by David Rakoff
Until came the day not long thereafter when we had to promote her characteristically terrible book (this, too, is not the unkind thing I said). Someone had the bright idea, since this was a novel about a character finding fame and fortune as a writer, that in a vain attempt at generating publicity for this book that no one cared about, and as a sop to her huge, unwarranted vanity (nor is that), we should have a literary contest in her name, calling for submissions of first novels, and we would publish the best one.
In the children’s fairy tale The Little Princess, a young girl of noble parentage is orphaned and briefly laid low by circumstance, reduced to working as a common char under the thumb of an abusive schoolmistress. When the girl’s nobility is eventually discovered and she is to be restored to her life of silks and velvets, she turns to her best friend—another soot-covered menial who labored in the house next door and who was the only person in the world who showed the princess any kindness—and asks her if she’d like to come with her to her new, palatial home … as her maid! The lowborn urchin, far from being insulted, replies in the gleeful affirmative. Because I am not a Victorian child inculcated from birth with the tenets and strictures of the British class system, I always told myself that, were I to find myself in a similar situation with just such a subjugation-posing-as-my-lucky-day-bonanza offer made to me, I would have both backbone and presence of mind enough to answer, “Your maid? I’d love to. Would you, in turn, like to suck my dick?”
But when told that it would fall to me to administer the contest—read all the submissions and choose a winner, in essence take on what amounted to another full-time job on top of the one I already had, and have to be back in touch with and even somewhat in the employ of the author, in whose eyes I was not just Box Office Poison but toxic to life offscreen, as well—my nerve failed me. I had no choice. I needed the job. They’d asked me to eat shit, and all I’d done was request a bigger spoon.
I consoled myself with the knowledge that we would receive very few entries, since the contest had been advertised on the back page of the very book we were trying to promote. A star-burst on the cover announcing the sweepstakes, even printed within the first few pages, seemed clever enough, but a promotion meant to drum up sales where the enticement was printed on the last page, a page generally only reached at the end of having read the entire volume, namely after one had already purchased the book and was by definition no longer in need of any further incentives or blandishments, seemed akin to handing out entry forms for a Caribbean cruise on the deck of a ship already three days out to sea.
But, lo and behold, mere days later, I started to get submissions. A trickle at first, they soon arrived by the binful. Over the course of the next three months or so, I received manuscripts for some two thousand first novels. I stacked them on a spare desk in my office. They covered its entire surface to a height of three feet, a daunting manila butte. The author came in to pose for a photograph for Publishers Weekly, seated among the piles of aspirants. The queen with her golden milk pail, she made a comically overwhelmed Teri Garr face, as if she had spent hours reading and had hours more still to go which, I hardly need to point out, she hadn’t and didn’t.
My days, however, were taken up with reading. For this aspiring writer who just couldn’t seem to get his own writing done, there was more than a touch of humiliation in being faced with two thousand individuals who could, and cold comfort in the fact that a goodly handful of those industrious souls seemed to be either insane, incarcerated—or both. I might have chuckled with superiority when I read the manuscript that began, “Hello, I was in the Ice Capades in 1947 and let me tell you, everyone thinks that Sonja Henie was such a sweetheart but take it from me she was one unholy bitch on skates!” But I could not ignore the material rebuke that was the word-covered sheaf of pages, thick in my hands.
There was no way I would make the contest deadline, so I pressed three co-workers into service and we spent a few lunch hours a week going through the submissions. Particularly lurid or whacked-out passages cried out to be read aloud and chuckled over, but this was pretty much a busman’s holiday for all of us. Publishing begins and ends with the reading of manuscripts. For the most part we ate our sandwiches and worked silently, all the while, of course, vigilantly on Devereaux Watch.
For mysterious reasons, possibly having to do with schlock auteur Aaron Spelling, in amateur writing, Devereaux is the default name for either the president, a ne’er-do-well scion of a powerful clan, an iron-willed jewel-encrusted dowager, or the family manse whose stately façade conceals many dark secrets. There was no prize for winning the Devereaux Watch. Coming upon the first—and by no means only—appearance of the name on a given day’s reading was its own reward, and finding it never took longer than seven minutes.
