Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde

by Rebecca Dana

  “Candace?” I said.

  “Hi,” she said. She was kind and friendly.

  I said that it was wonderful—really, so great—to meet her. She smiled and nodded in a way that could have meant “Likewise” or “Somebody call security, please.” In spite of myself, I started to fawn, expressing my admiration, thanking her for creating a modern female archetype that, however flawed, was superficial without being entirely substance-free. I said embarrassing things about how Carrie Bradshaw had been a totem to me, a kind of religious figure in my youth.

  How many twenty-seven-year-olds must come up to Candace Bushnell every single day and talk to her like they were old friends, just because we can all recite full script pages of Sex and the City dialogue from memory?

  Candace took all of this in. She was calm and polite.

  My effusion ran on and drifted into the personal. I told her about my breakup. I told her about my rabbi. I told her about Anya, the twenty-five-year-old mother of three who couldn’t remember how old she was, and about how all the women in my neighborhood looked at me with such pity, like I was a washed-up old maid, and about how many wrong turns I’d taken on my way to this seat in this room with these people. I told her I was freaking out a little. I used the phrase “freaking out a little.”

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Twenty-seven,” I replied, catching my breath.

  She thought for a moment.

  “That’s about right,” she said.

  All calm and cool.

  All Zen Buddha–like.

  (The woman to my right at dinner was a Zen Buddhist. “Richard Gere was telling me he switched to Tibetan Buddhism because Zen Buddhism didn’t go deep enough,” she told me later that night. A lot of her sentences began, “Richard Gere…”)

  Like a motherless maniac—like every other twenty-seven-year-old twit in shoes she can’t afford—I had poured myself out into a puddle before Carrie Bradshaw herself. And filling the role she didn’t choose but clearly has made peace with, as a lifestyle guru for all the lost girls who’ve modeled themselves in her fictionalized image, she did what she could. She didn’t commend me. She didn’t offer counsel. She didn’t say whether this was a good thing or a bad thing, whether I should change or “lean in” or run away to Majorca or find a husband as soon as possible. “That’s about right” was all she said.

  “Okay,” I said back, feeling mortified and also strangely comforted. I looked to Candace, but she had already turned her attention back to the stage. To my right, the Zen Buddhist sat ramrod straight, her focus on Melanne Verveer. I had no choice but to pass the rest of the evening this way, fidgeting between these two pools of serenity. Sometimes you get so close to your childhood vision of grown-up happiness that it scrambles the picture. You meet the messiah, and she’s perfectly polite, but she’s busy moving lasagna around her plate, listening to people with real problems.

  “WOMEN IN THE WORLD” continued, in this fashion, for three days. I sat still, surrounded by Candace Bushnell and her cohort, patiently listening to the stories of women with a lot more to say than any of us had: There was Edna Anan Ismail, a native of Somaliland, who was eight years old when her family tied her down and “circumsized” her, cutting and stitching her vagina to the diameter of a matchstick. There was Marietou Diarra, a Senegalese woman whose eldest daughter died as a result of being circumcised. There was Kiran Bedi, India’s first female police officer, talking of the country’s sex trafficking victims, and Sunitha Krishnan, a former child sex slave turned antitrafficking activist, who was gang-raped by eight men at the age of sixteen. There was Annie Rashidi-Mulumba, who described the “sexual massacre” under way in the Congo. At some point, there was lunch. During lunch, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman interviewed Christine Lagarde, joking that his daughter should hook up with her son.

  The last panel at “Women in the World” featured a handful of media types. The subject was “How do you make people pay more attention?” In a world full of people like me, who will pretty much listen to stories of female genital mutilation and sex trafficking only when they’re trapped between a Zen Buddhist and Candace Bushnell, how do you get anyone to care about anything? How do you even get them to hear anything? “We probably can’t look to Hollywood to save us,” said Nora Ephron, my Hollywood hero, who arrived for the panel dressed in leather pants, looking ageless and perfect and exactly as I always imagined her to look. Next up was Lauren Zalaznik, the president of Bravo, the cable network that created the Real Housewives franchise of programs, in which rich women get drunk on Pinot Grigio and yank at each other’s hair extensions, and also Top Chef, Cosmo’s favorite reality show. Her advice, for those of us who were past the point of dedicating their lives to aiding the infirm but who maybe wanted to be slightly better human beings, was: “Do as much good in the world as you can, and make some money doing it.”

