Communion

I wake up with the shakes on the cold cardboard bed. The sky is a continuous grey yawn. Everything feels grey. There is a light snow, such that you could walk between the snowflakes if you were clever enough. I’m not feeling clever and I let a snowflake kiss my cheek, then deliquesce–Its union with my beard causing it to lose its composure.

Life’s been rough for awhile. I spend my days on the hunt for hooch, and my nights are spent in the sauce, thinking about all the ways I done wrong; fantasizing about going back in time to make things right. Maybe if I loved her better then…

The shakes are going to get bad soon.

I get my bearings. I’m on 8th, outside the Episcopal church. I think it’s Sunday. Perfect. That means there will be a bunch of benevolent Liberals with their pockets full to tithe… 

That gives me an idea.

I take the Sharpie from my pocket and write on my bed, “TITHE TO ME I need it more than the church does.” I tear off the piece of cardboard, which is my drink ticket. Next I need to find a discarded cup. I see one rolling in the wind, about half a block up.

A man walks past and yells, “Get a job, you bum!”

I say, “Thanks, I hadn’t thought of that. Do you have any more sage wisdom for me?”

He doesn’t seem to understand what I’m saying because he just looks confused. “Fuck you!” And he walks away.

It’s weird living in a way that people just fucking hate you for continuing to live. I kind of understand it because I hate myself for continuing to live. But it’s just wild how skyrocketing rents and depressed wages and severe mental illness are my fault. They hate me because I remind them of what could happen to them with one or two bad turns. 

There but for the grace of…

I walk down to the cup, blowing in the grey wind. I pick it up. It’s a relatively clean cup. There’s only a couple drops of dried coke on the inside. It’s a Burger King cup, and it is my passport to the kingdom of drunkenness. 

The shakes are getting more severe. I find a snipe on the sidewalk and light it up to try and calm the terror welling up in me. It’s an old cigarette that’s maybe been there for weeks. I can taste the old of it. It’s disgusting, but it hampers the need.

I go to the door of the church with my sign and my cup, as the good Christians file past.

“Spare some change?” I say. “Spare some change?” I say again. A few people give me all of their change. It amounts to about 85 cents. Not enough for a beer. “Spare some change?” 

Most of them ignore me. A few make a show of patting their pockets before telling me they don’t have any cash. A few frown at my sign, but my sign is true. 

This church’s property was probably purchased in 1885 or some such time that they paid like $25 bucks for the land and they haven’t had to pay taxes on it since. It’s all gravy for them in there. I bet the pastor or priest or whatever lives in a mansion in Hyde Park. Meanwhile I just need three dollars for a drink so I don’t die of the DT’s. 

The pastor is a beggar too. Honestly, everyone is a beggar when you think about it.

The foot traffic slows to a trickle and it occurs to me that they have wine at Communion. I go inside and there’s an elderly greeter at the door like this is a Walmart or something. He hands me a slip of paper. I don’t look at it. He looks scared of me. I must look scary to old men. 

He says, “Peace be with you.”

As a reflex from my childhood I reply, “And also with you.”

I walk into the cathedral and the ceiling stretches up like it’s trying to prove something. There are all the churchy things here: stained glass windows, intricate carvings on all the columns, a throng of parishioners. I think that’s what they’re called. The audience, if you will.

I find a seat near the back. I sit far away from any of these nice people because I don’t want to spread my smell. I’m shaking like an Indonesian Richter scale now. It’s really bad and I see people look at me and whisper to each other.

I sit through the service for like an hour. It’s so boring, I drift off and think about when I was a kid going to church. I hated it. Dressing in my Sunday best. The button up shirt that would choke me with a little tie. The preacher being all fire and brimstone. He’d say that God was punishing me for my wickedness, and maybe he’d be right.

Finally it comes time for Communion and I’m a sweaty rattle of bones. I rush to the front, but as calmly as I can. I need that sweet blood of Christ in my bloodstream. An infusion to keep me going. I make my way through the line, trying to keep my cool, but people are looking at me like something stuck to the sole of their shoe.

Finally, it’s my turn and I greet the priest humbly. He’s in his 50s; A greying stoic structure of a man. He has the wine in a great golden chalice that probably cost a downpayment on a car. 

