The Sea Beach Line Read online

  Also by Ben Nadler

  Punk in NYC’s Lower East Side 1981–1991

  (nonfiction monograph, Microcosm Publishing, 2014)

  Harvitz, As To War

  (novel, Iron Diesel Press, 2011)

  Copyright © 2015 by Ben Nadler

  First edition

  Part of Chapter 2 was originally published as a short story, under the title “Krabov,” in the digital literary magazine Mandala Journal, a publication of the Institute for African American Studies, University of Georgia, in 2012.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents, either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Fig Tree Books LLC, Bedford, New York

  www.FigTreeBooks.net

  Jacket design by Strick&Williams

  Interior design by Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available Upon Request

  ISBN number 978-1-941493-09-0

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  In memory of Newt Johnson.

  Contents

  Book 1: The Yeshiva Bocher

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Book 2: Knickerbocker Avenue

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Book 3: The Binding of Isaac

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Acknowledgements

  BOOK 1

  The Yeshiva Bocher

  1

  IT CAME TO PASS that four sages entered Pardes, encountering the divine. Ben Azzai died. Ben Zoma went insane. Akiva emerged with perfect faith. Elisha ben Abuyah “tore out the roots” of the orchard, and emerged with perfect doubt. From that point forward, Elisha’s name was blotted out; the rabbis referred to him only as Aher, “the other.”

  The story, just a few lines long, appears in both the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds, but I read it in a photocopied packet of Aggadot and post-rabbinic tales in a Jewish literature class in college. I had taken acid the night before, and when I came to class that morning I was in the posttrip void where colors and logic don’t work quite the right way, and you can’t sleep no matter how tired you are. I ran my fingers over the lines of the story. The Xerox toner felt thick on the paper.

  The story opened up something inside of me. Piety didn’t really interest me, but I was fascinated by the path shared by these four sages. They had entered the heavenly garden of Pardes, achieving the highest of mystical experiences. Most intriguing was Aher, who found his own individual truth, which led him away from the bonds of his society.

  I had been taking hallucinogens regularly and recreationally for five years, since I was sixteen, but once I read the Pardes tale during my junior year, hallucinogens took on a ritual importance. They were a way to shake the dust off the world around me, to make the hidden signs on my path glow. My consumption increased dramatically. My mind felt like a local train that had switched to the express track and was picking up speed.

  The class soon moved on toward modernism without me. We had briefly discussed Moshe Luzzatto, who heard the voice of a divine messenger in eighteenth-century Italy. I devoted myself to reading his guide, Mesillat Yesharim, hoping that if I listened hard enough, and behaved rigorously enough, I could hear the same type of revelation. Despite my lack of piety, I tried to heed Luzzatto’s words as best I could, and follow “the path of the upright.” I started wearing a kippah, partly out of observance, because one had to live a righteous life before he could receive revelation, and partly because I saw myself as a character in a story and the kippah as part of my costume.

  In the university library, I read books by other seekers and tried to find myself in their texts. I learned from Kafka—who learned from the Belzer Hasidim—that everyone had their own door to pass through. It wasn’t always an angel or divine messenger who called your name. In Safed, Israel, a rabbi received a letter from Rebbe Nachman—two centuries after the rebbe’s death. Then there was Philip K. Dick, who was struck with gnosis in the form of a pink laser beam. In VALIS, his sci-fi novel–cum–spiritual memoir, Dick’s alter ego learned to thread together hidden narratives from symbols in the everyday world around him. I too believed that messages were waiting for me somewhere. I simply had to find them.

  After Oberlin expelled me in the fall of 2004, I went to live with my mother and stepfather in New Mexico. We agreed that I needed to sober up and get healthier—I’d pretty much stopped eating or otherwise caring for myself at school—before I tried to find a job or, my mother emphasized hopefully, reapply to college. I was all for getting sober and healthy; drugs had taken me as far as they were going to, and my brain felt exhausted and bruised.

  In the beginning, my mother tried to get me to talk to her. We would go to brunch or a museum while my stepfather was busy with work, and she suggested on several occasions that I attend counseling. Mostly, though, I just spent time alone, walking through the arroyos. It rained every afternoon for the first month that I was there. In the evenings, the sun set over the mountains, painting an image of fire on the sky. Late at night, the coyotes howled like demons. I slept facing east so the sun would wake me.

  Then, after two months in New Mexico, I received two signs. The first was a postcard from my father. Alojzy had not sent a postcard, or communicated with me in any manner, for several years. This postcard had been mailed three weeks earlier but had only just been forwarded from our old address on Long Island.

  The postcard depicted a pinup-style tattooed mermaid with the words “CONEY ISLAND” in big block letters. On the back Alojzy had sketched a cargo ship, a heavy freighter set against a New York City skyline. Each cargo container, smokestack, and antenna was detailed, though it wasn’t clear what flag the ship sailed under. The rough waters carried down to the bottom of the card, and the ship’s wake bled off the left edge. Skyscrapers twisted together in the background, forming a latticework. Other than my name and old address, and Alojzy’s signature—which stretched across the starboard side of the ship, where the ship’s name would be—there were no words. A Brooklyn, NY, postmark was printed by the American flag stamp.

