Death Comes In Threes-Part 1: Making Reservations

It’s been a rough week.

I have embraced and enveloped death at least three times. Death of a budding relationship, death of a close friend’s mother and death of a community radio station. I don’t always like starting my week out like that, but so it goes, so goes my nation. Each death symbolizes a small part of life that has been ultimately snuffed out.

In this segment, I’ll tell you about part one. Two and three will come later this week.

Budding new relationship. How I adored Kristine. Wrote 24 poems about her directly or indirectly related to her. From the start, she was running the show-in other words, she laid down the ground rules-boundaries, temporary state of flux, feeling each other out, quite literary too. It felt more like a FWB (friends with benefits) and there were catches. Major catches.  She was converting to another religion. And in order to date her, I had to convert too. She was long distance, so I had to be flexible and patient. And I was. Despite the long distance, five hours driving for her. She was in the middle of a divorce and fighting for full custody of two children. Kristine even asked me for attorney advice. She was very much in control. And maybe desperate.

Sid Yiddish And His Yeshiva Boys Two

But projection and conjecture on her part was bad. Not so good. She wasn’t totally to blame. I was too. I believed her and didn’t like being put on a short leash. I talked too much. Told her way too much too early. Trusted her easily. Bad move, because advantageously I was taken. And when she gave back, she gave back hard and good and soft and vengeful.  My phone blew up in her trunk one early morning while on the way to shul and I had to have it replace it entirely. I don’t think she cared.

I made a lot of the arrangements for us to have Shabbat dinners, visit Orthodox and Chabad halls. I remember one dinner in particular we went to. I tried to fit in and I thought I did. I was asked a lot of questions, as was she. And I answered them all. To her, that was talking too much.

As an observer I almost had to be a Jewish Quaker, in other words, be the dummy, Charlie McCarthy for all those over 70, on Edgar Bergen’s lap, who talked when Bergen threw his voice or moved the dummy, Charlie McCarthy. I wasn’t quite ready to be a dummy.

But I suspected that old stereotype Jewish joke fit me just fine. In case you don’t know it, it goes a little like this: “What’s the best job for a JAP (Jewish American Prince, usually it’s princess)? Making reservations.”

We met in the weirdest of ways, through social media, Facebook to be exact. During the latter half of December 2019, I have a habit of posting photos a lot. Similarly, like an art curator, who changes exhibits every few months. With photos it was the same principle. A lot of people don’t change their photos. Can’t imagine why. Oh well.

I had just posted a photo of myself with tefillin in a selfie with a couple of local Chicago Yeshiva boys. I’d been tefillined before by one of them and in fact, this past Friday during my week of death was tefillined by a familiar Yeshiva boy again. I can’t hide if I tried from them. Not that I want to of course, but anyway. Tefillin in layman’s terms is just this: a black leather strap with a small black box attached to it, containing a parchment with a prayer inside the box. Usually, when I see them is Friday afternoons-I see at least 10 of them, a minyan in fact. How ironic. Or maybe it’s in God’s plan of helping me get it all together.

 Whenever they corral me, I choose to be tefillined. And with them, I say a simple prayer in Hebrew that they repeat with me. I almost know it by heart in as many weeks that I’ve performed it. In early December, I had seen them first at a local Dunkin Donuts in East Rogers Park. I was with my friend Davina, we were playing Crazy 8s, I think and I saw one Yeshiva boy come in and as he was leaving, all I said to him was, “Have a good Shabbat.”

That’s all it took to get him to respond.

And then of course, the eternal question popped out; are you Jewish? I said yes and that lead to another Yeshiva boy who wanted to tefillin me. Davina had never seen this performed before and I had to reassure her a few times that these guys wouldn’t hurt me. I stepped outside, as she watched in bewilderment as they performed their mitzvah. Selfies followed and poof! They were gone. Onto the next Jew. 

A few weeks followed before I would see two familiar faces on the Morse el platform. The Yeshiva boys. I was heading south this time and they asked me if I wanted to be tefillined. This time I had said no, because I really wanted time to myself, which was the South Loop. They insisted and so I gave in. The great advantage I had going for me this time, was that I had an empty el car all to myself.

And so I was teflillined. And after that, they went on their way, as I did too. It was this particular experience however, when I believe I received one of the better selfies I had taken with these two guys. And so, when I posted the photo on my cover page in the early morning of December 15, exactly one week before my 58^th birthday, I had no idea what was about to take place.  It didn’t take long for any kind of reaction to begin popping.

