Of the dozen Menachem Mendels in his third-grade class, Menachem Mendel Herzog was one of them.
True, he wasn’t Menachem Mendel Blumenthal who had glasses stuck together by a piece of scotch tape; or Menachem Mendel Himmelfarb who had a pen from Walt Disney World whose felt tip Menachem Mendel accidentally broke; Or Menachem Mendel Schmeltzer whose brother was niftar from a bump in his head; Or Menachem Mendel Leiberman who had once seen a real, live, naked lady in Times Square and said she had hair in front of her privates like his father.
But he was a Menachem Mendel, named, like everyone else, after the Rebbe, the Lubavitch Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Shneerson, Yechi Melech HaMoshiach, The Moshiach, the Messiah, may he live forever, l’olam va’ed, who had died but wasn’t dead, wasn’t dead but only sleeping. You could visit his grave, but he wasn’t down there. He was up in heaven, shamiyim. How did you get to heaven? With an escalator? An elevator? How many stairs? A rope? A ladder like Jacob? He would come back soon if you prayed hard enough and gave tzedekah and did lots of mitzvahs. He was almost ready to come down, almost almost almost. But if you touched yourself at night, cursed, or said mean things to your mother he would say no, not now. and stay in the clouds and make Rabbi Mermelstein’s shuir never ever end.
Already, class never ended. It went on and on and on and on. The hands on the white clock on the class wall stayed where they were like a frowning face with pimples. Eight-twenty. Eight-twenty. Eight-twenty. Eight twenty-one. Menachem Mendel could tell time for all the good it did him. And then Rabbi Mermelstein, who gargled green Scope during class and spit it like a jellyfish from his mouth, said aloud “Menachem Mendel H.Z. is there something interesting on the wall? Something more important than the Torah?” And everyone laughed at him, because nothing, everyone knew, was more important than the Torah.
“Menachem Mendel H.Z. is there someone more perfect than Avraham Avinu?”
And Menachem Mendel knew that too, but sometime he wished class was over and he could go outside and play on the playground next door, not far from the cemetery. He wished to go down the slide that was freezing in the winter and boiling in the summer and the swings that would twist your finger off if they got caught in the chain. The classroom had no windows so Menachem Mendel couldn’t even see the playground or if it was warm or cold outside. Well, there was one window, but since the classroom was in the basement it was covered by a metal grate, filled with crinkly brown leaves that blocked out the sun. Rabbi Mermelstein said the sun was brighter in Crown Heights than anywhere else. And what was worse, sometimes before recess or after class ended at eleven-thirty, Rabbi Mermelstein would say “Menachem Mendel please see me” or “I want to talk to you,” — without even specifying which Menachem Mendel he was talking to since everyone knew —and the class laughed because Menachem Mendel, whose father was also in heaven, was always in trouble for something because he never paid any attention to anything.
Everyone left and Rabbi Mermelstein shut the door.
And Menachem Mendel was late for lunch again.
The boys ate lunch upstairs in the big room with the purple pews. The cheder, boruch HaShem, had just taken over the old silly stone church on Eastern Parkway. In churches they worshipped Jesus, an idol. Those silly goyim, worshipping someone who was already dead. He wasn’t coming back. Rabbi Mermelstein said that Jesus was boiling in a pit of pee in Gehennem. A big ba’ale tzedekah from Argentina who made all his money from the Rebbe bought the church for a million dollars and all the church’s big blue and red stained glass windows were covered by cardboard until another rich Yid gave them another donation so they could replace them with walls and rebuild the church to make it holy. But Menachem Mendel hoped they would keep the church’s tower with the bell that rang by itself on the windiest of days. You weren’t allowed to go up the stairs to the tower and if, chas v’sholom, you did Rabbi Mermelstein said in a second you got kicked out of the cheder.
“Just like this church became a school, all the churches will become shuls and yeshivas for kinderlach like you when the Moshiach comes soon,” Rabbi Mermelstein said on the first day in the new building. “And all the crosses into Magen Davids.”
But the Moshiach already came and didn’t he die? Menachem Mendel wondered. Knowing questions were bad, he fingered the blue lettering on his yarmulke that said “Yechia Melech Hamoshiach,” that dumb as he was, he even knew meant: The King Messiah Will Live.
Over the cardboard, the boys, standing on chairs, taped pictures of the Rebbe who all the Menachem Mendels were named after. The Rebbe’s kind face was everywhere and Menachem Mendel ran his fingers over it. Once when no one was watching him, he found a small rip and picked it until it became larger, almost a tear in the Rebbe’s face. Sometimes he thought that if he would just press hard enough he could jump into the picture and live in the deep groves of the Rebbe’s forehead, the tear or in the skin between where his beard met his mustache. Then when the Rebbe came back, Menachem Mendel would already be there. The Rebbe was so wise and kind, he could get him out of Rabbi Mermelstein’s class.
When the Moshiach came Menachem Mendel assumed he would also get better lunches. Other boys had fancy lunches and Super Snacks Onion Rings and Pizza Wheels and Falafel Bits and even Fruit Roll-ups, but Menachem Mendel only had a soggy sandwich of peanut butter and jelly and browned apple slices and if, he was very, very lucky, a squishy grilled cheese sandwich wrapped in tinfoil and a Yoo-hoo. He asked the other kids for some of their Super Snacks and sometimes Menachem Mendel Himmelfarb would give him a one or two or even a handful. But the other kids would call out “Menachem Mendel is begging again,” and everyone who had Super Snacks would run away from him. Once after Menachem Mendel was really bad during class but good during lunch, Rabbi Mermelstein had taken him out and Menachem Mendel came back with a slice of hot pizza, French fries and a small glass bottle of Mayim Hayim soda. And wasn’t everyone jealous then?
