I had packed up my backpack and gussied up my grandparents’ guest bedroom the night before. It was the culmination of a long and farcical evening that started with Kol Nidre services at the neighborhood synagogue where my great-grandfather used to daven. After jetting back to the apartment to change, I went out again to meet up with a few college friends. Over loud music and an abundance of sake and sushi we attempted to catch up - a project of increasing difficulty as my hunger and thirst rose alongside their drunkenness. Upon returning to the apartment, my grandfather offered me a piece of sugar-free caramel, which I chewed until I remembered I was fasting, and then spat out. Somewhere 'round midnight, I caped off erev Yom Kippur 2010 by smoking just enough to enhance the final stages of the packing experience (because who says you can’t be a little stoned to atone).
I woke up at 9am for a ten thirty Peter Pan bus from Port Authority to Amherst MA. It was a logical first move; my cousin was going to be home for the holiday, and she could drive me out to Rochester upon her return to school. I wasn’t sure if I’d packed enough, or too much, or the right stuff, but the weight of the backpack felt about right. I knew I had everything of real import, and anything after that is gravy. So I put on the tan corduroys and dress shirt I had laid out the night before and slipped on my burgundy dress-shoes. I felt absurd wearing so fancy an outfit to start off a cross-country sojourn of such epic proportion. But it was shul-appropriate and I would leave it at my uncle’s house for my mother to eventually schlep home, and thus my backpack would already be lighter after day one.
[A while back, a friend from college had crashed at my grandparents’ apartment before leaving for a year abroad. I awoke to him donned in a too-tight olive business suit and a brown neck tie. As he put on his backpack, I asked him why he wasn’t wearing something more transatlantic-appropriate, like jeans and a hoodie. His response had to do with his belief that the treatment one receives from the TSA is based entirely on attire. As we walked to the train, he chirped “you know what I love about New York City? You’re never the craziest-dressed person on the street.” I glanced around, looking for the inevitable unique lower-east-sider in eyeshot. Seeing nothing, I agreed with him on principal alone. But watching him descend into the train station a minute later, dressing in ridicules business attire with a back-packing backpack swelling six inches above his head and a face besmeared with a shit-eating-world-traveling grin, I thought: “actually Shakes, you take this round.”
A year later, as I strapped on my new Osprey backpack, I looked down at my Italian-leather shoes and button-down shirt, and thought to myself “you schmuck.”]
I said goodbye to my grandparents and headed out. It was a trip I’d taken at least a dozen times before: down 3rd Street, left on 1st Avenue, take the F from 2nd Av to West 4th, transfer to the ACE, get anxious while waiting for the train traffic to clear, hustle through Port Authority, and get to the downstairs gates with just enough time to pull the sweat-rag out of my pocket as my backpack gets tossed under the bus.
The ride was uneventful and more-or-less familiar. It differed slightly from the usual Chinatown rout I take back to Boston, making a few passenger stops in Connecticut as opposed to the singular fast-food pit-stop somewhere off I-84. I called my uncle to tell him I was on schedule, and said I’d give him a ring when I got in.
A “bus stop” and a “bus station” are not one in the same. On the east side of the Amherst Town Commons is a small yellow shelter next to a street-sign that reads “Bus.” I plopped my bag on the sidewalk and fished out my phone.
“Iceman! Where are you?”
“At the bus stop next to the green. I just got in.”
“Great. I’ll leave now. Should be there in around 15 minutes.”
A little while later my uncle’s white car pulled into the parking lot. As we wove our way through the Pioneer Valley, I couldn’t help but notice a pungent and familiar smell. As a man who was planning on crossing many a state boarder in the upcoming weeks, I got nervous, remembering how skunky my backpack had smelled as I lifted it into the car moments prior. But then I thought back to six months earlier, when my uncle and my first-cousin-once-removed (the most awkwardly-worded relationship one can have, heretofore known as “second uncle” or the like) had smoked-up my cousins and I in the garage. The smell was most definitely emanating from the cigarette case I had filled with spliffs the night before, but the moment of panic passed as I realized that my uncle was not the type to give a shit.
[The next day, while driving around Syracuse, my younger cousin asked me if I had weed in the car. I said yes. She told me she could smell it. I got nervous again, for fear of eventual drug-sniffing mammals. But again, the anxiety rapidly subsided.