  I WENT TO WORK on Monday and wrote my story about Fendi’s $1,400 Lucite platform stripper heels. I wish I could say the experience was soul crushing, but actually it was fun. I interviewed an erudite British stripper, who gave me lessons on walking in stilettos, and the creative director of Elle magazine, who gently suggested not everyone should wear these shoes. I wrote the piece and it went online, taking its place in my growing catalog of unapologetic fluff.

  What was to apologize for, ultimately? It is such a luxury of a problem to expect to be made whole by your work. It is such an absurd indulgence to stay up at night, thinking that maybe if you had made different choices, you would be a better person, living a more profound and useful life. This is the life I wanted, and for better and worse it is the life I got. I paid my rent and supported myself in New York. I had a community of meaning, a beautiful one, full ditzy fashion people and brilliant eccentrics and lovely young mothers I met in Crown Heights. I tried to be a good person, to help people when I could and to not be too judgmental of people whose values were different from mine. Sometimes I succeeded at this and sometimes I failed.

  Everything I knew felt half true. I hated Crown Heights, except the parts I loved. I adored Fashion Week, except that I also loathed it. I lived for my colleagues, worshipped Tina and Edward, was happy writing silly stories about Tiger Woods and stripper heels, but also felt a kind of hollowness in the abstract, that nagging pointlessness pulling at my clothes. If I could just get back to Manhattan, I caught myself thinking sometimes. If I could get away from the mice and return to civilization as I desired it to look, I would be okay. If I could just run away to Majorca. If I could just meet a new hero and start all over again. Again.

  You think you have nothing tying you down except a job and a few boxes of stuff in a shitty $650-a-month apartment and a rabbi who’s a little too dramatic about his love life, but then you realize the whole thing is a lead balloon. You can spend your days saving lives or writing stories or studying Torah or practicing jujitsu and otherwise trying to resolve the mess, distill it into a clear focus. But it turns out the mess is the whole point. So you might as well dig down. Lean in. Make a home there.

  Jujitsu Blonde vs. Big Oil

  What are you doing this weekend?” Edward said just before eleven one lovely spring morning in the Gehry boat.

  “Working?”

  “How would you feel about going to the Gulf?”

  My flight left in four hours.

  On April 20, an oil rig called Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, about forty miles off the Louisiana coast, in the Macondo Prospect oil field. The explosion itself killed eleven workers on the rig, which was controlled by the British Petroleum company. It left a gaping hole at the bottom of the Gulf, from which oil was gushing into the water at a rate that was first estimated to be around 1,000 barrels per day and later revised up to 62,200 barrels in the first day of the spill. People started saying Deepwater Horizon was the biggest man-made natural disaster in American history, although it’s always difficult to draw clear lines around such things. When do natural disast
ers start and when do they end, exactly? How many ripples out do you count—how many species of animals extinct or generations susceptible to exotic cancers? Are oil-suffocated birds and the destruction of hundreds of miles of freshwater wetlands better or worse than the nuclear devastation of Three Mile Island or Hiroshima, for that matter? In any event, it was bad. No one knew how to stop the spill, which had decimated the coast’s fishing and tourist industries, and President Obama had imposed a moratorium on further drilling in the Gulf, paralyzing the region’s last major business: oil.

