Old Ray leaned forward. “Do the footwork. Turn over the results. Isn’t that what we say in recovery? Do the footwork? Turn over the results?”
“Yes, but…”
He smiled. “So, do it.”
With heavyhearted reluctance, spiritually winded, went to see a travel agent who specialized in flights to Israel, hotel bookings, etc. She quoted prices to me so beyond my means that I had to fight to keep a straight face when I heard them. Wanted to blurt out: “It’s all my sponsor’s fault. There’s not a hope in hell that I can afford the prices you’ve quoted, or even a flight for a quarter of those sums. I don’t have nickel one to my name.”
But straight-faced, played out the farce to the end, thanked her, returned home with the useless, unobtainable figures in hand.
That night, at home, I received a fax from the Berlin Jewish Cultural Festival requesting me to perform alongside Allen Ginsberg and asking if I could think of some other California writers to invite; they hoped to assemble a program on California alternative Jewish culture. In return for my reading, as well as the work of recommending other writers, they would pay me a few thousand dollars in addition to the round-trip flight and my stay in a first-class hotel in Charlottenburg, where Ginsberg would also room.
I stared at the fax trembling in my hand, then listed names on a napkin: Kathy Acker, Jerome Rothenberg, Rabbi Michael Lerner. Called Old Ray. Could barely get the words out: “You won’t believe this…”
He suggested that when I fax back my acceptance I request that the festival add a Tel Aviv stop on the return leg of my air ticket. I did, and included the names of proposed invitees. They faxed back that adding Tel Aviv was no problem, thanked me, and named the travel agent in Union Square where I could pick up my ticket. I had just received, in a matter of moments, more than enough to visit Isadora.
There are no accidents in God’s universe. The invitation, coming when it did, was no coincidence. It was a miracle.
But there was yet the matter of Esther, who would hang up each time I called, after shrieking my ear off. She had even once refused to let my parents see Isadora after they had flown all the way to Israel expressly for that purpose. What would prevent her from doing the same to me?
I called. She answered. I calmly explained about the festival, said I’d stop in Israel for a week to visit Isadora en route home. Wasn’t even so surprised when, this time, she agreed. By now, nothing could surprise me. Was doing my Higher Power’s bidding. All I had to do was stay sober, show up.
I flew to the festival with Kathy Acker, who was a friend. Compact, pretty, pierced and tattooed, with short-cropped bottle-blonde hair, a studded motorcycle jacket painted with roses and skulls, and an assertive voice that brooked no nonsense, she was also one of the sweetest people I’d ever met, but only if she liked you. She liked me and we laughed a lot, reminiscing about the old days at the Nuyorican Poets Café, where we had first met on a second-floor balcony and blown pot smoke into each other’s mouths and puppy-kissed. These days, she was exploring the still relatively new social medium of online anonymous sex chat rooms and finding that it showed a whole new side to herself, including the strange realization that though the sex games were pure fantasy, her partners anonymous, still, she had feelings for them and they for “her,” despite neither party having a clue to the other’s identity. What, then, is identity, she wondered. What is love?
Our hotel was in Charlottenburg, one of the poshest districts of Berlin. The festival organizers explained that I would perform solo, but I was also invited, along with Allen Ginsberg, to perform poetry with the Klezmatics on backup. After my set, where I read “Marlboro Man,” “Relationshit,” and other rants, Allen Ginsberg took the stage. Though in frail health, he performed with the power of a dharma lion.
When it was over, a beautiful Nordic couple with white-blond hair and green-blue eyes came up. The man introduced himself as Carl-Johan Vallgren, a Swedish novelist. He said my performance was a revelation, would like to translate my poems into Swedish, write a profile about me for Bonniers Litterära Magasin, Sweden’s most important periodical of literature. Could we meet the next day? I handed him a sheaf of poems and said: “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
That afternoon, Ginsberg, Jerry Rothenberg, and I gave a press conference. Of course, Ginsberg was the main act, the center of attention, as was right. He was the guest of the Berlin Turkish community, which had sponsored his fee to the tune of thousands. In return, Ginsberg would speak out on behalf of the Turkish immigrants who were being incinerated in their homes by mobs of firebombing neo-Nazi skinheads. The government response had amounted to a shrug.
