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Ever since that horrible woman came over, I haven't felt like myself. Really. Something's been horribly askew. I don't know if it's because of some kind of curse she placed on me—one of her (many) tattoos appeared to be some kind of pagan / occult symbol. And while I'm skeptical of religion and the existence of a benevolent and caring God, I have no doubt in my mind that people can find themselves cursed, afflicted, and tortured by spells of bad luck.
My parents were always superstitious, each in his or her own way. Mom, on more than one occasion, warned me never ever to be in the same room with a Ouija board. One such exhortation, from when I was eleven about to be dropped off at a friend's house for a sleepover, has remained memorable: "Believe you me, Ross, Ouija boards are nothing but trouble. They ruin lives. If I find out you and your little friends have been playing with Ouija boards, I will have you sent off to one of those camps in Utah for kids who kill their pets and swear at their teachers so fast your head will spin. Do you understand me? You will be sent off to a camp for kids with disorganized attachment disorders and fetal alcohol syndrome. Do you want that? No? Then don't play with any Ouija boards, tonight, or ever. If the kids try to take one out, go stand outside and call Daddy, and he'll come pick you up."
Dad had rituals of his own that revealed superstitious impulses. Having special shirts and underwear he'd wear to work when he was "slumping," which is to say, not selling a sufficient number of motor vehicles. He'd also repeatedly made clear to me: "Don't talk bad about people. Whatever you say about others will happen to you. Life has a way of catching up with you." Which, I don't really see why this would be true, but in my biased (so often fooled by randomness!) mind, it seems to happen quite often.
And this, moreso than my mom's warning against Ouijas, bounced around in my mind in the moments after Madison (the woman I met on the unprotected sex app) crudely stormed out of my apartment and called me "a truly, deeply pathetic guy" and a "coward the likes of which the world has never seen," and said that I would "pay" for what I "did to her." Despite my best efforts to seem unfazed by and unconcerned with the opinions of others (to an arguably pathological level), for the past few days I've found myself fixating on my near-sex-experience, and its resolution. How harsh the sound of her slamming my door was—it seemed she really put the full strength of her large left arm into pull- ing it shut, a final tantrum meant to torture me after I broke the news ("We absolutely will not be having sex, unprotected or otherwise. Now, I kindly ask you to leave") to her and sent her out into a car I'd ordered for her on an app on my phone.
And as an immediate consequence of her slamming shut my front door (due to my refusal to give her every piece of me...), my glass-encased mezuzah lost its connection to the upper right corner of my doorframe and fell to the floor, fracturing into three large pieces. "Well that's inauspicious," I said aloud in the voice I often use when there's no one around to hear me. "I don't even know what a mezuzah's for!" I exclaimed exasperatedly, again, to no one but myself.
But I knew I didn't like the idea of mine falling on the floor and breaking, especially because this had been given to me by my Bubbe, who told me to bring it with me to New York City, and touch it some- times when I walked through the door, and then kiss my fingers after I touched it. And I actually did do this. Probably two or three times a week before that woman slammed my door shut and caused it to fall to the floor and break. But still, in the immediate aftermath of its breaking, I thought very little of it, instead focusing on trying to replay this negative interaction I'd just had with M (Madison).
For eighty-eight hours straight, I holed up in my apartment, lying around in bed, barely moving, only taking one shower a day, subsisting on nothing but low-carb protein bars and this new dissolvable "Greens" powder that claimed to contain a day's servings of vegetables (and fruits) in every scoop. I simply wasn't myself—my usual cool and unaffected self. During this seclusion, I accomplished absolutely nothing of productive value. Instead choosing to spend my time watching live (and some prerecorded) online "debates" between different video game players. Between video game players who wished to establish a genderless communist utopia, and video game players who wished to usher in an era of theocratic fascist authoritarianism. There were hours upon hours of these available on the internet on topics like abortion, women's suffrage, the right to own private property (including human beings), etc, etc, and despite my distaste for extremism (of all kinds), and lack of skin in the game, I found myself hypnotized by these videos. By the beautiful Socratic structure of it all. The left-wingers would say things like "and this exercise is not solely semantic, in fact, when we offer prescriptive definitions, we are actualizing our praxis by virtue of that very fact," to which the right-wingers would offer responses like "this is all just sick and demented. You need to be in jail. Locked up and executed by firing squad." It was enthralling.
