Everything begins in New York with a job. It is almost criminal not to have one. Aren’t you a striver, aren’t you ambitious? Want to get ahead? (Ahead of what? Why, the pack of course. The others.) Well, get a job then. They throw a “job fair” and on the first morning 12,000 people show up - 12,000 people who have nothing better to do with their lives than stand on line in order to receive a piece of paper telling them to go somewhere else. 

But perhaps you don’t want one, couldn’t care less, regard The Job as a conveyor belt to the grave. I lay down on a conveyor belt once - in a mine in Asturias - the belt was headed straight to the Crusher, where the small rocks were ground into gravel - it was very cool inside the mine, and outdoors it was cruising 100. I liked the idea of tempting mortality, so I lay there as long as I could, contemplating my fate once a worker flipped the on switch - but that’s another story.  It wasn’t until I got to New York that I gave into temptation in any serious way and began to investigate what sort of work might be available for someone like myself. Which is to say, a man without qualifications.
 
 

I was painting an apartment on Ninth Street and would sit on the front stoop when it got too hot indoors. The place belonged to an elderly sculptor and I had to be careful about my enthusiastic approach to throwing the paint on the walls. Sitting on the stoop in the afternoon, a dreadlocked dude would pass by about fifteen times an hour with just one word on his lips. “Opium.” I resisted the temptation all day but when the sun set over Jersey I gave in. I went to a party farther down the street and spent the rest of the night in the bathtub in the kitchen.

Nevertheless, when I woke up in the morning the host was peering down at me, rubbing what was left of the drug between his thumb and his forefinger. I could barely open my eyes. “What a specimen. You, my good man, smoked high-grade incense, and, oh yeah, they threw in a pinch of opium for good measure. Care for some coffee?” My curiosity aroused, I went looking for the real thing. Attempts to find my pal from East Ninth St. were unsuccessful - at least until the afternoon - when I was told that if I wanted the real stuff I had to sell the worse. I asked what the money was like and it was better than painting apartments, so I said I was game. There was much debate among the rastas about the virtue or lack thereof in employing a baldhead, but I won out - the big man thought I might provide a little cover, and in any case, he too was up for a lark. It would be my rap sheet not his. (When he heard I was from Sevilla, the boss said, “Well den you mus’ be some part African,” and everyone else in the crew cut me a little slack.) Nonetheless, it was a failure because although I managed to convince them to give me the best stuff they had (50/50 opium/incense), no one on the street believed I was selling what I said I was. I didn’t look the part - customers were afraid of being ripped off. In any case, pacing up and down Ninth Street and Avenue A was pretty hard on my feet. For the first time in my life, I began to think about a desk job with a certain - how to say it? - lust. I really wanted that chair.

I immediately took a job in a building owned by the Masons on 23rd Street where I did yes, indeed, have a chair waiting for me, on a vast floor filled with hundreds of swiveling chairs crammed into tiny half cubicles, everyone in headphones, repeating the same script into a mike. I was selling Death and Dismemberment insurance over the phone. A cheery call from Sears and Roebuck around suppertime, just to ask you if you had given any thought to what might happen if you were to suddenly perish in a horrific car crash and not have any catastrophic insurance paid for to cover your family in their hour of need. How old are you, sir? Over 40? Do you realize that your chances of being involved in an automobile accident or industrial related disaster dramatically increase during your prime working years? That while many perish from cancer or other wasting diseases, people in the United States die or are tragically disfigured and kept from working in inordinately high numbers from train wrecks, unspecified acts of vengeance, plane crashes, violence (kidnapping, theft, surgery, mechanical malfunction, malnourishment, decay of the affections, hypertension, daily terror), and that this ought to be considered before one sliced the ham on the carving board while casting a loving look at the enfants and teenage snots who depend on you, not to mention your wife, who is probably secretly planning to carve you up, or have her boyfriend do it,  should she get the chance one of these days. Get the hint? You’re doomed. It’s only a matter of time. But we at Sears Roebuck/Amalgamated Tertiary have solved the problem for you. For just pennies a month - and we do mean pennies - we can insure you against such tragic accidents as death or disfigurement whatever the cause, so that should you survive the unanticipated attempt on your life, you will be able to rest comfortably in the knowledge that a monthly check will be sent to you to care for your needs. And should you die, your grateful family will be well cared for. If you are between the ages of 35 and 75 we offer a three-month trial program, which we will simply bill to your Sears credit card at $5.95 per. No physical examination is required - we’ll take you as is, and we’ll throw in a rotary twin-blade hedge clipper at no extra charge. Not interested? Have a nice evening.

