Pain Killers (24 page)

“Just give me the hat,” I said.

“No hat.”

A couple of bikers had roared up. One had a fat girl riding behind him, her tramp stamp visible where her jeans rode low over her butt crack. She spotted the Chasid and squealed as if she’d found a unicorn.

“Hey, Ernie, look! It’s one of
them
!”

While my new friend was weighing his options, I grabbed the
spodik
off his head. To my surprise, the sidelocks came with it, attached by safety pins inside the hat. Without them, the crew cut lent him massive insignificance.

“You really are a comedian,” I said.

“It’s a long story,” he replied.

“I hope so. But I don’t feel as bad now leaving you in your underwear. What about the beard?”

“I can’t just yank it off.”

I reached up to grab it—a fraud, in my mind, was fair game—but he quickly rubbed his hands together, worked up some kind of friction and ripped the beard off in one piece, like a slice of hair rind.

“That’s not sanitary, sticking it right on yours,” he said.

“I’ll spritz with Bactine later.” A small crowd was starting to gather. I grabbed the thing, which felt uncomfortably warm. “Maybe you can work it into a routine,” I said before jumping in the Mercedes.

Two blocks away, I parked and adjusted the rearview. I planted the
spodik
and Chasid hair on my head. It was magic. I was transformed. From unshaved fortyish seedy guy to grown-up Yeshiva boy. I wanted to pinch myself on the cheek and give myself a macaroon.

At the airport, I checked myself out in the men’s room. The Chasid who stared back from the mirror was as interchangeable as all the others I’d seen strolling Beverly Boulevard in satin overcoats on ninety-degree Saturdays. I was suddenly invisible. Perfect!

As a bonus, I’d picked up the faux-Chasid’s wallet. Myron Goldman. The best crimes are the ones you don’t mean to commit.
Improv.
The Second City approach to lawbreaking.

Presenting Goldman’s ID and ticket to security, I was struck by the barely muted hatred aimed in my direction. Full-on Orthodox, I looked like the Jews Julius Streicher caricatured in Nazi propaganda cartoons.

A freckled little towhead saw me in line and pointed. “Look, Mommy, a
devil
!”

I felt the eyes of the passengers with open seats, the expressions of naked dread and loathing as I passed, a walking bundle of hot-day satin, fur and frills.
Please don’t sit here…. Please don’t sit here…. Please don’t sit here….
But a big creamy blonde, I guessed a not-so-long-ago cheerleader, licked her lips when I parked my shtetl-stud self beside her in 9A. She put down her copy of
Exodus,
by way of broadcasting her Semitic leanings. Her teeth were health-book perfect, her blue eyes blasting troubled smarts.

What’s under all that satin and fur?
my seatmate’s eyes seemed to be asking. No sooner had I opened my free
USA Today
than she canted sideways and whispered, “Is it true?”

“Beg your pardon?” My head itched but I was afraid to scratch for fear my locks would fall off.

“You know,” she continued, “is it true about the sheet? That you only do it through a hole in the sheet, once a week? Is your God kinky or what?” I watched her twist her wedding ring, trying either to keep it on or yank it off.

“You have no idea,” I said.

It turned out she’d already had a little gin party in the airport lounge. Three Beefeaters later, on a fifty-minute flight, she’d told me her name was Dinah, after Dinah Shore, which was her first inkling that her mom was gay. Gay Dinah-Mom dumped Dad and moved in with the mail woman, Denise, who had three older daughters, Daisy, Dot and Deborah, who all hated her. People’s lives. Dinah also let me know that she was forty-two and formerly married to a “beefneck” named Ned who worked in her father’s sportswear emporium, and she really really wanted to try some “sheet-holin’.” A term with which I was unfamiliar. “You know,” Dinah giggled, tamping spilled gin off her beige pantsuit, “Jew sex. Gettin’ my Orthodox on. Doin’ it kosher style.”

“Is kosher style the same as kosher?”

“Better be.” She dipped her finger in a gin puddle on her tummy, raised it to her lips and licked. I was enchanted. This was what Davey’d been ranting about—why he went spewy over the Alterna.com fetish Betties. It wasn’t what they
did
that made them hot—it was that they
wanted
to do it.