And when I wasn't watching videos of debates, I was sulking silently in one of many contorted positions atop my bed, or perhaps sitting on the floor of my shower while water streamed onto my head, contemplating the futility of being Ross. Thinking about, how everywhere I go, I upset people, rub them the wrong way, and cause them to get angry with me. I found myself asking: "Is this all my fault? Am I just a bad guy? What if I'm wrong about all these firmly held beliefs of mine, and I'm simply alienating people for no reason?" Replaying moments from my early childhood and adolescence in light of this perspective. That perhaps I needed to become a totally different guy. The type of guy who goes on "benders" and vomits all over Las Vegas hotel rooms after staying up all night playing "poker" and doing "mushrooms." That maybe if I were just a little less risk averse (willing to put myself out there), then people would find me more agreeable. Less creepy and infuriating.
At 12 p.m., after three days inside, I came out of hiding, convinced of this perspective: that it was wrong to be Ross. I ran down the stairs of my building in a frenzy, in a truly manic mood, ready to do something drastic. I got out onto the cloudy autumn streets of Roosevelt Island and marched intently toward the Bread N Butter Market, one of a small handful of convenience stores located on the island. I walked up to the counter and the man began shaking his head at me: "No bathroom! No bathroom!" he kept saying.
"No bathroom! No bathroom!" I replied in agreement, raising my arms and straightening my fingers as if to signal, don't shoot!
"Here to buy cigarette," I added, leaving off the letter 's' in cigarettes
because I thought it would help him understand me better.
"You? Cigarette?" he asked, nearly erupting with incredulous laughter.
"Yes, me, cigarette. Marlboro lights, in fact! One pack, please," I added, even though I didn't really understand what a "light" cigarette was or could be.
The man behind the counter handed me this golden pack of smokes, and I tapped my Watch against a point of sale (POS) terminal until it buzzed slightly, giving me a haptic indication that my credit card had been charged for this pack of cigarettes. On the box, I read the words "LOW TAR & NICOTINE," which sounded reasonable enough to me. Giddy from my edgy (it's truly subversive, I mean, basically the first thing anyone tells you as a child is never to smoke cigarettes, even if they're light) carcinogenic purchase, I skipped home, fantasizing about all the ways people (women) would soon be sympathizing with me once I became addicted to cigarette smoke. They'll look at me toking, taking long drags on a dart (who knows how many I'll have already had that day) and think, "Who is this mysterious man, who has the guts to smoke? I bet I can fix him. He needs a good wife to take care of him, to save him, and turn him into a proper man." And soon I'll be back to my normal unaddicted self, but with the benefit of several months of nicotine-enhanced cognitive development, and the life experience gleaned from a brief excursion into vice.
It would be incredible. People would no longer think of me as some naive naysayer, bullying them for their substance abuse, but rather as a reformed addict, speaking firsthand from experience! I peeled back the lid on the cigs, took one out, and held it in my hand, already feeling cool, fiddling and fidgeting with it. It was going to be perfect. I put it back into the pack and the pack into my jacket pocket and waved hello to my doorman and walked into the elevator up to my apartment.
Calmer, now that I'd made my purchase and conceived of an escape hatch from my citadel of suffocating sobriety, I sat down on my green loveseat and again picked up the pack of smokes, pulling them out of my pocket and up to eye level. "Your golden ticket, Ross," I said to myself. "Why not have one right now? Smoke indoors, that way your whole apartment stinks of smoke and people think you're a laid-back Bohemian?" The idea wasn't half bad. I could smoke inside my apartment, hotbox the place, and then people (women) would come over and fancy me a carefree artistic type, living a relaxed island lifestyle of cigarette smoking and casual (yet passionate) romance.
I plucked a single fag out of the box and with two fingers, held it up to my lips, miming my eventual first inhalation while watching an online video titled "HOW TO SMOKE A CIGARETTE (FULL TUTORIAL)" with over nine hundred thousand views. Empowering. I could really feel it: the entire world at my fingertips. But at about two minutes into the six-minute video, as I attempted to follow along, I realized I had neglected to purchase any lighters or matches from the man at the Bread N Butter Market. Typical, idiotic, forgetful Ross. You could have all the light cigarettes in the world, but without a lighter, they were useless! Perhaps I had a lighter, left behind from Lora or for candles or something. Or some matches taken from the maU+000EEtre d' desk at a fancy restaurant. I walked over to my "junk drawer," silently asking "please let there be something in here..." (although I'm not sure to whom) and instead only found a tangled nest of weird wires, several batteries of dubious levels of charge, and the three fractured pieces of my mezuzah which I couldn't bring myself to throw out after it had shattered several days earlier.