  Two days after I received Alojzy’s postcard, the second sign, a notecard from a Semyon Goldov of Brooklyn, arrived. It was addressed to my mother and folded into a small envelope:

  Dear Mrs. Ruth Edel—

  I am writing you to sadly inform you that Alojzy Edel is missing, and can only be presumed dead.

  I have known the Alojzy for many years, and this is a great tragedy.

  I thought you may want to know of this occurrence, both for the sake of sentimentality as you were once his wife, and also for the fact that there may be issues of estate or outstanding debts or accounts which you feel obligated to settle.

  Do not hesitate to write to me if you have questions on these issues.

  Yours and truly,

  Mr. Semyon Goldov

  The arrival of the two cards in the same week couldn’t just be some sad coincidence. There was more to the messages than what I could see on the paper.
Was Alojzy telling me that no matter what I heard, he was still alive? Was he saying good-bye? Was he calling for me? One way or another, I was being summoned to Brooklyn, my path lit by two signs. I called my sister, Becca, in Manhattan to ask if I could stay with her, and bought a one-way plane ticket to New York City.

  Two weeks later, I found myself back in Alojzy’s world. The Q train stalled at the Brighton Beach station, and rather than wait—I had waited long enough—I got off and walked through my father’s old stomping grounds.

  I stepped down the station’s green metal staircase and onto the Brooklyn pavement, where people with angry and haunted faces pushed through me like I was invisible, a ghost. The majority of the people on the sidewalk were fifty or older, and many leaned on canes or folding shopping carts. Some people closer to my age filtered through the throng as well.

  Brighton Beach Avenue was disorienting, blocked off from the sun by the elevated train tracks. Businesses refused to be contained by their doors, and merchandise tables, carts, and crates tumbled out onto the sidewalk. Cars and motorcycles wove past each other in the street, occasionally clipping one another, or popping up onto the curb. Though I could read a bit of Russian, it had been a long time since I’d seen so many non-English signs, and I was struck by the sight. Many of the signs were just English words like “food stamps” written in Cyrillic letters. The mixed languages confused my mind.

  I didn’t remember how the street numbering worked—Brighton Beach has a completely separate grid from Coney Island, where I was headed—but the area is not that large, and I soon found my way to the boardwalk. The ocean on my left, I headed west past the aquarium and along into Coney Island, all the way up to the old fishing pier. No one was crabbing off the pier. But it was late in the day, and early in the year.

  I turned off the boardwalk at West Eighteenth Street and continued north through the more desolate streets of Coney Island, where everything was covered in a layer of sand and grime. Everyone’s heard of the boardwalk side—Nathan’s, the Cyclone, the Parachute Jump—but the neighborhood side is more neglected, unseen except by the immigrants and other poor families in public housing, the desperate souls praying at the storefront churches, and the police officers who patrol the area. Most things in the world are like that: they have a visible side and an invisible side.

  A public home for seniors occupied the block closest to the water. Old people, abandoned by their families and forced down to the very edge of the city, milled outside with their walkers. Across the street from the senior home was a somewhat neglected community garden. The tips of green stalks were just beginning to emerge from beds bounded with salvaged two-by-fours or truck tires. A rooster emerged from a doghouse. He puffed up his chest and paraded back and forth on top of his black-feathered boots.

  On the next block, I passed a boarded-up bait and tackle shop where my dad used to buy his crab traps and line. The store had been destroyed in a fire, and the bricks were blackened, the giant striped bass on the store’s sign now barely perceptible on the warped metal. I wondered what had happened to the older Chinese couple who had owned the store.

  Farther up the street, heroin and crack addicts loitered outside a padlocked Christian mission whose walls were painted with anchors and crosses. They were the undead, their bodies wasted away to skeletons. On the corner of Surf and West Eighteenth Street, a group of teenage boys stood outside a deli. Like many of the businesses on Surf, the deli announced its name and offerings in Spanish on a hand-painted sign decorated with palm trees.

  “You looking for something?” one of the teenagers, a tall, skinny kid wearing a basketball jersey, asked me. I shook my head. I was looking for something down here, but it wasn’t dope.

  2871 West Eighteenth Street was in the middle of the block. I double-checked the return address on the envelope in my pocket, but there was really no need; I’d read Semyon Goldov’s notecard so many times that I knew the entire thing by heart, including the address.

  The building had clearly been a tenement house once, but the windows were now bricked over, and the whole structure painted black. Above the door was bolted a hand-lettered sign that read, “The R. Galuth Museum.” I’d pictured the encounter many times over the past few weeks, and expected that the building would be a residence of some sort, or maybe a shoe repair shop with pocketknives and refurbished radios in the window. Certainly not a museum.

