Are You Listening, Rabbi Löw

  Hey Rabbi

  Maybe you should also know

  That that little shit

  Now owns

  A whole street

  In mid town

  Manhattan

  13

  Jesus every lousy thing I ever experienced is crowding back into my life tonight. It’s the sound of these wheels on the track. And the whole black night flashing by outside. God I’m going to have another big coffee and Armagnac. A big fucking Armagnac. Wake up Schultz. Wake up. Rabbi Low if I did wrong. From now on I swear I’m going to do right. Sigmund don’t be too hasty. The other thing in life I didn’t tell you about, is to avoid regret. With all the disease and sorrow out in the world already. All it does is blind you so that you go stumbling into a new disaster. Got it. Rabbi. I’m glad you said that. And that I’m getting drunk enough to listen. Imagine. What could be now so ironic. That after weeks and weeks and thousands of besieging words, I got Louella. Right inside my house. Even to lying on a bed. And out we all go in purdah and in continued celibacy and I’m by now a hundred and fifty miles away. Lonely as hell and getting drunk as a skunk as no Jew should. Rabbi if I didn’t have you who else would I have to turn to in this world. And I got a question. Answer me Rabbi Low. Why did my parents have to fuck and make me a Jew in the first place with standards of morality to keep up. I suppose it’s no worse than being an Eskimo having to live on the Equator. Jesus all hell is breaking loose in my brain.

  Tiny dots of light out across the countryside sweeping by. Schultz pulling himself up on pillows looking out the train window. I must have conked out awhile. O my god this is wonderful. To wake up still on the move. My god the Flying Scotsman. Everything neat and smelling crystal clean. On the floor before one’s bed, a drugget. His Lordship told me it was so your feet had something clean to step on when you take off your shoes. Jesus the life he leads. His butler is already planning what will go in the hamper for Henley. But right here and now I’m going to open up the thermos still half full of coffee, and pour another brandy out of my nearly empty flask. Beautiful the way Jorricks has everything laid out. I’m going to sample a bit of caviare, smoked oysters and pate, in that order. What a fucking momentary relief to lie back on this bunk dozing through the night, and stare at the ceiling and then at the backs of the houses and the night time windows flashing by with the people in there fast asleep. The train swaying on the rails, rocking roaring through the stations, under bridges, through tunnels. Here I am now in my life escaping from under the black cloud, scrabbling up the beach on my hands and knees hoping to crawl back up out of the ocean depths clutching my fingers into the sand. While the big fucking waves of adversity are still beating on my ass. Wake up from the nightmare down the lingerie store. Hey christ. It’s getting bright outside with the full fucking moon. Cattle in fields. And what’s that. A castle. Right on the shores a gorgeous loch stretching out into the beautiful sea. Jesus we’re in the highlands. Lovely as it is lonely. Who the fuck is Scotland. They say Scotland the brave. And I’m any minute now going to find out. Who the fuck Scotland is. Jesus was there anything ever anywhere like a Scottish Jew. There must be. Looking for peace and prosperity we had to find anywhere we could. Even places as terrible as Glasgow. In bad situations, never look for hope. Instead cling to what there is of reality. And then get dispossessed out of your fucking mind with worry. How could my life in just a few innocent days trying to mind my own prosperous business, turn into that of a cornered rat. Because Sigmund at all times when you’re thinking things are OK, they’re not. Rabbi Low you said something. And this time it’s me who’s listening. With a top smash hit I thought I finally won. And here I am having to win again like I thought I’d never ever fucking have to win before. OK Schultz, go back to sleep now. But in the morning you walk out of this train and out of this station with your head held up high. The world’s going to know you’re not Sigmund Franz Isadore Schultz for nothing. O jesus. Here I am recalling that little fucker my cousin Saul. Imagine that there could come the time years later when that little fat bow tied fucker with his smarmy slicked backed hair becomes a big fucker too busy to see me or even return my telephone calls leaving me days pacing a room waiting that he might ring. When in an utter last ditch desperation holding the threads of a production together, I was trying to get an investment out of him. Voom. I went to New York and there I was marooned in the most desperately depressing hotel room of all time. Unable to pay the fucking bill to get out. Saul’s suddenly away in Chicago. He gets back to New York. And then nearly after two weeks waiting, a secretary keeps me further waiting fifteen minutes on a line and then another secretary keeps me on another line another twenty minutes till at last he comes on. Right away I hear him asking his secretary, hey who’s this I’m talking to. And I say, Hello Saul, this is Sigmund.

  ‘Sigmund who.’

  ‘Saul it’s me. Have you forgotten my father’s lingerie store.’