I just stared at it for a beat, then picked it up with my right hand, while holding the pack of MLs (Marlboro Lights) in my left hand. The poetry of it all was completely unsubtle—I wouldn't have believed it either if I hadn't physically felt these sacramentals in each of my sweaty paws. My parents immediately came to mind... their myriad warnings of "Remember, Ross, Mathcamps don't smoke" that I heard almost daily growing up. How at my seventh birthday party, they brought one of those guys with a hole in his throat to talk to me and all my friends (through one of those robot voice boxes pressed up against his throat hole) about how we should never smoke, and made us promise never to smoke or gamble.
They were really very funny, my parents. Funny, and wonderfully odd, often aware of these oddities in a way I haven't done an honest job of conveying. Choosing instead (regressively) to characterize them cartoonishly, as a couple of cretin monsters that made me into this retentive curmudgeon who hates anything resembling a good time. These were two people who cared about me and my sister and gave us everything we ever wanted. And in return, they asked only that we never smoke or do drugs.
Here was a brief moment of clarity, of being able to articulate, in words spoken softly by the voice in my head: that just because they'd never donated to NPR, didn't mean they couldn't love me. And that there was nothing fundamentally broken about me just because I was raised by a couple of small business owners who couldn't talk about "jazz" or identify the difference between a "Croque Monsieur" and a "Croque Madame." That these were people who with their love and money and idiosyncrasy managed to rear two children who never crashed cars or shoplifted or pissed their pants after drinking too much beer. How many college professors, movie producers, hedge fund managers, or acclaimed authors can say the same about their children?
This moment, this limpid little moment of longing for mommy and daddy while staring at my mezuzah, was powerful enough for me to put my whole "it's wrong to be Ross" idea on pause, at least temporarily. At least until I replaced this messed-up mezuzah with a functioning one and ensured that that wasn't all it would take to make me feel normal again.
On my phone, I searched "jewish store" and found a shop called Judaica Esoterica Warehouse, which I'd never heard of before, but after reading the reviews which said things like "I make the trip over to Roosevelt Island just to come here once a month and say hello..." I figured it was probably more than sufficient for my needs.
The Judaica store was a twenty-seven-minute walk from my apartment, located at the northern tip of Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms State Park. When I arrived, I was surprised to see it was a three-story brick building, with a teal-painted gothic wooden door at its entrance on East Road, probably two hundred feet from the Queens side of the water, with tall wild grass and a chain-link fence separating the road and the river. Truly a weird-looking building, in the style of an old Quaker meeting house, but narrower and taller, with nine windows on each side (three on each floor). I walked inside, mumbling to myself to rehearse what I'd say to whoever was working there.
I'd anticipated something more like a Jewish Walmart, but this was more like a Jewish antique shop. Rather than organized aisles with hundreds of bins of Chinese-made tallitot, menorahs, dreidels, etc, etc, there were instead mismatched tables with half-melted Yahrzeit candles (two of which I'd be needing, but not quite yet), dusty books, silver rings, sandals, and other Israeli-looking things that I didn't quite recognize.
"Can I help you?" an older-looking Jewish woman asked after I'd been in there looking around for a few minutes, hunting for a single mezuzah.
I readied my rehearsed line "Hi, yes, uh, I need a mezuzah, mine broke, I have the broken one here because I wasn't sure if it would curse me to throw it out..."
"Ah, a mezuzah?"
"Yes, a mezuzah."
"Isn't that nice, such a handsome young man looking for a mezuzah. What a mitzvah! It brings me hope for the Jews, it really does. What's your name?" She was about fifty years old (but keeping it tight) with dark dyed black hair and a nose that, while large, looked good enough that you could've easily mistaken her for an Italian.
"I'm Ross. Ross Mathcamp," I replied. "Nice to meet you."
"Welcome, Ross. Shalom. I'm Rabbi Sikho. My husband and I own this store. I can tell you're Jewish, you have that Jewish look to you, Ross. But don't be shy. Please. You're home here. How did you find this place? This little... diamond in the rough we have," she said with a laugh.
"Well, Rabbi Sikho—"
"Please, call me Minrose, my first name. Or Rabbi, if you'd like."
"Well, Minrose, you see, I've been in something of a spiral ever since my parents died a few months ago, and a few months before that, I broke up with my girlfriend."
She made a concerned face. "Do you want to sit down, Ross? I have these new benches in from these hasids in Edison, New Jersey, who make these cute little upholstered benches."
