BLOOD NEVER DRIES
Fred Jay Gordon
Published by Fred Jay Gordon at Smashwords
Copyright 2012 by Fred Jay Gordon
Discover other titles by Fred Jay Gordon at Smashwords:
AN AMERICAN FABLE
BENJAMIN GRABBED HIS GLICKEN AND RAN
Smsahwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for your use only, then please return to smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you.
BLOOD NEVER DRIES
by Fred Jay Gordon
Chapter 1
From a deep, warm cave, Max Star -- born Maximus Stavitsky -- emerged slowly, drifting through clouds, merging with water, then moving beyond as he went gliding up through space toward the distant, beckoning light.
Eyes still closed, he smiled and breathed in because he was an enveloped, magical essence who was continually self-created and who lived timelessly as a unique representative of God’s reverence.
Half down here, half up there, Max had become an angel.
He was gorgeous and flushed and dewy and sated.
Sighing with the pleasure of being sublime, Max kept is eyes closed in this dim, early morning. He stretched his strong fingers. He glided his fingertips along the silky, high thread white sheets on the king size bed in the very expensive double suite with balcony of New York’s World Hotel.
Then he remembered her.
Inching toward the place on the bed where she would be, he projected the penile tip of his forefinger to the back of her shoulder. Shifting his naked thighs, Max sensed his lower body hairs were slightly stiff and he moved his other hand and scratched himself sweetly. He was sticky and warm and imagined a shower.
Slightly dulled, heavy, not really remembering all of it, Max was a thick slab.
Her name was – ? She was Jewish -- ? She was from last night’s Compassionate Rally staff warm-up -- ?
His wife would be sleeping in their bed in their huge apartment on the twenty-first floor overlooking the green park from Central Park West. Aaliyah had been saved from endless phone calls in the middle of the night from his staff and from him to any of a half dozen people about last minute details about tonight's pivotally important --
Stretching his hand further from his well exercised thirty-two year old body to where her shoulder should be, Max pushed his palm down and pressed his hand alongside onto her skin.
Up and around until he found her….
But instantly: Huh?
She was cool.
Debbie! Now he remembered she was a Debbie.
But she was too cool.
Out from his sweet, enveloping glaze, Max opened his eyes.
The bedroom was dart from the thick, blackout draperies hiding double paned, noise reducing windows. Except for an invading slash of summer morning light which glared pale-yellow through the narrow vertical space, inside the city room the air was eerie and still.
Max turned, peered with sticky, black eyes at the woman next to him. Not since they were married had he allowed himself to be trapped into anything like this.
He listened for her breathing patterns but realized he wasn’t familiar with how she – who she – who was this woman? Not like Aaliyah whose grumbles and air whistles he knew so well he could identify how long she had been sleeping and when she might wake up.
But Max heard nothing except muted hints of a New York summer morning behind the innovative bend of the thick-paned glass of the surprisingly large bedroom bay window hidden behind the beige blackouts of this new hotel.
She was cold!
His brain fired terrorized images of distorted faces as chills leaped through his body and into his heart.
Wrestling down his hysteria, Max murmured, then forced himself to croon pleasingly to a glib, “He-e-eey – h-i-iii there -- you awake?”
She did what he feared most: she did nothing.
She didn’t move.
Shivers raced over Max again as he rolled naked off the bed. Bare feet on the soft carpet. Crouched and shuffling, he went to her side the bed.
He stood looking down at her. He touched her face: it was cool. He put his ear to her mouth but felt nothing. His fingers reached for her shoulders and he shook her a little but she seemed heavy, inanimate – dead!
Suddenly iced to his fingertips, everything changed. For so long, ever since he could dream, he had had a future.
He covered his mouth and cried, “Oh – God! – what have I done?” but remembered doing nothing -- or more specifically remembered not doing anything that would have – could have –
Actually, he remembered doing some of what he had done but not doing something that would have resulted in what seemed to be – seemed to have resulted in –
What?
Or maybe – seemed to be -- seemed to have been, well, if not done by him then accomplished by him somehow in some way – ways? -- he couldn’t remember – yet – but –
Who the hell was she?! Is she?
In these first few moments of panic, he felt the nakedness of his body pinging in the cool air-conditioned air of this now terrorizing hotel room.
“Brrr-r-r-ing!” the bell to the suite started ringing!
The world was coming in!
Twisting through air, Max snatched the unfurled but empty strawberry condom (‘Oh, no!’ thought Max) from the carpet under his side of the bed, leaped into the bathroom and threw the thing into the toilet where it floated on top so he flushed and shouted, “One minute!”
It was probably Jackie, over-coffeed, slightly plump, arms full of the latest Jerusalem Post and Jewish Daily Forward and God knows what else, most of which she had already read and was prepared to prep him with the hottest details as they cabbed across town so Max could to do that MORNIN’ AMERICA tv show how again with the big blond who pretended to be cotton candy, insouciance, and summer love. And there were two more shows after that all in preparation for tonight’s big Compassionate Judaism rally at the hotel’s massive Diamond Jubilee Ballroom.
And – but – but what about over there? – what about that whoever-she-was her?!
“Max!” Jackie was shouting softly as she knocked discreetly on the door. “Up and at ‘em, it’s 7:08. Time to shine! Max?”
Grabbing the sheet off the bed, Max draped himself, closed the French double glass doors to the bedroom, ran across the artfully arranged sitting room with ice buckets and faxes and leather bound hotel information booklets, and cracked open the door to the very brightly lit hotel corridor.
“Mornin’, sunshine,” he said, carefully positioning his head in the space so she could see he just woke up and wasn’t dressed.
Was Elohim watching?
“Missions are waiting, Max,” barked Jackie, not surprised he had overslept. He looked tousled and cute and helpless and sweet and puzzled and pinky white. And he had a musty smell. He shoulda brushed his teeth.
