Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde

by Rebecca Dana

  “Pearl?”

  He sighed. “Yes.”

  One nice thing about living a life in deferment is that you can worry less about the day to day. There aren’t big decisions to make so much as slight course-corrections to ensure you’re still heading the same way you’ve always been heading: to heaven or Manhattan or wherever it is you live in your dreams. But once you get this thing of wisdom, everything becomes more complicated. You have to stop living as the person you want to be and start living as the person you are. You fuck with God. You declare your freedom. It feels great, but it can also knock you out.

  “There’s a Jewish custom that when you build a house, you leave a wall unfinished, as a reminder of the second temple,” he said. “So wherever you live, there’s always going to be one part that’s still raw.”

  “Cheapskates,” I joked.

  Cosmo ignored me.

  “It’s interesting how on the one hand, I’m such a child, and on the other hand, I philosophize a lot,” he said.

  “I’m like that too,” I said. “Parts of me are young, parts are old. I think everyone’s like that.”

  “We’re fucked,” he said.

  We paused under a streetlamp.

  “We’re not fucked,” I said. “We’re fine.”

  Epilogue

  A few weeks after I moved into Crown Heights, Cosmo said something hilarious. Cosmo often said hilarious things, and I often told him as much. I don’t remember what he said in this instance, but I do remember telling him he was the funniest person I’d ever met and that I found myself wanting to write down everything he said so I could repeat it later to friends. “You should put it in a book,” he said. So I did.

  “The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself,” wrote Joan Didion in the essay “On Keeping a Notebook.” I share this compulsion and always have. I write down what people say all the time, and since—although he is funnier—he is ultimately no different from anyone else, I wrote down what Cosmo said too, from the moment I met him. “Not everything I say is funny,” he said once, and I wrote that down too. We talked about the fact of the book periodically: Before I sold it, after I sold it, while I was writing. He advised me to include certain information, like the passage from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and he made a suggestion, which I rejected, for the last line: “It should say: ‘If you ever want to date Cosmo, you totally should. Drop me a line, and I’ll give you his number.’” To that end, and in the spirit of doing some good in this world, if any readers of this book would like to go on a date with my former roommate, you can reach me at rebecca.dana@gmail.com.

  As of this writing, Cosmo and Vera are not an item. He is single, and after many months of being frei—of devotion only to jujitsu and considerably more experience in the secular world—he is also a new man. He wears contact lenses now. His clothes are modern and cool. He’s in outrageously good shape. He joined an online dating site. The last time we met for a drink, which was a few weeks ago, at a bar in the West Village, our very attractive female bartender tried to pick him up. Cosmo shrugs these things off. His life has changed entirely in the two years since we met. He has his motorcycle license now. He’s left Fast Trak and got a job at a company in Brooklyn that ships porn, pens and other supplies to truck stops and convenience stations around the country. He is still practicing jujitsu and hoping to become a teacher, like Professor Grey, someday. He has reconstituted Denim Fajita, and they now practice in a studio space across the street from Penn Station, meaning every week he passes through the sidewalk grate steam and the nut vendor cart fumes that still smell to me like the first day in New York. I’m jealous of this and tell him so, and but his bandmates won’t let him invite me to rehearsal. He has moved out of our old apartment at 621 Crown Street into a one-bedroom outside the Hasidic neighborhood. He is still close with the Goldfarbs and many of his old friends in Crown Heights, but as of this writing, he does not self-identify as a Jew.

  Whereas I do—as a Jew, as a New Yorker, as a girl from Pittsburgh, as a journalist and as about a hundred other things. On the outside, I am the same as I’ve always been. I look the same, except I’m a bit older and my hair is brown now. I have the same job. The only real change is that instead of being alone in the world, I see myself as one of all these people, part of a sprawling community of meaning that stretches from the Goldfarbs’ living room to Upper East Side brownstones to the back porch of an old vintage shop in New Orleans. New York has worked its movie magic on me after all. The fairy tale is real. I am in love. I am happy. At the date of the publication of this book, I will be thirty years old.

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful first to Cosmo, for letting me invade his life and for giving me a home when I was alone in the world. I am grateful to my editor, Amy Einhorn, for helping to turn this tangled mess of human life into an actual book, and to my agents, Jason Anthony, Rachel Vogel and Sylvie Rabineau, for seeing potential in the story of a lost, lanky Jewish girl long before she got it together. And I am grateful to the rest of my family: to Tina Brown, Edward Felsenthal, Sam P. Jacobs, Bryan Curtis, Gabé Doppelt, Lucas Wittmann, Jacob Bernstein, Tom Watson, David Jefferson, Ben Crair, Tom Weber, Paula Szuchman, Kara Cutruzzula, and everyone else; to Peter Kaplan, Tom Scocca, Choire Sicha, Michael Barbaro, and Michael Solomon; to Richard Plepler and Sheila Nevins; to Claire Howorth, Laury Frieber, Allegra LaViola, Sara Vilkomerson, Lucy Boyle, Mako Ijima, Sara Bernstein, Maria Zuckerman, Lauren Schuker Blum, Rachel Dodes Wortman, Kristin Victoria Barron, Annie Garment, Suzi Garment, Matthew Horowitz, Amanda and Greg Clayman, Robert and Jennifer Carlock, Jacob and Randi Brookman-Harris, Reihan Salam, Kate Bleich, Davi Bernstein and all the rest of my wonderful friends; to Statler LLC; to the Goldfarbs and everyone else who took me in in Crown Heights; to Francesca Mercurio, without whom I would be lost; to the Angelos—Judy, John, Jack, Kate, Hilary, and François—who have given me the big, beautiful family of my dreams; to my parents, David and Laurie, whose strength and sacrifices made me the person I am today.

  And to Jesse, the man at the symphony, who gave me something too good to write about. This book, my life, my love—they are all for you.

  About the Author

  Rebecca Dana has written for Newsweek and the Daily Beast, the Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone and the New York Observer. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and their dog.

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