Ha-ha! Aren’t the doomed aspirations of others funny? Their pitiful lack of conversancy with this murky-yet-dreamed-of industry? A scream! Why, if I wanted to, I could have just walked my own manuscript downstairs to one of the editors. Where was my manuscript, you ask? Fuck you. When I wasn’t awash in self-pity, I was as brittle and glittering and heartless as a shard of glass. Until the day I opened one of the submissions to read an epigraph of the poem that ends with the plea, “I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” That shut me up but good, albeit for all of five minutes. William Butler Yeats might have had truth and beauty, but they were no match for my thwarted grandiosity. I had stepped off the career track, opting not to become an editor so that I might concentrate on my writing, of which I had produced a scant and laughable amount. Nor had I managed to make a go of acting, my other dilettantish pursuit. My contingency plans for a creative life were, one by one, failing to pan out, with nothing but a future of highly unromantic rent-paying ahead of me. If I had to eat so much failure myself, then by God, I’d be sure to mete some out, too.
We settled on four finalists, all of them very good, all eminently publishable: the first was an autobiographical novel of an Irish Catholic childhood destroyed by alcoholism in Greenwich Village in the 1930s; there was a terrific book set in the nineteenth century in the Five Points neighborhood, written years before the movie Gangs of New York came out; an extremely dark comic story of an obese man who finally snaps and goes on a killing spree that sparks a social revolution of fat people demanding fair treatment; and the winner, which was an assured and beautiful book about a family of Jewish refugees in the 1920s who move to South America. It was page after page of lovely writing, full of heat and Yiddish-inflected magic realism, an achievement of craft and virtuosity. Worlds better than anything the person for whom this contest had been set up could ever have written, even if she had taken a bottle of smart pills and was hooked up to an IV where she was getting hourly transfusions of liquid talent (injurious and unkind, perhaps, but still not the thing I said). This young woman would be published by the house, her dreams would come true, and it would shine the light of publicity upon our established author.
That had been the plan, anyway. By the time the contest was decided, however, the underlying book was already leaving bookshelves, having enjoyed dismal sales. There were no embers of interest left for the contest to fan into flame. The winner was published, but with little promotion and even less advertising. She was disappeared by this apathy, as unknown as if she’d never published a book at all. The entire enterprise had been ill-conceived and was, by the end of it, a desperate and resigned hookup in a bar at closing time with the lights turned up bright: exhausted, flailing, and tinged with contempt from and for all involved.
As for the other finalists, there would be no introductions to agents, no pictures in trade journals, no punctuated equilibrium of any sort. I was left to my own devices as to how to handle what had now officially become a problem that the higher-ups wanted taken care of. I walked over to Sam Flax and bought three ready-made frames with glass along with some oversized certificate-looking paper. I found some fancy gold-foil stickers in my craft drawer
, and using an elaborate font, I mocked up an “official” citation. I mailed them off, feeling incredibly shabby about the whole thing. Then again, who am I to say what nourishes or starves a dream? When I called the fellow who’d written the Five Points novel to make sure the plaque had arrived, his wife told me that the validation of being a finalist had lifted him out of a years-long funk and he was writing again. I would never know, she told me, what a gift that was. She, in turn, would never know that the entire enterprise had been little more than a backfired prank, or that I was an over-entitled wage slave with absolutely no power and too wrapped up in my own aborted fantasies at the time to be of any help to anybody. And that the golden seals on the diplomas were salvaged from the packaging of the bathroom soap I bought in Chinatown for fifty cents a bar.