Max tried to remember normal. He relaxed his knees. Sheepishly smiling his Time Magazine smile, he aw-shucks silently to her but his chest and the space behind his eyes were dumb-numb. As if television cameras were about to flash red lights and go live for Max to deliver his charismatic message, Max did his cute “I-need-you” mumble to his Numero Uno and made a wink. “Give me ten, Jackie, and I’ll meet you down in the coffee shop.”
“We’re late-late,” she grinned back, her cocoa brown skin beaming in the corridor light.
Wearing pressed GAP blue jeans and a white blouse with a wide lace collar and pale blue buttons, Jackie Baadogo, in her new, blue and white Nike running shoes, Jackie, efficient, keen edged, and passionate, was ready. Readjusting a black shoulder strap carrying her laptop in its padded case filled with computer printouts, she turned from his closing door with a huge, satisfied grin and raced toward the elevator.
Her parents had been air-lifted out of Ethiopia to Israel when she was eight and her name was still Tsabi which she changed to Jackie (“I’m going to live in the United States of America!” she declared with the ferocity of a nine-year-old who knew everything and revered the American star, Jackie Kennedy.)
Smart and focused on education and hard work, the Baadogos refused to be settled in Afula or Qiryat Malakhi like many others from Operation Solomon, lived at first in one room in Tel Aviv, worked hard, studied computers which both her parents believed were the future, and surprised their Israeli neighbors by continually fighting for their tiny but incremental successes. Nights, Jackie’s father went without sleep until he learned enough about computer programming to get a job in a internet start-up. He taught his wife who taught Jackie and her brother. After high school, Jackie served proudly in the Israel Defense Forces, traveled through Germany because it made her uncomfortable, had several boyfriends, rode the highways in Greyhound buses up and down the west coast of the United States with two girl-friends from Stanford, and read and re-read “Gone With the Wind.”
She received a BS from UC Berkeley in World Economics/Agricultural Underdevelopment, got a partial scholarship for an MBA from Stanford, was heavily in debt, and was still looking to really connect with God.
In Los Angeles, Jackie first heard about Max Star where he and his troupe were finishing a whirlwind sweep of the West Coast. Jackie Baadogo didn’t believe all the dictates of Judaism but she did believe in Max and she still passionately believed in the gift and mission of Israel.
“Got you coffee and a flat sesame bagel with an extra-extra cream cheese,” she said, sticking a white paper bag next to his face. “Let me in, go shower, I’ve got some calls to make, we’re only about half sold out, we’ve got to sell-sell-sell today. Max?”
He could smell the coffee, feel it warm from the paper cup, suddenly realized how dry his mouth was, how cold that body on his bed was, how genuinely terrified he was. Suddenly, he hated his penis – but only wistfully. “Jackie, I got – gee willickers – I got gas, Jackie, and it’s kinda embarrassing so meet me downstairs -- okay? Later, Jackie, thanks. And don’t eat my bagel!” He closed the door and leaned back. Hashem must be testing him. Again.
The sheet slipped off his shoulders and fell to the floor as shivers swept him like electric eels slithering over his skin and he stared at the closed French doors wishing he could see through the panes of glass to see if her body were still lying there on the bed.
Did his mantra: Think you up: Project you out: Embrace Him now!
But Max, all naked and jittery jelly, gave over to the wracking fires and fell in a slow motion down to the carpet where he landed in a flesh-heavy puddle.
But -- but, as much as he wanted to, he didn’t black out.
He didn’t disappear the way he used to dream of disappearing when he was just a skinny kid and desperately wanted to be invisible and huge so he could see everything everywhere all at once. Especially when he parents were screaming and raging at each other.
He opened his eyes. He was still on the floor. Iced and terrified. And, picking up his head, then pushing down with his arms, then standing up on his legs and body, walked and pushed open the glass doors.
Peering in, Max saw that the she was still lying on the bed coolly immobile.
Clearly, even in numbness, Max knew he needed an Ariel Sharon to get him out of this ambush. Or, at the very least, needed his much professed God-stream.
Max – only child of an rural born alcoholic mother who accidentally succeeded at suicide at thirty-eight in the Bronx when Max was five and a Southern father who had already died in denial from crystal-methamphetamined AIDS at thirty-three – Max – who gave off an aura of continual, personal cleanliness – who was symmetrically pleasant of face -- six feet tall – athletically muscled with a full head of curly auburn hair – whose deep, black eyes flew out from enormous stillness to embrace you and the world –-- Max slowly rolled up to his knees, precariously stood, became conscious of his heavy, sexual, dangling parts above the beige carpeted floor and, shaken and overwhelmed and disbelieving, Max – alone again – two years older than when his father died – Max forced himself to walk back into the bedroom.
I look to you now, prayed Max with his eyes closed and his mouth open, to come to me now in my time of need because I have sinned again and I need Your merciful love. Please? Please?
Then he thought, God, I need to be mikvahed!
But Jackie didn’t go down to the coffee shop. She was puzzled. Max had been charming, mildly confused off his pulpit of religious passion, almost wormy. Nothing unusual. But he had also been reticent. Which was not a description Jackie or anyone would ever use for Max who was always bursting out of his well-made body, embracing, passionate in a containable, brotherly sort-of-way. Something like: fiery but without sex. Everyone could see the umbilical between Max and Aaliyah in her light blue, straight, one-piece, simple appearing but surprisingly expensive and subtly stitched sheer silky threaded choir-like dress flowing deliciously around her. Arm and arm, together, up on the podium as usual last night after he had called out his chants to them and the assembly had answered, after Max had challenged and they had accepted, after Max had dared them and they had vowed their love of Israel and commitment to Compassionate Judaism and Our Great Way To Joy. Max and Aaliyah: proudly familied, circled into and with each other, engaged publicly and sexually with the majesty of Hashem.