“Do you stick it through the hole and then lay down, or do you cover me with the sheet, then move the hole till it’s right over my cookie?”

Mistaking my silence for shock, she grabbed my arm. Concern flashed from her Aryan blue irises. “I am a big, big supporter of the Israeli people.”

“Thank you.”

What else could I say? Was there a wave of blonde-on-bagel sex I had no idea about?

She reached for my
shmidok.
“Can I try it on?”

“No!” I said, seizing her hand.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s a man hat. Only men can touch it.”

“Wow…”

We both stared at my paw wrapped around hers. Then she withdrew and parked her hand on her chest, as if to express her virtue.
“Wow!”
she repeated.

“Yes, it’s in the Bible,” I lied. “Only men!”

I shuddered to imagine what would have happened had she lifted my locks off, found out I was in Bobover drag.

Her thigh pressed mine. “I know a hotel near the airport. I can’t stop thinking about that
sheet.
Egyptian cotton—or is that too…Muslim? I bet they have percale.” She clasped my shoulder with new urgency. “Do you cut the hole yourself, or do they have kosher party stores?”

It didn’t matter whether Dinah was “my type.” The fact that she had this thing that got her hot—the specificity of her freakdom—would have flicked my switch, in some
Wild Kingdom
kind of way.

While I passed up a date, I did take the opportunity to peek in the port-o-pharmacy, disguised as a Marc Jacobs purse, that Dinah left on the seat when she went “to tinkle.” Depakote, lithium, Lexapro, Boniva, Valium. I thought about filching her Valium. But the way she’d spilled her drink, it felt criminal to deny the woman her relief. I had to live with myself. I still had the piggish reflex to steal drugs, even if I didn’t intend to use them. My first year off of everything, I continued to raid medicine cabinets on general principle. I wasn’t proud of it. I was so miserable, I did not even
want
the drugs. I just didn’t want anybody else to have them.
Drug Grinch.
I knew, if I wanted to survive with any kind of serenity, I had to unclench the fist that was my ex-dope-fiend heart, just so I could live in a world where other human beings got high and I didn’t.

Dinah staggered back and passed out on contact with her seat cushion. She drooled prettily until we landed.

Eating at Quentin had been problematic. I’d purchased a small suitcase in the SF airport and dropped a minor fortune on fruit salad, stale Starbucks sandwiches and a few bags of cashews packaged when I was in grade school. I stuffed all my provisions in the case and zipped it up. The thing had wheels, but I carried it by the handle. I’d had one in Cincinnati that got stuck in the up position. I couldn’t get it in the overhead on a puddle-jumper to Akron and had to leave the plane and go by bus. So now I just carried. I assumed they were all broken.

The first thing I did at Burbank airport was find a pay phone and call the five numbers I had for Tina. (I’d given up on cell phones, which ended up like sunglasses, lost, smashed or left somewhere within seventy-two hours of purchase.) The first three had greetings in other people’s voices—two female, one male. I left the same message at all three.
Tina, pick up.
Then I said I was “in town to meet our friend.” The fourth number picked up, said nothing and beeped, which seemed like Tina’s style. And the last one just rang. Also her style.

I put the phone back in the cradle. I didn’t expect to find her that way. But the important thing was faith. (If you didn’t have anything else.) And right now I was manufacturing the belief that if I could track down Zell and find out what made his clock tick, the cosmos would reward me with Tina. If I could sniff out Zell, she could, too. What I could not do was stay still.

Without knowing where I was headed, I stepped out of the Burbank airport and a fellow Chasid, somewhat older than me, tried to grab the suitcase out of my hands. He stood back when I resisted. He stared at me in horror, while passengers swirled around us, as though I’d sprouted horns and a tail. “What?” I said, playing the indignation card. “Aren’t you my driver?”

“My name is Jack,” he began, in a Russian accent so thick I could smell the borscht. “I was told to meet—
wait
! Where’s your tallith?”

He clamped his hand over his mouth, horrified.

“My tallith?”

I looked down. No fringe.
See what happens?
I thought to myself. If I hadn’t gone all Good Samari-Jew with Myron, I’d be fully tallithed and in a car by now. I didn’t know where I’d be going, but it would be somewhere. Nineteen hours isn’t very long, and that’s all I had before I had to turn around. I hadn’t worked out my ports of call. No matter. Now I was in the airport, lying to a man I’d known two minutes. I had not foreseen the consequences of going fringe-free.