  I climbed the two cement steps, took a deep breath, and rang the doorbell. No response. I rang it again. Disappointed, I stood helplessly on the doorstep. Then I heard footsteps and heavy breathing through the closed door and could feel myself being scrutinized through the peephole. The door opened.

  “Welcome to the Galuth Museum!” The pale skin of my greeter’s wrinkled face—wrinkled, you could tell, more from worry and torment than from age—was overshadowed by the orange and purple streaks of his acrylic sweater. The few words he’d spoken were enough for me to hear a strong Russian accent, which matched the syntax of the notecard. This was the right man, Goldov. He stepped aside so I could enter.

  The interior walls had been knocked out so that the bottom floor was one wide-open space. White paint had been applied directly to the bricks, and the shape of each one could be made out. There were no windows, and the electric track lights were not quite adequate to properly illuminate the framed pictures that circled the room at eye level. A wooden bench in the middle of the room reminded me of the ornamental stone benches sometimes found at grave sites. In fact, the whole room felt more like a tomb or shrine than an art gallery.

  Goldov drew my attention to a plexiglass box mounted next to the door, marked “Museum Donations.” Next to that box was a smaller, tin box that said “Tzedakah”—charity, or righteous act—in Hebrew, and “Glupsk Yeshiva Fund” in English. I put a five-dollar bill in the “Museum Donations” box, to get off on the right foot.

  We started our tour to the right of the donation boxes, with an old black-and-white snapshot that had been blown up beyond recognition and set behind plexiglass.

  “This, here,” Goldov said, “is the only known photograph of R. Galuth.” I squinted. It was a picture of a slim young man, wearing a suit and hat. “Very little is known of the life of Galuth, one of the most illustrious painters of the 1930s.” He seemed to be reciting a memorized script. “We know that he arrived in New York City in the mid-1920s, from Ukraine by way of Paris. He apparently returned to Europe in 1937. Nothing more was heard from him. Presumably, like so many great artists, he was killed by the Nazis.

  “His home, for the earlier part of the period he spent in America, was this very house, though he later became a fixture in bohemian Greenwich Village. Very few of his paintings have survived, but almost all of the ones that have are collected in this museum. On occasion, another Galuth painting surfaces, in which case we do our best to acquire it. So our collection continues to be growing. We have been very lucky that an anonymous benefactor subsidizes our work.

  “Over here, we have one such painting.” I followed my guide down the wall. “Some consider it Galuth’s masterpiece. It depicts an unfortunate but true-to-life incident, in which goons were hired by the Sea Beach Railway to eject fare evaders. They murdered innocent passengers by throwing them from an elevated portion of the line.”

  “It’s a very beautiful painting,” I said. It was a New York street scene, a whole world in one intersection. The old elevated tracks slashed across a purple evening sky. Cruel faces peered from the open windows of the stalled, rust-colored train car. A young woman, tangled in her long green skirt and half-unraveled braid, hovered in the air. She had an angelic quality, and you hoped that she was ascending, but the force of gravity in the painting was too strong to ignore.

  The individuals in the gathered crowd—each one a full portrait—looked upward, unable to save her. Their long backs stretched up from the bottom of the canvas, and as a viewer I became one of them, fighting to push myself forward through the crowd, to get a better view o
f the girl in that last moment before she died. A boy in knickers picked a man’s overcoat pocket, but the personal victory did not exempt him from his share of the collective pain.

  “Yes,” Goldov agreed. “Very beautiful. If you notice, even the expression on the face of this goon, this murderer, is masterful. If you will look at his eyes . . .” I looked into the man’s eyes. Truthfully, they reminded me of Alojzy’s. That wasn’t so far-fetched, that the goons were men like Alojzy and his friends. Rough men who did as they pleased. Would Alojzy throw an innocent person from a train? I had been entranced by the picture, but was now jolted back to my purpose.

  “Listen,” I interrupted. “Thank you for showing me this, but I didn’t come down here to see the museum. I actually came for something else. You see, Mr. Goldov . . .” He tightened up at the mention of his name. I saw his hands become fists at his side. I smiled, to show him that I came in good faith. “My name is Izzy—Izzy Edel.” I stuck out my hand, but he did not reach to shake it. I took it back. “My mother received a letter from you. About my father. Alojzy Edel.”

  “You? A slim thing like you? You, coming into my museum in your fancy shirt and your yarmulke, are the son of Ally Edel? Is that not a thing!” I didn’t think my shirt was particularly fancy, but it was true that button-down oxfords weren’t Alojzy’s style. And though my path was taking a different turn, I still wore the kippah out of habit.

  “Well, now,” I said to Goldov, “I’ve lived a different life than he’s led . . .” Alojzy never had time for hallucinations or revelations. He was a practical man who spent every day fighting and hustling, a man who’d already been through everything and achieved perfect doubt.

  “This I can believe,” Goldov said. We stared at each other. “You know, Ally stole from me eight thousand dollars, once. Restitution has not yet been made.” I had been half expecting something like this, considering the tone of Goldov’s note. “I thought your family might want to tie up loose ends.”