But this Max, thought Jackie, this morning seemed – seemed, well, he actually needed a shower and she didn’t know him like that. His hair was always squeakably clean. His cheeks smooth. His eyes clear. His penis tucked in and safely flaccid behind his zipper and available only to Aaliyah (Jackie couldn’t help that last thought – that image, really – well, actually, that nervy/giddy full flowing animaled feeling that usually left her confused in a warmly physical rushy dumb-sweet EAT ME! sort of way).
Jackie lifted her finger to the buzzer again so she could just check and make sure he was okey-dokey and – and -- but: no. Max was the one since he had been chosen and she was only a disciple. Smart as she hoped she always was, committed deeply to cause and country, thoughtful, wanting to be loving, Jackie knew – and was comforted by the realization – that she was not at his pinnacle. Few were. Max did have some other connection that all who knew him recognized. And clearly transmitted on television. Comfortably disappointed, reminded of her limits, Jackie turned away toward the elevator.
She worked with the most revolutionary religious person in America. Who, after modest living expenses, gave away all his money. Her steps became springy until, standing in front of the elevator, pleased again at her good fortune, Jackie smoothed down the front of her well tailored, dark blue pants and shook her short hair free. She loved being on the trail with him, and the organization, and with her very best self.
The elevator door opened revealing a tall, curiously silent and contained man in his late twenties. Strongly built around his shoulders and chest, with a shockingly thick neck, dressed a in powder blue suite, bald, with a tiny diamond stud in his left earlobe, he liquidly stepped out and instantly moved close to Jackie. Negroid features but pale white skin: the one and only: Stackerlee “Butt-Butt” Bomber.
Jackie’s blood rushed in hot flushes. “Stacky, in the name of God,” she stammered, “what are you doing here?”
He smelled of limes. His teeth were very white. He had a gold tooth that shined whenever he smiled but he smiled infrequently. This time his smile was small, tight, closed, she didn’t see a gleam. Stacky said, “He’s trouble.”
“Who?”
“Your Maxie boy.”
Even though Jackie had been in the airlift from Ethiopia when she was only eight, she remembered it fully and her parents had spoken about it so often that what she didn’t remember, what she heard later, meshed to actual experiences in her mind which meant she always carried the residuals of terror, guns, dislocation, hope and tears inside her heart always ready to burst. Along with enormous relief that she and her family had escaped. Operation Solomon and they were officially designated: black Jews. They had been almost 1200 Falashas from Gondar crammed into the Israeli cargo jet, sitting everywhere -- on the floor, in the aisles, on top of each other -- smelling everyone and crying crazy with fear that at the last moment, they’d be stopped by the rebels, yanked off, and shot. But, oh!, the plane took off. The relief was shocking. All of one mind, they were stunned and amazed, humbly grateful to the world-wide community connecting them as primordial Jews, and free!
Two babies were born during that record setting flight on the packed, Israeli 747.
Nothing quite fazed Jackie after that.
She zapped Stacky: “You’re so jealous, your teeth are green.” She loved hitting and then watching people fight to recover.
Stackerlee came even closer. He stared down into her with his small, deep blue eyes. He was all muscle and halos and his eyebrows were shaved. “Remember,” he whispered. “I’m watchin’. Real close.”
“Then you’ll be arrested for trespassing and thrown in jail which is where you belong. Move away, Stackerlee, God loves you, too, don’t worry about it.”
“It’s different now,” Stacky said, not moving. “After last night. After what he did to my momma.”
“All he said was that Israel is waiting.”
“No one trucks with my momma. Humiliated her.”
“She loved it – told me over and over again at the party afterwards that her heart was happy and her mind was as clear as God’s Heaven.”
“Hear me, Jack-o: I had to take my momma to my place last night. Comin’ back with that picture of him and his wife and puttin’ it on my fireplace where I had to look at it.”
Jackie almost asked, Where do you live? but she kept her face neutral. “I like that picture. Actually, I took it and I gave it to your mother last night – both of them look good. Especially Max. Well, she does, too, actually.”
He glared at her. “My momma cried till her eyes almost fell out and I couldn’t stop her. Wanted to give her whole life all away to your bimbo. Not gonna happen, Jaclyn, tell your boss: ain’t gonna happen.”
“You graduated Rutgers, don’t give me this pseudo jive talk, Stack-o. And, Stack, don’t get stuck in the road because your caravan’s crossing on and you’re about to lose your seat.”
“What’re you sayin’? Nothing! It’s bullshit, Jac-o-lyn, total fabrication with those evangelical sales pitches: I’m tellin’ you and that little fruit-cake: leave her out.”
“So where did you sleep?”
“On the couch – but that’s not the point.”
But it is sweet, she thought.
“Only gonna give you both this one warning so hear me Jack-off: tell Max the pseudo-Star to leave her alone. She’s not giving away family accounts to some fraud-fuck for his version of glory.”
“THAT IS NOT THE WAY HE WORKS! And don’t you talk to me that way,” she said, now furiously glaring back at him. “And don’t you ever talk about Max Star with anything but absolute reverence.”
“He’s a mouse, he’s a scam, you been duped.”
She threw a few droplets of the now-cool coffee toward his face. “I’ll have you arrested for assault and defamation.”
“Nothing’s legal about any of you,” said Stackerlee, as he pulled out a blue handkerchief and wiped his face. “You’re all cream-puffs dreamin’ in the sky. Hear it now, Jackie: leave my mother be!”
She slapped him.
He grabbed her hand and held it away from his face. “Mosquitoes,” he said, and stared deep into her.
She winced. But she had served her two years in the Israeli Defense Force before going to Berkeley and then on to Stanford and now, slowly, Jackie moved closer to him, centered herself, and held his glare.
He came closer to her, his huge face like a blanket.
She almost relaxed.
He kissed her on her lips with his huge open mouth.
She wanted to scream but he was covering her like a volcano.
Gently, he took her shoulders and held her away from him. He was in her face and he was gigantic.
“I’ll be watching tonight,” he said, breathing in her licorice and spice. “Tell my momma you changed your mind. If you don’t, I’ll change yours. Good morning, Jackie.”
