can’t be alone on Hanukkah, even though it’s really a little nothing of a holiday. On the scale of Jewish holy days—and there are many Jewish holy days—Hanukkah is about as important to Hasids like Cosmo as Kwanzaa is to Hasids like Cosmo. But try telling that to a godless twelve-year-old who just spent the day watching A Christmas Story on loop and who knows, to her very core, that something potentially life-changing sat in front of the fire.

  What can you do under such circumstances? I didn’t have any presents hidden away, so I sat down in an armchair and waited until he was done.

  “Tell me about your family,” I said.

  “What’s to say, really,” he said.

  “What did your parents do in Russia?”

  “They did what everyone’s parents did.”

  “And what was that?”

  “They were rocket scientists.”

  Every superhero has his own creation mythology, and so does every person who comes to New York. Cosmo cultivated an air of mystery around his upbringing, as if he emerged whole and hardened on the streets of Brooklyn, his past a gauzy void. I never bought it. Who knows how alike Cosmo and I actually were, but we had at least this in common: We wanted to find, and so found in each other, a similar pattern of pain and resilience. His parents were geniuses. He grew up alone. His childhood was the fog he drove a tank through.

  Cosmo’s parents were Jewish, but he grew up in Soviet Russia, so any religious observance was limited. In an act of teenage rebellion, he embraced Orthodoxy. He hooked up with the Lubavitchers and “started getting really into it.” He studied the Talmud. He learned about Menachem Mendel Schneerson, read his writings and listened to his speeches. He started to believe, and then he really started to believe. Schneerson was captivating. Just maybe, Cosmo thought, this guy is actually the Messiah. He imagined what it would be like to come to America, to live a righteous, holy life in the image of his hero.

  By this point, the Berlin Wall had come down, and the mafia was making the most of the power vacuum of the immediate post-Soviet era. One way the mob cemented its place in communities was through charity, and one object of their charity in Moscow was Cosmo. Some of his Lubavitcher friends became friendly with a mobster, who funneled them money for books, supplies and other activities. So what if the provenance of the money was less than pristine? This was Russia in the 1990s, and you took money where you could get it. The mob sent Cosmo off to yeshiva in London.

  After another yeshiva in northern Israel, near the Sea of Galilee, Cosmo set out for New York, touching down at JFK with a banged-up suitcase full of black coats, white shirts, tallit, tefillin and a few other personal effects. He came across the Atlantic and found himself transported back in time, into a photostatic re-creation of an eighteenth-century shtetl. He knew some Russian men who’d come over before him, and he quickly made friends at shul. He lived cheaply in a group house owned by a man who was remarkably kind and generous to the boys who rented his rooms. During this period, he survived on two dollars a day.

  Every Orthodox Jewish mother prays for a tzaddik: a blessed child, a righteous man, a person whose “merit surpasses his iniquity,” in Maimonides’s words. Who knows if Cosmo is a true tzaddik, but the Crown Heights Lubavitcher community saw potential. They put him up and fed him. They pooled their money and sent him to rabbinical school in South Africa and yeshiva in New Haven. But instead of going off to lead a congregation somewhere, he tucked his certificates into a prayer book, shoved the prayer book on his shelf, and went to work at Fast Trak. The shop’s o
wner agreed to be his sponsor for a green card, and Cosmo was stuck there until his papers came through. As he explained it to me, Cosmo had been on a two-year “temporary status” awaiting his green card, but it “got suspended pending something or other.” Once he got a green card, he could work legally or get government loans for school. He could begin his path to eventually becoming a U.S. citizen. Every possible course of life hinged on those papers, and their delay was both infuriating and convenient, since it put off indefinitely any obligation to choose a path, to return to the fold or embrace the profane. His was a life lived twice in deferment—awaiting the Messiah to usher him into the next world and the United States government to accept him into this one.

  Hasidic men spend their lives studying Torah. The best become great scholars, sage old men peering out through thick bifocals, dispensing the wisdom of millennia. The flip side of Orthodoxy is that it keeps all adherents, even the whitest beards among them, in a state of perpetual childhood. You don’t have to choose what you eat, the rules of kashruth tell you. You don’t have to try out pick-up lines at bars, the community will find you a bride. Whatever parents you had to begin with are, in a way, incidental. The religion is your mother and father. Anytime there is a question about how you should think or behave, the answer is in a book.

  Three years before I met him, Cosmo’s mother had confessed to a suspicion that she may have been adopted. The book says that a person is Jewish if his mother is Jewish—if and only if. If Cosmo’s mother was adopted, she might not be Jewish, which meant he might not be Jewish, which meant—the dominos all collapsed from there. The only areas of life it wouldn’t invalidate were his employment status at Fast Trak and his slow progress in jujitsu. Cosmo begged his mother to investigate her lineage, but she declined. Strictly speaking, and there is no other manner of speech to a Hasidic rabbi, given those circumstances, Cosmo should have begun a conversion process, just to be safe, to absolutely guarantee he was a Jew—if not Chosen by God then chosen by his own damn self. Orthodox conversion is a pain in the ass, though, even for someone who’s already a rabbi. Cosmo wrestled with whether to go through with it, going back and forth for years. Finally, shortly before I moved in, he decided: No. If he was a Jew, he was a Jew, and if not, not. But at thirty years old, too much of life had already passed to be a slave to technicality.