“Stolen,” I said, “long story.”

I fought the urge to yank out a picture of Tina and start shoving it in the faces of arriving passengers.

“Stolen?” The driver stared at me.

“It’s no big deal,” I said, picking up the bag and nudging him on.

A crowd of passengers I recognized from my flight passed by. Jack and I were dressed identically, standing face-to-face. “Two Jews arguing over a nickel,” I heard a red-faced exec in a Burberry raincoat say into his cell phone. His eyes met mine. He knew I heard. But he didn’t flinch. Jews are not known for bouts of sudden and impulsive violence. I assumed the man had never seen Bernstein in action. I did nothing about the insult and he kept walking.

“What kind of man,” asked the driver, “takes another man’s clothes?” And then, as if from a well of bitter personal experience, he answered his own question. “A schmuck,
that’s
what kind of man. A
schmuck.
”

The way he kept scrutinizing me, I wondered if he could tell my
shmidok
was hot. It was arrogant to think I could fake my way through a world I didn’t know. But it still made sense to try. If anybody saw me, they’d see an Orthodox Jew. That’s what
I’d
see. I was going to show up places where I had no business showing up. Places with receptionists and housekeepers and security guards. If things went south, let them remember
Fiddler on the Roof.
It’s not like anybody’s heard of a Chasidic burglar.

“A schmuck,” the driver declared again when we got in the car, cementing my intention to make good on my earlier
rekel
theft. I remembered the card Myron Goldman had given me and pulled it out.

“Mendel and Mendel,” I read, before he could ask me anything about who I was supposed to be, “serving the Fairfax district for thirty-seven years.”

“Solly Mendel? You getting married?”

“Why?” I opened the stolen wallet and saw a wad of hundreds and closed it fast.

“Solly does wedding suits. Groom. Best man. His father must have kept sewing till he was a hundred and twenty. Eyes like a kosher hawk.”

“No wedding,” I said as we headed for short-term parking, “just a suit.”

Nearly two hours later—half of that in single-file on the 10 East, slowed by looky-loos shooting cell-phone pix of a jackknifed beer truck—Solly Mendel was stroking his four chins and frowning. He was a round man whose own shiny black
rekash
fit him as snugly as sealskin fits a seal.

“That’s not you,” he said, reaching for the
shmidok.
Why was everybody interested in taking my hat off?

“It’s me enough,” I said, holding the brim with both hands. “I want the same thing, but new.”

He frowned down at my sleeves, which stopped just below my elbows, Johnny Knoxville style.

“And this time, it should fit?”

“A man can dream.”

Tina, where the fuck are you?

“Uh-huh,” Mendel grunted. “Tallith?”

“That too. I’m surprising my great-aunt,” I said, as if that explained everything. “I just want it to look right.”

“Maybe you’d like a yarmulke too. We do the best yarmulkes in the city.”

“All the big Jews!”
an old lady warbled from somewhere.

I spotted her in a folding chair, behind the counter, between racks of pants.

“Mama, please,” Solly pleaded. “The man doesn’t care. I’m trying to do business.”

He Zero Mostelled his shoulders up to his ears, a parody of a shrug. “My mother. What are you gonna do? I want you to take a look at something.”

Solly extended his arm and bowed his head, as if introducing a dignitary. “Maybe something like this.” He stooped and eased a hatbox out from a shelf underneath the cash register. “Open it,” he said. I did, and saw a lush satin skullcap, wine colored, set on an upside-down golden bowl. “Better than all the Beverly Boulevard
alta kocker
s.”

I tried to imagine appearing in public with something like that on my head.

“Not every day,” he said, reading my mind as easily as if I’d texted him. “High Holy Days. Now flip it,” he said, making a motion with his hands. I turned the hat over and saw what he was talking about: inside, tucked discreetly to one side, in Hebraically stitched English letters: NEVER AGAIN.

“You wear it so it’s right on your temple,” he said.

Our eyes met in the mirror, his sad for two thousand years, mine yellow and blurred.

“Do you need that to remember?” I asked.

“Not to remember. To honor.”

Just hearing the word “honor” made me wince.