Her mouth was still open. She raised her hand and covered it.
He bowed, he growled, he turned around like liquid mercury. As if on ball bearings, he glided erect to the elevator which magically opened and he stepped inside and turned back around to her.
She wondered how big his couch was. Wondered if he changed his sheets and his pillow case for his mother. Wondered if he gave his old mother warmed milk to help her sleep.
He smiled because, of course, only 50% of it had to do with his mother. And just because because and just because she was there and just because she was watching him and he was watching her, he kept smiling at her even though he wasn’t quite aware he was still smiling but he was aware and it wasn’t that he planned to smile at her but, anyhow, he kept smiling.
Jackie couldn’t miss that gleam.
Whoever she was, Max saw she was still there! Lying on the bed all female curves and skin and secret passageways. Max remembered now when she pushed herself over to him last night as he was working his way out of the hall. Hands and fingertips of all sizes and strengths were pressing onto him -- into him -- adulating, dazed, as Max, high on Elohim’s great gift, spent and full and humble and knowingly united with earth, sky, and flesh, Max was as full as man could ever dream.
And the greatest gift: that after tonight’s extraordinary mission of faith and humility, he and Elohim, at heart, were One and Max could believe that he was not only righteous but that he was also a contributor.
In the cool air-conditioned room, silent and dark on the 23rd floor, she was stretched out so very still on the hotel bed, her lips puffy, pale, and her black hair spread over her face in thin strands like octopus-inked, angel-hair spaghetti.
It couldn’t have been him! Max had no moment in his being where he remembered he hurt her. Or even wanted to! She was rapacious, she was cooing, she was open and lava and he rose light-years into exploding universes with her.
He couldn’t remember.
Then he flashed: ‘Why was she – dead?’
He had to get her out. He had to be at the television studio. He had to do something to make her disappear.
He kept looking at her because she was beautiful but shockingly inert, weighted mass but no soul, and from somewhere he hear her saying: You cannot disturb me. I am no longer I. I am other.
Without knowledge , Max pushed himself against the wall, closed his eyes, breathed.
Everything, now, was different. He would be hunted.
Slowly, fighting shock, Max moved across the little suite to the front door, twisted the handle, and pulled. With all eyes watching, he leaned his head out, peered to the left, peered the right. No one there. He kept his naked feet very still and, slipping the plastic Do Not Disturb sign around the outside doorknob, Max held his breath and released the door. It closed. It clicked very loud electrifying Max who froze in the refrigerated room. He leaked into his pajama bottoms and grabbed himself. Heart pounding, sweat icing his face, Max turned and looked through the boxy room and back at the woman who –
Still hadn’t moved!
He should – cover her.
No, move her.
Hide her.
Under the bed!
Max ran. She was still lying there, facing him, horribly silent, and Max slid one hand under her leg, slid the other hand under her shoulder -- his fingers dug into her and she was cool but warm, heavy but flexible, and he curled and was just about to pull her toward him so he could ease her down onto the various florals on the carpet and – but – !
But he saw the frame was solid wood to the floor and nothing could be hidden under the bed!
Max wanted to die but he was awake and Jackie was pushing him onto his schedule with a tv interview in an hour and radio and the big one tonight -- and Jackie would be back in a moment!
Looking down at her in the slightly swirling cool-conditioned air, he saw her and felt her lying so still on top of his hands.
What had he done?
Could it be that he was Elohim’s new Job just as he was on the runway and beginning his ascent?
Would this inexplicable event now be Max Star’s burden to carry in his heart and weigh his soul down – down – down?
Privately or publicly?
Standing directly in front of the elevators off to the side of the black marbled and Dale Chihuly chandeliered New York’s World lobby with its gigantically voluptuous glass globes of lime, blue and white cascading down in spirals from the center of the ceiling, Jackie, tapping her toe inside her soft leather black shoelaced Walkabouts, waited for Max.
Two of the three elevator doors opened simultaneously and a white standard bred Poodle with teased hair stepped out on a long blue leash. Stepping out of the other set of bronze doors, Max, chest up, smiling, was ready to be photographed, thought Jackie watching him with flushingable pride which pounded her eyes and edged tiny pulses into her groin which she denied.
Striding toward her, Max handed her the empty Beano paper cup and slipped her his special grin. “Ready to set!?”
“And up to go!” she responded, automatically and with special familiarity, not quite as intimate as she’d like but intimately knowing in a secret one-on-one, just-between-the-two-of-us sort of way.
Sporting his Italian leather attaché with the long strap over his shoulder, Max fingered Jackie’s elbow and wheeled them toward the lobby entrance.
The pink marble floors were freshly waxed and were shining, the staff was uniformed, smiling, nodding, saying, “Good morning, Mr. Star,” the black limousine was waiting for them as they emerged from the revolving doors, and Max, suppressed panic, was at least hot fire red and ice blue cold.
Jackie gave the daily update and overview as they drove across town to the television studio with the floor to ceiling glass windows in Times Square where throngs would be waiting behind ropes.
Max nodded, grinned, “Uh-huh”-ed. He knew that focus was all. If he couldn’t focus, he’d simply be dead. Like her. Maybe he’d exercise later – when? – sometime – or run. Or push-ups at least. Had to. Had to.
“Aaah!” he cried. “For a moment I forgot that we’ve got this – what’s her name?”
“Sophie Sailor.”
He blinked. “Quite a woman.”
“Yeah. This is really going to be really important for us – really big break, Max, so do your most blessed.”
“I need to watch out for – what again?”
Jackie peered into him. He usually told her. “Cotton candy and cyanide,” she said, quietly, watching him stare out the window at the city. He was very photogenic.
“Right!” All those studio lights would be on him. All those eyes. And that vast unknown electronic audience watching on tvs & on ipods & cellphones -- & -- & -- all that global human connection invisibly out there and huge on multiples of up-to-the-minute devices peering in on him. Getting his message. Messages. Fabulous, he thought, but burst his head and his heart with snakes. Dead. She was dead.