"Sure," I said as we walked over to the back of the store and sat on a bench next to some rugs rolled up and leaned against the wall.
"...and they're pushy, sure, the hasidim, but people seem to love buying these benches, so I keep a few in stock... you know?"
"Yeah, I know."
"But back to your little spiral, Ross."
"Yes, of course, my spiral. Well, I had this woman from a dating app over a few nights ago because I'm... you know, a sick guy."
"Ross, please, don't be so hard on yourself, you're on a journey, we all are. The Indians call it dharma, the Greeks and Carpatho-Rusyns call it theosis, but we're all trying, we're all going to end up in the same place some day."
"Well, I'll have you know, that I didn't do anything, sexually, with this woman from the dating app, and she was so incensed by this—the chastity of the night—that she slammed my door shut, and it shook my mezuzah off, and then it fell and broke."
"Well, at least something got smashed that night, huh, Ross?"
We both laughed at this.
"That's very funny, Rabbi."
"You know, I'm not like other rabbis, Ross," she leaned in toward me and put her hand on my leg. "You don't have to be afraid to tell me anything," she pulled her hand away and put it on my shoulder.
"Thank you. So am I in trouble? With this broken mezuzah? I've felt sick ever since it happened, and today I almost smoked some cigarettes, which my parents would've hated. And then I found the broken mezuzah again and started thinking about my parents and how they're gone and how much I miss them and how I didn't really appreciate them while they were here. And now I'm worried that I'm doomed or cursed or destined to a life of... forlorn misery, and that perhaps I was already cursed, and my parents dying is simply part of that curse."
She stood up and pulled on my arms, gesturing for me to stand. "Oh Ross," she said, wrapping her arms around me for a hug. "You're not cursed, Ross. I would be able to tell if you're cursed, and trust me, you aren't." She released me from her grip.
"That's good to know, Rabbi."
She appeared to be tearing up slightly, "You know, Ross. I lost my parents too, when I was young. It changes everything." She looked me directly in the eye and bobbed her head. "Everything," she said.
I nodded and she continued. "Were they your best friends? Could you talk to them about anything?"
"No, but in death I've come to appreciate their perspective more."
"Isn't that always how it is, Ross? How does that old poem go?"
"What poem?"
"That old one. They fix you up, your mom and dad. They turn your brain into their slave. They fill you with the thoughts they had, and add some extra, from the grave. Is that it?"
"I'm not sure I know that one."
"You know, Ross," she said, standing up and walking toward the back office. "Oh, do you want a water bottle?"
"Sure."
"You know," she said, grabbing a little miniature water bottle, "if you want to hear from your parents, it's not exactly impossible..."
I took the bottle out of her hand and took a sip. "What?"
"I said, it's not exactly impossible."
"No, I heard you, but I don't understand what you're saying."
"Well, Ross, I'm actually a medium. I'm quite good at talking to the dead—to their spirits.
Especially if they were, you know... Jewish?"
"Rabbi," I was standing up now, "I'm sure you know much more about the Mishnah than I do, or whatever, but I'm pretty sure it's forbidden, like by Moses, to try to talk to the dead. Like I was raised pretty secular, but even I know about this rule."
"Ross..." She shook her head and showed a smile at me, "you know, there are six hundred and thirteen commandments in the Torah."
"I've heard that."
"And if we exiled people, or stoned them to death, every time they broke a tiny little one of them, well... then, well our people would've ceased to be any sort of people at all, a very long time ago."
"Uh huh."
"I mean, that's what being Jewish is about, Ross. It's about doing what you can to survive. Doing what you can to survive in a world where everyone hates you for what you are. You have to adapt to modern times. Simply ignore the parts of divine commandments that are no longer convenient to abide by. That's what religion is all about."
"That makes sense, I guess, Rabbi, I mean, I like to think of myself as pretty practical, for the most part. I'm basically allergic to dogma. You know, that and most other things." She laughed at this. "But I feel like... divination is a little different from eating a Chinese food dumpling with some shrimp in it."
"Believe it or not, Ross, there's a long tradition of women talking to spirits in Jewish culture. King Saul himself visited a medium in Endor to conjure up the spirit of Samuel. It's right there in the Bible."
"I didn't know about that, actually. But it's interesting that you bring this up, your status as a medium, because my mom, while she was alive, you know, was very very against any sort of occult trickery, Ouija boards, in particular, used to send her over the edge."