I never saw the author again. Not long after the contest, she found fault with the publishing company as a whole and moved on to more lucrative pastures. A few years after that, she went in for some plastic surgery and never came to, an untimely, wasteful, but thankfully probably painless end. Once, when leaving a party, my friend the hostess turned to a woman standing beside her—Upper East Side ash-blonde, black-velvet Alice band, gold Elsa Peretti earrings, pearl necklace—and said, “You should really meet David at some other time. He’s very funny.” The blonde looked me up and down appraisingly, and purred, “Yes, I bet I could have a lot of bitchy fun with you.”
I could imagine which of my signifiers had led her to this conclusion. No doubt one of the visual cues I give off that had initially gotten me cast as Duarto. Whichever it was, I really didn’t care, because with barely a pause between her words and mine, I corrected her, “Oh no. I am a homosexual, but I’m not a bitch.” It was important to me that this woman I had never met know this. I value kindness in myself and others. I try to remain super-vigilant about my targets and make extra sure that my sometimes barbed comments are deserved and in response to some genuine malefaction. Perhaps my insistence on this nuance is waffling self-delusion, given what I have said in print about public figures like Barbara Bush, Robin Williams, and Karl Lagerfeld, to name just three. And what I am about to tell you—with no pride—weakens my claim to kindness to the point of pitiful. Before the author died and was lingering in a twilight of her anesthesia-induced vegetative state, the ether was a-crackle with a volley of e-mails from the legions to whom she had done dirt. All of us whose kindness she had repaid with cruelty could speak of nothing else. One of my former colleagues wrote:
“You’d have thought the doctors would get the ether right the first eleven times she had the procedure.”
To which I replied:
“Do you think her being in a coma will affect the quality of her writing?”
Dark Meat
The chief rabbi of the shtetl, a sage renowned throughout the land as the greatest mind in Jewish thought, is approached by two young Seekers of Truth. They have traveled for weeks, a great distance, on foot, in order to sit at his feet.
“Rabbi,” asks one, eager for wisdom. “Why can’t we eat pork?”
The rabbi reels back and, smacking his hand to his forehead, exclaims, “We can’t? Uh-oh!”
Purim commemorates the narrow escape from genocide of the Jews of ancient Persia. It is a great, collective “Phew!” of a celebration, a snatched-from-the-jaws-of-death festival, and as such, a holiday of heartily endorsed drunkenness: sanctioned inebriation to the point where one can no longer distinguish between Haman—the despised villain in the book of Esther—and Mordecai, the sanctified hero. Such codified abandon makes Purim replete with subversion. All manner of things forbidden throughout the year are not just allowed but called for on Purim: raucous noisemaking in the synagogue, costumes, carnivals. Purim is the one day of the year that the Talmud allows cross-dressing.
“There’s a lack of reverence built into the holiday,” says Rabbi X, the head rabbi of a sizable Reform congregation in a sizable American city, “so I thought to myself, what’s my little rebellion going to be? For those twenty-four hours of Purim, I eat treyf.” Once a year, Rabbi X returns to the foods of his nonko-sher youth (“I never saw my father happier than when cracking open a crab on the seashore”). Beginning at sundown the evening before, “I go to a place in Chinatown and eat this shrimp with special salt. Unbelievable. It’s really a hole in the wall. The next morning is bacon and eggs at a diner. I don’t mean this to be arrogant, but I’m recognized almost everywhere I go, so in the morning, I go to a totally out-of-the-way diner. Lunch is a pizza with double pepperoni and a Coke—to me, one of the finest combinations of food on the earth—and before sundown, always lobster. Lobster tails with drawn butter, at a little tourist place. The equivalent of going to Lowry’s for the prime rib. It is clearly in contradiction to the letter, but completely embraces the spirit of Purim. And I’m a spirit-trumps-letter kind of guy.”
There is a reason Rabbi X has opted for the pork products instead of, say, walking down the street in an Escada dress. His actions speak to a larger universal truth, and that truth is that between Jews and pork there is no greater love. Perhaps lacking the Darwinian elegance of the coevolution of humans and dogs, and undeniably one-sided—the scores of hogs who give their very lives so that Hebreo baconophagis americansis may continue to revel in the secular wonder of the BLT might have a thing or two to say about it, if only they could—but it is a great love, nonetheless.