“Max? Hello, you here or where?”
“Got all of it, Jackie, I’m right here.”
“So okay, then, repeat what I just said.”
Staring out at the passing city streets and remembering the time when he traveled the city on his neighbor’s unfashionably fat tubed bicycle, Max was still amazed that he was still amazed by New York. Its continual movements and its solidity, always New York City always being carved into by jackhammers. New York city’s air blowing down, into, and through Max: hot, invisible waves during summers like this one. Icing him with freezing winds eating his eyes in the winter. Sweeping across endless blocks of huge inanimate buildings housing layers stacked up on layers of people separated by floors but united by common walls whose inhabitants were blocked from Max’s view, unseen people who were – hiding under blankets in their beds? – sitting in old chairs? – eating microwaved food? – dancing naked with closed eyes in small rooms?
Staring out at cars and July colors and people as if he were a dream.Always the orphan who was taken in after his mother “passed” by his great-aunt on his mother’s side. Rose Rosenstein (pronounced in a self-tutored “I’m-getting-the-hell-out-of-immigrant-Brooklyn” accent by Rose as “Rosen-steen” and underscored with a stern but knowing smile), Rose was his frenetically happy maiden aunt of fifty-eight who taught high school English in the Bronx, went regularly to the ballet (“baaa-lay”) at the massive rococo City Center Theatre on 56th Street, lived alone in Chelsea with two Siamese cats, and loved Friday night services uptown at Temple Emanuel. Rose Rosenstein’s use of the word “passed” was the first of many mysteries swirling around her because Max, after two months in foster care and taken in by Rose when he was almost six, Max couldn’t figure out where he thought she thought his mother had passed to. And as Max grew in that little space off to the side of the little hall where just his small bed and a table and lamp could fit, Max, always bewildered by his mother’s disappearance (“passed to where?”), lacking a father, having no answers, Max determined that he was going to be special, brilliant, and be able to walk unscathed through walls. He was blessed with a now-famous, almost-photographic memory and had emerged fully muscled from skinny city orphan to Rose’s cherished, lavished, and handsome ward (“Bubbie-boy-boy, you are magnificent!” she’d croon to him when she tucked him in at night). Max, who graduated in the top three in his class at Peter Stuyvesant, an insanely competitive public high school filled with kids from Asian families and Brooklyn Jews from the former Soviet Union who never slept and always studied especially on weekends and were determined to enter the guaranteed futures from Harvard and Columbia and Yale and a select, few others. This same Max who had won a full scholarship to New York University with a part-time data entry job at the library. But under his gleaming surface, he was still little Max haunted by the inexplicable facts that his mother had “passed” and his father had “passed” and he didn’t know who they had been or why they had been or where their souls were now. (Who was that Bubbie-boy Aunt Rose loved so much and believed so much that he was so magnificent?) When Twenty-First Century Magazine had described him last year as one of 50 “bright-young-professionals-on the-rise,” he had explained to the Village Voice just after his first Call and Response Jubilee in Washington Square Park on a summer night, that his continual unknowing and complete ignorance in the methods of living were probably some of the mysteries of self that led him to his calling.
Unquestioned until this morning. Until he woke up to the fact that he had killed another human being. That he was a murderer. That he was even worse than his parents. That he had failed his extraordinary Aunt Rose and would now lose all the dreams he had for himself.
“Max! Are you listening?”
Blinking, Max turned to her and smiled his big and easy affable grin to this estimable Jackie whom he genuinely liked because she was loyal, nervous, very smart and practical, and uprooted in the world like himself. Insinuatingly, he nodded and purred, “Sure I’m listening,” and softly repeated his day’s schedule back to her word for word. In every detail. Showing enormous equanimity and respect toward her.
Then he patted her hand and looked out the window again up into that limiting sky.
Driven like his father. Haunted like his mother. But both more like figments now and maybe more dangerous as memories. Bigger clouds to choke in, thinking: They’re not gonna get me.
“Hey, Max, you patronizing me?”
“Never, Jackie – we’re fine, Jackie – thanks – really thanks for checking – ‘preciate it. Really do.” Because even more powerful than residual parental smoke were the blood’s reverberations from the crash.
Sudden flickering images still seared him from all those years ago.
The unheard sounds from the impact. The inner calm of catastrophe before and after but unknown at the moment of contact.
Twenty-one and Max was young stud hot eyes and constant erections.
Snowy mountains in Pennsylvania driving during NYU’s freshman year’s Christmas vacation with his friend, Henry, in Henry’s friend’s friend’s rusty Volkswagen Bug to go skiing for the weekend. Invited by Kathy Pontoon’s family – Kathy: shiksa goddess of Introduction to Shakespeare and His World, (if this is the world, Max will engorge on it!). Blond pony tail, round breasts under a yellow sweater, white teeth, blue eyes, o o Kathy was instant UP.
Jewish city boys learning to ski and being taught by the Princess of the Slopes! Couldn’t get much closer to Heaven.
But they got lost in the Adirondacks, couldn’t find their way even with Google maps, called her, were re-directed, the snow began flaking down in layers of feathers that blinded. And Henry had never actually driven a VW Bug before despite his explanations and so bug was a stick shift and Henry pretended as if they both at NASCAR. The heater suddenly stopped which added to the boy’s adventure and their toes and fingers shivered as the little two seater on its four, small, balding tires crept up the biggest mountain’s straight snowy road in second gear. Henry shifted to first near the top, they went up, up, flattened out briefly at the summit, then over and then they began going down. Down was way down, steep and ski-slope-straight, and neither Max nor Henry said a word.
The road was iced. The tires rolled forward, slipped, regained control, their little buggy basket was a rolling dot on the side of the mountain.
