The Last Jewish Virgin

Chapter 8

36 8 O n the way downtown to Mr. Rock’s studio, the subway came quickly, and I sat in the last car, which was almost empty. On one end sat a redhead in a sequined T-shirt and skin-tight jeans, her head bobbing along to music piped into her ears via an iPod. She paid no attention to the round-cheeked, unsmiling child in the stroller in front of her. At the other end, a bearded man in military fatigues read a Spanish-language newspaper . Neither of them gave a second glance to me and my black vampire costume. But from the moment I’d gotten on, the child in the stroller had stared at me without blinking, making me feel as though she could read my mind and knew exactly where I was heading and what I was about to do. At Times Square, the mother, still bobbing her head, rose and wheeled the child out, and I breathed a sigh of relief. A few stops later, at Christopher Street, it was my turn to get off. My feet were leaden, but my heart was beating absurdly fast as I began to walk slowly across town from the West Village to the East Village, passing trendy shoe stores, drug dealers hawking their wares, tattoo parlors, and electronics stores blasting music . Picking up my pace just a little, I turned and headed further Janice Eidus 37 downtown past the glitzy new condos that dotted the formerly grungy Lower East Side, until I reached my destination. The block on which Mr. Rock lived ran perpendicular to the Bowery. Even in mid-afternoon, it was dark and desolate. An elderly woman with bandages wrapped around her head walked a dog so skinny its ribs stood out. The dog looked directly at me as it relieved itself against a straggly tree. The siren of a passing police car was so loud I covered my ears, realizing how raw my nerves were, since usually a siren or two didn’t faze me. On the other side of the street stood a shelter for homeless men, a weathered old building that had somehow resisted gentrification and that seemed to mirror the faces of the handful of men standing idly on the steps, their chins grizzled and grey, their eyes vacant. I felt more and more out of my element, more and more confused and disoriented. Mr. Rock’s small brick building, only five stories high, was wedged between two others which looked equally old and run-down. The Upper West Side building where my mother and I lived was always in slight disarray, but nothing like this. His building looked as though it hadn’t been cleaned in a hundred years, as though the roof were about to cave in, as though one’s life would be in danger the moment one stepped inside. Even though it should have been clear to me by then that Mr. Rock, a part-time teacher at Bennett, wasn’t exactly an internationally -renowned superstar artist bringing in megabucks, I hadn’t expected him to live in such a grungy place. So where had I expected him to live? A floor-through of a freshly painted brownstone with a small, well-cared for garden in the front? That was ridiculous. He would never live among neighbors who nurtured and cultivated fresh flowers, who treasured the beauty of nature. Judging by the assignments he gave in class, he was far more interested in death and decay than in bringing anything to life. In fact, what his building boasted, instead of either fresh paint or flowers, was a rusted, crooked metal gate in the front with an equally rusted padlock. The padlock was open, probably left that way by him expressly for me. When I was in grade school, Tante Molly had lived in a rundown building not far from this 38 The Last Jewish Virgin very block, although there were fewer and fewer such buildings, since luxury condos were being built anywhere one could fit a tin can. Eventually, Tante Molly had moved to a government-funded apartment complex in midtown for actors and artists, in a building with a uniformed doorman, a plant-filled restaurant on the ground floor, and a state-of-the-art health club. My instructions from Mr. Rock were to walk up to the top floor. There was no elevator. The...