  My colleagues knew I lived with a rabbi in Brooklyn, but they joked that I really lived under my desk. The debate boiled down to semantics. If where you “live” is determined by where you pay rent, then I lived in Crown Heights, no question. But if it’s determined by where you keep the majority of your wardrobe, they were absolutely right. My desk was in a corner, between two walls of windows overlooking the Hudson River and the West Side Highway. I had six vertical files and one small closet, and all were filled with clothes. Not once in all the time I lived in Brooklyn did I actually do laundry there. Instead, every week, I filled a tote bag with ten pounds of clothing and carried it to a wash-and-fold place three blocks from my office. When cornered by colleagues and asked what I was doing—as I, say, unloaded this week’s wash into a filing cabinet—I would quietly confess to my private shame. In this respect above all others, New York had softened and sissified me. I could stand, rail straight, upside down for five minutes in yoga class, but I couldn’t wash my own underwear.

  Since the mouse incident, I had been spending more and more nights in the city, sleeping in Brooklyn less and less. What once had felt like an escape—like a dark, loud kosher cave I could crawl into to avoid my actual life—now felt like my actual life, and my escape increasingly was Manhattan. I lingered in the city after work, went to yoga, met up with friends and ended up crashing on their couches. Kate had a seafoam green futon in her living room, where I slept sometimes with Bailey, her labradoodle, who would put his head on the pillow next to mine and snore. Rachel and her husband, Josh, a former Wall Street banker, had a plush sectional sofa and a limitless supply of Special K Red Berries in their two-story condo in Long Island City. Kristin, a designer, had a double-wide brown velvet couch in her Tribeca loft plus coconut macaroons from Whole Foods. Sara, a film executive, had a stubborn dachshund named Muri, a one-bedroom with a patio on Sullivan Street in Soho and a boyfriend in Brooklyn with whom she stayed much of the time. Between these options and my office, I made a home. By summer, I was sleeping in Brooklyn only one or two nights a week. A friend called me La Vagabonda.

  One night in Crown Heights, I was sitting in the living room, tapping away on my BlackBerry, when Cosmo marched out of his bedroom, carrying my copy of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, opened to page 143. “Read this,” he said, jabbing an index finger at a passage. I read aloud:

  “And you have to tell us how’s come if you’re from Japan, you could be Sammy’s cousin and look like such a Jew,” Davy O’Dowd said.

  “We’re in Japan,” Sammy said. “We’re everywhere.”

  “Jujitsu,” Joe reminded him.

  “Good point,” said Davy O’Dowd.

  This was more literally true for Cosmo, who substituted a community of Jews with a community of jujitsu masters among whom he felt perfectly at home. For me, it was not Jews per se but people who felt, for one reason or another, like my people. They were scattered all over greater New York, and they fed me and put me up for the night as I wandered around that spring and summer, half homeless, afraid of being eaten by mice. You collect these people, like reverse osmosis, as you go through life. Drawing toward you people who are not your blood but are your family. At Sara’s apartment, I kept a toiletry bag and two dresses. At Kate’s, a full complement of yoga gear. And under my desk at work, which was my primary home away from home, I kept nine pairs of shoes.

  This made it easy to pack for a weeklong trip to Louisiana set to begin four hours hence. A few colleagues gathered to point and laugh as I crawled around my desk area, selecting summer dresses and pumps for my trip south. By midafternoon, I was in a Town Car to JFK, with a jam-packed travel bag in the trunk. (I kept a travel bag near the printer.) By midnight, I was on Bourbon Street.

  Here was my chance to do something good.

  NEW ORLEANS IS the only other place in America I’d ever seriously considered living, and it has always lingered in my memory as an object of fading desire, a road not taken. After my sophomore year in college, I worked on the metro desk of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, an intensely quirky regional newspaper that would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina. My first assignment during my intern summer was in the East Jefferson bureau, where I covered such headline-making news as the last day of elementary school and the annual return of a flock of purple martins—a not especially handsome species of migratory bird—to a local bridge. On my first day of work, a photographer took me on a tour of Metairie, the neighborhood in “East Jeff” where our bureau was located. Metairie was a largely white, middle-class area composed of drive-through daiquiri shacks, po’boy shops, closed-up movie theaters and churches in strip malls. “Are you a member of the tribe?” the photographer asked at one point during our tour. “Do you mean, am I a Jew?” I asked, frightened. He said yes, and I said yes, and in response to that, he took a sharp right and drove me through a crowded neighborhood of split-level homes, ultimately pulling up to one that looked no different from any of the others. “This is where David Duke lives,” he said.