  ‘O hey hi ya kiddo, how you doing. Heard you went to Europe. Long long time no hear. What are you doing.’

  Holy shit I didn’t tell him I was waiting in the fucking sweltering heat two weeks just waiting for his fucking call and for him not to call me kiddo. Pacing a mangey puke green room with flaking paint and broken tiles and a leaky shower in the bathroom keeping me awake at night. Haunted like murders had been committed there. And Saul the fucker up in his air conditioned penthouse office somewhere on the top of a skyscraper and now sounding with a long casual drawl as if he graduated from Harvard.

  ‘Saul, I’m in show business.’

  ‘Hey that’s really great old buddy boy. That’s great. Long way from lingerie. Ha ha.’

  ‘Yeah Saul I have a nice large special opportunity available for an investment in my latest show.’

  ‘To be sure old buddy boy, to be sure. That’s great. Give the details to my secretary. I got a call on the other line. Have a nice day.’

  Twenty fucking words I said to him and never heard another fucking thing. I spent half an hour giving some stenographer over the phone details of the production and nearly of my whole life plus I was tempted to mention, just to remind Saul, of the prize for mathematics I won on my high school graduation. It was all like speaking Greek to a stone and yet I couldn’t stop so enthusiastic was I to save my fucking life which was sinking faster with each second into an abyss of looming eternal poverty. Never mind the present ignominy. Having from the first moment I heard from my parents that Saul had made it, I confess I then planned to reserve him for the exact right time of a desperation moment and to hit him hard then for a whopping great investment. He was even demolishing a theatre in a building he was now tearing down, to erect a luxury condominium, on top of which he was going to provide himself with a twelve room triplex. When I couldn’t at the time afford the fucking hamburger I ordered on the half assed room service that took two hours to get to me in that sleazy hotel. And O my god to have come three thousand miles pretending I was just casually stopping by in town. After endlessly reciting my casual approach the whole way coming on the plane. And then boy was it casual. I was like a comma in a conversation to him. Every time trying to call him he was involved in a meeting. If he wasn’t in Houston or Minneapolis for the day. Then I wake up over a putrid breakfast to read in the morning paper that the little upstart fucker had bought two skyscrapers in Chicago. Imagine. Fat Saul with the bow tie. How did such a schlemiel ever make it. I was nearly fucking well tempted to ask him, hey Saul, just give me back with interest the money you stuffed up your sleeve from my father’s store. That’s right. You heard me. I want it back at two and a half percent over the prime rate obtaining over all these fucking years you’ve had it in your clutches. Jesus that afternoon I walked down Broadway between the pimps, whores and pushers and past porno joints and topless bars like I was wandering on a desert trying to sell shoelaces to Arabs. I walked along Forty Seventh Street seeing all those guys in their little cubicles getting haemorrhoids examining and selling gems and jewellery. Like Uncle Werb wa
nted me to do. And imagine, at such a crucial low time Uncle Werb was in Amsterdam. Then I met two guys who knew him. There they are under their black homburgs and I mention an investment in the show. They say, hey are there girls we could meet. I say yeah. No problem. Beautiful girls are a dime a dozen in show biz. Especially if you’re rubbing elbows with a big impresario producer. They say count us in for a piece of the action. I had investor agreements right there with me drawn up on the finest paper. And jesus I ruin the agreements printing in their names before I find these two fucking shrewd cheapskate rabbinical cunts wanted to put up fifty dollars apiece and meet the girls. They probably each had at least a hundred thousand dollars in diamonds in their pockets. I tore up the agreements and said, hey look don’t overspend for girls, you can for less than ten dollars buy at bargain prices around the corner. Everyone wants glamour for nothing but show biz is the most costly way in the world to get a piece of ass. Then I was on my way planning to go to Providence and to catch a bus at the Port Authority bus station. I’m on the upper level. And bang a gun shot. I duck. And a girl ten yards in front of me blew her brains out with a pistol held to her head, blood and gore everywhere. There she lay. Not much more than twenty years old. I nearly cracked. I needed to talk to somebody. I didn’t know who to call up. But at that moment boy did I need something spiritually bolstering like a fuck. And I knew a gorgeous glamorous starlet who to me was always a personally pleasant friend in spite of me never casting her in anything but who now was going to break her way into serious acting and had a few months previous come from London to New York trying to get a part in a play. Shit she sounded so glad to hear from me I should have been suspicious. In London she had a string of rich boyfriends to take her all over the place. Then she said she wanted to be recognized in the legitimate theatre and to be independent of men. Holy shit did she get her independence. She invited me over. I nearly got mugged twice in her street. Up some mangey stairs in Hell’s Kitchen in a shoebox cold water flat with a window out on an air shaft with cockroaches crawling all over her pillows. I brought a bottle of wine. She had a couple of avocados and some spaghetti she cooked. The two of us putting a brave face on both our fucked up situations. Compared to how she was in London she was crushed to such insignificance. Her face seemed like a mask ready to crumble in a million pieces. We were even trying to impress each other. Then to forget horror for a second, the two of us tried to have a fuck. Going through the motions. A little kiss here a little kiss there. And then. Wham. Suddenly we both collapsed in commiseration. Throwing our arms around each other and sobbing. Shit I hope you’re not listening to this Rabbi Low. She had no money for the rent or for her voice lessons and acting classes. Her phone recently put in was going to be cut off. She had a drunken uncle in Chicago’s skid row and no other family to turn to. She’d spent every penny she’d borrowed from the string of guys she then ditched back in London. And in the middle of it all it was her birthday. Her age a secret but two candles for each half of the years stuck out of a tiny cake. My hands trembled lighting them with a match. She’d turned herself into a new person. Her first name was Frederica and friends back in London called her Freddie. And imagine, her middle name was Joy by which she now wished to be known in her future career. And far from singing it, I could hardly say it on my lips to say happy birthday Joy. I thought maybe she was going nuts. But it was at that moment a moot question as to which of us was more bewildered in our desolation. I had some remnants of confidence left to bolster hers, but nothing is worse than having to be a nursemaid to women. You make the big whacking bloody mistake of thinking they need you. As you sincerely advise that their lives can be cured by their lying back and giving you one big almighty fuck. And holy jesus all it does is put them snoring to sleep and stretching out their limbs, taking up all the fucking room in the bed. Out of her still pretty beautiful body maybe showing a sign of a sag in a couple of out of the way places, she’d been selling her blood to get food and the car fare to her auditions. I could tell by the way she talked about him that she was being screwed by her hairdresser who did her hair free. She had the most beautiful fucking nose in all the world that you could stare at for hours even trying to figure out why it was so beautiful, and even this she was thinking of having reconditioned. I couldn’t believe it. Holy shit where do you ever find a pure simple uncomplicated woman who accepts being herself. Let me tell you one place you don’t find her is in show biz. In the sultry heat we had our feet on the bare boards of her floor. Eerie sounds of groans, moans, coughs and crying coming in through the airshaft window and beyond from the walls and ceilings which looked like they were any second going to fall down. Shit this was a girl I used to see climbing in and out of the biggest limousines and going in and out of the best hotels and making every head turn in the most elegant restaurants all over London. Even Binky and Basil tried to date her and to Al she gave apoplexy. And the fucking utter incongruity when I went to take a piss in her sink curtained off with her evening gowns and silk dresses, and a shelf of the most expensive London fashion house face creams and cosmetics. Sooty grime everywhere with cockroaches running in and out between the bottles and jars. Even in my own dismal circumstances I was struck numb with the disaster of her situation. Because I knew, beautiful as she was from the top of her head to her toes, I knew she couldn’t act her way out the automatic doors of the crosstown bus I took to get here. And that instead of a happy birthday I really should have been saying have a not too unhappy horror. And I hope it’s over soon and then you go do just what should be no problem and marry a guy with a few million dollars. The crime was, that beneath all the tough persistent ambition she was a lovely person. And would do you any favour so long as you weren’t annoying her panting after her cunt. But all she had left in this world to get her through tight spots was her ass and that, if she was like this much longer, could start drooping fast. Then she said, Sigmund, tell me, seriously, do you think I can make it as a serious actress. Amazing thing was she could have made it as an unserious actress. But I said sure honey, sure. Because let me tell you, we did not need any extra pessimism, for already, for both of us, that evening was a fucking requiem. After the final fiasco with Saul I went to see Joe Jewels. And at least he was someone who would at least fucking well see me. And I tried desperately to do a deal. Him behind his big desk as I ended up standing right out in the middle of his big carpet. Christ you have to hand it to him, the guy’s with snake eyes in the back of his head and with three fangs sticking out of his tail. But you could tell he loved show business and respected the battle scars that we both wore. Also that he could smell a mile in the distance I was desperate. It was all over in no more than a couple of minutes. It was figures and money in cut throat syllables like sword blades swiping fractions of an inch away from your jugular vein. And shit he sliced through mine and I went wobbling bleeding to death out of there. Only I was going to make fucking sure I would die out of his sight. I wasn’t going to give him that satisfaction. But before I got back down to the street I vowed that one day I’d shrink his balls in a deal to the size of a flea’s. And of course the fucker has yet once more taken me in a deal. While my balls got swollen up into grapefruits. And there I was a couple of hours later in Freddie Joy’s unjoyous company, utterly shattered and trying to get distracted looking at her beautiful legs. And heard myself saying to myself in her cracked mirror, you’ve just about had it you poor son of a bitch. But even in the most dire of times always the one thing I could still do was fuck. That evening I couldn’t even sustain a semi hard on. When with Freddie there didn’t have to be any fuss, no fanfare no song and dance. No saying I truly love you. Because we simply liked each other, and for old time’s sake, she was just going to unhesitatingly open up her legs for a simple old fashioned straightforward fuck. O christ correct that. Fucks may be old fashioned but no fuck is simple. And especially not straightforward. It is the most fucking complicated thing mankind can do with each other in the so called civilized parts of this earth. And mayb
e it’s even complicated in the jungles of Zumzimzamgazi and in King Buggybooiamcheesetoo’s harem. But this night, the prospect of this fuck was at least as simple as it could get. I just gently held her. A hand softly on her hair and head. But my hormones just wouldn’t react. And hers must have got grounded as well. I told her of a play I knew was looking for a female lead and gave her a couple of phone numbers she could call. O fucking god. Hey what am I doing. Reliving all this dirge. All out of the distant horrible past. O jesus. I know Rabbi you’re listening to this. And I hope I’m dreaming. And O jesus I’m not. I’m remembering like it happened yesterday. With the world as it was then those New York City sultry days, so fucking lonely. In which I felt so fucking crushed and awful. And in which I had nothing left except the creeps and willies. How I ever got through that night I’ll never know. I chewed back the avocado and spaghetti and drank the wine out of a broken cup. But all I could feel was death. I wanted to fly like a bat out of hell out of that place. Even so I hated to leave her there alone. But that’s what she wanted. Not to depend upon guys. I made her take a few dollars of the few I had left. At least to stop her selling her blood. I could see the needles’ holes in her once immaculate arm. My fist was locked to throw a punch at the first looming shadow as I went back down those four flights of stairs. I tripped over a wino curled up unconscious inside the front door. I got out on the street, the death and doom just reeking in the air. The few people passing in the darkness were like the living dead. As I hurried towards Tenth Avenue I hoped like I’d never hoped before in my life for a taxi. I could tell that the block across the avenue was no place to go. And suddenly near the corner I found myself stranded in front of a funeral parlour. A vase of ceramic flowers illuminated by a green neon light in the window. I couldn’t believe the power of the premonition that hit me. I just somehow fucking well knew that Freddie Joy’s funeral was going to be in there. All five foot eight and a half inches of her spectacular beauty and those exquisite ballet dancer’s legs stretched in a coffin. I even felt a tear in my eye. All I knew was I had to get out back across the ocean. Back to the sanity and even the treacherous aristocracy of London. To a pair of business partners who half the time were trying just to pull tricks on me, and had entangled me in a production looped around my neck to hang me. In the morning someone pretending they had a message tried to bluff their way into my hotel room to rob me. I said if you don’t fucking well get away from that door in two seconds I’ll kill you. There wasn’t even the sound of the guy running away, so fast did he get out of there. Shit it was the first opportunity I got in the whole city to fight back. When I went out that morning on the street I was even looking for a mugger so I could flatten the fucker in his tracks. Because my fist was ready to flash to his jaw three times faster than his knife or gun could come out. And then just as more of my fighting spirit was seeping back into me. More horror. On the subway station a girl got deliberately pushed into the tracks. And in the screams, her bones crunched and flying, she was turned into mincemeat. I reeled back up to the street, sick. Everywhere. On every side there was nothing but pure spiritually crushing disaster. Never mind my whole future in jeopardy. It was like my next hour was in jeopardy. I hardly could buy a newspaper or even a pineapple soda. Somehow something in the voice gives you away. When you’re talking to somebody who’s on top of the world and you’re clinging by your fingertips to the cliff edge and he knows exactly without even looking and stepping backwards where to crunch his heels down on your knuckles to send you plunging to the bottom of the chasm. And I came fucking well three thousand miles to what I thought was my ace in the hole, and a sure fire thing after all the deals we done as peeping toms, to just hear Saul say to me. Have a nice day. And some fucking nice day I swear on the Torah, if it is the last thing I ever do, I’ll show him. At least the one consolation in show biz is, it’s so tough that final failure is a relief. The only trouble is you get so beaten getting beaten you don’t have enough sense left to know you’re finished and you go on twisting in the anguish and agony. Till, if you’re lucky