Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde

by Rebecca Dana

  in a few months i can file for green card!!!!

  I wouldn’t have been more shocked and excited if Cosmo had told me the Messiah Himself was riding a donkey down Eastern Parkway. Cosmo was finally going to be an American! He could leave the copy shop, leave Crown Heights, go anywhere he wanted and do anything. I wrote back, upping the exclamation-point ante, asking how he wanted to celebrate?!!?!!!!!!! We came up with a plan: cheeseburgers and Avatar.

  The following night, I blew off seven fashion parties to eat treyf at the Burger Joint, a dingy soda shop in the back corner of Le Parker Meridien, one of the nicest hotels in New York, with my rabbi roommate. Cosmo ordered a cheeseburger with the works and a Coke, then took off the bun and shook out at least a teaspoon of salt on the cheesy, greasy patty, topped already with mayonnaise and ketchup, before taking a bite. This was his first-ever cheeseburger, and he seemed to consume the entire thing whole. I was two bites in when Cosmo leaped up to get back into the half-hour-long line to order a second burger. While he was in line, a nice young couple sidled up and asked if they could share the booth, since there was no place else to sit. They had just come from a cut-paper exhibit at the Museum of Arts and Design and were clearly on a third or fourth date. Sure, I said, then pointed out Cosmo, telling them we were out celebrating that his papers had come through and he would finally get a green card, after seven years of waiting. He returned with his burger to a small round of applause.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked as he wolfed down the second cheeseburger.

  “I think maybe I’ll go to Brazil,” he said.

  “Yeah, but are you going to leave the copy shop?”

  “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

  “But you’re nearly there.”

  He stopped eating his burger and fries and shot me a look that said, You’re raining on my parade. I abandoned the nagging and switched to a line of questioning focused on new jujitsu moves he had learned and cute girls he’d encountered on the subway lately. He had recently moved up to the advanced jujitsu class and expanded his repertoire to Thai boxing.

  He told me he’d had a nice conversation the other day with the head of his jujitsu school, a man everyone called Professor Grey, whom Cosmo worshipped. Professor Grey had said something that shook my roommate to the core. What he told the students in his advanced class was: “It’s never going to get easier. You think you’re getting your ass kicked now? It’s only going to get worse. You think once you’ve mastered this set of moves you’re home free? Wrong. The way things are now, with sweaty men throwing you to the ground, knocking you around, beating you senseless—that’s the best it’s ever going to get.”

  It put a momentary damper on the green card treyf fest. Why keep fighting if the fight only got harder, no matter what direction you took? An American citizen weighed down by a pound of beef and cheese didn’t necessarily have a much clearer shot at happiness than the long-suffering, half-legal Russian immigrant. Then again: This was the easiest it was ever going to be! Might as well enjoy it.

  We made our way uptown to the Lincoln Square Cinemas for the nine-thirty showing of Avatar in 3-D. The movie had been out for months already, but the theater was packed, and though we were early, the best we could do were off-center seats a few rows too close to the screen. It was almost a three-hour movie, so we took turns going to the bathroom, then settled in and put on our special glasses. “I think I’ll get a motorcycle license,” Cosmo said. And after a few minutes: “Maybe I’ll move to Harlem.” He would become an EMT, or maybe an earth scientist and move to Texas and look for oil. He would get Denim Fajita back together and they would play some gigs. A whole new universe of possibilities spilled out before him as we sat in our 3-D glasses, waiting for the movie to start.

  I looked over and saw Cosmo grinning ear to ear.

  “Welcome to America, dude,” I said.

  THE FIRST THING Cosmo did with his newfound freedom was go to see Kim, my hairstylist, at her buttercup-colored salon on the Lower East Side. When he walked in, his hair was shaggy, his beard about six inches long. Like most Lubavitchers, he did not wear the traditional sidelocks, or payess, that other ultra-Orthodox men sport, but he did take a Samsonian view of his mane.

  “Have you ever thought of shaving your beard?” I once asked him.

  “Stylistically, without a beard, I would look like such a fuckface” was his reply.

  Kim is five feet one, with a round face and big eyes. She dyes her hair light brown, in the fashion of many stylish Japanese women, and weaves strands of glitter in it to look festive. She wears a flowered dress and brown Christian Louboutin stiletto ankle boots, and because she also styles runway shows, she has fabulous stories about supermodels: who’s sweet and who’s a giant hungry bitch.