He pours the wine in my mouth and I grab the chalice and chug all the wine I can in front of everyone. He fights me, trying to get the chalice back. He pulls back hard and wine gets all over his robe. 

People gasp and mutter. “Filthy animal,” I heard one person say. I just confirmed for them everything they think about me.

Something strange happens to my stomach. It’s like the wine is turning itself inside out. My mouth tastes like copper. I don’t know how I know this, but the wine is actually transubstantiating into blood in my gut. 

I look up at the stained glass window depicting Jesus. I fall to my knees as the clouds part and sun shines through his face. Tears stream down my cheeks as large men drag me out of the church.

Next Year In Jerusalem

Mom wants us to move to Israel. She made the decision after the second time someone scrawled “kike” on my locker with a Sharpie. I didn’t mean to make a big thing out of it. I got a paper towel from the bathroom and soaked it in warm water and soap. I tried my best to scrub the word off the blue steel while a few other kids watched me in silence, but the ink just wouldn’t budge. A Russian janitor passed by pushing a mop and a bucket, and I asked him for some help. That turned out to be a mistake. 

The janitor managed to remove the slur with some rubbing alcohol and elbow grease. But he must’ve told someone in the administration, because an hour later I was called into the principal’s office over the PA. I was happy to leave math in the middle of a quiz, but my good spirits died the moment I saw the school counselor and Mom were there waiting for me. Mom was hunched in a fold-out chair and was red in the face as she tried not to cry.

The school counselor tried talking to me about how I was feeling. I insisted that I was fine and that this sort of thing was part of being a Jew in a small town, but she was hearing none of it. She told me about how unsafe and traumatized I must feel. Some of what she said was true, but she didn’t have any business knowing that. 

At some point I let it slip that it was the second time that had happened. That turned out to be the biggest mistake I’d made yet. The school counselor brought a manicured hand to her lips and Mom started balling. The principal quietly suggested that I should go home early. At least I didn’t mind that. The whole thing didn’t come up again until a few days later, at Shabbat dinner.

Mom took a deep sip of wine and stared into the flame flickering on the melting candle she had said a prayer over minutes earlier. “I think we should move to Israel,” she said. Dad almost choked on the forkful of steak he’d been chewing. Dad coughed and pounded his chest with a fist until the cow flesh was successfully swallowed and death was averted. He got up to pour himself a glass of water, drained it, then came back.

“Israel?” Dad asked as he sat down. 

“Israel,” Mom confirmed. 

“But both our jobs are here,” said Dad. “Our families are here. The kids’ friends are here. Our lives our here.”

“I want to live in a Jewish community, in a Jewish state,” said Mom. “I don’t want to live in a town where folk write hate speech on our son’s lockers any longer. I’m tired of always being an outsider.”

Dad glanced at me and my sister. We’d both stopped eating and were watching the conversation unfold between our parents in rapt silence. I’d left a chunk of skewered steak abandoned on the tines of my fork.

“Perhaps we should talk more about this later,” said Dad. “When we’re alone.”

Mom shot Dad a look that could have made Godzilla stop dead in the middle of destroying Tokyo, but she didn’t say anything else. We spoke no more about it that evening, although it was clearly on everyone’s mind. 

I didn’t mind the thought of leaving Rhinebeck. There isn’t much to do here but go to farmer’s markets and high school football games, and neither of those are of any interest to me. New York City is about a two hour and half hours’ drive south, which is the exact worst distance it could be. It’s close enough to be tantalizing, but far enough that we never go. But I didn’t really know much about Israel yet.

I knew Israel was a country in The Middle East. I knew that its political situation was complicated, although no one had ever taken the time to really explain it to me. I also knew that my whole life, older Jews had been telling me that Israel was my homeland. I never really understood that. I’m American.

For as long as I could remember, the final words of every Passover seder were, “Next year in Jerusalem”. I felt relieved when those words finally came, because it meant that I could leave the table and rituals behind to play Xbox alone in my room. But I never understood why my parents said them. There was nothing stopping us from hopping on a plane the next time Passover came around and having our seder in Jerusalem, but we never did. My parents knew we wouldn’t, even as they said those words, but they said them anyway. I guess that’s religion for you. I wondered if this past Passover was the first time those words might not have been a lie after all. 