The German press, as well as reporters from France and Italy, listened respectfully to Ginsberg’s opening remarks. He deplored Bonn’s apathy, called on Kohl to stop the killings of Turks at once. Then he appealed to the film stars of Germany to raise their voices.
“Why film stars?” asked one of the reporters.
“Because if American film stars had raised their voices against Nazism, they would have prevented the Holocaust!”
This I could not countenance.
“Excuse me, Allen,” I spoke up.
“Everyone,” said Ginsberg, “this is Alan Kaufman from San Francisco, one of the new breed of Spoken Word poets, making a new scene in America. Yes, Alan?”
“With all due respect, Allen—there’s no poet I more admire than you—you can’t seriously believe that Gary Cooper and Shirley Temple could have stopped Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler!”
“I believe exactly that,” he snapped, face darkening with anger. “The collective force of popular culture could have prevented World War Two.”
Numerous reporters groaned and rolled their eyes or sat with pained, bewildered smiles. Beside me, a beautiful Italian photographer leaned close and squeezed my wrist. “What nonsense! I completely agree with you!”
After much back-and-forth between Ginsberg and the astonished reporters, Ginsberg turned to me and said: “Alan. I apologize for losing my temper. You angered me but that doesn’t justify my behavior.”
“No problem, Allen.”
You had to like Ginsberg, no matter how offbeat his perspectives sometimes were. In publicly apologizing to a relative unknown, he showed real class, I thought.
At the festival Kathy Acker spoke to me about her ambivalence toward the whole matter of Jewish identity, the prohibition against tattoos, Orthodox treatment of women, her sense of estrangement from Judaism’s institutions. Kathy did not seem to like Berlin that much. It was a harsh winter of searing cold, the city buried under snow and ice. She left the festival site as often as possible. My impression was she couldn’t wait to return to San Francisco, where she drove a motorcycle and occupied one of the punkiest Goth apartments I’d ever seen, draped in velvet nineteenth-century Baudelairean decor and hung with original shotgun art by William Burroughs and David Wojnarowicz.
The next day, I breakfasted with Allen Ginsberg and Michael Lerner. I have never been fond of small talk in such encounters, where everyone butters their toast with a sense of momentous occasion. Perhaps this time great things were said, but I don’t recall. Was too busy wolfing down my eggs as Lerner spoke at length about his magazine, Tikkun, to which he invited both Ginsberg and me to contribute. I do recall that at one point Ginsberg exchanged a fatigued look with me. When I left, Lerner was still talking.
That afternoon, Carl-Johan Vallgren took me for a walk around Berlin. At the site of a former train station that had served as the central round-up point for the deportation of Berlin Jews to the death camps during the Holocaust, we stood in silence. And I listened. Vallgren had mentioned the large number of Jewish children who had gone to their deaths from here. I heard a child crying. A mother pulling a very upset little girl. For an instant could imagine the cries of children as they were pushed or sometimes thrown into overcrowded cattle cars for journeys of two and three days, standing the whole time, unfed, parched with thirst, hurtling toward gas
and, as often, incineration while yet alive.
I thought of my mother, who had succeeded in escaping this fate, and of my daughter, Isadora, in Israel.
I looked at Carl. “I hear them.”
“Who do you hear, Alan?” he asked respectfully.
“The dead, Carl. I hear the dead. I’ve been listening for them my whole life. And sometimes, I hear them everywhere. And I hear them now in this place.”
“I think I understand,” he said.
65
THE PLANE’S WINGS DIPPED, AND THERE WAS ISRAEL. As always when I see Israel, I felt overtaken by the sad, warm drowsiness of the place, the inexorable link between her harsh brown unforgiving soil and my soul. The knot within, which Jews abroad live unaware of, relaxed. I was home, safe, back among my own.