I have no idea how long I lasted on that one but I do remember jogging up and down the gilded stairways of the Masonic Lodge, walking in and out of the ornate rooms with their high ceilings, delicate filigree work everywhere on the walls, motto over the door, lengthy biblical quotations urging righteousness on the scrim between wall and ceiling and complex maps of a reconstructed Temple of Solomon and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. All the rooms are empty, empty, empty, not a soul around. None of the other D&D workers have found it. Is it permissible to light a cigarette in King Solomon’s Temple? I jump atop a counter ledge and lean back. Eventually I stretch out, put my head down and close my eyes...

When they open again, I am in a vast field somewhere outside the city, standing beneath a sky heavy with the burden of stars. A truck goes by in the distance. There are no lights anywhere except above, the heavenly garlands like enormous wreaths or bouquets, scattered in front of me - a landscape or labyrinth I must enter. My next step, surely, will take me closer to them. What is the point of walking on the ground when one can rise, freely, up into the stars and go further, getting lost in the milky translucence that emits a silent lure dragging me ever closer to it. A trick of the mind no doubt. The stars are very steady and still - as if holding their breath, waiting to see what I’ll do. Perhaps I have finally come to that magic place where the mysteries are revealed, where I will learn the secrets of wisdom and ecstasy - at last. All my stubbornness and endless peregrinations have paid off - I have found the secret spot. I just have to lift my feet and get closer, I must learn how to rise. I spread my arms as if I expected wings to appear but they don’t. If I jump will that do it?  I am stuck on the ground, with the stars so close. Stuck, stuck, stuck and seeing this revelation isn’t enough. I don’t want to be consoled, I want to get inside the mystery of the world. I must get inside it somehow. I lean farther and farther, hoping that nothing will break my fall....

The constellations on the ceiling are as remote to me as the songbird on the top of the maple tree is to the worm in the dirt or caterpillar in the grass. A million miles. But I can hear them singing, even through the rough flap on the side of my head. They look down at me, complacent in their safe heaven and say, First you must learn our cipher, our music, our code...then you can find a way to us. 

The last embers of the cigarette burn my fingertips and I wake up.
 
 

The Old Jews of the Lower East Side, last grains of sand in the hourglass, wander around, from morning minyan to Streits to the market for a bite to eat and then the morgue and home, to the synagogue for evening prayer and then all over again, every day. They walk in the paths of their forefathers, and yet there is no one to follow after. After them? They cock their eyebrows. As you can see. A disaster. The Jews have left for Long Island, Phoenicia and Palm Beach but the ghosts are still walking around, the place is bustling with them. The famous Bratislava rabbi argues with Gershwin while Mike Gold hangs on their coats and tries to get a word in edgewise. And now? So many strange tongues: Chinese, Dominican, Polish; strangest of all, the lost souls of America, clinging to the enigma of identity: young men and women from the suburbs trying on costumes, looking for their essence in a disguise.
 
 

I too wander these streets as if I had been born here like anyone else. Far from it. It was just a stopover that became...something else. But here I am.

A man walks up to me and asks, are you Jewish? He is burly, with white hair in curly wisps all over his head, dancing eyes. He moves slowly, almost like a crab, sideways. Two other men are walking with him.

