Knee Deep

by Tzvi Gluckin

The secret to driving in New York is to tailgate cabs until you’re good enough to cut them off.”We were doing seventy as we hit the sharp right at the end of the Brooklyn Bridge going into Manhattan.

“The next thing is to watch the ‘Don’t Walk’ signs. Hit the gas when they start flashing.”

Botz was driving and talking. He felt it was important to teach me about the practical things most people overlooked. I’d soon learn about garlic and the wonders of the digestive system.

Our banana yellow 1978 Dodge Aspen wagon was moving cross-town at breath-taking speed. Somebody honked.

“New York cops will never bust you for a moving violation. Here we have real crime.”

Botz was expounding upon the never-ending list of advantages to New York living. I was a newcomer from Boston. These insights were crucial for my development.

“I’d take you for a cup of coffee but they’ll charge you five dollars.”

I started screaming out the window. Our friendship was reaching a new level.

Botz and I shared an apartment in Park Slope with another guy. We were musicians. In theory we played professionally, but in reality we weren’t making any money. Botz sold life insurance. I did surveys over the telephone.

An old acquaintance called me out of the blue. He was now booking a club in Hoboken. He offered me a Thursday night for $200 and a $30 bar tab. I took the gig. I hired my roommates as the other musicians and a band was born. Soon we were playing regularly with an occasional road trip to Pittsburgh and other exotic places. Botz turned me on to Frankie Valli and AM radio.

The Hoboken gig evolved into a fairly steady weekend job. We’d start around 11:30 and play into the wee hours of the night. We were a decent band, but there were times when we went beyond ourselves. In most bands, the members need constant eye contact and body gesticulations in order to communicate musically. By us, this was unnecessary. If I wanted to create a certain mood or texture, Botz would telepathically anticipate what I was going to do and be right there with me. It was amazing.

There were times, usually after one AM, that we’d hit a level of extra-sensory communication and go intergalactic. The walls would pulsate. The lights would grow dim. The usually packed crowd would temporarily stop their endless mating ritual and listen. Everyone there, the crowd, the band, even the bar staff, was aware that something big was happening. It was an incredible feeling. I was alive, tickling the soft white underbelly of existence, wading knee-deep in the funk of life. I wanted it to go on and on and on and on.

But it always ended. Inevitably the club would close. We’d have to pack up our stuff ourselves and head back to Brooklyn alone. The feeling was gone by the time we got all our equipment back to our space and went out for breakfast before going to bed. The great transcendental high of hours before was fleeting and fading.

“The peristalsis effects of coffee are quite remarkable,” Botz would say looking up from his fried eggs and hash browns. “Just the mere sound of the percolator gets my body rumbling. Have you ever used coffee filters as toilet paper? They work just as good.”

I began reading Henry Miller and hanging out in Prospect Park. I was depressed. Why wasn’t life as real as those moments when the band was plugged-in?

I shaved my head and became a conservative. Nothing.

I wrote lyrics and arty poetry. I thought I was Charles Bukowski. I was miserable.

“You’re depressing me,” Botz told me, “Why don’t we get some White Castles?”

Nothing could cheer me up. Something was missing.

On my twenty-fifth birthday, the World Trade Center was attacked for the first time. I took this as a sign; it was time to get out of New York. I figured I’d go to Paris. I could be like Henry Miller. Maybe if I lived like a real artist I could recreate that on-stage feeling off-stage. I’d live on French bread and cheap white wine. I’d scam free rooms and try to stay healthy. I left my band, quit my job, said goodbye to my apartment and bought an open-ended ticket to Amsterdam. Something big needed to happen.

I spent the next five months moving east across Europe. I stayed in cheap hotels. I crashed on people’s floors. I played guitar in the streets. I read voraciously. I was open to everything. I stayed up all night talking art, politics, religion, whatever it was with whoever cared to listen. I was becoming the most pretentious person alive. I felt electric. I was free.