“My mom wants us to move to Israel,” I told a friend of mine the next day. We were biking over to another friend’s house the next day to play Dungeons & Dragons, like we did every Saturday. There weren’t any cars on the road and we biked at a lackadaisical speed that made conversation easy. He’s the only other Jewish kid I’m friends with, so he’s the only person I really felt comfortable mentioning it to. If anyone would get it, it’s him.

“Is it because of what they wrote on your locker?” my other Jewish friend asked. I told him that it was. I’d tried to keep the whole thing quiet, but people found out anyway. The fact that the slur was visible to anyone walking down the hallway probably hadn’t helped.

“That’s pretty heavy, man,” said my Jewish friend. “You know if you move to Israel, you’ll have to join the army when you turn eighteen? Your sister too.”

I told him that I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that at all. Did Mom really want my sister and I to have to fight in a war? I didn’t like having to scrub hate speech off my locker, but it sure beat digging a bullet out of my lungs. 

We reached our other friend’s house and rested our bikes against the garage. We knocked and his mom let us in. Knowing exactly where to go, we went straight down the stairs and into the subterranean lair that our friend had made his own. Most people would call it a basement, but that doesn’t feel like the right word.

The lair is filled with LED lights of every color. Every inch of the walls are covered with posters of heavy metal bands and horror movies and colorful illustrations of large breasted women wielding broadswords. It’s to the point where there’s not even a visible spec of the gray cement walls beneath. An old doom metal LP spun on a turntable hooked up to an impressive sound system, because our friend considers himself too cool for Spotify.

Our friend was waiting for us in his lair with the game all set up on a foldout card table. He’s the dungeon master, and he’d been preparing for this all week. Our fourth friend had beat us there, and she sat on a beanbag chair beside the dungeon master. She’s the only girl who’ll talk to us. The dungeon master is openly in love with her and I’m secretly in love with her. We’re both pretty sure she doesn’t know about either affection. 

“Good, we’re all here,” said the dungeon master. The dungeon master handed out our character sheets while my Jewish friend slipped his backpack off his shoulders. My Jewish friend pulled out a small clear baggie and some corresponding apparatuses. He pulled some nuggets of a controlled plant substance out of the baggie. He grinded the nuggets into a thin powder and loaded them into a glass bowl while we chatted. The dungeon master and I both spoke over each other trying to engage the only girl who’d talk to us. This resulted in her not speaking much to either of us. We began the game once the bowl was packed. 

That week we led the invasion of an orc fortress. We passed around the bowl and the bag of dice. Everyone except me had a good time. I played well and strategically, and my barbaric alter ego ended many an orc’s life with swings of his axe.

But every time the dungeon master described a cloud of black arrows flying toward us, all I could imagine was dodging gunfire in the desert. Everytime I rolled a high number and the dungeon master informed me that I had successfully killed another foe, all I could imagine was the life leaving its bulbous, imaginary orc face. I couldn’t help but wonder if that orc really deserved to die. After all, we were the ones invading. 

What had the orcs done wrong besides being born big and green with sharp teeth and tufts of hair in the wrong places? The Monster Manual describes them as chaotic evil, but that seems like quite a generalization. And anyway, I didn’t know if the Monster Manual was a source that could really be trusted. For all I know, whoever wrote the Monster Manual could be harboring some terrible prejudices against orc kind.

By the time the game was over, we had conquered the orc fortress and smoked everything my Jewish friend had brought. We hung out for a bit longer, just talking and watching TV. Eventually, the only girl who’d talk to us’s mom came to pick her up in time for dinner. My Jewish friend and I got on our bikes to head home soon after. We biked in the same direction for a while. My brain felt like it was encased in jelly, and I had trouble keeping my bike moving in a straight line. 

“You alright?” asked my Jewish friend.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. “I’m just kinda high. Also, I really don’t want to have to join the Israeli army.”

“Then don’t move to Israel,” advised my Jewish friend.

I got home just as Mom was finishing cooking as my sister wrapped up setting the table for dinner. I could hear the Yankees game echoing from the connected living room. I didn’t have to enter to know Dad would be slouching on the couch watching it. There’s never any expectation for either him nor I to help with dinner. It’s not in my best interest to question such things.