Are you Jewish? He repeats. We need a tenth. The old man looked at me with kindly eyes.

Maybe, I said.

What do you mean? The man asked.

My mother. And I tell him the story of how my mother discovered during her pregnancy that her family, one of Sevilla’s oldest, was originally Jewish, conversos who became Christians in order to save their skins during the Inquisition. Her final act before she gave birth to me and my brother was to convert back. When the family protested, she said she was too busy with children to change back again. Hence the family legend of my “mad mother.” She fled Sevilla two years after she gave birth. Some say she was chased. 

A Jew. They conferred among themselves.

Are you sure he’s not an Arab? One of the others said as a joke - but with looks like mine it could go either way.

I said I would come along with them, if they didn’t mind, and if they were short a tenth perhaps I would do. They seemed amenable. 
 
 

Pinched between apartment buildings, the front of the old synagogue throws up an imposing black iron fence, giving it a forlorn and somewhat abandoned air. The rabbi fumbled with the oversize lock, and then we all go in. The four of us quickly disappear down the rickety stairwell to the basement. 
 
 

There are books everywhere, in piles on tables along the wall, on the seats on the prayer pews, in the corner in back, all around the altar, old brown books, the gold leaf lettering fading away so that you can’t tell one from another. But who can get rid of books? Perhaps some shard of wisdom is trapped in there, between the lines, perhaps it simply lies in the book’s existence. One man is davening in a chair away from the gathering. Neither books nor bodies exist for him. 

More people came in and everyone gets busy with tea and crackers, fish sandwiches. They forget about me....The congregants are mainly old people, relics, the last of the Lower East Side’s glory days. The ancient Rabbi himself worked in the diamond district when the flock thinned out in the 40s, the people too poor or there was a war on. But then younger people start to arrive, Glasnost refugees and a few rebels, misfits and dropouts whose rebellion brought them on their knees to the front of the synagogue. 

By my count they are still one short. More than anything else I fear that my ignorance will be exposed. It is not simply that I cannot read Hebrew - though I can mumble with the best of them - but that I know nothing at all of the order of the service, the order of anything. Still I don’t move. Why should I? I am comfortable and may learn something. No one pays any attention to me.

And then, as if in answer to my prayer, a young guy comes crashing down the stairs on roller blades. As if this isn’t enough, he does a quick circle around the rabbi and comes to a stop facing me. He has a monkey on his head, a monkey with a diaper whom he clutches by the tail - but in the moment that he turns to greet the rabbi the monkey springs free and lands on the table set out with food. I wanted to rub my eyes but there it was: leaping from the man’s shoulder onto the table, the monkey executes a spectacular series of somersaults, pirouettes, evades several pursuers, heads towards the tea urn, flips the switch and begins to busy himself with tea bags, happily shredding them in his paws and flinging the tea around the room. One of the old fellows tries to grab him but the monkey bares his teeth, hisses. The old geezer totters off. The guy on rollerblades sneaks up behind and grabs the animal by the tail. The minyan, plus monkey, is complete.

Later, the caretaker shows me around upstairs. We climb up to the narrow nave of the synagogue - on Fridays and Saturdays it was filled with men. The women sat above in the loft, so as not to distract their husbands. The whole space seems narrow and pinched - I get claustrophobic standing in front of the altar, its bright, naked bulbs burning into my eyes. I’m a little dizzy. There’s something the matter I say to the man, what is it?

So don’t stare at the menorah so much, he says. 

The synagogue - was it always like this? 

What do you mean?

It’s too narrow, it seems as if the walls had been drawn in. 

It was a larger place. About five years ago we were running out of money so the rabbi got permission to sell the two wings where the school was - he flapped his arms like a bird - for apartment buildings. It was a terrible thing, but there weren't any students.

And how are things now?

The same. We may have to sell more, if we could just figure out what part. You don’t know any rich people do you?
 
