Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (39 page)

“He is a writer.”

They stared at me.

I smiled and waved and said: “I'm Izzy's father. I love her very much. It's nice to meet you.”

They applauded, and the teacher smiled and nodded that this would be a good time to leave.

That week, I helped Izzy with her homework every night. We spent every possible moment together. I passed hours with her and her friends—a little friend club of which I became a full-fledged temporary member.

Yaacov and I spoke little and stayed out of each other's way. But at one point I said: “I'm very glad that Esther has you and that Izzy can depend on you when I'm not here. Let's both be good fathers to that wonderful little girl.”

He only smiled. I found it hard to get a sense of him, but I was only a guest here, felt fortunate even to be allowed to see Isadora. I chalked up my inability to read Yaacov to language barriers, cultural differences. Or there may have been a problem lurking, some jealousy he felt at my suddenly showing up. Perhaps my appearance had raised tensions between him and Esther, or set him against me, which in turn might confuse Izzy, her love divided between him and me: a very tough dilemma for a child who had already lost, for a time, her dad. In truth, I just didn't know. I had to remind myself that just a while ago I had been little short of Satan to my ex. And then the moment I dreaded, that Isadora feared, arrived: I must leave.

She seemed fine for a little while, but as the hour approached she began to ask, at first calmly and then ever more emphatically, why I must go.

Then it was time. Esther and Yaacov left the room so that Isadora and I could say our goodbyes.

“Why must you go, Daddy?”

“Sweetheart, I love you. But I don't live here. I live in San Francisco. All my work is there, my friends, my recovery groups, my partner, Lana, my apartment. I have nothing here to make a beginning with—no money, no possibility of employment. You are here
and you are important to my life and I will be back, I swear that I will. I will always be in your life for as long as you let me. I will never disappear on you ever again. We can talk by phone, we can write. I'm your daddy, Isadora, and I'll always love you.”

Words. Empty words. Sometimes I hate words. Sometimes they fail human experience. Sometimes words are a way to avoid the truth. But in the mouth of an innocent child, words have the clarity and pinpoint precision of a laser beam.

She collapsed onto the bed and began to sob inconsolably, sobs that shook her little body, that seemed to begin in a place buried so deep away, a grief so dark and great that no one could find it and from which violent tremors shuddered to the surface and convulsed her in an agony of loss.

I closed my eyes, prayed to my Higher Power to know what to do, and the answer came:
Let her have her feelings, let her say what she needs to say and remain by her side until you have to go.

I laid my hand on her gently and said: “I love you.”

And she cried out: “Why do you have to go? Why? Why are you always going?”

The truth of it cut me to the soul.

Why are you always going
?

All my life, I had been going, fleeing, leaving. Home, friends, jobs. Cities, countries, armies. Marriages, families—everything, everyone, everywhere, always. For a time I was there and then, gone.

Even as a writer, what had defeated me, in part, was my inability to complete anything. I didn't finish what I began. Left things half done, grew bored or frightened, or frustrated, and lit out for other, another, elsewhere, different: anything but this, anyone but you, anywhere but here.

I didn't know. For once in my life was answerless.

But as she wept I remembered her little feet on the hardwood floors of our Park Slope apartment, the way she clung to my leg, cheek pressed to my shin, as I waited to head back to the bar at Billy's Topless, wordlessly begging me not to go—and how I looked into her eyes and felt so much love yet was helpless not to leave, had to go have my alcohol. Not even her love could stand between me and booze. Booze had been my lord and master, the tyrant that posed as a liberator, destroyed what it seemed to liberate.

And I saw, understood, here before me as she cried, the full consequences of my drinking career: how the innocent suffer, how unforgivable it is, how utterly irresponsible.

I hung my head in shame. Esther looked in, said: “You'll miss your bus.”

Slowly, I stood. Isadora clasped my hand. We held on to each other so fiercely, with so much longing.

“Come with me to the bus,” I said. “Sweetheart, let's go together.”

She sat up, eyes puffed with tears, clinging to my hand, and we left with Esther and Yaacov following behind. At the bus, I kneeled before her and said: “Give me a hug so big it will hug us both all the way home.”

She encircled my neck and buried her crying face into my shoulder and held on and squeezed, squeezed with all her love, all her longing, all her hope, all her heart, all her wanting to have a daddy.

Then it was time to board. She couldn't believe it, wouldn't release me. Esther pried away Isadora's arms.

“This is not goodbye,” I said. “I'm your father. I'll always be your father. That never ends.”

And turned and walked to the bus and boarded with her cries in my ears.

Yaacov held her back. I took a seat, pushed open the window. Izzy reached out with both arms, imploring. I stretched out my arm. Our fingers touched. The bus began to move. And then she was gone.

WHEN I RETURNED TO SAN FRANCISCO, I COULDN'T bear the thought of giving another poetry reading or ever writing another poem again. Sat in cafés bleakly staring out of windows. All of it—Isadora, Germany, Israel—triggered a sadness that lodged in my chest, wouldn't budge, and petrified my spirit in stone.

I told Old Ray about Isadora. What should I do? More would be revealed, he said. But for now, aspects of life long repressed with drinking had come to the fore and I should stay open, see what my Higher Power had in store. In the meantime, why not look further into Judaism, even for a possible synagogue to attend?

Tore the list of shuls from an old Yellow Pages and went on a quest, from one to the next, to see which, if any, resonated.

None did.

Conservative, Reform. Orthodox. A barrier stood between me and the congregants, the very settings. I disliked having to pay an annual fee for full membership in a shul. Shouldn't worship be free? Reform temple services seemed too Christian, Conservative
temples too middle class, Orthodox too rigid.