At the airport passport control, used my Israeli passport to enter. Took a taxi into Tel Aviv and from there a bus to Jerusalem, my old hometown, where I booked myself into a cheap hotel. Called Esther immediately, let her know that I’d arrived. She was cool but cordial. We arranged to meet the next day in Ashdod, where they made their home. She refused to give me an address, asked instead to meet at a café near the town’s main post office.
The next morning, wandering too early along Ben Yehuda street in the center of town, hardly able to grasp that I was actually here, I bought a miniature Casio piano keyboard for Isadora. Don’t know why. What do you get for a nine-year-old girl? Hadn’t thought to ask before leaving, and, on my own, my aching brain scrambled the task into an anxious muddle. Could hardly believe that I was really about to see my daughter. It had been so long.
What would I say? How to speak to her? Would she forgive me? How would I state my amends? When would the right moment come? Oh, please, YHWH, I prayed, God of my people, help me to make amends to this innocent who has harmed no one but has been hurt by my drinking. Please, I ask that you allow me to be the kind of father that I should have been before.
66
ASHDOD WAS A POOR IMMIGRANT SEACOAST TOWN, with a more upscale district along the shore. With wide, dusty streets of rows on rows of ugly housing blocks, it was known both for its blue-collar uncouthness and its burgeoning criminal class—a whole stratum of the population engaged in illegal activity, as is common in slums, where hope and money are scarce.
The rendezvous point was a typical cheap kiosk café with a few outdoor tables—a place that sold coffee, tea, ice cream, cigarettes, and lottery tickets. Bought tea and took a seat at an umbrella-shaded table, out of the burning sun.
And then I saw them—Isadora holding the hand of Esther, who was rushing along in a kind of frantic charge. Spotting me, she stopped and stared with wet eyes. I came to my feet, searched my heart for rancor. Despite all that we had gone through, I felt none. But kept close internal watch nonetheless for some resentment that might lurk somewhere, hidden, and lash out, ruin everything. Whether or not she could forgive me, I must completely forgive her and remain in a state of forgiveness.
But I couldn’t bear to look at Isadora, who was the only reason I had come. If not for her, I would simply have sent Esther an amends letter and left it at that. Isadora was the reason I was here.
Isadora did not approach and also did not look my way. And then she looked.
The last time I had seen her, she was a toddler, less than two years old. Now she was nine, a developed little girl with a full head of dirty-blonde ringlets and the most angelic face, with big blue eyes and a lovely mouth and a perfect little nose. And there was something of the tomboy about her. But I couldn’t tell what she felt on seeing me. Her true face, the one beneath her face, kept itself secret. I wanted to put my arms around her so tightly and warmly and tell her I love her and promise never to disappear on her ever again. But stood there, restrained, trying to relax. And slowly, reluctantly, Esther and Isadora came up to me and we all stood there transfixed by the sheer awkwardness of the moment.
Esther giggled. Then said, in a voice husky with drama: “Hel-lo.”
“Hi.” I smiled.
“Izzy,” she said. “This is your father. Say hello to him.”
Isadora regarded me. Still couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Though she stood in full sight, something, a kind of ambivalence, yet veiled her from me. I realized that it was the presence of Esther.
“Hello, Daddy,” she said, trying to seem controlled, the voice flattened, just a touch, as if reading from a script, her face struggling not to show a feeling.
But I fought back tears to hear her call me “Daddy” and it must have showed. Didn’t deserve such a precious gift, though I had yearned to hear those words every day since the time I left, never to return.
“Hello, sweetheart, my daughter,” I said. Her face changed. There she was. As if we hadn’t been apart for a single day: my Izzy! But Esther must have seen it: the illusion of her control slip for a single instant. She tensed. And Izzy vanished again from her own body. And the walls were up once more.
We sat and I ordered them whatever they wanted. Esther talked about some career difficulty she had and I did my best to be attentive, but internally my focus was all on Isadora, her every gesture, expression, body posture. In me an unfilled space made sacred for her was desperate for her content, and each time she just breathed, another item was added as I sat there, registering each flicker of her golden eyelids, shift in skin tone, the fall of her hair, trying to discern subtle hints of mood, noting how she gradually relaxed, particularly when the ice cream came, and how she simply stood up, leaned against my leg, placed her hand on my shoulder, and, ignoring Esther, stood there, listening, leaning into me, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, which it was.