From the bottom of the mountain road, just beginning its ascent toward the top, was a 15 ton garbage truck, solid and large and confident in the snow. As Henry wrestled to keep control, both of them saw the truck and, as the VW swerved left then right as it lost its traction and began skidding down, Max looked through his windshield toward the truck which was closer and closer, bigger, darker, solid where he and Henry were feathers. Max knew they would crash. He looked over to Henry, now panicked and opened mouthed, and his thin-framed black glasses jittered on his face as the car swerved again.
One more look through the snow covered windshield with the scraping wipers making small see-through fans on the glass and Max saw the truck looming as large as a meteor and, most curiously, Max gave in, quieted every part of his being, eased himself into inaction and, with an almost smile, almost beatific, Max thought, We’re going to crash, and then he passed out. Which probably saved his life.
He woke up in an elevator seven and half hours later. He was on his back with tubes in his body and something around his head and he was very happy because several women were looking down at him.
He said, “Hi,” but he wasn’t sure they heard him. So he reached out to touch the starched blue and white skirt of the smiling young woman who was closest to him, thinking: Did they get me? Am I gotten? and young, battered Max, bleeding, was still grinning when he lost consciousness again.
Henry had lost control of the car which crashed head-on into the truck.
The truck threw the little car off the road where it hit a tree and bounced back onto the road.
Another passing car hit it again back off the road.
At some point, somehow both Max and Henry were thrown out of the car and landed off the road in the snow near the trees. There must have been a lot noise in those heavily snow-falling mountains where metal smacked metal but, for Max, after he passed out, it had all been very quiet. Very still. Almost ordinary.
Because Max was on the moon or, actually, standing next to the moon and looking down onto his blue planet. Floating in space. Very black and sleek and not unfriendly. Neither warm nor cool, just right feeling. He who had been Max laughed. The whole trip had been so ironic because he thought he was going to be such a big star and now he was – well, actually, he wasn’t anything! That was it. He just wasn’t anything anymore! Just a floating filigree. Funny when you think about it and you thought there’d be such big stuff happening.
Over and out. Except for that man in the white robes holding a staff and floating near him. Max thought the old man was Abraham. O maybe Moses. Very friendly whoever he was. Giving him a big grin from a full white beard. Quite impressive. Cheery, even. Both of them there in the wide, deep silence. Very glossy. Slightly cool. Most ironic.
And then, as if there were a silent click, Max and everything he could see were gone.
When he regained consciousness again, he was in a hospital room and Aunt Rose was sitting on his white bed. She was holding his cool fingers with both of her hands. Her friend, Jacob Allonsky, who also taught English at her high school, had driven six hours in the snow to get them to the mountain hospital. The doctors had told them that, amazingly, Max had suffered no broken bones, only a gash in his face running down from his left cheekbone to the corner of his mouth and that one of Henry’s lungs was punctured and a rib broken but, amazingly, nothing more serious than that. The car had been flattened and doctors believed it was surely a miracle both boys were still alive. The police were astonished.
She sat there alone with him in the small hospital room, rubbing his fingers with her warm fingers, leaning forward, shaking, terrified that the person she loved most in the world might be – taken from her, from everyone. Tears rushed but she bit her lips and refused them. Lying there in his wounded body so still in all these white sheets with all those tubes and drips and pulsing electronic monitors checking every unseen pulse of the living. How do you measure life if life is all we know? she thought. By love, say the poets and the philosophers, answering her own question and stunned again that he was living and she loved him and they shared ancestral blood, stunned by her bursting heart and his independent life, willing him to live but knowing helplessly that he was on his own, separate journey. All that New York Jewish stuff she had poured into him. Where was it now? Where did love go? The visits to the Guggenheim and walking down that spiral ramp to the lobby, the Bronx Zoo and immobile white tigers, the small and historically refurbished Jefferson Market Library near Greenwich and Sixth Avenue (“limited collection but evocative aesthetics”) where she took out PBS and BBC documentaries for him about Jack Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Jackson Pollock and Jerome Robbins and the Development of Motion Pictures from the 1890’s – she’d read to him from the New York Review of Books about Philip Roth and Saul Bellow and he’d read to her from Boy’s Life about fish angling and he taught her how to tie sailing knots, she bought him a little Amiga computer when he was 13 and together they tried and succeeded to get On Line with Prodigy, and she got him pretzels – the best crunchy and salty pretzels in New York – Martin’s Handmade which she bought in the Union Square Greenmarket in clear bags each with six pretzels from those handsome young men who –
Giving over to the huge magnet, Rose looked at Max who was drifting in some other world, rubbed his fingers, prayed and then, with utter exhaustion, closed her eyes as tears fell down her cheeks. Please, please, don’t let my Max be taken from me. Not now. I’ll try harder – I will – I promise – please.
She opened her eyes and saw him staring straight up through the ceiling. He was struggling with something in an invisible convulsion that she felt was from his deepest soul and his mouth opened and he turned to her. His bright black eyes burned as he leaned forward. He looked at her and through her. His mouth was dry, his face was white and bandaged, his tubes jangled as he whispered, “Aunt Rose? Aunt Rose? Now can I go?”
She could hear his voice again! Rose whispered, “Go where, Maxie?”
His mouth twisted, relaxed, he beamed to her. Looking into her eyes, he was finally able to find his voice and he cried, almost shouting: “To the Yeshiva!”
Which was very surprising to Rose because he had never mentioned a Yeshiva before. She continued to rub his fingers and blinked. A Yeshiva? For years, with cascading joy, Rose had listened to his stories, heard him puzzling ambiguities until he reached a decision, watched him grow, cheered him on almost from the sidelines, knew there were male things about him that she’d never know, but – a Yeshiva? Finding her voice, Rose said, “What, dear?”
Max watched her crinkled face as it puzzled at him. “Yeshiva, Aunt Rose – it’s my duty,” he said, smiling at her as big as he could as if seeing all of her in some larger context. “And it’s my honored joy.” From deep pools, Max’s eyes welled with tears. He nodded to her, he licked his dry lips. “I love you, Aunt Rose – you’ve been so good to me – I love you.”