  My boss in the bureau had lost half his index finger in a lawn mower accident and spent most of the day gnawing on the nub. One of my three fellow reporters was a blond, motherly type who gave me unsolicited dieting tips like “Eat absolutely nothing sweet after three p.m.” I cried every day for my first two weeks because all my friends were in New York or Washington that summer, and I was stuck in some sweat-drenched nightmare, covering high school baseball games with no friends except a photographer suspiciously knowledgeable about anti-Semites.

  It took time for me to realize that the beauty of New Orleans is in its languor, and because I was training to be a New Yorker, I fought it for a while. I fought against the humidity, complaining that coming to the city was like crawling into the mouth of a Saint Bernard. I fought against the pace of life, the slow lurch of traffic, the imprecision, the way it took forever to get anything done. I wanted specifics. I wanted the old lady in the faded pink shotgun house to shut up about her grandchild already and answer my questions about the fire down the street, because that way—the logic went—I could finish my work for the day and somehow get back North sooner, and somehow graduate sooner and go to New York. One by one, I fought against the daily rhythms of a place that seemed to slur its way through time, and what took some time to realize was that the slur is the whole point.

  I lived with an M.D./Ph.D. student named Ralston and his girlfriend, a circus acrobat, in a dilapidated house on Fern Street, a few blocks away from Tulane University and its rows of fraternity houses. At night you could see cockroaches crawling around in the cracks of our front stoop, which gave me the idea—correct, I’m sure—that the entire framework of the house was teeming with roaches, that if you were to peel back one of the walls, millions would spill out. There was also a particularly insidious subspecies of cockroach, which someone had given the deceptively sweet name palmetto bug. Palmettos had wings and would fly directly at your face. At first I fought them and cried when I lost, and then I gave in to them, like everything else. I submitted to the heat, to the slow turning of pointless fans, to long afternoons going nowhere, doing little. I knew almost no one in the city, so I had infinite stretches of solitude.

  Of course, the city itself, and the broader American South, has a mythology of its own and a filmic quality that easily rivals New York or LA. But I had never read those books or watched those movies as a kid. They were beside t
he point. I went to New Orleans that summer because it was the job I had gotten, and my other choice was to go back to Pittsburgh and resume my post at the Andy Warhol Museum, where I had worked as a “gallery attendant” in high school, earning $6.53 cents an hour to ask children not to touch the paintings and Japanese tourists to please refrain from taking flash photographs—responsibilities I almost always performed stoned. The Times-Picayune gig, which paid $600 a week, was a relative windfall. It wasn’t until later that I read A Confederacy of Dunces and Jitterbug Perfume and watched Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, not until much later that I sobbed through the ending of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, which is not a book about New Orleans but about isolation and longing in hot dusty places, and made a pilgrimage five blocks from Chad’s apartment in Brooklyn Heights to the house where Carson McCullers had lived. I arrived in the South in the summer of 2002 uninitiated and annoyed at this detour from the Eastern Seaboard; I left under duress, not wanting to go.

  New Orleans, for me, begins at ten o’clock on a Tuesday night at the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak Street, with a bottle of Abita and a game of incompetent pool already behind me, another to come. Anyone who knows anything about the city knows, at a minimum, that the name of the place is “New ORlins” or “Nawlins” or any variation that is not “New OrLEENS” and that Rebirth plays Tuesday nights at the Maple Leaf. Rebirth is Rebirth Brass Band, which was less a band than a parade. It felt and certainly sounded like there were more people up on the Maple Leaf’s small stage in its cramped main room under its original, ornate, pressed-metal ceiling than there were out in the audience. You got to the Maple Leaf early enough to get a spot in the first couple of rows, which guaranteed you would be hearing through cotton for the next few days, after the first six minutes of “Feel Like Funkin’ It Up,” whose only lyric, repeated over and over between horn solos was: