Nick Bones Underground

By Phil M. Cohen

Shmulie Shimmer promised he’d call his father, Abe, but he never did. And Shmulie never broke a promise to his father.

Professor Nick Friedman takes a wild ride through a dystopic and dangerous New York City searching for his old high school buddy Shmulie Shimmer. Shmulie is the inventor of Lerbs, the most popular de

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phil Cohen
• Release date: Nov 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781633939219

Phil M. Cohen

Phil M. Cohen's passion for storytelling emerges from his love of reading fiction and his commitment to the Jewish tradition. Through his education, he's learned how to create and interpret stories; how to grapple with philosophical questions; and how to write fiction. From his rabbinic work, he's gained insight into the world. From realms unknown and a bit scary, Phil M. Cohen continues to discover his creative imagination. He is the author of nearly twenty published stories, dozens of articles and papers, and of the eBook Lucky 13. He blogs for The Times of Israel, as well as at his website, philmcohen.com, where he interviews authors and other literary figures. He writes flash fiction and short stories, as well as all the things clergy write. Nick Bones Underground is the first of a trilogy.

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Nick Bones Underground

by Phil Cohen

© Copyright 2019 Phil Cohen

ISBN 978-1-63393-921-9

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.

This is a work of fiction. The characters are both actual and fictitious. With the exception of verified historical events and persons, all incidents, descriptions, dialogue and opinions expressed are the products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

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philmcohen.net

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DEDICATION

No one has seen more of the evolution of this book than my wife, Betsy Gamburg, who can recite whole chapters by heart.

It is to Betsy, whose dedication to my writing, and to me, has kept me going, that I dedicate this book.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Meeting Destiny

Chapter 2 Man On The Half Bench

Chapter 3 Questionable Deeds

Chapter 4 My Man

Chapter 5 Smart Boys

Chapter 6 Sex Machine

Chapter 7 Skeleton In The Closet

Chapter 8 The Rationality Of All Things

Chapter 9 Maggie

Chapter 10 Bob Dylan-Not

Chapter 11 Big Gray Lady

Chapter 12 Finger Of Fate

Chapter 13 Velvet Underground

Chapter 14 Woman With The Knife

Chapter 15 Information Squeeze

Chapter 16 Psycho Path

Chapter 17 Root Beer

Chapter 18 Sex Talk

Chapter 19 Tough Sonofabitch

Chapter 20 Rebbe's Gifts

Chapter 21 End Of Eternity

Chapter 22 To Oz

Chapter 23 Cold And Gray

Chapter 24 Funereal Maggie

Chapter 25 Farewell To Abe

Chapter 26 The Chemist

Chapter 27 Big Bucks

Chapter 28 Home Invasion

Chapter 29 The Key

Chapter 30 Rising From Ashes

Chapter 31 Feeding The Monkey

Chapter 32 In The Flesh

Chapter 33 A Favor

Chapter 34 Farewell

Chapter 35 Together

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER 1

MEETING DESTINY

IT WAS THE MIDDLE of February, and I was biking my daily five laps around what remained of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The park, like the world around it, teetered on the brink of the abyss. Economic collapse had devastated New York City, causing a shutdown of most city services, including the subway system, all but paralyzing the city. Much the same level of disruption rippled throughout the rest of the country. Recovery from what had been coined The Great Debacle became all the more difficult because of nefarious behavior by our computers. It was not quite an artificial intelligence revolt as much as machines running amok, unleashing chaos among the people who birthed them into this world. They no longer could be trusted to do what they were built for, a trait that felt eerily human.

Why bike the park in the bloody middle of February? A reasonable question.

Not long before New York City collapsed, I found myself on a table in St. Murray’s emergency room under the care of cardiologist Murray Levine, the doc who saved my life. My heart quit in front of the half dozen students still willing to abandon the STEM building to study religion across campus.

I lay on the hard-tiled floor wondering if my time was coming to its uncelebrated end and, if so, whether the heaven I suddenly wished existed awaited my immortal soul so I might visit with the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Moses Maimonides, and my maternal grandmother—unless for my great sin I was doomed to the other place. In that case, I’d run into Richard Nixon and that lousy antisemit who sold me a crappy used Oldsmobile in college. One of the students in my History of the Faiths of Humankind class whipped out her phone and summoned the medics, who brought me to the attention of the aforementioned Dr. Levine, a nice-looking fellow, as best as I could tell through his mask. He kept reassuring me, You’ll be fine, Professor.

I rested on his table connected to this thing and that, assured the doctor’s healing ministrations had saved me. I was not insensitive to the fact I had avoided my one business meeting with the Angel of Death, who, upon learning I’d live to teach another day, took an abrupt U-turn, seeking more fecund ground elsewhere, his generally being a packed day. In the quiet and—let’s be honest—the rapture possible to someone at the moment he’d escaped death, I took an oath. No more poisons masquerading as food. No more cigarettes. No more indolence. Daily would I sweat. And eat local. Vegetables mostly, and just enough of them.

I attempted keeping my exercise pledge indoors. I purchased a sophisticated bike system that offered wind, sound, even aromas, and included detailed virtual-reality bike rides from all around the world, courtesy of Google Maps projected onto a seventy-two-inch screen. But pedaling in front of my giant Sim-Screen dressed in boxers and sneakers did not engage my imagination, not even when the bike opted for unrequested junkets to off-world destinations like Mars, courtesy of Google Mars. The illusion, with high-def, real-time images, could not recreate the authenticity and excitement of biking outdoors— the polluted breezes, the ups and downs, the odd smells, the crater-sized potholes, encounters with unexpected people and things, the great unpredictability of it all. Despite the increasing collapse of the city’s infrastructure and decreasing law and order, I bought a bike and carried on outdoors.

Almost two years on, my near-death pledge had become the single abiding feature of my life. Every day—and I mean every day—I dragged myself outside to be among the decay, the debris, and the poisons suspended in the air. As long as there was no snow on the road and the temperature remained above twenty degrees Fahrenheit, with filters thrust into my nose, helmeted, goggled, my neck wrapped in a wool scarf, swathed from head to toe in Gore-Tex and looking like a fugitive from a ninja movie, every day for twenty-one miles I biked the park.

That frigid day in February I met my destiny.

It was twenty-two degrees. A thick, gray mist covered the earth like an unwelcome blanket. The rocks, trees—everything was monochromatic. As always, I forced myself into that fog. Pure force of will kept me out there humping that icon of disrepair ringing the park, always hoping that the exertion would minister to all my needs, helping me transcend my grim state.

From time to time, the effort eased the gloom, and diminished my lethargy. I could look the world in the eye and get on with my day.

CHAPTER 2

MAN ON THE HALF BENCH

AT THE END OF my second lap, I observed an old man sitting on one of the park benches. Half a bench, actually, the other portion of the over-painted wood-and-concrete structure having long ago fallen into the void where things went, unrecovered. You couldn’t miss the old guy. Except for the odd jogger, a couple of dog-walkers, and two cops in an armored police car tooling the park, no other human being ventured out that afternoon—save for this codger, erect as a yardstick.

There he sat, staring off into the cosmos, the unfiltered sun raining skin cancer down upon him. Every time I passed this old fellow, he nodded ever so vaguely toward me. Why should I care about this wisp of a man wrapped in a gray overcoat? My only job was to pump away, doing my best to lose myself in my meditations, my daily moment of private worship, awaiting the emergence of endorphins that would, if they did their magic that afternoon, push out the pain and chill, and leave me momentarily energized.

Ah, my daily moment of private worship.

I confess I no longer engaged in the act of prayer. I hadn’t for some time. In different parts of my life, prayer—both the act of it and contemplation about it—had consumed me. I retained striking memories from my teenage years of smooth-cheeked boys and men wearing long, unruly beards in various stages of graying, all davenning, praying, with vigor. They would bow up and down, human engines powering a divine machine, eyes closed with orgasmic power, addressing their Father in Heaven with words like, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is One, and When everything comes to an end He alone will rule, and Every soul praises you, O Lord, and so on and so forth, making these and so many more claims of equal or greater absurdity.

No. I prayed no longer. But my act of riding circles around the park, day in, day out, replete with dressing rituals, breathing rituals, rituals of movement, rituals of sight and sound, leading to exertion and sweat, occasionally capped by a meditative mood that, when will and grace combined, would persist for a couple of hours—this formed a kind of religion at least comprehensible to my colleagues over in Anthropology.

In one bundled-up mass, I was collectively the rabbi, the cantor, the congregation. I preached, I hummed melodies, I sang, I attended to the great wisdom pouring from my lips. The park was the synagogue, and my bike was the pew. I was a solitary multitasking worshiper-cum-leader.

And God? Always a good question.

I finished the ride, walking the bike to cool down, enjoying the cardiovascular lift. I passed the old guy again and felt his eyes root on me. He was, I figured, observing me in all my sartorial strangeness. I sought to walk by him and reenter my own little world unbothered by elderly men seated on elderly benches. But instead, his eyes compelled me to halt, turn around, and regard him.

He smiled in a toothy and familiar way. I thought he was going to cluck like a chicken as did so many in the city these days, hospitals attending to the mentally ill being nearly nonexistent. He leaned toward me. In a tone filled with familiarity, even intimacy, he said, Hello, Nicky.

No one had called me that since I was seventeen when I decreed myself an adult and demanded to be called Nick or Nicholas, or occasionally St. Nicholas. Nobody called me Nicky except relatives or old friends, neither of which was in large supply.

I halted and looked him over. Beyond his coat, I could see little. His hat came down to his eyes. His nose bore the scabs characteristic of men and women exposed to the sun’s increasingly damaging rays. Loose skin gathered around his chin, reminding me of a turkey that survived one Thanksgiving too many. He was pale as an ancient ghost. His ratty overcoat—once upon a time it might have fit him—hung clownishly. Above his mouth, a patch of white hair masqueraded as a mustache.

Yes?

Don’t recognize me, do you?

I struggled to place his voice in the text of my life. But his words had squeaked out in the tones of old age and disease, masking the younger voice I might have once known. Something familiar emanated from his face. But I couldn’t morph him back in time.

No, don’t recognize you, I said.

He bent toward me some more, and in a triumphant tone declared, I’m Abe Shimmer, Shmulie’s father. You remember me, no?

I remembered him, yes.

I whispered those words that come when truly surprised. Holy shit, I said.

For a moment, the air between us lay still as a corpse.

Been a long time, he said. A cliché, yet true.

Yeah. We’ve been out of touch, I answered lamely. For thirty years.

Yes, out of touch. I’d say. He looked at the ground as if studying a blade of brown grass or the mud on his shoe. You know about Shmulie, of course, he said, a note of pain thinning his voice.

A middling-sized boulder plopped into the center of my gut, and I had to pull hard to breathe.

Who doesn’t? I said. Your boy’s more famous than Al Capone.

He waited eight full beats and said, Fame like that I can live without.

A faux pas, I realized. Sorry. You must feel terrible about Shmulie.

Yes, terrible. But you get used to feeling terrible. The feeling takes up residence in your soul and never leaves. Not used to Shmulie himself. Him no one ever gets used to. How can anyone, even his father—especially his father—ever get used to him and what he did? Such a brilliant chemist, and he made that awful thing instead of helping people. Uch!

I placed my bike against a tree and pulled off my helmet.

All those poor souls in those hospitals lying like meat in a freezer at the supermarket. They might as well be dead, he said. They’d be better off dead. I can’t tell you how many times have I thanked God his mother wasn’t alive to see what finally became of her son. She knew about the drug and the victims, but not the end, not the trial and everything else. By then she was, may she rest in peace, fortunate to no longer be among the living.

Wincing, Abe pushed himself up from the bench, his left arm pressing on the cement armrest. He was bent at almost a forty-five-degree angle from the waist up, leaning slightly leftward. Yet, he conveyed a counterfeit sense of forward momentum, all that remained of a robust middle age.

Maybe we can walk over to your place and talk? he asked.

Of course. Of course, Abe. I’m right off the park.

Yes. You’re in the book. I looked you up. There was no book anymore, but old linguistic habits died hard. I still claimed, for instance, to dial my telephone, even though rotary phones had long joined the void, and in any event, my computer, Maggie, did it for me.

Thus, we walked to my apartment, Abe hobbling along, brought low by age and disease and grief, stopping now and then to catch his breath.

I slowed my normal hurried pace out of consideration for my visitor, for the memories his presence evoked, and because of curiosity. Why appear out of the mists today?

This encounter resurrected my past. I had never sought to escape it, just leave it far enough behind to bury memories best left to the archaeologists to uncover some eons past my time. But that old man on the half bench returned me to my personal antiquity, and I was dazed.

He did not set out to upset my equilibrium. He must have had his own personal reason for his appearance. Why come after all these years?

CHAPTER 3

QUESTIONABLE DEEDS

SHMULIE SHIMMER WAS MY childhood study partner, my chavruta, as they say in the yeshiva world, and my best friend. For five school years we hung together in Midwood, Brooklyn, like a pair of argyle socks blowing on a backyard clothesline.

Shmulie and I abandoned the neighborhood immediately after high school. We believed our lives lay outside the confines of Orthodox Judaism and the interior of Brooklyn, that we could make lives for ourselves in the world without encountering the spiritual death the rabbis at the yeshiva promised would be the fate of anyone who ditched the pristine world we’d been privileged to occupy.

We wished to escape what we saw as a sexually repressive, narrow-minded world that espoused a conservative God-centered philosophy. We had similar reasons for leaving but wildly different destinations. My adolescent critique of Orthodox Judaism was not as nuanced as it might have been. Still, any regrets I might have had, existential or intellectual, were long ago swallowed by that space of college, graduate school, marriage, child, and the career I built for myself in the secular world.

And face it. In the 1980s, the secular world was seductive. What we saw from a Brooklyn window enticed two sex-and-knowledge-starved yeshiva boys. The temptation was all the greater since the Orthodox community kept reminding us of our talents. We had little difficulty applying those talents for wider purposes than our teachers would have preferred. Yeah, we were geniuses Shmulie and I. We could handle what in Midwood they called our neshama, our spirit, our soul, our inner spiritual essence, as the Schmeltzerites, that new sort-of Hasidic sect, called it. We could handle things about as easily as a blindfolded child could handle a Mack Truck going downhill.

We’d both sought our measure of greatness in the secular world. I became an intellectual of sorts, and Shmulie a criminal of note—of very great note. Of very, very great note. And since, in this material world of ours, fame was the sole criterion by which we judged greatness, and since fame was often measured in deeds of questionable repute, Shmulie took home the blue ribbon.

Everyone in the city with his head aboveground had heard the name Shmulie Shimmer. Shmulie Shimmer, the renegade Orthodox Jew. Shmulie Shimmer, the inventor of Lerbs, the most interesting and destructive designer drug ever ingested by modern humans.

For some six months running, he’d been a major news item, appearing in every possible medium when walking to and from his trial. He took obvious pleasure in his notoriety as he exited the courthouse bearing a smirking arrogance that to me was pure evil.

Which it may well have been.

Where evil approaching perfection originated is a mystery, but like art and pornography, once observed, its presence is palpable.

As Abe and I walked toward my apartment on Garfield Place, I stole a glance at the shrunken old man.

Abe Shimmer was born in 1940, the son of a large Hungarian Jewish family and the only member to survive Hitler. His parents found an order of nuns willing to take him. Once conditions became toxic for Hungarian Jews, the good sisters raised him as a Catholic, keeping him alive at great personal risk. A devout Catholic Abe may well have remained, save that his uncle Walter, his father’s brother who’d immigrated to the States before the war, sought him out at the end of 1946 and brought him to America.

Abe’s parents had given Walter’s address and Abe’s whereabouts to several friends and pleaded with their friends to seek Walter out, should they perish. Uncle Walter heeded their wishes, extricating the five-and-a-half-year-old Abe from the abbey, bringing him to America and adopting him. Abe grew up American, a survivor of the catastrophe. He graduated from Midwood High School of Science and from Brooklyn College certified to teach high school, and met and married Minnie Brooks, who gave birth to Shmuel, their only child, named after Abe’s father.

All his life Abe taught history at Jacob Schiff High. An excellent teacher who loved his students, who came from all over the world, he devoted himself to helping their Americanization—for he worshipped the American public school system that represented the great promise of this country.

Abe believed in the public schools. Yet he wanted his son educated in a traditional Jewish school. Jewish education, he thought, conveyed compelling values that created a mensch. To make his only child a scholar, a humanist, and a Jew, Abe sent Shmulie not to Jacob Schiff High, but to the Yeshiva of Midwood.

Shmulie and I met there, a meeting that forged my destiny.

CHAPTER 4

MY MAN

ONE DAY IN LATE summer before ninth grade, my father came into my bedroom. He proclaimed that I would attend the yeshiva around the corner. This announcement traveled from well beyond left field, far outside of the stadium.

I liked my public school. I had friends. We weren’t religious. I hadn’t had a bar mitzvah. We ate bacon every Saturday morning. Attending Jewish parochial school lay nowhere on my horizon.

Why? I asked my father, appalled.

The Rebbe told me I should send you, he said.

The Rebbe? I mused.

The Kobliner Rebbe, Reb Dovid Schmeltzer, the greatest spiritual leader of our time. I attend his classes for Jewish mailmen Tuesday afternoons after I finish my mail route. A bunch of us from all over Brooklyn meet at the Kobliner Center. He’s terrific.

That’s why you’ve been coming home late on Tuesdays?

Yes. He’s brilliant. He brings us to the light.

Light? What light? I surmised this had nothing to do with AC or DC current or bulb wattage.

The Light, Nicky, he said, and I could hear the capital L. The Light God placed in the world on the first day of Creation, the light our foggy minds cannot see without help.

Now, understand, my father practiced a respectable trade. His livelihood put food on the table, paid the mortgage, and enabled much else. But nothing in his work or background suggested the hint of an interest in spiritual matters. That he took this class stunned me. My father, a man who spent his days walking the neighborhoods delivering bills, love letters, and unwanted adverts, had become a religious fanatic. I became the first victim of his fanaticism.

As if he read my mind, he added, Don’t worry, Nicky. I haven’t become some nutjob and entered into a cult, God forbid. I just heard from some of the guys that he did this, the Rebbe, teaching Jewish mailmen. He runs a class for Jewish cops, too.

I must have looked skeptical—my father going to Hebrew school for grownups. He said, When Uncle Teddie died last year, it hurt the family bad. Ted and I were real close. You know that.

My mother’s brother, Teddie Hurvitz, died in a car accident on the Long Island Expressway. Sixty years old with a wife and two sons. His death devastated everyone.

It bored a hole inside me and I wanted to know.

Know what, Dad?

I don’t know. Why did something like that happened to such a good man? Something like that.

And the Rebbe talks about this stuff?

And more.

Just before he came into my room, I had been sitting at my desk meditating on my newly discovered primary interest in life—whether girls liked me. One in particular. I had my eye on Priscilla Liebowitz, on her wire-rimmed glasses, her long, straight, auburn hair and a new pair of breasts she had mysteriously grown that summer. This interest led to a growing curiosity in erections, one of which I’d been entertaining the moment my father came to speak with me. Fortunately, he knocked.

Dad, I said, trying to absorb this news and my father’s desire I go to a yeshiva. I miss him too. Really. But this is not a good idea.

Do they have girls in yeshiva? Do yeshiva girls have breasts?

The Rebbe guessed you’d say that.

This Rebbe had never seen Priscilla, with or without her breasts.

My father sat on my bed and leaned toward me. He understands. Very insightful, this rebbe.

Insightful as a stone.

With a keen look in his eye I’d never observed, my father said, You don’t know the half of it, Nicky.

Neither do you, Dad, I thought, the wilting beneath my boxers now complete. I glanced at my pants, making certain I had pulled up my zipper. Before this is over, I suspect I’m going to know the whole of it, I said.

My libido rebelled at this decision. I’ll flee to Philly and live with my mother’s cousin. Priscilla could come with me.

The Rebbe told me you needed to study the Torah.

The Torah? Yes, I’d heard of the Torah. What Jew living in Brooklyn hadn’t?

"Okay, then. Buy me one of them and I’ll read it if that’ll make you happy, Dad. Can’t be any harder than Huckleberry Finn."

It’s not that simple. Believe me, I’ve seen how deep and wide the Torah is.

So, then you go to yeshiva, and I’ll deliver the mail.

Perhaps Priscilla’s house was on his route.

Nicky, I’ve decided. You have to go.

And so, I wilted. As did my erection.

On the first day of eighth grade, I joined my new classmates at the Yeshiva of Midwood for lunch. The room hummed with noise and commotion as friends who hadn’t seen one another all summer had their first free moment to catch up and chatter, replete with tales of discovered sexuality.

I was wretched. Everyone else was in sync with the knowledge and rituals of Orthodox Judaism. The boys’ yarmulkes were knitted by their moms or grandmas with their names embroidered on them in Hebrew and sat just right on their heads, held down by metal clips. My black cloth beanie, stolen years before from a synagogue, kept sliding down my head and into my eyes or onto the floor. All the boys sported tsitsit, ritual fringes emerging from a garment boys wore. They’d all mastered Hebrew slang and jargon. I knew shalom.

I sat alone at a table that seated eight, staring morosely at my peanut butter sandwich, praying for invisibility, and straightaway realized no one saw me anyway. I had no old friends to boast to about how I pawed this breast or touched that crotch in the woods at camp that summer. No one acknowledged my existence. I received not even a token nod of recognition that I, too, walked planet Earth.

I wished an alien from a very distant world would pull me out of there with a magic beam and take me far away for them to learn about the tragic life of an earthling teenager.

Amid this dark fantasy, a tall, pudgy and clunky guy wearing an enormous bright-blue yarmulke with a white Star of David on it dropped his ass next to me. He clutched a green sack as big as a garbage bag and wore a smile so radiant you could have roasted chicken on it.

Bet you’re new here, too, aren’t you? he asked.

Yeah, I answered. How’d you know?

Jesus Christ, man, it’s written all over your face.

I looked at him. I feel like crap, I said. I’m a complete stranger here. I don’t know a word of Hebrew. I have no idea what the hell the rabbis are talking about. What am I doing here? I’d rather be on my way to Mars.

He gave me that smile again. "That’s a lot of don’ts, man." He paused and scanned the room imperiously. In that one gesture, he declared his invulnerability to teenage angst. He pulled his chair closer to me. In a conspiratorial whisper, he said something unforgettable.

Look, I’m about to teach you something that’ll change your life. He paused, took a breath, leaned closer still. Here it is. Fuck it, man, just fuck it. That’s all. Just fuck it. It’s all trash. All of it.

All of what? I asked.

It, man, it. All of it. As I absorbed this wisdom, he reached into that lunch bag and withdrew a thick sandwich. He unwrapped it and gobbled each half down in four mammoth bites in what seemed like seconds. I looked at his lunch.

He was ingesting a ham and cheese on rye.

The chutzpah, the astonishing nerve he showed by bringing that treyf, that unkosher, meal, within the walls of a yeshiva cafeteria, to eat it in the presence of the other students and our teachers—this was staggering. I nodded in shock and admiration at this gesture of rebellion against the heavens so powerful that I had to catch my breath, as I am sure did the angels above.

