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Passover

Port Authority, NYC 1992

“Need some help?” the homeless man asked while he watched me schlep my bags from the Airport Bus Center through the Port Authority.

“No, thanks,” I said, kicking the flowered one that was bigger than me and wouldn’t stay on my shoulder. The yellow cabs were all lined up on Eighth Avenue, just waiting to be hailed.

“We have to make a quick stop,” I told the cabby while I stood to the side and watched him put my baggage in the back seat. He was a big, chubby guy with wild, messy brown hair in baggy jeans and flannel shirt.

“It better be fast,” he said.

“Why? You have someplace to go?” I asked him, thinking that after he dropped me off, he’d probably like to go back twenty years, run over to the student union, lead a peace march and drop some acid.

“Well, no,” he said. “I just don’t feel like stopping.”

I opened the door to get out.

“But I will,” he said.

“Thanks a bunch.”

We sped between the traffic up the avenue.

“You just get back from a trip?” he asked.

“Uh, yeah.”

“Where’d you go?” he asked, stopping the cab at a red light.

Through the window, I watched a man shoving leaflets at passersby.

“Check it out. Check it out,” he said, hoping to entice them into entering the House of Heavenly Delights. I looked up and saw an enlarged color photo of two women having their way with each other, while a man, dressed as the devil, held a pitchfork over their heads.

“Florida,” I said.

“Vacation?”

He was turning out to be pretty chatty, this…I looked to the front seat to see the name on his identification card. Alan Cohen.

“Passover,” I answered. Mom, Henry and I flew down to spend the holiday with Aunt Cookie and Uncle Sy. It had become a new tradition since my aunt and uncle had retired there five years ago. Uncle Sy’s Passover seder was so different from the holiday I remembered as a little girl when Grandpa Lou was still alive. He would recite the whole haggadah in Hebrew. My cousins and I would twist and turn in our seats for what seemed like a century until, finally, we could eat. After the meal, Grandpa Lou would hide the Afikoman, the magic piece of matzoh, and give a quarter to the kid who found it. All of us kids would search the Brooklyn apartment high and low only to find that, once again, our grandfather had hidden it in his suit jacket.

Some years later, after Grandpa Lou had passed on, Sy had stood at the head of his Long Island table and flipped on a small tape recorder. After a series of static sounds, Sy’s voice had filled the room. “Your mission tonight, if you choose to accept, is to skip the formalities and go directly to the Passover meal catered à la Cookie.” Everyone thought it was very funny, except for Grandma Rose, who was missing her husband and the days when “the holidays” meant her house.

“Yeah, Passover. Yeah,” said the cabby with the recognition I expected. “The folks glad to see you?”

“Thrilled.” There seemed no point explaining my folks didn’t really live there.

“Boca?” Alan Cohen asked in shorthand.

“West Palm.”

“Nice.”

Alan Cohen probably had family in Boca, I thought, and wished that he had gone down for Passover to see his parents. They probably lived in a development with two swimming pools, four tennis courts and a clubhouse. Alan would always think he was going to play tennis when he visited, but it never happened. He probably never went to see them much, being the black sheep of the family. Alan had probably had great potential. He was probably the salutatorian of his graduating class at Midwood High School in Brooklyn. His parents had thought he would be a doctor, or at very least, a dentist. But he went away to college, did too many drugs and never got out of the Sixties.

“So…” he said. He was determined to keep the conversation going. “Does your family do a whole seder thing, or do you just eat?”

I pictured Sy standing at the head of the table wearing a blue satin yarmulke on his head, a gold Jewish star around his neck and a yellow-and-white kitchen apron tied behind his waist.

“Why is this night different from all other nights?” he asked. “Because tonight we’re not going to ask the four questions. Every year you ask me the same questions, and for thirty years I’m giving the same answers. So, if you don’t know the answers by now, you’re out of luck.”

“We did a little seder,” I told Alan the interested cabdriver. “You know, the usual stuff.”

Sy was in rare form this year. “Now I want everyone to listen to the instructions on how we will proceed with tonight’s seder. First, this will be an abbreviated version of the abbreviated version we generally have. Only, I will say the blessing over the wine and that’ll be it. There’s no reason for us to go around the table and have everyone say the kiddush. So I will say the blessing and you all say Amen. Are you with me so far?”

“Like what’s your usual?” asked Alan. “How many minutes is yours? Ours were like about fifteen minutes. Me and my cousin, Ricky, always tried to sneak in some decent wine. That Manisohewitz crap is not anybody’s idea of a great vintage year.”

