HAPPY NEW YEAR!

It's Rosh Hashanah.... Again

What a thrill! Yet another religious holiday yours truly has completely forgotten for the 50th year in a row. Though I’m not sure why… You’re talking to a guy who’s been bar mitzvahed, confirmed, circumcised – though not in that order – suckled by a loving mother so okay with her Castro’s beard bush she had no problem toodling around the house and leaving it exposed on special occasions. And why wouldn’t she? It’s not, you know, like this was some kind of Menendez Brothers thing. Nobody was hiding toothbrushes and camera equipment in my alimentary canal. That I know of.

But wait! What the fuck? Why am I babbling about this weirdness? It’s like you start trying to write something meaningful and end up cranking out a cocktail napkin. Does that happen to other writers? Anybody? Did John Milton ever sit down to a busy day of Paradise Lost and end up banging out dirty knock-knock jokes?

Never mind, forget all that. It’s the High Holy Days. And somehow (boy is my face red!) every time they roll around it’s like I’m caught short yet again. Secretly ashamed for still having to look up the meaning of “L’shana tovah.” And no, since you asked, I cannot imagine any Christian or Muslim readers struggling not to forget when it’s Ramadan or Easter. But still, go figure, every year it’s as if the Jewish holidays come at me for the first time. As a little boy, the only reason I even knew about Yom Kippur is because every few years, out of the blue, we weren’t allowed to eat cake – or anything else - on my birthday. Having been born in late September (prime Jew holiday season), once in a while the Day of Atonement – bleakest day of the year – fell on my b-day. Which, I’m not going to lie, is pretty much perfect for a lifelong, full-tilt depresso. (My mother - nobody believes this - would actually write a note when I stayed home from kindergarten: Jerry could not come to school today because he was sad….) But back to Yom Kippur. Not only do you get to obsess on all the things you need to atone for, all those big juicy regrets that start piling up around the age of three, but you aren’t allowed to eat. So you can’t even stuff your feelings. I mean, as a budding young neurotic, it became clear, early on, the old lady wasn’t slopping Spaghetti-os on my plate for nutritional purposes. God no! The whole point of putting food in your mouth, from what I could tell as a squirming little nipper, was to keep putting in more until you had no emotions whatsoever, or the ones you do have had gone starchily numb. Am I wrong?

And no, thanks for asking, ours was not a particularly religious family, though I did have a 5’5”, 400 pound uncle, named Sweets, who favored natty plaid “holiday” yarmulkes. Uncle Sweets was so obese he’d fall asleep eating a blintz, then start snoring at the table like a clogged vacuum cleaner. Which, in a way, he was. In fact, the very first man-to-man, adult conversation I ever heard, between my father and Sweets, involved which uncloggers were more effective: stewed prunes or Serutan. The latter, for those not born in Medieval Times, being a tonic and laxative which, as the jingle memorably explained, was “Nature’s spelled backward!” Constipation, as Philip Roth chronicled years ago in Portnoy, comprised a large part of the mystery of Dad-hood for young boys in my position. In my case, it stood out, like long earlobes or unibrow, as one of my people’s more pronounced hereditary gifts. So much so that when, at the start of my own fourth year on earth, I’d gone a spectacular six weeks without so much as plopping out a marble, the mere thought of my mother bringing out the dread bicycle horn-like enema from its special case (in my mind, it’s in the same drawer as the menorah, but that can’t be right) struck fear down to my toes. But happily, that was the year Dad started sharing his prunes, so problem solved. (Occasionally.)

Unky Sweets, by the way, kept kosher in his own (much more upscale) home, but liked to slum over to our house on Jewish holidays and eat bacon. After brunch he’d slide a few strips in the lapel pocket of his sportcoat to take home or eat in the car. For years, embarrassingly enough, I actually thought the inside pocket of every suit-jacket was called the “Bacon Slot.” Invented, I somehow came to believe, by Santa Claus, who also slipped Chips Ahoys in there. But really, who knows where children learn the wonderful and demented things they learn?

