Run You Down (7 page)

We leave the house at nine thirty and take the F train to Avenue I. It’s a little warmer tonight than it has been in weeks and it feels nice not to have to rush from one place to the next. I even left my hat at home. The address on Ocean Parkway, it turns out, is a synagogue.

“It’s in a church?” whispers Iris. We’re standing across the street.

“It’s a synagogue,” I say.

“I know,” says Iris, still whispering. “I just meant, you know, a house of worship. I wouldn’t have guessed they’d let them do that.”

“I don’t think they can hear you,” I say.

“Come on,” she says. “Isn’t that strange?”

“I read about two in
The New York Times
. One was in somebody’s home. One was in a community center basement in Manhattan. A synagogue is kind of a community center, so…”

The ornate stone building is probably at least a hundred years old. Two sets of steps come together in the front, and on them linger about a dozen people. One man is very fat, with an enormous beard and wild brown hair. A Jew-fro, I’ve heard it called. He is wearing a yellow hooded sweatshirt with a Hawaiian scene silk-screened on it, and talking to two girls about my age. Both girls are dressed in long skirts and flat shoes, their hair covered with scarves. But the skirts aren’t plain black like the ones most of the women I saw in Borough Park wore; one is denim, and one is a crinkled, fiery red-and-orange fabric. Little rebellions, I think.

Iris and I walk toward the threesome and Jew-fro greets us.

“We tend to start late,” he says, with a smile. “Welcome. There’s food and drink inside.”

Iris and I say thank you and continue inside the iron gates and up the stairs to the entrance. People are smoking and drinking from plastic cups and chatting with each other. I spot two black-hatted men. We walk into the foyer, an elegant, if worn, mosaic-tiled rotunda with a dome rising fifty feet into the sky. I look up and see a stained glass window. It’s too dark to tell whether the image is abstract or depicts some sort of scene. At my dad’s church they had a stained glass window called the Christ window. It wasn’t a terribly artful illustration—just white Jesus in a white robe with his hands out, a halo above his head—but I remember that when the sun lit the blues and yellows and pinks on the mornings when I used to go to Sunday school I couldn’t help but be a little bit mesmerized by it. Iris and I follow the noise down the hallway from the foyer to a multipurpose room big enough for a wedding or a concert. Plastic and aluminum folding chairs line the walls. There is a buffet set on tables along one side of the vast space. I see beer and wine. We set down our six-pack and Iris opens one for each of us with the flamingo bottle opener on her key chain (a holdover from college). There are probably twenty people in the room. Most of the men wear some kind of covering on their head. Many have black yarmulkes, and several wear sidecurls and black pants. But more than one wears a knit beanie, or a baseball cap. One has a hat that says C
OMME DES
F
UCKDOWN
. I alert Iris and she loves it.

The buffet is mostly canned or bagged—chips, nuts, salsa, Oreos, a plastic barrel of Cheez puffs—but everyone seems to have chipped in. There is white wine in a box, several varieties of juice and punch, and a half-empty jug of Smirnoff. We drink our beers and look around. It’s mostly men inside, and everyone appears engaged in conversations that don’t lend themselves to interruption, so we walk back out to the front steps. We aren’t leaning against the railing a minute when a woman approaches us.

“Are you here to see Dov?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say. “Are you?”

The woman nods. She is wearing a wig and a navy blue turtleneck. She is probably in her late thirties. “You know him from Facebook?”

“Sort of.”

“I do not agree with everything he says, but I think he is doing a good thing.”

I nod.

“You are frum?”

“No,” I say.

“But you are Jewish?”

I hate this question. Before I moved to Brooklyn, I don’t think anyone had ever asked me if I was Jewish. Now I feel like I get asked every other day, and my answer is more complicated than they assume, or, frankly, want to hear about. Fortunately, Iris jumps in.

“I’m not,” she says. “But she is.”

“Are you from Brooklyn?”

“No,” I say. “We’re from Florida.”

“Florida! Miami? I have cousins in Miami.”

“Orlando.”

“Are you married?”

Iris opens her mouth, but doesn’t say anything. She’s shocked, I can tell, that we’ve been asked this personal question by a total stranger ten seconds after meeting.