 

So the synagogue was shrinking, parceling off parts of itself and growing smaller and smaller until it would be too small for anyone to fit inside: first the two wings, and then rooms and finally entire floors, until the believers had only part of the basement in which to meet, with the sound of a wild party going on upstairs and down below the members of the congregation slowly whispering the ancient texts to each other and looking upwards. I saw it but I threw it away; I looked into the puzzled face of the caretaker, and thought better of saying anything.
 
 
 

When I got back downstairs there seemed to be some sort of crisis. People were shouting - they quieted down when I appeared in the doorway. The rabbi, a middle-aged Russian woman - who didn’t take her eyes off me - and a few older members of the congregation were standing in a small circle. Despite the lock on the fence, the shul was being broken into regularly, by hooligans who ran around, made a mess and then ran out - young kids. Who knew how they were getting in?

Buy a new lock. Maybe they have the key. How could they have the key? Are you crazy? Well, get a better lock. Are they sneaking in through the back? This seemed to be a possibility. Is the back locked? Of course it is. Well, then...

Finally it was decided that the shul needed a night watchman, someone to keep his eye on the place a few nights a week.

No one from the congregation could do it - they all had jobs, the worst kind, low level teaching jobs or secretarial, the type of thing where you had to show up at 8 a.m. every day or suffer abuse. They batted around the idea but had no candidates. Go and ask people you know, the rabbi said. Maybe we can find someone. The issue was adjourned.

Everyone was reaching for their coats when I stood up. I’ll do it, I said. Pay me whatever you like. You don’t mind if I sleep a little do you?
 
 

Another crisis.

Well, are you a light sleeper or a heavy? We’re not paying you to get a good night’s rest.

I assured the old man that even the lightest noise, a mouse scampering across the floor, woke me up. 

At last the debate was finished. The rabbi ruled that it was not improper for a non- or merely plausible Jew to guard the synagogue. I was set.

I came in at ten or midnight on weeknights and left in the morning when I woke up. I would go straight to the kitchen, fix myself a meal and then lay down on the landing upstairs, where I could hear anything strange above me or below. The building was warm, if a touch gloomy. When it rained the water came in through the roof so several times a night I would get up and put out buckets, or empty them. Other than that, it was quiet. I read as much of the night as I could, by the light of a single bulb. When that got to be too much, I would walk around the synagogue and sit in different places.

I began to dabble in Judaica, picking up stray volumes scattered around the building and learning the alphabet. (Someone had left a grammar book open downstairs by the bread tin.) I wondered what was in the closets upstairs and down, how the rabbis dressed differently from service to service. I was restless and began pacing the stairs night after night wondering what was to become of me, night watchman in a faraway city, guardian of a house of worship which didn’t count me among its believers. 
 
 

I brought a girl into the synagogue one night and we made love on my bedroll on the stairs. She wanted to investigate further in the building but I was full of trepidation and afraid to do something I would regret. I cannot tell you what stopped me. These people had not harmed me, they had given me their house. Still I felt no guilt about the episode on the landing, thinking it must have been done many times before. In any case, loneliness is a fierce creator of one thing only: more of itself.

I began to enter the synagogue proper more frequently, at first sitting in the pews and slowly reciting the alphabet in the primer and then reading the very simplest phrases out loud.

(Q_desh haqq_dash_m - Sanctum sanctorum, holiest of holies - All pronounced in my Spanish accent.)

Late on a Friday night I stood before the empty shul with my back to the altar. I imagined I was addressing the raggedy group I saw each night in the basement plus the other strays I encountered out on the street, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. I waxed eloquent, discoursing on the need for justice and fairness in the world, describing our sense of separation, of apartness, as being the true poison of the apple. As I got going - imagining I was addressing the world but in fact only entertaining myself - I grew lit up and fiery in my solitude but more like one of those American hellfire preachers one sees late at night on television than any rabbi. How would I know? My country pitched the Jews and Arabs into the sea half a millennia ago.