Mind you, there exist, I suppose, individuals who actually enjoy New Years. The whole fresh start, fresh beginnings thing... Although, when it comes to this subject, I always remember the words of the great Ralph Thorson, the original pre-Dog the Bounty Hunter bounty hunter, who Steve McQueen played in the movie, The Hunter. (This was before bounties and and mullets became as linked, in the public mind, as Popeye and spinach.) Big Ralph, who I profiled in a long-ago magazine piece, told me everybody got depressed around their birthday and New Years. Birthdays, especially, were when the most hard-ass, violent offenders would start feeling sentimental, or lonely, and risk all to call their Mom. And that’s exactly when Ralph would nab them – sneaking off to the phone booth (this was before cell phones) to call the woman who bore them for a little maternal warmth and succor. (Not, needless to say, my first move were I a hardcore, sadly lonesome criminal. But that’s me. If I were dodging Johnny Law and feeling poorly on that special day, I’m guessing the last person I’d call would be a relative of any kind. Some people grow up to embrace their families, some to escape them, either by starting their own or changing their names and putting down stakes in Uruguay and becoming mysterious and taciturn guava farmers. Either way, it’s a world of mystery.

Still, now that I think about it, religious holiday-wise, growing up in a Catholic neighborhood I thought there was nothing cooler than Ash Wednesday. Not only did my Catholic pals get to feel grief-stricken over the fate of Jesus, they got to rub stuff on their foreheads to demonstrate their grief. To me, this was the height of cool. Like old Yom Kippur, Ash Weds involved prayer and fasting, but there was that great visual component, too. I always wondered why Jews couldn’t have something like that. A dab of mustard, say, between the eyebrows, or a nice shmear of cream cheese. The whole apple-and-honey treat, so dear to Rosh Hashanah fans, never really grabbed this little Juden. Then again, the only honey we had came from those little packets my grandmother stole from IHOP – always stashed in the same drawer as the tiny mustards and soy sauces. Somehow, for my much-tormented ancestors, escaping through the desert with Moses gave rise to the unstoppable urge to pilfer condiment packets from Chinese restaurants and pancake houses. I’ll leave it to scholars to explain why. I just work here.

But we were talking about celebrations! Sad but true, the closest thing to any kind of fun, on my Jewish New Years, was the annual dirty joke the aforementioned Uncle Sweets used to tell, about how a Christian cock looks like a dunce cap and a Jewish dick like a derby. I have no idea how the rest of gag went. Somehow, I believe, it tied in with the fact that, in Hebrew School, we were told Rosh Hashanah translates as “Head of the Year.” But don’t quote me. All this Junior Jew knew was that, swept up in the spirit of renewal, the punchline (like so many of life’s subsequent lessons) felt kind of deeply creepy and deeply meaningful at the same time.

But hey, we almost forgot the shofar. Yet another “fun” part of the holiday. One year, I shudder to recall, our cantor suffered a massive coronary while blowing the ram’s horn, which rendered the whole tradition so triggering I can barely recall it now without having to lie down and dry-gulp a bottle of Advil. Pathetic. Even today, it’s all I can do to hear the score of a Rams game without getting the fantods. Not to mention, how do you think the ram feels about being deformed and left to trot through life as a uni-horn? Think that’s fun for a sheep? In the immortal words of Rita Hayworth, “Put the blame on Maim.” Or something…

God knows we live in troubled times. And by the time this bit of weirdness drops, it won’t even be New Years any more. At least not in my socio-cultural, monotheistic neck of reality. But, thankfully, there are so many religions that, on any given day, it’s bound to be New Years somewhere. And so, to all of you celebrant and non-celebrant Sikh, Shintoist, Hindu, Baha’i, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Rastafarian and whoever-I’m-forgetting-ian believers, I offer my own heartfelt l’shana tovah. Even if I’m still not sure what the fuck it means, live it up!