Ruthie And The Klezmers
I feel like I've been on an airplane for the last 48 hours, my circadian rhythms having been totally destroyed by an all-night Thursday visit to the Commerce Casino with two Austin friends in town for the Rose Bowl. It was the closest to Entourage I've come in L.A, the only difference being that instead of partying at The Playboy Mansion, I was playing 2-4 blind Texas Hold 'Em with a bunch of drunk Chinese ladies. The evening's highlight arrived when I, ignoring the table because I was eating a delicious order of spicy prawns with rice, took a pot from a Russian guy who was wearing a blue velvet tracksuit. As soon as the spot to my right cleared, the Russian moved his stack next to mine and started making absurd bets in at attempt to drive me to the nearest almshouse. I escaped with $43 in winnings, which just about covered the cost of the gas required to drive my friends to LAX.
I managed to sleep until almost noon the next day, but my poker binge caught up with me the following night as I lay awake, grinding my teeth, while my disgusting cat kneaded my scalp with her clawless paws. Then it was 7 AM. Elijah burst out of his room, slammed his door, and jumped on our bed, declaring that he was a shark-eating dinosaur. I was so tired upon rising that I had to eat three toaster waffles with extra syrup. Soon after, we were getting into our station wagon to drive to Elijah's preschool's weekly Shabbat celebration.
Somehow I secured Elijah a spot at the Silverlake Independent JCC's preschool while still living in Texas. I guess the director figured that any guy who's willing to make a long-distance call to a preschool at least once a week for five months must really need his kid out of the house. We visited the school once before we moved. Children ran berserk with no seeming purpose. Several of them had dusty clothes. A pretty little girl sat on a bench, sobbing, because her diaper rash hurt so much. The director had to take over the kindergarten herself because both her teachers called in sick. It was perfect for us.
Now, the JCC is "independent" because some sort of Southern California JCC organization tried to shut it down a few years ago. The neighborhood rallied to save this beloved institution, but they didn't raise enough money. Now the JCC is actually just a preschool, though they did just refinish the gym floor and are holding yoga classes for parents every Wednesday morning. There's much love being put into the structure, and also a new roof, though if you turn right onto Bates Avenue off of Sunset, you'll see that the front entrance has been tagged almost beyond recognition, and that a rather large pile of trash has accumulated behind the locked main gate. The director recommends parents come around the back.
The J's playground exists on several tiers, each with a sand floor and individual play structure, each tier progressively below Sunset Boulevard. I try not to think about the fact that transvestite prostitutes have, for years, been giving blowjobs to johns on the street about 30 feet from where my son rides his tricycle every day. Anyway, on Friday mornings, the concrete central play yard becomes a sort of de facto temple as the community celebrates the Sabbath together, willfully ignorant of the seediness occuring just outside the gates.
Ruthie, the director, stands at the front, while all the parents, kids, assorted grandparents and teachers sit on sheets and blankets. Backing Ruthie is a band, called The Klezmers, that's comprised entirely of parents from the school, many of whom compose TV and film music for a living. On this day, The Klezmers included a standup bassist, an acoustic guitarist, an electric guitarist, an eight-year-old boy bongo player, and a woman with bright-pink hair who played the recorder while a slinged baby clung to her chest.
We sang several lovely songs, including "Oseh Shalom Bimromav" and "Bim Bom," both of which I swore, in 1981, never to approach again after the trauma of seeing my rabbi's ass crack at the bottom of his overalls while he played them on the piano at summer camp. But here I am, on the other side of the generational divide, and I suddenly find myself drawn to those traditions again, though maybe for no more noble reason than I scored a lot of girls through Jewish youth group and I want my son to have the same opportunity.
Elijah lasted about four songs before he started getting yitchy. I can tell already he's going to be the guy who leaves the concert halfway through because he wants to go to the next bar. On this day, eighteen years before his legal drinking age, he twitched his head around.
"Hey," he said, looking up. "What's that?"
He was a first responder. Little tufts of white vapor were drifting up from the roof of the building behind us. Then someone from the back started shouting that they smelled gas. In the middle of singing "Minnie Mac," the director changed course and immediately ordered us all into the parking lot, which stank of gas even worse.
I found myself standing next to a guy in a University of Texas baseball hat. He looked like everyone I knew in Austin, and I found myself longing for my former home's casual ways.
"Well, I won't have to use my vaporizer later," I said, assuming he'd get the pot reference.
"I think that smell might be me," he said. "I had Cajun last night."
A construction worker appeared out of a deep hole a half-block long, which comprises the J's Eastern border, the Western border being a shuttered crack motel. Gentrification is fast approaching that block of Sunset, but I sort of began to realize why the center had almost shut down in the first place.
Anyway, the worker informed us that someone had struck a gas main about a block away, which was why we had the smell. Nothing to worry about, he said. Indeed, none of the parents seemed particularly concerned about a gas leak next door to their children's preschool, and we all went back inside to finish "Minnie Mac," only to be joined by three firemen, who marched around the facility to make sure that nothing was, I guess, on fire.
We got Elijah into his classroom, gave him his challah and apple juice, and left. I overheard another parent say: "Just another day at the Silverlake JCC."
I turned to Regina and said, "Man, am I tired."
"Me too," she said.
Suddenly, we realized that our main reason for exhaustion wasn't going to be with us for the next five and a half hours. We were in a new city and we had much work to do. In order to stay afloat in the hyper-competitive corporate entertainment rain forest that is L.A., we needed to be efficient about our time. And thus we decided to go out for a second breakfast.
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