What turned out to be a catastrophe in the beginning ended as a blessing in disguise. A film guy I had been friends for a few years, based on a sketch he had made of me nearly 30 years ago, in a subway tunnel in downtown Chicago, after searching for and finding him on Facebook and asking him about it, we became fast friends. He saw my photo with two Yeshiva boys and it made him react caustically, a psychotic episode at best. Overreaction at its worse. Anyone who came to my defense that day on that particular day and over the course of the next few days, would be verbally attacked and threatened with the wrath of God. I’ve had previous experience with that situation before, so it wasn’t exactly new to me.

Between that film guy, and me I had promising career placement all lined up-a small part in one of his films and two of my Henchmen compositions within the film. I was a shoo-in at last for an indie award. But not to be. Being Jewish was my downfall to him. In the meantime, while all of this was going on, my friend Scott had tried to intervene on my behalf to see if he could get inside this guy’s line of thinking, but alas he was trumped too. Threw up his hands and posted his conversational threads with the film guy. On that particular day, Kristine was watching and waiting and then decided to direct message me. “Are you Jewish?” “Yes,” I responded. She showed up on my doorstep nine days later and so our relationship began.

In between that time, we romanced each other, ate and talked our way about all of our lives happy and sad and everything else in between. Most people think or at least tell me that romance is supposed to go on for a long, long time. Whatever that means and for some reason, I always get involved with the crazy ones, despite how they sell themselves off to me.

The doom to fail part came up quite early, when we had talked the first time she showed up on my doorstep. We had just been walking from my local city center. It was Christmas Day. I had found a $20 bill on the way home that afternoon. It was to the point, our deep conversations began. We talked about anything and everything. And I mean everything.

Being that she was in custody battle for her two children and in all likelihood she assumed somewhere in her mind that she would lose them, because she had told me, that her ex-husband had planned to testify that she was unfit to be a good mother, because of her varied mental illness, which for the sake of this conversation, will not be disclosed, but she did have one leg up on me, that of being hospitalized for inability to cope.

Her chief concern was that. And so she told me outright that she wanted more babies. I didn’t know how ready I was at that moment to hear that, because usually, that kind of talk takes place when you’re in solid and not the second day you meet someone. Also, she confessed she had been “stalking” my page for two to three years.

Stalking. That poses a problem. Or as my friend Grue says, “it’s toxic.” When I saw Grue in Philadelphia in late January, she told me as much as she cares about me and she does a lot, she didn’t want to hurt my feelings but did bluntly tell me, that the relationship I was having with Kristine, was toxic and it would be best to bail.

I saw the beginning of the end of our relationship in early February, while I was in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania discussing weather options with Punxsutawney Phil. Phil came through with his end of the bargain. An early spring. Meantime, Kristine came to Chicago on her own and stayed with the couple that we’d met a few months previously. I felt betrayed. Used. Used as her steppingstone in order for her to get where she needed to go.

When we talked the night I got back from Punxsutawney to Philadelphia, the conversation lasted for 14 minutes. I knew the end was near. The week after, she sounded chipper, but then, last week, we had a decent conversation and then she sprang it on me. Decided to put me in the friend zone and reminded me that it was all temporary. Simply put, she stated that she was had “no interest in “typicalness.”  I laughed quietly to myself and said, “Well, I’m very atypical.” She sneered back and said, “Oh, that’s for sure!” I stopped her in mid-conversation and asked her what she meant by that. She refused to answer. It was like pulling teeth. And then she switched the subject purposely and dug deeper into my personal difficulties.

So I thought about it and responded this way: “Stop projecting your anger onto me just because you are coming out of a bad marriage and leaving a bad husband and projecting all of his flaws on me, doesn’t make me the same person.”

Dead silence on the phone for what seemed like hours, but were indeed seconds. She wished me luck, as I did her and then, boom! Down went her receiver. I cried hot stinging tears for five minutes and then it was over. I was very sad, but knew I had to move forward. “At least you saw some action,” my friend Peter would tell me a few days later. I wanted more than just action with Kristine. I saw a lot  of myself crumble in those five minutes. But five minutes is all it takes to figure out what your next moves will be. And I perked up.

And that’s kind of the easy part. Kind of. Sort of. Not really though, because you damn well better believe if you’re going to switch-hit into another religion completely, that you will still be carrying all of your previous baggage with you.
Grue was right. Kristine was toxic.
She’ll make a fine Jewess to some poor schlub someday.