“I know,” I said. “You know what else is funny? They always have the yarmulkes from all the affairs they went to over the years. There were three white velvet ones that said ‘Wedding of Mark and Mindy Sokoloff, May 15, 1982,’ written in gold and nobody knew who the Sokoloffs were!”

“I wonder if anybody still has the ones from my Bar Mitzvah?” Alan Cohen wondered aloud. “Oh. Did you use the coffee books?”

“Yes! What is that about?” This was turning into a fun cab ride. “How appropriate is it that a coffee company publishes the most popular Haggadah! You read this horrific tale of the Jews fleeing Egypt with a picture of a piece of matzoh on the front of the book, and a cup of hot coffee on the back!”

“Well, we as a people like to eat!”

“No kidding,” I said, glimpsing a look at Alan’s back taking up a broad part of the front seat.

“So, what do you do?” he asked me.

“Well, Alan,” I said, feeling it might be a little personal to use his name, but also as if I knew the cloth from which he was cut. “Why don’t you guess?”

“Drugs?”

“That’s it! You got it on the first try. Amazing!”

“Really? You’re kidding.”

“Of course I’m kidding. Do I look like a drug dealer? Look, we’re here,” I said, pointing to the white doorman building on Eighth Avenue. “Stop. I’ll be just a second.” The cab stopped near 52nd Street. I ran in and picked up the yellow manila envelope that said FOR PICKUP—K. KLINE from the doorman.

“What’d you get?” he asked when I got back into the cab.

“I had to pick up a script.”

“An actress!” he said, driving up Eighth Avenue.

I received a last-minute call from a casting director asking me to fill in for an actress who wasn’t going to be able to do the reading. I pulled out the script and started to read. The play was a political farce about a presidential campaign that totally revolved around junk food. It was called Eat This. I flipped to where Mac, the campaign manager, and the candidate come into the diner where they always eat and come up with their campaign strategies. In this scene, Mac and the waitress, Addie—that would be me—try to convince the candidate to hold rap sessions at fast-food chains across the country and give the voters free food. The casting director said they hoped to bring the show to Broadway. It was a stroke of luck that I got in on the project.

“I’m sorry,” said Alan, breaking the silence.

I realized I had suddenly stopped talking after having that whole Passover conversation. Now I felt guilty. Well, that was ridiculous. I didn’t have to entertain the cabdriver. I was a passenger, he was doing his job and now I wanted to read my script.

“Sorry for what?” I looked up at the back of Alan’s wavy head

“For thinking you were dealing.”

“Don’t worry about it. It happens all the time.” I held the script high so he would see me reading in his rearview mirror. I was way too involved in this relationship.

“So… Uh… You’re an actress?”

“Uh-huh.” I didn’t want to talk anymore.

“What have you been in lately?”

“Nothing. Really.” I always hated that question.

“You have an audition?”

“Uh-huh.” Here we go. Why was I so friendly before?

“What’s it for?”

I put the script down. It seemed easier to have the conversation than not to. I’d be home in a few minutes and I could read then. What could it hurt to talk a little more to Alan Cohen. I was sure I had known him all my life. He seemed like a boy who would have summered at my bungalow colony in the Catskills when we were kids. Someone a few years older than me, I would have looked up to for a while just because he was there and he was older. Someone who would have been a counselor at the day camp and led you in Color War when you were little, then put that stuff down, grew his hair long and tried to get you to smoke when you were big. Someone whose mother would say she didn’t understand him, as she played her Bingo card in the casino on Wednesday nights, and waited for her husband to come back upstate after working in the city all week, because she couldn’t handle Alan alone.

“Do you do anything in addition to driving a cab?” I asked, curious to see if I did have him all cut out.

“What do you mean?”

“Anything particular that you aspire to do?” I figured him for a comic book collector.

“Does anybody ever get what they want?” he said. “An actor, a musician. Even a doctor or lawyer. Does anybody really get what they aspire to in life? Does it really pay to even care?”

“I’m sorry. Just making conversation. I didn’t mean to be condescending,” I said. We were gliding past 72nd Street, a few blocks from my apartment. “Driving a cab is great. Anything you want to do is great. Really.”

“You think so?” he asked, turning the corner on my block.

“Oh sure,” I said. “People should do whatever makes them happy.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.

“YES,” I said. “Yes. Yes, I do!”

He pulled up in front of my building. The meter clicked off.