I began to wonder if I couldn’t recover a bit of what was lost, and if so, how would I do it. After all, Andalucia walks around staring at the vast mirror of its neighbors and strangers, all of whom look vaguely Arab or Jewish. Our roots are not far from our wings. 

And so I went to the closet on the floor below and put on the tzitzit and the black brocade robe, the scarf belt and a fancy velvet hat I found in a box on the upper shelf. I stood in front of the altar intoning in the sweetest and most resonant voice I could summon sentences which were beyond my comprehension. I read them aloud without caring whether anyone on the other side of the wall heard me or not. 

And I began to wonder who I was exactly. A pious person trying desperately to recover some sense of the sacred or merely a disbeliever trying on costumes? I mocked no one. I stood before my imaginary audience, intoning wisdom, hoping some of it would rub off - on me. Jerusalem is very far away and history is a fiction written by mad and vengeful monks. 

But who was I, a descendant of Ahesuerus who ruled over the exiled Israelites?  Christian or dread Canaanite using guile to enter a synagogue, with what intent? Or David, whose lyre echoes still, he of a thousand consorts, many of them unbelievers? Absalom or Adonijah, scorned sons? Or Lucky Perez, born out of wedlock, child of Hittites and Jews? None of them perhaps.

My blood runneth - I addressed my imaginary parishioners - divided in currents, coursing in every stream and through the valleys of the world. Spain is a fiction, a patchwork held together in order to keep the King and all his gendarmes from having a collective nervous breakdown. Would bread taste the same the day after? Would the car start? Ah Andalucia, blown to the winds, its remains packaged in tiny boxes that fit inside carry-on bags!

One arm raised over my head, singing, I came to a sudden stop. There was a sound - from the basement. At first it was nothing and then I thought I heard laughter. I stopped again and listened - nothing - and began to read again. Then I heard more and was sure.

I crept down the rickety stairs as quietly as I could. I paused before I came into the kitchen and slowly stuck my head around the doorway. 

There in the pews meant for davening and by the altar were five young boys leaping and pushing each other around, throwing punches and ducking, jumping over the railing. A tall, skinny kid grabbed a book and began to read it, producing something between bad Spanish and a strange new tongue before one of the other kids grabbed the book out of his hand and threw it across the room. 
That was enough. I jumped down the last two steps and landed with a thud, my hands on my hips. 

Aha! I yelled. 

They were frozen right where they were, eyes as big as saucers, mouths falling open. Who stood before them?

How did you get in? I demanded in Spanish.

They said nothing, staring transfixedly at their shoes. I forgot for a second that I was in full regalia.

Well? Bueno, niños, no les voy a matar. (Come on, boys, I’m not going to kill you.) But I might call the police.

They became more talkative, and eventually showed me a small window, six inches high, in back behind the boiler. They pushed it open and squeezed in. It was a pretty piece of work.

I gave them a stern lecture about what they had done and then sat them down in the kitchen. Are you hungry? I asked. A dumb question. I made sandwiches for them and let them load up on crackers, and they began to trust me a little and started to ask questions, all the typical ones. What was a Jew? Who were they? Where did they come from? Why were they so different? Could they wear some of the clothes that I had on? I said I would explain if they would promise not to sneak in again. No point in going the guilt route.

It was past five now. First light. These boys must have crept out of their tenements before their parents were awake. What was I going to do with them? I was afraid to let them out the front door, and couldn’t very well push them out the back. So I sat them down in pairs and let them look at the books and rest. They became docile. I pulled up a chair in front of the altar and sat down so that I could keep an eye on them. The ones who were awake I gave yarmulkes to, and taught them a few letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The rabbi would arrive within the hour. I should have shown them the door but by then I was too tired to think straight myself.

I only woke up when I heard his footsteps on the stairs.