“No,” I say.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

I look at Iris, who speaks, finally, and without any of her usual grace: “Uh-huh.”

“Why not get married?”

“We’ve only been dating a little while.”

“Do you want children?”

Iris shrugs. “Someday.”

“I had my first son when I was nineteen,” she says.

Iris looks at me. She knows I had an abortion when I was nineteen. She smiles and puts her hand on my arm. “Well,” she says to the woman, “I hope that worked out for you. Rebekah, I need to go to the bathroom.” She pulls me back into the rotunda.

“Sorry,” she says once we’re inside. “I just hate that shit. What is she, your mom?”

“Maybe,” I say, which makes her laugh. “I don’t think she was trying to make us feel bad. At least you have a boyfriend.”

“Whatever,” says Iris. “I smelled weed out there. Let’s find that person. I bet they don’t ask why we’re not married.”

The weed, it turns out, is being smoked at the bottom of the stairs by two young men, one in sidecurls and black pants, one beardless, with his button-down shirt open, revealing chest hair. He has a small New York Yankees yarmulke clipped to his hair. Iris approaches first, smiling.

“Got any to share?” she says.

The man in the sidecurls, who is more a boy than a man, freezes. His friend seems momentarily stunned by our presence as well, but recovers quickly, taking the joint from his friend’s hand and passing it to Iris.

“Hello there,” he says, obviously thrilled. “I haven’t seen you before.”

Iris takes a pull from the joint and passes it to me. I decline. I feel like I need to be sober for this. She offers her hand to shake. “I’m Iris. This is Rebekah.” Both men look at her hand. Chest hair shakes, sidecurls does not.

“Are you from Williamsburg?” asks chest hair.

“Gowanus,” says Iris, taking a second puff.

“Are you married?”

“Jesus Christ,” says Iris. She hands the joint back. Chest hair giggles (poor man doesn’t know what he’s gotten himself into) but before she can lay into him, we hear a commotion at the front gate.

“Is that him?” says sidecurls, straining to see over the half-dozen people who are crowded around a livery cab at the curb. Chest hair seems more interested in Iris than whoever has arrived, so sidecurls abandons him and joins the group escorting a man I assume is Dov Lowenstein up the stairs and into the synagogue.

“Do you know him?” I ask.

“From Facebook. I’ve read about him. Everyone hates him, but I don’t know. I wanted to see for myself.”

“Why do they hate him?” asks Iris.

“Because he calls the Chassidim a cult.”

“He does?”

“Yes, of course. Don’t you know? I understand he had a bad time. But he is hoping for a big payday.”

“We should go in,” I say.

“One more smoke?” says chest hair. He loves Iris.

I take her hand. “We’re good,” I say. “Thanks.”

We follow the rest of the smokers and stragglers into the multipurpose room. Iris grabs two more beers from our six-pack and we find two folding chairs along the edge of the room. As we wait, I blurt out: “I called my mom.”

“Excuse me?” she says, almost spitting out her beer.

“She didn’t pick up,” I say. “I tried twice. Straight to voice mail.”

She stares at me, her eyes glassy.

“You’re high,” I say.

“I know!” she says. “Wow.”

If she wasn’t high, Iris would probably have questions, but she’s just sort of staring at me, shaking her head. At the front of the room, Dov has taken off his jacket. He is wearing a white t-shirt with a rainbow Star of David on it, and his head is uncovered. He has very light hair, so light his eyebrows blend into his pale face. People start sitting down, but everyone is still talking. Finally, the boy with the sidecurls from outside, who is sitting in the front row, stands up and yells “Quiet!”

Dov steps forward to the standing mic at the front of the room. He opens a spiral notebook and sets it on the table beside him. “My name is Dovi Lowenstein,” he says, leaning forward. “But you probably know that.” The crowd murmurs a light laugh. “Let me ask you a question. How many of you know somebody who is gay?”

Iris and I raise our hands. I look around and about half the room does the same.

“Okay, put your hands down. Now, how many of you know somebody who is gay and Chassidish?” About the same number raise their hands.

“Yes,” says Dov. “You see. Yes. Now how many of you know Chassidim who are gay and married?”

Fewer hands this time, but Dov’s point is made.