The Old Testament forbids the eating of animals with cloven hooves or who do not chew their cud, or fish without scales, and of course, there is also that clause about not boiling a calf in its mother’s milk. But it is fairly bare-bones in its instructions beyond that. The more tortuous rituals of kashrut—like the separate sets of dishes, what foods may follow others, the sanitizing of sullied implements by burying them in the dirt, etc.—are all later extrapolations of the Babylonian Talmud, the multivolume text of rabbinical commentary.
The Talmud is composed almost entirely of dispute, and the arguments were still raging several centuries later and many oceans away when, in 1885, a rabbi named Kaufmann Kohler authored a call for the modernization of American Judaism in a document that came to be known as the Pittsburgh Platform, Article 4 of which states: “We hold that all such Mosaic and rabbinical laws as regulate diet, priestly purity, and dress originated in ages and under the influence of ideas entirely foreign to our present mental and spiritual state. They fail to impress the modern Jew with a spirit of priestly holiness; their observance in our days is apt rather to obstruct than to further modern spiritual elevation.”
This rejection of what was dismissed as mere “kitchen Judaism,” had surely found fertile soil two years previously when, for the 1883 banquet of the graduating class of rabbis from the Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati, the menu included clams, shrimp, and frog legs. Now widely considered to have been nothing more than the mother of all caterers’ errors, the mythology of the “treyf banquet” was taken up as a clarion call by the burgeoning Reform movement and such men as Kohler and his komrades.
Internecine disagreements among an interpretive rabbinate are emblematic of the interrogative nature of Judaism itself. We are a questioning people. Why shouldn’t something as beyond-the-pale forbidden like the eating of pork become normative among people who fully and proudly identify as Jewish? It can be quite confusing to the outside observer to see Jews whose adherence to the laws of kashrut has all the logic and elasticity of quantum physics. Jen C., a freakishly gifted voice-over artist, able to switch from a guttural Queens housewife to a spot-on Yoko Ono without even taking a breath, might have developed such versatility growing up in a “Conservadox” household. “My father came from an Orthodox background and my mother was Reform. But he wanted to maintain certain aspects of his Orthodoxy, so we were sent to super-crazy Orthodox yeshiva, but he also liked eating butterfly shrimp in Chinatown on Sunday night. At yeshiva, the worst thing you could possibly say was, ‘I saw you eating a ham sandwich.’ That was the ultimate bus taunt. We had a kosher
home befitting any Orthodox Jewish family. The kitchen was kosher, but if the Chinese food was brought straight from the car to the coffee table in front of the TV and eaten on paper plates, then that was okay.” This doesn’t even take into account the C.s’ all-bets-are-off “ConservaForm” beach house where anything went. “I remember I was five or six and I was telling my grandmother a story that somehow involved me eating a ham-and-cheese sandwich, and I remember thinking, ‘Oh, that’s not kosher,’ so I changed it to a plain ham sandwich. She was horrified and I quickly said, ‘No, no! It wasn’t ham, it looked like ham but it wasn’t!’ I was covering.”
A Red-diaper baby, raised according to the precepts of good old-fashioned pinko socialism, becomes an entertainment lawyer, successful enough that he can afford to send his son to that august private institution, the Trinity School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. One day, the man’s eight-year-old son comes home and says, “Dad, we learned about the name of our school today. It’s called Trinity because there’s the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”
Horrified, the father grabs his son by the shoulders before he can continue and, shaking him, says vehemently, “Joshua, get this straight: there is only one God! Who does not exist!”
———
For other, more progressive Jews, religiosity in all its opiate forms was anathema. The modern dispensation of the Pittsburgh Platform was no different from, nor any more attractive than, the dusty pages of the Talmud with its incomprehensible and inapplicable Aramaic. Both smacked uncomfortably of the clergy, and neither was going to bring about justice or help create a new society, of which treyf-eating was one demonstrable aspect.