“You’re home,” said Mom as I burst through the front door. “I wasn’t sure if you’d make it.” 

“Mom, I don’t want to move to Israel,” I said. 

Mom looked up from the vegetables she was arranging into a salad bowl and narrowed her eyes at me. Her hands kept working even as her gaze settled on me, transferring lettuce and cherry tomatoes from their plastic packaging into a big ceramic bowl. My sister watched us with eyes that had grown big beneath her glasses while her mouth was as silent as ever. She’s never been big on talking.

“You don’t know what you want,” said Mom. 

“I know I don’t want to join the army during a war,” I said. “That seems dangerous.”

“You won’t have to join until you turn eighteen,” said Mom. “Maybe the war will be over by then.”

I didn’t know a lot about the conflict in Israel. I didn’t know whether it had the potential to wrap up in the next few years. But what I did know gave me the impression that was unlikely. 

“Do you really want to bet my life on that?” I asked. Mom started crying. She didn’t move the salad bowl, and her tears smothered the lettuce like ranch dressing. I heard the baseball game click off and Dad walked into the kitchen.

“What did you do?” he scolded. “You’ve made your mother cry.” 

My sister was in the room too, but there was no question which one of us he was speaking to. Dad didn’t have to see what had happened to know whose fault it was.

“I just told her that I don’t want to move to Israel,” I said.

“You didn’t just tell me that,” said Mom. 

Dinner was tense and mostly silent. Dad was the only one who hadn’t seen Mom cry into the salad. He took a big bit of lettuce and made a face when he tasted the tears. He swallowed the portion that had already made its way into his mouth as quickly as he could. He then discreetly lowered his salad fork and didn’t raise it for the rest of the meal. I excused myself after I finished my chicken, as I usually did. My sister waited for my parents to excuse her as well, as she usually did.

Mom came into my room a couple of hours later without knocking. She never knocked. I didn’t bother pausing my Xbox as she entered. I just kept wandering around a peaceful meadow. The game I was playing had monsters lurking around every crevice, but I didn’t really feel like facing them at that moment. That felt a little too real, so I just kept frolicking in a virtual meadow.

“We should talk,” said Mom. She walked over to my desk, pulled out the chair and sat. I just kept running around in the virtual meadow. I even caught a butterfly.

“I know you’re nervous about moving. Picking up and going halfway across the world must be scary to a kid,” she said. “But I need you to trust that as your mother, I really know what’s best for you and your sister.”

“But if we go, I’ll have to fight in the war,” I said.

“Military service is something that every Jewish boy and girl in Israel goes through when they grow up,” said Mom. “You’ll be defending our Jewish homeland, the land that God promised us.”

“I don’t believe in God,” I said. 

“You say that because you’re fifteen,” said Mom. “You’ll believe in God again when you get older.”

I thought that seemed unlikely. But there wasn’t much to do other than wait until I got older and see who was right. 

“Well, at least as of right now, I definitely don’t believe in God. I don’t know anything about Israel, and it doesn’t feel like my homeland,” I said. “America feels like my homeland. But I wouldn’t even fight a war to defend America, so I definitely don’t see why you want to sign me up to fight for Israel.”

“You’re focusing too much on the military service part,” said Mom. “There’s so much more to Israel than that. We’ll be returning to the land of our ancestors. For the first time in your life, you’ll be in a primarily Jewish community. You finally won’t be on the outside looking in.”

“I think I’ll be on the outside looking in wherever I go,” I said honestly. “And I’m ok with that.”

“Well, I’m your mother. Believe it or not, I know more than you do.”

“What does Dad think about moving to Israel?” I asked.

“I’m still working on your father,” said Mom. “But he’ll come around. In his heart, he must know what’s best for all of us.”

Mom got up and left my room. There wasn’t any room for further discussion. I played video games until I fell asleep, carefully avoiding any battles or conflicts that couldn’t be solved with the right dialogue options. 

That was weeks ago. The weekly D&D sessions with my friends give me panic attacks that I try my best to hide whenever it’s my turn to reach for the dice bag. I don’t play violent video games anymore because I can’t enjoy them. My dreams are filled with bullets and explosions and my own blood spilling over hot sand. But there’s nothing I can do, because Mom wants us to move to Israel.