I died of happiness. Had to restrain myself from shouting joyfully. Against my body, hers, which in part had come of me, emanated an essential distillation of familiarity unavailable anywhere on earth except from her in relation to me. She was my little girl and I was her daddy. Breath of my breath. Love of my love.
Esther didn’t like it. “Izzy,” she snapped, “Stop bothering your fa-ther. It’s hot!”
I put my arm around Izzy, as if to hold her in place. “No,” I said. “She’s fine.”
But Izzy slipped away and stood off to the side, apart from the table, and began to play some mental game with herself and hop around. I was fine now. Knew that she was thinking about me, a thousand thoughts, and about other things probably, her friends, and whom she would tell about me first and what she would say and how to describe me. Intuited all this immediately, relaxed. It was going to be fine.
Let Esther talk as long as she liked; I heard none of it. Finally, when she had spent herself—talk was her way of staying calm—she said: “What now?”
I suggested that we take some photographs. Sensed how important it was that Isadora experience a moment, if ever so briefly, of normal family life, like posing together for photographs, to break the ice of her estrangement not only from me but from any sense whatsoever of sane family closeness.
“Izzy,” I said. “For a proper photo, you should sit on Daddy’s shoulders.”
Her face lit up. “Okay, Daddy.”
I offered her a hand up, and effortlessly, like a little monkey, she swung onto my back and carefully placed one leg after the other over my shoulders as I held her firmly. Laughing, she blindfolded my eyes with her hands and I pretended to stumble around confused and teeter on the brink while she held fast, squealing and laughing.
Esther shot some photos of us, and then Izzy came down and Esther asked someone to shoot all three of us, as I took note of how my emotions protested against appearing in a picture with her, an idea as repugnant to me as ever—I evidently had not forgiven her enough even to pretend to allow a relationship, and perhaps she sensed this, perhaps in this I failed to maintain my spiritual stance. For though I intended to speak with her in private, to make amends face to face about the wrongs I had done, I also wanted her to be very clear that my only reason to be here was Isadora. I did not quite
grasp that she, in turn, wanted me to understand that she controlled Isadora’s every breath and step—that nothing I could do would take her away. As if that had been my intention, then or ever.
“Would you like to come see where we live?” said Esther.
It was more than I dared to hope for.
“I’d be honored,” I said.
“You won’t feel so honored when you see the dump we live in.” She was right. It was awful. The building sat, old and ugly, in a neighborhood overrun with feral cats where laundry flapped on outdoor clotheslines amid knee-high weeds.
A large balcony thrust from the flat like a pouting lip. This was heaped with a compacted avalanche of discarded clothes, photos, hairbrushes, newspapers, and anthologies containing my poems, mangled into rain-twisted mulch. Clothes, books, shoes, dinner plates were strewn everywhere throughout the flat. It looked as if some biblical flood had hit, then abated, and everything it destroyed was left as is.
I wanted to buy something for Isadora. The Casio piano had flopped, I could tell, as well it should have: there was nothing of me in it. Would Esther permit me to go off alone with my daughter to shop in the local mall? I asked nervously, remembering the pitched battles that Esther had waged in the past when I tried to take Isadora out in the stroller for a walk through Brooklyn’s shady Park Slope streets. Feared sparking more of her paranoia. But something in my manner reassured her. Amazingly, she agreed. The sober man had calmed the skittish fox. Hand in hand with my daughter I left the flat, unescorted, unmonitored, just she and I.
Air and light returned to the planet’s surface. I walked along, smiling, as Isadora skipped ahead and turned frequently to see if I was still really there and not some mirage that might dematerialize back into the sad surroundings. I’m still here, sweetheart! my smile signaled. Not going anywhere. Just with you. I love you!
Drunken Angel (9781936740062) Page 28
