B heads through the night up Broadway, is it, then around the Park with its Temple left as if a basement resurgent: partially finished, which, as it’s been said, is also partially unfinished, being renovated again…up toward what He thinks, they have to be, more open, quieter streets, these avenues widely silent: once upon a time, the richest slice of town, the morsel choicest and chosen, that’s if you had the money and right referrals, today full of poor, filled with pauperings, it’s galling, how destitute, such shammeses to shame, wheedling beadles sidestepping copulating dogs, bloated goats grazing on leaflets, munching notices by lamplight…O these perpetually rushing, stamstammstammering menschs in their mandated yarmulkes held down against the gusts, hurrying, always schurrying, home to their womenfolk, to the luxury apartments and penthouses they’d been assigned or had bought outright on the fiftyyear forgiven mortgage that their women’d just finished redecorating for them and their families (everincreasing, raised roofward toward the gulls, stolen for consumption, cooked then garnished with their rent), in the latest style known to privation: bedclothes hung from fireescapes, disastrous pianos converted to bins of trash having fallings out with windows…these menschs with the faces of entire families themselves, of women and infants — save their hair…for what — wombred and honeyglowing, illuminated from within, the abyssal shine of their ancient eyes, disgusting. Sinking. Perpetually deep in the One True Depth, they traipse through the Broadway snowbanks, their beards and sidelocks flapping, getting tangled with the beards and locks of other menschs just passing in the opposite direction, Uptown for an audience in the court of a rabbi holding an opinion that’s dialectically opposed to an opinion held by the rabbi the others are heading Downtown now to meet; two students coming around the corner, tied up, how they’re tripped to ice…many not yet used to wearing these yarmulkes (but they’re trying, they assure you, they have to), with the thin, governmentissued scraps threatening to fly away at every turn of street and wind, with tassels rustling they stoop to snitch their remnants from the sewers, slap palmfuls soaked and dirty down onto their skulls again, frumiliar — in a ruached rush to make in time the shiur of Rabbi Avraham Ben Shmuelbob Johnson III, shlit”a, the son of Reb Samuel Johnson II, z”l…or else Rav Billybob (Mendy) Mendelssohn’s tisch, or that of the Ramjohn he’s known as, the Ranjim, to glean a pesher from that posek, the son of Baba Wawa, a soothsayer and local benevolent personality, her tongue the hottest ticket in town: dynasties hewn like smoke from wintered air…the Old Traditionalists among us upholding amid all else and the pillars of the universe, the furriest shtremiels, pointy thin spodiks and rounded kolpiks, peaked kashkets, not to forget the littlest kutchmas and shlyapkas stacked six high, in felt and in velvet, rabbit and beaver, and these worn without any discipline, without any notion that what’s worn atop the head once marked the origin if not the allegiance of the head and its body grossly garbed below. Everything done wrongly: newly minted Mogilevichs rubbing shoulders pricking elbows with Mogelescus, makes no sense, knock knees, Newmans friends with Neumanns, Ostrovitch married off to Ostrowicz who knew but nu (and the more unpronounceable or unspellable the name, the higher the price the bride commanded, her family and the shadchan, too), it’s the mouth under all that matters, the bated breaths of these liverlickers adhering, the garlicky followers of Rabbi Onions, who’d been buried to grow famous from a grave, the word rooted up in shrouds from a bulbous beard. How with every scent and clarinety cymbalon song in the world they’re blasting the newest rebbe on the block whoever he is or thinks he is or might be with question after question, all these questions, though, in the end the same…which is the nature of the Depth, the depth of the Depth, hymn, how many feet of fall today, and what’s the forecast for tomorrow, you’re such a big shot ba’al teshuva? America your streets are paved with cold, a black year in your ear, in your mouth, only the dreck fallen, frozenover: horses up to their haunches in potholes heretically unprophesized, whinnying for a bullet between the senseless eyes; oxen ensnared in the hidden stumble — a guttergrating or sewerlid removed as a servingplate, or to provide the pit of an outdoor fire — their shankbones jutting from their flesh, with crows and doves to perch thereupon and cluck sweet liturgy to the clattering of pots beaten attentively with pans…the sounds and the cooking smell, oy, of a vagrant’s ritually poisoned cat.