The outside world began to take an interest in my Judaism. Total strangers would approach me and ask me if I was Jewish. Fellow travelers were curious to find out about my Jewishness. I couldn’t figure out why this was happening. Maybe Europeans had a keener sense of who was a Jew than Americans did. They’d hated us longer. It began to occur to me that maybe being Jewish meant something. I went to Poland and wandered through the old Jewish ghost towns. What could it be?

After Poland was Turkey. It was August of ’93 and the Oslo Accords were announced. I could smell the history in the making. I had to go to Israel. I made my way to Jerusalem and danced with the newly independent Palestinians.

I stayed in Israel for a while and was slowly absorbed by a giant Jewish amoeba.

Something was happening to me. The religion, the culture, the people, my heritage, everything overwhelmed me. I studied. I talked politics and spirituality. I couldn’t get enough. I lacked the ability to articulate what I was feeling, but it was powerful. Judaism amazed me. It was primal, earthy, real. For the first time in my life I stopped playing music and I didn’t care.

I got lost in my new Jewish world. I grew my beard long. I was insane with the newness of Judaism. I wanted to live in the desert, slaughter my own animals and grow organic vegetables. I wanted to be Abraham. I was the “Earth Jew.” I was one with my new cosmic Jewish Earth culture. I was on fire. I was in heaven.

And then I was back in New York. My cousin was getting married and my mother insisted I come.

Nobody could understand me. My family thought I was a space alien. I looked for Botz. He’d spent the last year on the road touring with an old blues musician. He was in town visiting his mother.

We met downtown.

“You’re one of them beanie-wearing-Heebs,” he said.

We roamed the streets looking for kosher food. I tried to explain to him what I was going through. He was interested but distracted. It was summer time and mini-skirts were in.

“That’s number twenty-seven. I can’t believe it! She’s not really blond though.”

It went on and on like this. I fled uptown and took refuge in the house of a painter I knew.

My painter friend and I hung out for three days. We talked nonstop about everything. Zappa, Hendrix and the jazz avant-garde played continuously in the background. I tried to tell him what I was feeling but it was difficult, he didn’t get it and he was threatened.

We talked about music and the blues. We both loved the blues, especially John Lee Hooker.

“If John Lee Hooker offered you a gig, would you take it?”

“Sure I would,” I said.

“Isn’t that a contradiction? On the one hand you want to be ‘Earth Jew’ and yet you’d go touring with John Lee Hooker?”

He was right. I didn’t know how to answer him. I’d left my whole world behind but I still wanted my old life.

I went back to Israel bothered by his question. It took me a few weeks to figure it out.

John Lee Hooker the bluesman was amazing, nobody could touch him. He created a special energy and his music brought people to a higher level. But that was music, what about real life? Would I want him as my father? His life was a mess. He was a womanizer, a drug addict, never at home. His music was fantastic, but what about him?

My friend thought I wanted to be a musician. I thought I wanted to be a musician. But that wasn’t true, that wasn’t why I played music. Music was an attempt to go beyond, to do something meaningful, to find G-d. The problem was that the experience always ended, it had to, and it left me empty. I traveled, I read, I searched, I tried everything and it was always the same. The things I tried were good attempts; they felt great at the time. They just weren’t real.

I realized my goal as a musician and my goal as a Jew were exactly the same. The difference was that music was limited to music. When the music was over it was over. What about the rest of the time? How did it offer transcendence in real life?

Judaism was real. It gave me a tool, a system, to help me tap into the groove-energy thing all the time. Instead of getting lost in the artificial world of music or art, instead of tapping into the cosmic fabric via a canvas, it was telling me to let life be my canvas. Every moment in life is an opportunity for transcendence. Music is great, but it is limited. Life is unlimited. Every moment is thick with potential.

I could take the John Lee Hooker gig and it would be great, but it wasn’t real, it wasn’t how I was going to find G-d. I had to find G-d on His terms, not mine.