My man.

I heaved my peanut butter sandwich into a garbage pail. You got another one of those? I asked. And damned if he didn’t produce another ham and cheese out of his bag just as big and treyf as the other. He slid it my way.

Go to town, man, he said. And I devoured that sandwich like a starving man just rescued from a desert island.

He pulled out a third one, unwrapped it and took a bite in the middle. In the midst of decimating it, he ceased chewing and looked me in the eye. With a mouth filled with food and mustard on his cheeks, he said, Oh yeah, name’s Shmulie Shimmer. And he offered me a hand thick as a gorilla’s.

Nicky, I said, attempting to crush his hand in return.

We hung together for the rest of the day, the rest of the year, and the rest of our time at the Yeshiva of Midwood, five academic years. We were inseparable until just before graduation. Then our relationship ceased forever.

CHAPTER 5

SMART BOYS

ABE SHIMMER AND I walked toward my apartment, my bike to my right, Abe to my left. I see you’ve become a big-deal professor, he said.

I’m a professor. Not much of a deal, big or little.

You must have students and write books and articles and give lectures. I hear you’re an expert on the Kobliner Hasidim.

These days I meet most of my students online. I haven’t written a book in over ten years. I haven’t published an article in the last two or three. Ever since the Kobliners became the Schmeltzerites, there’s little interest in the old world. Everyone’s focused on those wackos.

Still, you work at a great university.

Since the Great Debacle, it’s not so great.

You have children?

A daughter. Lorraine.

Very nice. Shmulie never had children.

Thank God. What monsters would that bastard have spawned?

I was sorry to hear about your wife, I said.

Shmulie was at her side when she died, you know. Part of him always did his best to be a good son. Abe sighed. Another sigh turned into a sob. It’s hard when your only child goes bad.

I’m sure that’s true. I guess at least there’s some comfort that it wasn’t always that way.

Abe knew what I meant. A faint lilt entered his voice. Yes. Yes. The two of you at that yeshiva on Fourteenth Street. A pair of great learners, you two.

I put my hand on his shoulder, and he looked at me. The contact was electric. The whole chapter came rushing back and for a moment washed over me like a warm spring rain. From two outliers eating ham and cheese on rye we became, as Abe said, quite great learners.

Perhaps the third week after school began, I went over to Shmulie’s house. We sat at the kitchen table. Abe made us tea and placed a few sugar cookies on a plate. He asked us about school. We grumbled that we didn’t understand Talmud class, that the teacher expressed no interest in helping us.

Abe became incensed. That’s a terrible teacher. Who doesn’t stand up and help his student? Me, I would never ignore a student who didn’t understand. I’m going to call this guy and talk to him, one teacher to another. What did you say his name is?

Uh, Rabbi Kramer, Dad. But I don’t think you should call him up to yell at him just yet, Shmulie said.

Yelling I’m not going to do. Just talk very quiet, but stern. Why not? I pay a lot of money to send you to this Jewish school. You shouldn’t get help from your teachers when you need it?

Dad, can you maybe wait a couple of weeks?

A couple of weeks? That’s forever when you’re drowning in class. You want you should drown?

Shmulie looked at me, eyes pleading for help.

Maybe you could request a tutor, I suggested. I’ve heard they might do that.

Okay. Good idea, Abe whispered.

He complained to the school, and we got ourselves a tutor—paid for by the yeshiva. We not only got a tutor, we got Reb Avram Pinsky, the biggest and baddest Talmud tutor in all the Five Boroughs.

Reb Avram had nine kids, so the extra money put meat on the table on Friday night. Symbiosis happened. Tutoring helped him a little with the bills. Tutoring helped us—a lot—with grades. Collective obstinacy got us through that year and drove us to the head of the Talmud class.

Every spare moment, we’d sit with our Talmud texts struggling to grasp the argument on the page. Reb Avram, a man of piety as well as potency, grasped our passion and pitched in, frequently giving time beyond his wages. Every week, including summer, for no fewer than six hours, these two kids,