And he fainted back in slow motion to the many pillows on the white, cool bed.
Max Star sat in the make-up chair with a napkin tucked into his collar to prevent make-up smear. Listening to the progress of MORNIN’ AMERICA through the tinny speaker above the door, Max was checking himself as if he were all dry and was about to become all wet. As if these countdown moments would change him from integral to ostracized and the soft lapping of his undulates would become the bites and whines of the heathens.
Jackie whispered in his ear. “This is our biggest one today, Max, really. Good luck.”
He held her shoulders softly and entered her eyes. “It’s for all of us,” he said. “’Preciate it.”
White glare. Someone leading him out to the chair next to Sophie Sailor.
Hello.
Good morning.
Sit.
Intro music bouncing and filled with cow bells and:
At 7:16 a.m., a sharp male voice cutting through the chaos: “5 – 4 – 3 – 2 – “
And:
“We’re live!”
“Welcome back to Thursday’s MORNIN’ AMERICA,” said Sophie into the camera, dewily smiling all fresh morning coffee and vanilla-icing dunking doughnut.
Max almost responded, “Thank you,” to her before he realized she wasn’t quite talking to him.
“During this segment,” continued Sophie, “we have the pleasure again of introducing you to Max Star whose Compassionate Judaism Synagogue brings Join Our Great Way To Joy celebration to tonight’s national conference at New York’s World Hotel.” Creamy seamless under the brilliant studio lights, Sophie Sailor didn’t stumble over one word.
Over and out and beaming curls of palpable feminine tongues right at him. Nod of her head to him: bigger smile just for him: “Mornin’ to you, Max Star, and welcome.”
Now fully aware, Max twinkled back at her. “Thanks for inviting me, Sophie, I’m privileged to be here. What a beautiful day this is, right?” he immediately challenged her but with his little boy’s smile over an exercised body.
“Right!” she chorused back, prepared by her staff and acknowledging his usual call-and-response exhortation during his newly attention-getting celebrations.
“Nice to know you know – and, Sophie, I’m humbly grateful.”
“Max, since you were here in New York last December – “
“For our Compassionate Chanukah World celebration – sorry for interrupting, Soph.“
“Right!” she wide-grinned back. “Since then, Max, your Compassionate Judaism campaign has traveled throughout the United States – “ she looked at her notes, “Houston – Los Angeles – Las Vegas -- and Toronto – “
“And Calgary, Soph, with a special one night only Joy-to-You Rodeo at the Cow Palace right in Fort Calgary Historic Park – “
“I saw that footage – you were mesmerific, Max.” But she didn’t do her beam at him. Sophie was born a Presbyterian and no longer went to church except on Christmas Eve. She was genuinely wondering what need he and his campaign were filling and how this indicated changes in the religious values of her audience. “I was very moved,” she said. “In many ways.”
“Wasn’t just me, Sophie, it was my message that did all the work – I’m just one person who happens to believe with all his heart and soul that we’re here for a reason and that reason is: all of us.”
“Let’s get right to one of your more controversial issues, Max.”
“Nothing more controversial than God,” he said. “And nothing less controversial than God. We’re all here. So’s He.”
“Or She,” said Sophie, but it sounded obligatory and she didn’t like her automatic response. “There’s something I need to ask you,” she said, recovering and genuinely interested.
The bright studio air was both hot from the strong lights and cold from the air-conditioning and Max, chilled and sparkling under the world-wide cameras’ eyes, leaned toward Sophie. “My pleasure – real glad to be here with you, Soph.”
“Max,” she purred, with a very active insouciance, “isn’t it true that Judaism does not encourage converts and that members of your own faith believe your actions amount to a publicity stunt to continue the lightening increase in membership of your Compassionate Judaism organization which is only – what? -- three years old?”
“We’re actually over 400 years old, Sophie, and I’m glad you asked me these questions – again – because our tradition of human values is both ageless and universal -- not only for the Jews or for Muslims or for Catholics but to all men and women and children since the very beginning of consciousness.”
Max suddenly turned and looked into the camera. “Good morning to you, good morning on God’s great new day. Your great new day.” He smiled slowly and, curiously, his face appeared less round – less boyish -- longer than just a moment before, and his heart opened and seemed very serious. Then Max turned back to her and said, “Sophie, in your own very sweet and intelligent way, you hope to pin me in apparent contradictions and help me stumble like all good reality television. I am on the spot, Sophie -- but so are you.”
Looking above the camera, Max whispered, “Could you please follow me?” And without waiting for an answer, he stood up from the interview couch.
“Excuse me,” said Sophie, flustered and suddenly rigid. “Max?”
“Just between me and them,” he said, almost smiling to her but enigmatic, troubled, and Max walked a few feet over to the side of the television set and backed himself up against the huge floor to ceiling window panel that looked out onto Times Square. “Could you bring the camera in close on me, please? I have a secret,” he whispered so softly the sound man had to increase the volume level. “Sophie,” he said, turning to her, “I need you and your audience. Please.”
In the control room, the director, Robbie Weiner, a veteran of morning television wars, leaned into the panel of monitors, pulled in deeply on his unlit Camel cigarette, and whispered, “Number Two Camera: follow him.”
As the lens slowly zoomed in onto Max’s pained face, his eyes opened wide, became glassy and wet, and, as if to his best friend, he leaned forward and whispered, “I -- am -- in enormous conflict. I’m afraid. Help me, please. Please?”
Although later that moment in television history was to be called “Maxed Media,” Jackie, in the Green Room, shouted: “Oh, no – Max – no!!” and she ran into the studio and wildly looked around for him.
But Ralph, the floor producer, grabbed Jackie’s arm and held her still. She shouted, “Max!” once more before Ralph covered her mouth with his hand gently, firmly, and said very clearly, “He’s fine, he’s fine -- let him be.”