Alan Cohen turned and faced me. “You have a steady boyfriend?” he asked. His eyes looked vacant behind the dirty divider that was meant to protect the people in the front seat from the people in the back.

“Very steady,” I said. I took a ten from my wallet, shoved it in the tray and dipped it toward the front. “Can I have back three dollars?”

Alan Cohen didn’t move.

“How about you keep your money and have a date with me instead?”

“I really can’t do that. I have this boyfriend. I can’t. May I have my change?” That’s what you get for being friendly, I thought. The change wasn’t forthcoming, so I collected my bags and opened the door. Alan Cohen was standing in the gutter, blocking my exit from his cab.

“Are you going to go out with me or not?”

My eyes came level with his stomach. It was protruding through the buttons on his dirty navy-and-green flannel shirt.

“I need to get out of this cab,” I said as calmly as possible.

“Oh yeah?” he said, getting in the back seat and slamming the door behind him. He threw my flowered bag to the floor of the cab. It had been the only thing between us.

“So, you think you could go for a guy like me?” he asked, leaning over me.

“Alan…” I didn’t know what the hell to do.

“I really like how you say my name.” Alan Cohen leaned in closer. I could tell he had consumed a few beers. “Say it again.”

I inched backward against the other door, hoping I could open it behind me. He pulled my hands into his and gripped them tightly.

“Say it again. You’re really hot. Say it again.”

“Uh, Alan,” I said, trying to grasp what was happening. A few possible scenarios crossed my mind, none of them particularly appealing. “Alan,” I repeated, trying to appease rather than seduce.

“Kiss me,” he said, moving closer toward me. I could feel his breath on my neck. I thought I would puke. “Come on…”

“Stop it, Alan. Just stop! What’s the matter with you? Get off me. Leave me alone!”

He didn’t move away, but he didn’t move closer.

I tried to figure out how much trouble I was in. I didn’t know what to do when I found out, but I searched his eyes trying to assess if Alan Cohen was Nebish Gone Astray or On Track Psychopath. I opted for number one. We were both breathing harder. Obviously for different reasons.

“You were flirting with me,” he said.

“I was talking to you.”

“Bullshit.”

“I was…friendly.”

We were face-to-face in a stare-off. No one was winning.

“Why won’t you go out with me? Don’t you like me?”

“I’ve known you fifteen minutes. That’s not long enough to like or dislike you. I just got home from Florida. I hailed a cab. Please…be a mensch and just let me out of here.”

“If you weren’t going out with that guy would you go out with me?”

“Perhaps,” I said, wondering if someone had once dropped him on his head for him to wind up like this. “Perhaps if you asked like a gentleman instead of scaring the shit out of me.”

“Are you scared?”

“Yes! Of course I’m scared. I’d have to be lobotomized not to be scared.”

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Alan Cohen said. He sat up straight and tucked his shirttails into his khaki pants. “I just wanted you to like me.”

“I think you can use some improvement on your courtship skills, Alan,” I said, feeling out of danger although I was not yet out of the woods. “Some men bring flowers and candy. Wine and dine a girl. You trap me in the back seat of your taxi, act like you’re going to rape me, and, by the way, now you owe me money because suddenly I don’t feel like tipping.”

He looked right through me and got out of the cab. I grabbed my bags and bolted out the door. I could feel my hands shaking underneath my bravado. I approached the first step down into my building. A hand touched the back of my neck.

“AHHHHHHHHHH,” I screamed. My bags rolled down the cement stairs. I could see my tampons tumbling over my curling iron.

“Don’t scream. I won’t hurt you. I’m sorry,” he said, putting his pudgy hand in his pocket. “Really.”

“It’s okay,” I said. My heart beat so hard I thought I’d find it on the stairs next to the tampons and the curling iron. “I have to go.”

“I just don’t want you to think bad of me,” he said. “Do you like me?”

Out of my right eye I watched my blow-dryer fall out of my bag and cascade down. I heard a small crash.

“Yeah, Alan, I like you. In fact, I’m crazy about you. Jesus Christ!” I screamed. “JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!”

He ran into the street back to his cab. The engine had been going all this time. I knelt to pick up my broken belongings. My script was still in the cab. Fortunately, the envelope with my name on it was in my purse.

“Are you absolutely sure?” I heard him yell from the street. “I live in Park Slope. We probably won’t ever see each other again. I can leave my number on the car over here or, if you…”

Alan Cohen was still yelling when I rang for the elevator. I couldn’t make out the end of the sentence.