“Yes, you see?” he says. “This is what I am talking about. Why would a gay man marry a woman? Why! Because he has no choice. His parents tell him to marry and so he marries. Or she marries. What else can he do? If he does not want to lose everything he has to pretend. He has to keep who he really is a secret.” He pauses and picks up his notebook, looks at what he’s written, remembers, continues. “Now, how many of you know someone who went to New Hope?”

About a fifth of the room raises a hand.

“And are they still gay?”

“Yes!” shouts a man at the back. Everyone turns around.

“My friend!” says Dov, gesturing to the man. “Was it you?” The man, who appears, like Dov, to be in his mid-twenties, nods. He is wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt with B
ROOKLYN
written across it. I don’t see a yarmulke. “How old were you?”

“Sixteen,” says the man.

Dov says something to the man in Yiddish. The man says something back and the room becomes agitated, people whisper to each other, shift broadly in their seats.

“What did he say?” asks Iris.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“We will talk later,” says Dov to the man. “But see? See?” He is trying to bring the crowd’s attention back to the front of the room. “And that is why I said it is a cult. Not Judaism. No. But the way we grew up. You know. In Williamsburg and Monsey and Roseville. It is a cult because you cannot get out without being damaged. You cannot get out without losing your family. It is a cult because you are isolated and insulated. The problem isn’t the religion. Judaism is a beautiful thing. Community is a beautiful thing. The problem is that the people who are born into it
have no choice.
And the cult, it is not about Hashem. It is about fear. Everybody thinks their neighbor is spying on them! Your parents, maybe, your sisters and brothers, they believe what the rebbe tells them. If the rebbe says send your son to this place, they have doctors, they will make him well. What do they do?”

Under their breaths, people respond. In the row behind me, the woman who asked us if we were married whispers, “You send him.”

“Yes! You send him! Because the rebbe knows best. But they are not doctors! They are frauds! Everyone knows this. Everyone outside. But your parents, and your brothers and sisters, they do not know this. Because they are in a cult! They may be wonderful people. They may be kind and they may mean well. But they are in a cult! Their minds have been abducted by the wrong priorities. Their priorities are appearances. And if you make a different choice—if you dare to choose something else—pack your bags!”

Dov is a riveting presence. I’ve never seen someone speak so viscerally from the heart. His remarks seem both prepared and completely spontaneous; eloquent and clunky. He gestures wildly, waving his arms as he tells stories, his voice up and down—practically shrieking at points, then mumbling and making little jokes with his friends who are gathered at the side of the room. Like so many of the ultra-Orthodox I’ve met, he has an accent, and for the first time it strikes me as quite beautiful. Iris’s mouth is slightly open; she looks hypnotized. Dov talks for the next forty minutes. He says he was born in Brooklyn and moved to Roseville when he was a child. He says he was never sexually attracted to girls and at age fifteen his sister caught him kissing another Haredi boy. When his mother confronted him he told her he was gay. He said he found the word on the Internet when he rode his bike to the public library and looked up “boys who want to kiss boys.” (Everyone laughs at this.) A year later, his parents sent him to New Hope, and when he ran away from the program, they cut him off and he lived on the street and with friends and people he met on Facebook. I wonder if he ever stayed at the Coney Island house. He says he started speaking out when one of the boys he knew from New Hope committed suicide. And then, he says, he was approached by the lawyers. He stops speaking abruptly.

“I have been talking a long time. Thank you for coming. If you would like to get more information about the lawsuit you can talk to me.”

He steps back from the mic and the room fills with applause. The front two rows are on their feet. Dov suddenly looks shy. He smiles and puts his head down, then grabs a friend from the front row and drags him to the buffet table.

People stop clapping and immediately start talking.

“Did you know about any of that?” Iris asks.

“I knew gay people weren’t accepted. But, I mean, they’re barely accepted at my dad’s church.”

“I’ve read about gay conversion therapy,” says Iris. “There have definitely been articles about it. You know Brice’s sister is gay.” Brice is the nice young man that Iris has been dating for a few months. I don’t really get the attraction—he doesn’t seem terribly interesting. He works in men’s fashion, which is one strike against him in my book. And he has highlights, which is two. Iris hasn’t brought him around much. But I guess I haven’t been very fun lately.