She grinned widely at this. "I can see that for her, Ross. But you have to keep in mind that people don't know what they want until you give it to them."
"What do you—"
"You should have seen the way my husband reacted when I came out to him as queer, Ross. He looked so... defeated... but now we have three kids together and have an abundantly happy partnership, and the sex just keeps on getting better... and we're just so damn happy!"
"I'm sure," I replied, scratching the wooden surface of the bench with my fingernail.
"What I'm trying to say is, your mom wasn't upset at all to hear from me. In fact, she reached out. She says hello, Ross."
I shivered and shuddered. "She's here... right now?" I asked.
"Yes," Rabbi Sikho replied. "But she's leaving. And your dad is coming over," the Rabbi was sitting across from me, staring into the distance in a mystical manner. "Your father says you look terrible, Ross. He says you seem weak and unimpressive, and you're not honoring the family by being so sad and pathetic all the time."
"Ask him if he was murdered, and if I should avenge his death like Hamlet."
She nodded. "He says he doesn't know what that means, but that you need to stop feeling sorry for yourself and work on self improvement, that way you can win Lisa back. He says he and your mother both thought you and Lisa were very cute together."
"That's not her name..."
"I swear he's saying Lisa, Ross. Now he's telling me to tell you to quote 'grow a pair.'"
"Okay, fine. Tell him I appreciate it."
"He says you're lucky he didn't listen to you about the life insurance, and if he were alive right now and saw you acting like this, he would put you in something called an 'arm bar' and make you 'tap out.' He says you're making Jews look bad. You're embarrassing our entire race, he says."
"Is he mad?"
"No, it seems like he's having fun."
"Okay, I get it. I think that's enough. Thanks Dad, love ya man... I'm gonna go now, I'm gonna finish up in here and get working on becoming the sort of young man you'll be proud of."
"He says he loves you too and only pushes you because he knows you can take it."
The Rabbi gave me two hugs. One from my dad, and one from herself. "Oh, and I almost forgot," she stepped a dozen or so paces toward a shelf near a paned window. "You came for a mezuzah, didn't you?" she said as she grabbed one off the shelf. "Take good care of this, Ross. According to my seller, it once belonged to the brother of Ariel Sharon's mohel."
"I will. Thank you so much, Rabbi. I feel like you've given me so much to work with."
"Ross, please. It would be a shande if I didn't share my gifts with the younger generation. I could tell you were suffering when you came in here, so to see you now, with your brand-new mezuzah, with some advice from your parents... it brings me... a lot of joy, let's just say."
"I'm happy to hear that."
"And you know, if you ever want to get into any... fun with an older couple, I'm sure my husband would be very approving. You're definitely our type..."
"Uh... I think I'm alright. Thanks."
I'm still not sure how legitimate the signs and wonders of the psychic rabbi were. There are, of course, many things to consider. Can women even be Rabbis? Need she even be a Rabbi to harness necromantic powers? Was she communicating with the actual souls of my parents? With an evil spirit impersonating my parents? Was she simply performing a cold reading on me—or perhaps a not-so-cold reading, as I told her my full name, meaning she could've looked my parents up on a popular internet search engine when she went into the other room for a few minutes. But all of this was (and still is) immaterial to me.
As I walked out of the Judaica Esoterica Warehouse, the potentially pseudepigraphal words of my father's poltergeist reverberated in my mind's ear. I was pathetic. A broken man. A man of inaction, cowering and fleeing from his own healthy desires. And worse than that, even, was the realization that I really had been living the life of a cheap stereotype of an urban J.
It was shameful the way I'd left things with Lora. So passive, so deferential of me. To let her walk out my door with nothing more than a peck on the cheek and a "we should do this again soon..." There was no confrontation, no expression of what I wanted, or what I felt entitled to.
All of this for no particular reason. You'll recall that my parents' death rendered me a man of myriad means. But my inheritance was being sidelined, socked far far away in a brokerage account accruing interest that'd never actually be used for anything. Inaction, my fatal flaw. You could inherit the whole world, but what use would it be if you're too meek to do anything with it while you're still alive? Well, obviously this would have to change. It would be a grave disservice to my deceased parents to continue on like this.
On my walk back home, I considered donating my pack of cigarettes to a beggar or vagrant, but then I realized first, that it would be wrong to hand out poison to a stranger, and second, that beggars and vagrants are practically nonexistent on Roosevelt Island anyway. So I took the pack of cancer sticks out of my pocket and hurled them directly into the nearest East River, where they fell and floated with a faintly perceptible plop.
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