  Kim took a matter-of-fact approach to both hair and love. She celebrated her birthdays—and all holidays—with a trip to see Hunkamania, a roving male strip revue. Her boyfriend was a prominent fashion photographer. They lived together downtown, along with Kim’s morbidly obese cat, whom she always referred to as “my big kitty.” Together, we had been through a lot, Kim and me: I came to her brunette with hair down to my shoulder blades, rail-straight thanks to a $300 “Japanese” treatment I underwent in Queens. She cut my first bob, which became my first pixie, and when I got bored of that, she bleached it to the whitest possible shade of blond. She took me back to brown after my breakup and then began layering in reds that winter. I liked making big changes to my hair for the same reason I liked the fashion business and New York: because it was a shortcut to reinvention. You can completely change the way you look, act, feel—at least for a few weeks—just by going blond. Hair may seem like a trivial underpinning for your identity, but it’s not nothing. In some ultra-Orthodox communities, you have long, flowing brown hair and are a little girl one day, and then the next you are bald, a wife.

  As part of every haircut, Kim gave her clients a little head massage.

  I was not there to see it, but Kim reported a very productive session with Cosmo, once he recovered from the massage. He requested a full Mohawk and forbade her to even trim the beard, but she persuaded him to go with something a little more contemporary. The beard shrank down to three inches, the hair to more of a Caesar cut. In subsequent visits the beard would shrink more and more until Cosmo could have, and did, pass for any hipster in Bushwick.

  The evening after his first haircut, Cosmo appeared in the doorway to my room, chomping away on dinner.

  “What are you eating?” I asked.

  “Bacon.” I looked up and he was beaming as he chewed his gummy—wait, gummy?—meal.

  “I don’t remember you cooking bacon,” I said. “And…it doesn’t smell like bacon in here.”

  “I didn’t cook it,” he replied.

  “So…you bought it cooked?”

  “No.”

  I snapped my laptop closed on the bed. “Cosmo, are you eating raw bacon?”

  “Yep!” he said. Chew, chew, chew.

  “Oh God, no—” I spoke in my calmest worried-mama voice, but inside my stomach was already doing violence to dinner. “But…trichinosis.”

  He hadn’t cooked the bacon because he didn’t want to treyf up his pans. He hadn’t washed it because he didn’t want to treyf up his sink. He was on the very brink of freedom, staring into the abyss but unwilling to cut the last threads. Once you cook bacon in a kosher kitchen, that’s the end of it. The pans are ruined, the apartment is ruined, there are millions of invisible specks of bacon grease everywhere; a bacon pall is upon you.

  “What if someone comes over for dinner?”

  “When is the last time someone came over for dinner?”

  Cosmo looked wounded, so I apologized. “Someone could totally come over for dinner,” I said, doubting it as I surveyed the room. “Just cook the bacon next time, please, for your safety if nothing else.”

  “I don’t do this to you,” he said. “I don’t tell you how to live your life.”<
br />
  “I’m not telling you how to live your life, I’m just saying that raw bacon can make you really sick.”

  We had an argument about this—him standing in the doorway defiantly gumming the bacon, me on my bed. I regretted the knee-jerk revulsion. In my defense, I am the child of chemists. We do not mess around with food-borne illness. But the argument quickly spun away from bacon and toward restrictions of any kind, to me telling Cosmo what he could and could not do. He didn’t tell me what to eat, and I shouldn’t tell him.

  I was reading in the living room one night later that week when Cosmo trundled in after jujitsu looking particularly solemn. He stopped in the doorway.

  “Everyone knows,” he said.

  “Everyone knows what?”

  “I’m frei.” He said this as if delivering a eulogy.

  “What is frei?” I asked, worried he was in some kind of legal trouble, that his green card wasn’t going to come through, that the tsnius police were about to come banging down our door.

  “It means I’m free,” Cosmo said. He flashed a rubber band smile, then went into the bathroom to wash his jujitsu uniform.