Anshei Ha'sefer at 23rd and Taraval was last on my list, all the way across San Francisco.

Small shul housed in the building of the Humanistic Society. In the pews, elderly, most with numbers tattooed on their arms: Holocaust survivors. They bore an air of invincible desolation, which appealed to me.

The rabbi, Jack Frankel, was an American-born Israeli Army veteran in his late sixties, the former rabbi of Anchorage, Alaska, where he administered last rites to Eskimos and gun-bearing trappers; previous to that had been a rabbi in Reno, Nevada, where he ministered to prison inmates and professional gamblers. He was Jack London meets the Torah, rabbinical rogue and ladies' man. My sort of guy. All the women congregants batted eyes at him and despised his wife, Brue, a toy manufacturing millionaire with a vicious temper.

I sat in back, dressed in my plaid shirt with torn sleeves, long black hair, and gold earring.

At a certain point in the morning ritual, two or three of the elderlies crowded around and one said: “Young man. Would you mind very much to remove the big Torah from the cabinet and carry it up and down the aisles? The poor rabbi has been doing it every week and he's going to give himself a hernia. No one else is strong enough.”

“Sure,” I said, slightly abashed. Had never carried a Torah before. Seemed like a singular mystical sort of honor. But what if, God forbid, I dropped it? Balancing its handles, hoisted it aloft, walked up and down as congregants pressed the fringes of their talisman to the Torah, planting kisses.

After the service, they said a blessing on the challah, and I readied myself to slip away. I'd had my synagogue experience, didn't plan a
return. But as I moved to the exit several of the congregants closed around.

“Young man, would you mind very much to come next week and carry the Torah again?”

They looked up at me with such hope, I couldn't refuse. To stay would be amends for all the times I'd left when I should have stayed. Ended up going to that congregation for four years. Jewish guilt: it works.

 

Through the synagogue, I heard of a therapy group starting up for children of Holocaust survivors, offered by Jewish Family Services, and decided to enroll. Once a week we met with Yigal, a therapist. My fellow Second Generationers were Gadi, David, and Naomi. Week after week, we revealed to each other ways in which being children of survivors had made us different not only from Gentiles but from other Jews whose parents had not experienced what ours had.

We found amazing similarities to our experiences. The isolation. Distrust of the world. Fear of what people were capable of. A sense of being unable to fully bridge the gap between oneself and the survivors' memories. Most of all, a haunting sense that somehow we must make up for what they suffered—try harder, live more fiercely, take extraordinary risks or, alternatively, none at all; be as inconspicuous as possible, preserve ourselves against risk, suspended over a chasm between crazy gambits and immobilizing caution.

The four of us began to meet outside of therapy, to socialize. We became a close-knit, quirky family, brothers and sisters bound not by blood but by atrocity.

One day, I received an unexpected call from Danny Shot, editor of an East Coast underground lit mag called
Long Shot,
which Danny had founded, in part, with money from Allen Ginsberg
and in which writers like Charles Bukowski, Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso appeared alongside younger relative unknowns from the emergent Spoken Word scene, like myself.

“Alan, you're the son of a survivor, aren't you?” said Danny.

“Yeah. Funny you ask. I'm in this therapy group just now for kids of survivors. The Holocaust is on my mind a lot.”

“Did you know that I'm the son of a survivor?”

“I had no idea, even, that you're Jewish.”

“Listen. Why don't you and I co-edit a special
Long Shot
issue of underground Jewish writers?”

Later we brought in Hershel Silverman, a Beat-era poet, and among us we assembled a definitive compendium of underground Jewish writers and artists that included Ginsberg, Tuli Kupferberg, Wallace Berman, Bob Holman, Adrienne Rich, Jack Micheline, Marge Piercy, and Hal Sirowitz. We titled the issue “It's the Jews! A Celebration of New Jewish Visions” because when something goes wrong in a society, the first thing Gentiles do is blame it on the Jews. In keeping with our irreverent countercultural stance, our avant-garde pledge to shock, the cover displayed a photo of a completely naked muscle man posing on a beach alongside a fully clothed ultra-Orthodox Chasid.

The simultaneous release parties in New York and San Francisco were massively attended—in San Francisco the club so crowded that in the middle of the performance someone had to climb a ladder to remove ceiling panels to let in more air. Ten underground poets read, including Jack Micheline, Julia Vinograd, Jack Hirschman, and myself. The enthusiasm and size of the audience persuaded me that in America, and perhaps around the world, an audience of young unaffiliated Jews did not feel served by the rigidified institutions of the Jewish community and yet longed for some way to be Jewish in a postmodern world. Perhaps pop culture might serve as
that bridge: it now was, after all, the true religion of the US. Green Day and Madonna held far more sway over young Jewish American minds than UJA.

I thought, too, of the Jewish magazine itself. Could anything be more moribund, out of step with today's world?
Commentary
,
Jewish Frontier
,
Moment
,
Present Tense
,
Lilith
—provincial phantoms of an outworn glory, a time when Jewish studies were on the rise in America and Jewish writers like Bellow and Malamud and Roth had staked their claim—successfully—as the new boys on the block.

But that day had come and gone. Most of these writers were now household names. Multiculturalism ruled the roost, and I knew from my experiences in the underground that Jews were not invited to the party. We would have to throw our own.

Consequently, I conceived of a kind of experiment. Had always been interested in Jewish magazines, from the one I published in college,
Jewish Arts Quarterly
, to those I worked for in Israel, including
Shdemot
and
Spectrum,
to my dramatic staging of a live literary magazine at the Israel Museum and my editing of
Jewish Frontier
and serving as an editor on the
Tel Aviv Review.