The Enlightenment of Dicky Lifshitz

Dicky Lifshitz lived in the Brooklyn in the late fifties. He had worked at Dombrowskys Deli on 48th Street since he was fifteen doing the same thing day by day; slicing pastrami, corn beef, rye and serving up bagels with coffee. Thirty eight years old, a Jew who wore a skull cap to cover a bald spot on the back of his head, that never attended temple. He was a only child whose parents where killed by Nazi's. Lifshitz escaped the death camps, saved by the grace of G-d and angels, lucky to get on a ship of young Jewish kids sent to a orphanage in the British country side, then migrating to America after the war.

The death of Dicky's parents in Bergen-Belson, Flora and Chaim, played on his soul like a dark cloud following him, a ghostlike and decaying fume. Lifshitz lived in a gray, unsung flat, as colorless as his life in walking distance from Dombrowskys Deli. The flat was spartan and bare with only a red silk easy chair, a TV and a queen size bed and a transistor radio he would occasionally listen to Dodger games on. The walls were under-lit and dingy, with one picture of  the great Rabi Kook, tagged with the quote from the rabbi, 'The world's inner reality is identical everywhere.' Certainly Dicky's inner and outer reality was something that years of psychotherapy might or might not cure.

The highpoint of Lifshitz's week was Friday, on payday. He would buy a bottle of Mogen David wine and head to Times Square, drinking the gut churning wine in a brown paper bag, slumped in his chair while watching a movie. He liked the splashy MGM color extravaganzas of the Day. His favorite movie was "The Wizard of OZ" just the thought of owning a pair of ruby sleepers, clicking the heals together three times escaping the rat race was a boon to Dicky.

When the film was over Dicky would cruise Times Square eyeing the cowboy hustlers, constanly repositioning their hat's, taking deep drags off Marlboros with red blooded macho zeal. Lifshitz would always ask the hookers "Are you circumcised?". It wasn't merely bravado or shtick for Lifshitz asking the studs if they were cut or not, he saw those uncut to be unholy, impure and second-fiddle.

On a particular night Dicky brought a midnight cowboy named Brad back to his flat. Brad asked Lifshitz if he could fix before they had sex and then handed Lifshitz a joint of marijuana telling him told him to smoke it. Dicky had never seen anybody fix on TV and thought only Schwartzs in Harlem did dope. Brad took out a old bent spoon and mixed the brown powder with water and cooked it, sucking it into a plunger. He then took his rodeo belt and tied it around his right arm, fixing then nodding off.

Lifshitz looked at Brad laying in bed nodded off, placid as if born again like a sleeping angel in a opium haze. Dicky thought to himself, "G-d above what the fug?" Then he remembered hearing stories about Cabalistic Jews at the Western Wall who smoked hash before praying. He lit the ganja and started to puff on it. At first feeling nothing and then it hit him all at once, he started laughing and turned his radio to WZBT jazz. It was as though the dark shackles of the his past broke and fell from his neck onto the floor. He felt a massive rush of joy that gave him chicken skin. He looked at the picture of the great Rabbi Kook on the wall and the Rabbi was smiling down on him.

When Brad came too, Lifshitz paid him, but didn't want to have sex with him, instead giving the hooker money to go score some weed for him. The next day was Sunday and Dicky would go to the deli as usual, after the morning bagel rush, Lifshitz went to the the alley and filled a bowl of ganja in a old meerschaum pipe, getting high and going back into work. Lifshitz laughing as he sliced corn beef was a odd sight to his fellow workers who felt Dicky always seemed strange and detached and had finally gone totally meshuggeneh or nuts. 

From that day on Dickey smoked dope all the time. Growing a beard and letting his hair grow. He would frequent  Beat poetry readings in the Village and jazz clubs. He hung framed prints of modern artist full of color on the walls and painted his room pastel. He covered all the lights with colored scarfs giving the flat a Bohemian feeling. His life went from gray to truly gay, like a rainbow and the great Rabbi Kook never lost his smile.

Brad the cowboy hooker and shaman did for Dicky Lifshitz what all the mitzvahs and commandments could never have done, turning Dicky on to life.

The drunken Chinese poet and monk Lao Tsui told the story of a  monk who spent his life in a temple seeking enlightenment, ascetically meditating, chanting and doing merit day by day for forty years. One night he felt as though he couldn't go on, leaving his mountain top temple  and going to the city getting drunk on jasmine wine. Then he went to a Chinese brothel and and got laid, as he experienced a orgasm for the first time he achieved nirvana. Maybe there is a little bit of Dicky Lipchitz and Lao Tsui in all of us, needing to break the chains of society and routine from time to time as spiritual boon or windfall.

Jesse and Butterfly

                                                               

In the summer of 1971, it was hot as hell in Chicago, I was new in the city and schlepping my ass off  at Monkey Wards. I worked with a Mexican guy, his name was Jesse. He wore a pompadour and was no taller than 5' 2". I guess you could say Jesse was a greaser and a philosopher who loved sharing corporeal wisdom like, 'If you are talking to a girl and you get a woody, it is a sign from God that u can ball her.'