  ON THE LAST NIGHT of Fashion Week, I went back to the apartment early and ran into my neighbor Chavie, who lived with her fiancé Chaim across the hall. They had both grown up in the Lubavitch community. Chavie had “done the whole all-girls-school thing” for a while, had even gotten as far as law school at NYU, but dropped out after her first year to become a trance DJ at local clubs. Chaim was “supposed to go to architecture school” but ended up “managing a pharmacy” in Crown Heights. They had been engaged for six and a half years. They were also heroin addicts.

  When I ran into Chavie, she was scratching furiously at her wrists. “I need a cell phone,” she said. This was the first time we’d met, and she only introduced herself later. I offered her mine, and she took it in to Chaim, climbing over the stacked armchairs that cluttered their entryway hall. She came back and joined me on the landing, smoking cigarettes and compulsively apologizing for it, even though it didn’t bother me and I said so. She told me all about trance music, how it’s “kind of a hippie scene,” how “people there will just pass you a J. It’s really nice. And they won’t care if they ever see you again.” She liked me because I looked “normal” and because I was wearing pants. She was petite and striking, with a slim angular face, heavy brows and giant chocolate-drop eyes. Her hair was pulled back in a haphazard ponytail and she wore loose-fitting cotton pants self-consciously. She explained that their phone and Internet had been turned off that morning, and that Chaim had a lot of “business calls” to make. Chaim had shoulder-length hair parted straight down the middle and dirty fingernails. He ducked into the hall after a few minutes, handed me back my BlackBerry and nodded his head once in thanks.

  “Vogue,” Chavie kept saying, looking at me, not acknowledging her fiancé’s brief appearance. “Vogue, vogue, vogue,” she said, and it dawned on me at last that this was a compliment.

  “Thank you,” I ventured.

  She waved her cigarette around in the air and said, “You’re welcome,” then disappeared back into D6. “Come by anytime,” she offered, “just knock.”

  I went in and buried myself under the covers, drifting off before ten to the muffled screams of our neighbors, possibly Chavie and Chaim, but I doubted it. Around two o’clock in the morning, I woke to the feeling of a hand delicately rustling my hair. The next sensation didn’t cohere. It was a tiny thumping on the far side of my pillow, a little scamper across my bed. I opened my eyes just in time to catch the whip of a mouse’s tail.

  I leaped up and screamed long and loud but no one noticed, not the hollering neighbors, not Cosmo asleep in his bed, not Chavie, not Chaim, in their drug-induced haze. For the rest of the night I sat up with the lights on, curled up tight in a ball in the middle of my bed. The next day, I brought home a nuclear arsenal of rodenticide and scattered it around my room. I mentioned the mouse in a brief note to my mother, the scientist, and a plug-in sonar device arrived, without comment, a few days later in the mail. It was all useless. As soon as the lights went off, every sound was mice running around me—every rustle of wind, every muffled domestic dispute, every car passing on the street outside. I turned music on before I went to bed at night, singing along to Katy Perry like a mental patient until I eventually drifted off, only to wake again at the first little scratch-scratch-scratch on the floor.

  California Gurls, we’re unforgettable!

  Daisy Dukes, bikinis on top!

  On the final night of Fashion Week, I met my friend Rachel at the Boom Boom Room and we sat on a banquette eating miniature cheeseburgers. Rachel covered fashion and luxury goods for the Wall Street Journal. She has a dry and wicked sense of humor, and a worldview that holds that basically everyone is insane. “I’m surrounded by idiots” is a thing she often says. Rachel is one of the most loving people I’ve ever met. The way she shows love is by looking at you skeptically for thirty seconds and then shattering every illusion you ever had about life.

  At Booms that night, I told her about my mouse problem and the fact that I would almost certainly die alone and also that I was increasingly finding my work to be something short of wholly satisfying. She looked at me, took a bite of a cheeseburger and said, “I don’t want to hear anything more about this.”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “You’re on a spiritual journey,” she said. “I don’t want to hear about mice or men or any of this other crap.”

  “I’m on a spiritual what now?”

  Rachel is not the world’s most religious person. She is the daughter of a famous dentist and a powerhouse financial services executive. Her sister is a performance artist who once posed for a photographer dangling a blue-paint-soaked tampon in front of her crotch, while sitting naked and spread-eagle on a toilet. (“The Blue Period.” Get it?)