“Because,” said Max, staring into the camera with the red light, “I am a child of Abraham – as are we all – and – and – “ he said, falling down to his knees as the camera tilted and looked down on him, “ I am – I have – oh – !” he cried softly into his hands, “help me – I am a sinner – I didn’t know – it was an accident!”
Everything in his head froze.
Everyone in the studio froze as if witnessing Babel.
Only the blowing of the air conditioning could be heard and, in between and behind those sounds, was a distant rattling/grinding noise from what might have been some pieces of metal rubbing up against each other from the many hidden fans which were blowing cold air from the round ceiling vents and into the huge, high television space.
“I must be responsible,” Max cried out as his knees touched the floor.
In the control booth, Robbie told the camera man to lower the camera to be on the same level as the now kneeling Max.
Lowering his hands and staring into the camera, Max’s eyes welled up with real, hot tears and he tried not to sob as he sobbed out, “I didn’t know – oh, dear Elohim, I didn’t mean it – I really didn’t! But if this is His path, and I am responsible, I am ready. I am always ready. I am a Jew. Like all of us. Whatever our faith.”
Sophie cried out, “What??”
But Robbie spoke into her earpiece. “Hang in there, Soph – let him go – this is incredible.”
“All of us,” said Max. “We are all of each other’s faith – we are all the children of Abraham.”
Nice save, thought Jackie, pushing away the hands of the floor producer but not moving.
“In Hebrew,” said Max, so tightened up inside, so filled with pleading, so eager to explain himself, it was as if he were unfolding like a new born into the sun and asking to claim himself. “In Hebrew it’s avera – it’s sin. I sinned. I did an avera by accident! I – I – help me! help me!”
Max fell back down to his knees and he truly was wracked and sobbed and covered his face. “Forgive me – forgive me.”
The electric silence in the room opened caverns of disbelief, shock, and billows of awe.
He wanted to disappear. He wanted to be exposed. He wanted to be cleansed. He wanted to understand how he, so determined to be the best, how he now had become the worst.
“Somehow,” he cried, his eyes now wild and yet fully focused as he stared into the camera naked and twisted, his face dark and disbelieving. “I must have denied Him – I must have succumbed to – to -- Shema Yis'ra'eil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad.”
Stunned, Max opened his mouth even wider to proclaim his instantly famous words: “I embrace. I fulfill. And – I – will – pay for my sins according to His command!”
And in the next moment, these words leaped from his Compassionate Judaism website to the connected civilized world in one, bursting, electronic flash.
And then in slow motion, Max, as if unburdened but as yet unjudged, gently leaned his head to his shoulder, and closed his large, black, wet eyes. Unaware of anything except warm black velvet rivers running down over his head and surging into him and lapping trails all through his body. And then there was nothing – as he fainted softly to the floor.
Jackie pushed through the hands that held her and ran. Crouching next to him, she scooped her arms under his head and held him next to her bosom.
“Let him breathe!” someone shouted.
Turning her head, she snapped, “He is breathing, you idiot!” She lowered her face toward his. “Max,” she whispered, “Max – you’re fine – it’s fine – wake up – you can wake up now, Max” and she repeated his name over and over and over.
Robbie moved another camera in for a wider shot of Jackie holding Max as pandemonium rose in the background and someone was crying, “Call the doctor – call the doctor!”
Sophie ran over from her interview chair and was caught in the final, very still shot kneeling behind Jackie and Max with her hand reaching toward Max’s full head of curly auburn hair and looking up into the camera with a pained question on her beautiful face just before the screen went to black and the network, after a moment, went to a commercial.
They carried Max into the Green Room and lay him down on the huge leather couch. Jackie folded the NY Times in half, then folded it again and, taking the proprietary position, she sat down on the couch next to him and gently fanned his face.
After a few moments, Max opened his eyes. They slowly widened revealing two huge black irises set in the middle of two bright white liquid oval canvases as he searched behind his face and back in time.
Then he found it and you could see him remembering. Then he connected with it and you could see his pain return as Max imploded into himself in a realizing, horrified, red/black burst.
“Forgive me,” he said, and fainted away again.
Max’s team back at New York’s World Hotel had been watching on the huge plasma tv set on the wall in the surprisingly friendly and darkish International Traveler’s Lounge which was to the side of the main lobby and had an entrance from the street.
Shiny-headed Stackerlee “Butt-Butt” Bomber was standing in the back watching everything, expecting anything, but even this televised reality show surprised him. Stacky, the oldest of three sons, a multi-racial African/Scotch/German New Jersey boy born on the right side of the street with an academic scholarship from Rutgers which earned him a B.A. in Criminology, hid his roots behind a street-smart persona that fooled even his boss who believed Stacky had come up from the cracked cement of wild Newark. The gold sheath on his tooth was removable. So was the diamond stud in his ear.
Involuntarily moving closer to the screen, Stacky watched as MORNIN’ AMERICA returned flashing a close-up of Max and his smiling, make-up free wife. Sophie Sailor said, “To all of you, please know that Max Star is fine – probably just a minor issue – and if he can – he’ll come back later during the show. Or if not today then soon – but he’s fine. Just fine. And now – live to Charlie Applebee in New Orleans.”
A recorded tour unfurled of yet another renewal of the renewable New Orleans – showing yet again the same tourists’ sections of Bourbon Street – as Stacky, pushing buttons on his cell phone, ducked out of the room and onto the street and, from an alley lined with big new plastic garbage bins, held the warm electronic device up to his ear.
“Feels funny,” said Stacky when his call was answered on the first ring.
“And it’s good for business,” said Randee P. Matterly, a woman in her mid-thirties with a resonantly deep voice which grumbled gentle, strong, and unsurprised. Her longish blond hair curved over half her face which had only little bit of brown eyeliner and the remains of half chewed peachy lipstick. Brushing her clean strands of bleached hair back across her ear, Randee P. Matterly watched her computer screen and deeply chuckle-coughed, “Ooops.”