Menachem Stein

The awning of Empire Kosher at 529 Empire Boulevard in Crown Heights, Brooklyn is red, yellow, and blue. There is a shopping cart between the words ‘Empire’ and ‘Kosher’ that resembles an angular Pac-Man ready to chomp down. The chipper sign stands in stark contrast to the ruddy and chipped façade of the block long stone building. The windows on the second floor are broken and boarded; the paint on the roof is rusted. The sun is setting on a Friday and a young Chassidic boy is pulling down the grey metallic paneling that protects against vandalism. There is a lot of vandalism to protect against.

I know my way to the second floor. Through the service entrance and then into the deserted store, past shelves stacked with Tradition Foods and towards the Handicapped Bathroom I walk. At the bathroom door a man, tall and angular with pomaded peyas and a blunt jawbone, emerges. He is Yossi Stern, head of the volunteer civilian patrol organization, the Shmira. We know each other, but from the blithe way he brushes past me, I doubt he remembers why. I’m not here to see him and he has more pressing issues on his mind than unpaid gambling debts.

In the Handicapped Bathroom I flush the urinal three times and a panel to its left slides open. I walk through the opening and close the door carefully behind me. The eighteen steep stairs end at an opening draped with beads.

“William, good of you to make it back to the old neighborhood.” The voice, arid and accented cuts through the tobacco coated air. The voice belongs to Menachem Stein, the man I have come to see.

“You got my email then?” I ask. I stand just inside of the doorway, waiting for an official invitation to cross the waiting room and enter Stein’s inner office.

“We do not live in the stone age, as you may like to think.” Stein’s voice does not express annoyance; it rarely betrays emotion of any sort. “Come in Bill, let me have a look at the man you have become.”

Now, I walk across the waiting room, empty but for one plastic folding chair and an unwatered acer palmatum ‘koto ito komachi’ plant and push open Stein’s office door.

Menachem Stein is a bilious man. He has a face like a mound of half eaten pastries. His flesh, necrotized in patches, reads like a map of humanity’s woes in the seventy years his life has spanned. It is all there: a fading tattoo on the right forearm, remnants of radiation poisoning from a period in his life in the fifties of which he is not obliged to speak, unsightly furrows in his cheeks from repeated high voltage water pelting. And that is merely what is visible. Beneath the dusty and frayed black jacket, beneath the alcohol and pastry stained white shirt, beneath the tattered prayer shawl are countless and uncatalogued abrasions and burns. It is no wonder he has stuffed himself so full of food and drink since I last saw him. He can no longer look down past the bulging plate of fat jutting out from what, if one really was to strain his imagination, was once a neck. His girth provides a welcome bit of ignorance.

Ignorance is not something Stein would ever profess too. His disposition may be as sour as the bile in his corroded liver, his body may be an altar of self-loathing and debasement, but his mind is still quick, his pride still strident. He sits behind his newspaper covered desktop, stacks of books framing him, with ink stains on his fingertips and a half smoked Camel clasped between his chapped lips and looks at me. He is not pleased with what he sees.

“Shit,” he says and turns his attention right back to what he was studying. A bolt of panic shoots through my gut. For the first time in years I stop to consider what I have actually done to myself, what I look like to one who once had deep faith in me. Had he been whipped into a Yiddish or Hebrew screaming frenzy, had he stood up behind his desk and flung a book at me in disgust, had he calmly admonished me for my transgressions it would have been enough. But this one look, one derisive word, in English no less, tells me all I need to know about the man I have become. Pride trumps panic momentarily and I muster a great speech on the life I had seen and the Earthly experience now in my possession, the kind of experience that could shoot holes in all his scholarly learning. But then I remember what kind of Earthly experience he has and his response to it, and I lower my head, shamed, and turn to exit.

“William, sit down. Oy, you were always so dramatic and impetuous. I wasn’t talking about you.” This makes me feel worse, but I walk to the carpenter’s stool in front of Stein’s desk and take my customary place. Visitors are not intended to be comfortable here.

“This neighborhood is in decline again. Our people, the blacks, and the goddamn real-estate developers are all warring it out for dominance. It’s going to be a long summer. I’m sure you and Stern crossed paths coming and going.” I nod and scratch my nose.

“I’m here to ask you about McCain.” I say. And as soon as I do, I feel the strains of a child tugging at my heart and mind; there is something decaying, fetid about the whole office, probably the entire life of Stein. The room is dry, the window shades drawn, and there is little light beyond the borders of Stein’s Cadillac of a desk.

“William, I know you have been following this McCain character for some months now. I urge you to stop…” He looks disdainfully at his pillar of ash. I wait for him to continue.

He reachs into a desk drawer and pulls out a brown accordian file. He runs his liver spotted hands over the dusty brown container. A sinister smile creeps onto his face. The smile is slight and sly and can mean only one thing: revenge.

“Bill, I am due at the synagogue in fifteen minutes. I’d invite you but I doubt you’d deign to join us.” I nod my head with a mixture of pride and shame. “I can also think of a few people who would not take kindly to your presence.”

I stare at the folder on his desk. What’s in that thing? My face betrayed my thoughts and Stein’s smile fades.

“Take it,” he says and heaves it across his desk. I reach out to catch it and practically fall off the stool. It weighs more than I expect.

“In there is everything you need to know and every reason for you to stop and stop now. Now leave. I will contact you soon.”

No goodbyes are exchanged. I stand and leave. I understand as I cross the barren waiting room and descend the scuffed staircase that Stein’s urge to stop is his way of pushing me forward, of testing my mettle. I have no way of knowing what sort of information is in the case and of what use it will be (let’s face it, the esoteric sect of any religion do not always have the kind of information that readily captures the public’s imagination), but I know it will lead me in unexpected directions throughout the coming months.

Outside the sun is setting and the streets are quiet. I will wait till the end of the Democratic primary season to open the folder, I decide. I doubt Stein will contact me before then.