  “You’ve moved to Crown Heights and surrounded yourself with these maniacs for a reason,” she said. “What do you think, this just happened?”

  We are not in dialogue with the universe, I explained. The universe does not send us signs.

  “Just figure it out,” she said, and then she gave me a hug and a kiss. Courtney Love stumbled through the door with her entourage and was making her way noisily to the fireplace. I said good-bye to Rachel and then went up to the roof, where I lit my cigarette off a girl next to me. I wanted to stay up there in the clouds all night. But I looked around at all the identical boys and girls, smoking and preening and feeling like nothing under their clothes. The bubble popped. The effects of the drug wore off.

  THE COMEDOWN AFTER Fashion Week is soft. The traveling circus moves on to London and suddenly it seems there is nothing but time. I had a drink after work one night with my friend Davi, whom I hadn’t seen much since college. He was going to graduate school out of town, so he called me up and suggested we have a beer. We met at a little French place near my office and caught up on each other’s lives. Davi is a lot like Rachel—clearheaded, intolerant of fools—but unlike her, he is an Orthodox Jew, and the subject of his thesis was partial Jewish identity. We talked about War and Peace, which I had just suggested to Cosmo, who declared the book to be “about nothing” and then went rummaging through my collection for something better.

  “It made me sad,” I told Davi. “All these people just looking for something to live for. It’s war or it’s love or it’s God or money. And it works for a time, and then it doesn’t, and then they have to go find something else to devote their lives to, until that doesn’t work, and on and on. It’s pointless.”

  “I don’t see it that way,” Davi said. “For me, it seemed like people searching for—I guess you could call them ‘communities of meaning.’ And it wasn’t so much that they were fighting or praying necessarily, but that they were part of this group of people, and that’s what gave meaning to their lives.”

  It’s funny to think of the chirping women of Sex and the City as a community of mea
ning, but that’s what they were, gabbing brainlessly about their boyfriends and shoes. Same goes for the fashion crowd, who aren’t exactly the people you’d imagine having Thanksgiving with, until you do. It’s messy and difficult to shape a family out of bosses and colleagues, professors and fictional characters, girlfriends, boyfriends, mothers, fathers, Hasidic Jews. It was strange to ride the subway to Fashion Week and think about all those women in their crazy outfits as part of my community of meaning, but that’s what they are. Every mini-cheeseburger or after-work drink is a spiritual journey. It’s no different really from finding people to make money with or fight wars with or gather together with to pray.

  What is God? Call him love, call him a father, call him whatever name you want. It’s the calling that matters, not the response. God is never the thing that fulfills you. God is the name for the hole.

  Rough Beasts

  One Friday night, Cosmo invited me to accompany him to dinner at the home of his friends Shaina and Avraham: “It will not be as nice as the Goldfarbs, and the food will not be as good.”

  “Sounds great,” I said.

  Shaina was an Israeli-born massage therapist with olive skin and green eyes so dark they looked black in the dim light of their apartment. Avraham was thin, pale, American. He was a rabbi, like Cosmo. They met while studying together in South Africa, at the second-best Lubavitch rabbinical school in the world, Cosmo said. According to my roommate, Avraham was brilliant, the star pupil. He spoke the way a dancer danced, light and quick. He made large gestures and lingered on his s’s, so the words took on a ringing quality, like live wires hanging in the air. Like Cosmo, Avraham didn’t lead a congregation. He traveled around the country, inspecting restaurant kitchens and performing the rituals necessary to certify them as kosher. Shaina and Avraham had three children under five.

  Their apartment smelled strongly of freshly baked challah. It stood in such contrast to the dry cold air outside that once we arrived after the long walk over, I had to keep reminding myself I was still awake. There may be no more perfect food than a braided challah straight from the oven, burnished brown on top, soft and dense underneath. It’s no wonder Jews have a prayer just for this bread. It’s the first thing I learned in Hebrew school, and in my head it’s one long word—baruch-atah-Adonai-Eloheinu-melech-ha’olam-hamotzee-lechem-min-ha’aretz—chanted as quickly as possible, while staring at a torn-off hunk of bread cooling cruelly in your hand. Shaina was unloading three warm challah loaves on the dinner table just as we walked in the door.