Jesse and I lived in far gone, nasty rooms that smelled of dead rats decaying in the floor boards. Rooms that only drunk transients & bums merited, a arms reach from the CTA elevated train tracks. We could hear and smell the the electric trains, wheels giving off a high pitched squeaking sound, miasma of old tar coated cross ties, electric red hot rubber and rusted steal track. 

On sacred, magical and stirring Chi Town summer nights, Jesse and I would drink cheap mescal while sitting on the fire escape, watching the the "L" trains pass. At times leaping onto the platforms, evading trains, frying hot dogs or electrocuting Barbie Dolls we pilfered from Monkey Wards on the highly charged and lethal third rail. Knowing that many a poor bastard with no more juice to live life had cashed it all in there, a quick volt and gone.

Jesse and I were the worst stock boys in Monkey Ward's 100 year history. We had no regard for the merchandise, handling it loosely and throwing it about. We would run scams to make extra money for dope or drink, like having a pal buy a cheap bike, bringing the receipt to the docks, instead giving him product worth much more, like a chain saw. We would distract clerks and rip off gold chains, easy to get past the store dicks at closing time. Once we put on dresses and wigs from stock, going into the ladies toilet and discreetly sliding mirrors under the stalls, jacking off in drag, looking at wet pussy. We would sell weed in Oregano bottles to the employees or pints of whiskey in the cafeteria. We where wasted all the time on and off the job.

One day Jesse told me to go chat up a fat girl whose name was Butterfly, a cook in the cafeteria. He wanted to titty fuck her, saying, 'Even losers could bang a fat girl man, it's charity'. For Jesse banging fat girls was like working for merit, a venerated duty and a stairway to Heaven. Jesse taught me about the cataclysmic and spiritual nature of fat girls. Butterfly didn't even have a pretty face, but that made little difference, we were going to do God's work.

Butterfly lived in a trailer park, at the edge of the city in no-mans land before you got to Gary. Jesse and I could take a bus there, the holy event was scheduled to happen on Friday after work. Jesse had some spanish fly, I asked him what he needed it for, thinking to myself that Butterfly was a done deal. He said 'It makes a bitches pussy itch man, so much that they become nymphos', and 'Dude we should bring Big Caesar with us because we might not be able to give Butterfly enough, she might kill us',  thinking that Butterfly might lapse into a state of mad sexual fever and hallucination, out of control like a stampeding herd.

Big Caesar had to work Friday night so it looked like Jesse and I would have to do the job of three or four men on Butterfly after Jesse dosed her with Spanish Fly. We  were men of honor who were up for the task. We packed the fly, some mescal, and just in case a dildo and some rubbers or skins. I asked Jesse what we needed the skins for? He said 'Nobody wants to knock up a fat girl man and have to feed her tacos the rest of her life'. I began to realize that when it came to fat girls, Jesse knew his shit. 

Butterfly said her trailer was in a place called Shanty Town Trailer Park, at the end of Coal Rd., and that it was sky blue color with paisley patterns on it. As we approached the love shack both Jesse and I got a case of the nerves and had to down full goblets of mescal before finally knocking on Butterfly's aluminum door. She told us to come in, she looked good at 240 lbs., sitting on a old blue sofa with gold trim, eating Mars Bars and wearing a see through nightie.  Jesse and I sat down at the kitchen table, looking around the place that was painted like a rainbow, realizing that Butterfly's crib was tripped out, a paradise compared to the rat holes we lived in on the 'L' tracks.

Jesse took the bottle of mescal and some plastic cups out of his gym bag putting them onto the table and poured three hefty shots. He waited for the right moment to slip the fly into Butterfly's drink and then as she got up to go to the toilet  he poured the white powder in. She came out and asked for a drink saying, 'Boys would you mind adding this extra potent  asian fly  I got in Chinatown to my drink? It makes me feel like a nympho', laughing with a big smile on her face.


Butterfly started rubbing her  53 plus xyz cup boobs and Jesse poked me with his elbow saying 'She's ready man'. I started to drop my trousers and Jesse said ' Wait a minute man'. Well I thought it was going to be a gang bang, then Jesse said ' Look amigo I want to be alone with Butterfly', as though he had learned secrets at the Donkey Show in Tijuana that he didn't want to share.

I stepped outside the love shack and waited a few minutes, then to my amazement the trailer started to move up and down, faster and faster, so fast that it began to smoke as though on fire. Then green flame and lightning bolts came out of the shack and Shanty Town Trailer Park was materialized in purple light, before my very eyes the trailer levitated and disappeared into space. Bewildered and scared I ran all the way home. 

I went to work as usual but Jesse and Butterfly didn't  showed up for days, but the cops did. They wanted to ask me a few questions and to file  a report on the missing lovers. I knew if I told them the truth they would put me in the nut house, so I said 'All I know was that Jesse had a date with Butterfly last Friday and I haven't seen them since'. This seemed to satisfy the pigs and they let me off the hook. I figured Jesse and Butterfly had transcended the material level to a higher dimension or something. I hoped the best for them in their new form, but  hardly wanted to go myself and would in the future stay away from fat girls who lived in trailer parks.