and alive enough, you wake up bankrupt in the street and at least able to look for a fellow bankrupt’s pocket to piss in. Momma meeo. Which if nothing else sure fucking well makes you look out where you’re going in the future which you no longer have. And I didn’t look out heading into mine and into the black cloud of marriage. A sneering wife snarling at you. A flop producing buffoon she called me. Jesus she was right. While meanwhile she’s become an international high diving sensation. But hey now honey. Hear me good. The wind is changed. It’s blowing perfume up and perfume out my fucking ass. My sails are full. You go fucking well now and you listen to the jingle and jangle of a box office cash register and to the applause and bravoes at that final curtain. But don’t you or your mother ever again ever go sticking your noses into my private life. Because those meddling protuberances will get amputated off. And that applies to the minuscule pricks of your lawyers too who will find their limp appendages on my chopping block. O god. I may be soon facing the horror of another courtroom. I guess somehow that disastrous trip to America set the course of my life. Sailing resolutely steering towards bullion. But whatever else it did for me I can do without. And holy mackerel I’d totally forgotten it till now. I walked into St Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue and lit a votive candle just like I did in Farm Street Church. Momma meeo. Freddie Joy was a Catholic. And I was just saying a little prayer for her soul. And if God could, to help her career. Me. Who doesn’t believe in anything. And certainly not God. Except that one who looks down over the box office. Sorry about that Rabbi. Back in London a couple of months later, I get a postcard of pretty little flowers from her with just the words. Forget Me Not. And signed Freddie in her hardly legible scrawl. A few days later I pick up a copy of Variety lying in a beam of warm sunshine on Binky’s desk. I’m in his office having a cup of coffee and I’m reading through the pages. I’m already making fists furious to discover that Joe Jewels has three plays running simultaneously to packed houses on Broadway. And then flipping through the back pages, always, I admit, hoping to find Al’s death notice and as I close the paper, the name Joy and Frederica suddenly catches my eye. I turn back to the last inside page. There she is. Listed second. In the obituaries. The tears just fell plop on top of the bland report and the matter of fact words. Which said that police discovering the body of the screen actress and dancer reported that she seemed virtually penniless and without known relatives. I was amazed at the space she got. Giving a potted biography and the names of all the grade B pictures she was in and even mention of a couple of grade C. Like she was a fucking star that she dreamed of being. And that obviously the show biz trade already thought she was. Holy jesus christ will such insane anomalies never cease. Said she was killed in an unexplained fall. And I’ll explain it. Her beauty was just too much for her. She could do anything with it. It could get her anything she wanted. Except make her into a great actress. Had she just stayed a starlet or a chorus girl she could have after a career retired to a house in the country and had six kids and a couple of millionaire husbands. I guess if she was there on the market to sell herself, she wanted, not the highest, but the longest lasting price. This once gorgeous girl who if nothing else was at least fucking understanding, thoughtful and kind and could crack you up laughing at some of her brutally cynical remarks that would drop on your toe like a sledgehammer. And who could blow up a restaurant by just walking in the door. Holy good god. I could have been and probably was in love with her. One of the phone numbers I gave her was Joe Jewels. And get ready for this Rabbi. I later discover it was he who paid for her funeral. Held right exactly in the place where I knew it was going to happen. And whatever it was, I don’t know what he did to her, or what, more likely, she did to him, but I guess that’s why, after all the vicious cut throat deals, I don’t begrudge Jewels and even respect him and even very very slightly like the guy. He got her a grave I never now fail to visit when I’m in New York. The one really still secret thing I
’m going to keep secret that I do in my life. The headstone there looking so lonely on a little knoll. I kept that postcard. Looked, looked and looked at it. A year later I went for the first time to her grave and there carved in the stone under her name, the words Forget Me Not. Jesus honey I won’t. And I don’t. And even tonight I spare a thought for you. And for women. In all their battles with men. God I’m tired. And the fucking tears now are streaming down my cheeks. Here’s a kiss Freddie Joy, honey, I didn’t give you back that sad night then. Holy fuck. What am I crying and talking about. After what’s being done to me. In an international incident a few hours ago. Fuck women in all their battles with men, they don’t need any sympathy. Not even in their graves. And certainly not while they’re sitting in their spiders’ webs. Fuck Joe Jewels. Especially fuck Saul. I’ve got now on this train to go back to slumber-land. And wake up in Edinburgh alive and sane. And ready for another funeral. Here’s with this swallow back of Armagnac, finally goodnight Rabbi. Sigmund. Let me tell you, after what I’ve just heard. I’m pleased at least you’re going to sleep.