That was the last time I seriously considered the dangers of being a marijuana enthusiast in America. Until El Paso Texas 5 months later.]
Within fifteen minutes we arrived at my uncle’s house. I was greeted by the shouting brightness of his home’s interior color scheme - an scheme that, while not entirely new, was still novel enough to cause momentary shock. His front door opened into a vast, comprehensive space that combined a kitchen, a dining room, and two living-areas. As of a few months prior, the house had lacked the vibrant and distinguished aesthetic it now enjoyed. Each comprehensive shape of wall-space boasted its own solid color: an aqua-green wall with a midnight blue trim, a deep-red ceiling here, a sand-colored door-frame there. It reminded me of my unfounded impressions of a modern-adobe house in, let’s say New Mexico.
At five o’clock, after a few hours of schmoozing with my cousins and watching Disney movies, we dragged our rumbling stomachs to the J(ewish)C(ommunity of)A(mherst) for the evening’s Ne’ila service. After taking a tallis from the rack by the door, I walked to the front of the sanctuary where my grandfather and other assorted family members were already seated. As the oldest and one of the more vocal members of the congregation, it was no surprise that my sabba was seated in the front row. (When I was six, I asked my mother if her parents were “the Jewish king and queen” upon noting their bedazzled-esque, silver-plated volume of Hebrew scripture.)
My uncle Sam was on the bimah for much of the service, joyfully filling the roll of hazzan. Halfway into his chanting, as the congregation was asked to rise, my cousin Shoshana tapped me on the shoulder.
“Have you seen my shoes?” she whispered.
As I glanced down, I noted the cartoonish rocket-ship tattoo crawling up her naked foot. The floor was strewn with assorted high-holiday supplements and a few tallis-bags, but her kitten-heels were nowhere to be seen.
I shrugged.
She shrugged back.
A minute later I noticed her sister rummaging underneath her seat. But nary a shoe was found.
For a good quarter of an hour, the three of us tried to mask our giggles of perplexity as we tapped aunts and uncles on shoulders and peered under aisles both far and near. Eventually we gave up and turned our attention back to empty stomachs and penitential prayers.
One of the more frustrating parts of the Yom Kippur service inevitably occurs when the rabbi - no matter how hungry he is, how much he has prayed, or how sure he may be that all have been written down for a good year - still cannot end the holiday until the sun has set. Such was our lot at the JCA. The rabbi went from song to song, one eye perpetually circling his watch. As one especially spirited nigun ended, I could feel that the time had come, and I saw the rabbi prepare to make the community announcements that would precede the culminating prayers. But before he could open his mouth, my grandfather’s voice filled the room. The punk started to sing “Akhake Lo,” a song my family was quite familiar with, as it was a staple of any Gladstone b'nai mitzvah celebration. But while few outside the clan knew the song, much of the congregation was acutely aware of my grandfather’s tendency towards chutzpahtic action. I could feel a mass of eyes roll (mine included) as Saul went rogue and briefly held the service hostage. But he was who he was, and at ninety years young nobody was going to stop him. So with nothing else to do, my cousins and I sang along, voices crisp with embarrassment.
At long last, announcements were made, final prayers prayed, and we scooted out of the synagogue, mysteriously finding Shosh’s shoes five rows behind where we had been sitting.
Back at my uncle’s house, family and friends trickled in with bagels or tuna- salad or seltzer, as we eagerly broke our fast. The past 26 hours had been so hectic - my hunger so great, that I managed to go bagel-for-bagel (and then some) with my cousin, whose metabolism is worthy of a Food Network challenge show.
As the eating wore down and the lethargy settled in, the break-fast broke up, and I hitched a ride with my other uncle to his house where I was to spend the night. My room for the evening had been the childhood room of my cousin, but now functioned as a guestroom. It was overly-comfortable for a first night on the road. I flossed my teeth, and put the tan pants, button-downed shirt, and leather shoes (as well as an old prescription of Percocet I had reluctantly packed the night before, but now decided was not worth the schlep) into a plastic bag. I rummaged around the kitchen and found scrap paper and a pencil, scribbled “For Ora, to Newton” on it, and taped it to the bag so that my uncle would know to pass it along to my mother whence next they met.
Feeling full and free of sin, I crawled into bed to settle down with my reading light and the first pages of Compulsion, the book that would carry me through Chicago.