One way Menachem Mendel passed time in class was thinking about his secrets. While Rabbi Mermelstein talked about Avrohom Avinu and his three guests who were angels or Noach and his animals, Menachem Mendel thought about his many secrets, so many that sometimes he had trouble keeping track of all of them. When Menachem Mendel Blumenthal said Menachem Mendel didn’t have a friend in the whole entire world and even if there were aliens they still wouldn’t be Menachem Mendel’s friends, he was wrong. Menachem Mendel did have a friend. And that friend was a goy. And he was a Black Goy. Imagine how shocked Menachem Mendel Blumenthal would be if he knew, but Menachem Mendel could never tell or his mother would find out and he wouldn’t be able to visit his black goy friend.
No one was home when cheder finished. Menachem Mendel’s mother worked for bad goyim who barely let her off five minutes before Shabbos and she had to cook a delicious meal for Menachem Mendel and his three sisters who didn’t really appreciate and know what — all — she did for them. So Menachem Mendel knocked on the landlord’s door and sat in Mrs. Schwartz’s dining room that smelled of pea soup and did his mishnayot and chumash homework on her glass coffee table. Mrs. Schwartz, whose face was wrinkled like a dill pickle, put out some stale crackers and herring and talked on her cordless phone about how she hated having to watch her tenant’s kid, that woman, that woman, who just couldn’t get her act together, though Mrs. Schwartz had such rachmones, pity, she just had it up to here with them and that little brat wasn’t even grateful. Boy, did she know how much Gan Eden she was getting for this. And they never ever paid their measly rent on time and sometimes the checks even bounced. And how would she buy a new treadmill for Shloimy if their checks kept bouncing?
Instead of going to Mrs. Schwartz’s apartment, Menachem Mendel stayed by the newsstand on Eastern Parkway and looked at the covers of the magazine. Even in the rain. Some of the magazines had almost naked ladies on them. That was where he met his black goy friend. His black goy friend lived inside the newsstand like a turtle lived inside its shell.
“You going to buy something?” The black goy asked Menachem Mendel. When Menachem Mendel didn’t answer, the black goy said: “Shoo. On your way then.”
Menachem Mendel left. He knew it was his yetzer hora, his evil inclination, pulling him to the newsstand, like it pulled him to put his hands in his pajamas at night when his sisters were sleeping and he could hear his mother snoring in the living room, but he couldn’t fight it; he knew that if he really wanted to go to Gan Eden he should troop back to Mrs. Schwartz’s dining room, say please and thank you, and do his homework at the glass coffee table and make the brochos over the stale crackers he didn’t like, but instead he came back the next day.
“You back again?” The black goy sighed, a pincushion letting out air. And Menachem Mendel just stood there hoping he didn’t shoo him away. And it was a lucky day for Menchem Mendel because soon some other customers came around and his black goy friend forgot all about him.
He came back the next day and there were more people mulling around the newsstand.
“Look, it’s Haim not-buying-anything.” The black goy laughed and Menachem Mendel scurried away, his cheeks hot.
Menachem Mendel knew how to get things from adults. You kept on asking until they gave in. So Menachem Mendel did that day after day, until the black goy stopped noticing him at all. Menachem Mendel just stood there like he was a part of the envir-on-ment, like he could change colors like a chameleon; that if he stood still he was like an unlit street lamp, and it worked.
Sometimes the other customers talked about him, but the black goy didn’t laugh at him.
“What’s your name?” The black goy asked him one day when it started getting dark early and leaves fell in clusters from the trees.
You never talked to goyim, Menachem Mendel knew, especially non-Jewish ones. So he just shook his head and the black goy smiled.
“I got you. You don’t talk to not chasidim. I’m Harold.” He held out his hand and Menachem Mendel shook it because — while you weren’t supposed to talk to goyim — no one said anything about touching them or shaking their hands. His hands were coarser and harder than any hands Menachem Mendel had shook, especially Rabbi Mermelstein’s hand always soft and slippery from the lotion he kept in his desk. They didn’t talk after that, but whenever Menachem Mendel came after school, the black goy nodded at him because they were friends.
“I lived here all my life,” The black goy said one day, said gesturing around. “I wanted to be an astronaut, but back then, there weren’t no black astronauts. Think about that. Negros in space.”
The really holy Lubavitchers would be sent off to faraway places with strange names like Cambodia and China where there were palaces made of skulls, but a few brave Jews would go there and then Hashem’s light shined on it. Maybe the holiest Lubavitchers would be sent to outer space to find troubled Jewish neshomas there.
Before Menachem Mendel left that day, the black goy handed him a brown paper bag and a bottle of coke.
“No one buys this stuff anymore, anyway,” he explained. “Go home and read that shit.”
Shit was a bad word and Menachem Mendel didn’t read. He could if he tried really hard, but usually he could get away with mumbling anything when his teacher asked him to read aloud. At home, making it just in time before his mother arrived, Menachem opened the bag. Inside were thin books of bright colors. They had better drawings than he’d ever seen; better than the pictures Menachem Mendel Leiberman drew for a quarter each. In the thin books, men flew and shot webs out of their hands. Menachem Mendel stared at the pictures while he lay down on the floor of his room. When he got angry, one man turned green and strong and threw cars into the air. His favorite was Superman. He could fly in the air and wore a blue and red suit with a red cape and had an “S” on his chest. During lunch sometimes Rabbi Mermelstein said that Menachem Mendel was the best boy and that he was so smart; smart enough to know that the “S” stood for Tzaddik and that the man in the red cape must be Lubavitch.
Menachem Mendel didn’t have much time with the comic books. The next day when he came home he found the brown bag in the garbage along with the books, ripped to shreds. His mother didn’t even have to say anything. Menachem Mendel knew he was bad. She just walked up to him and slapped him twice, once on each cheek, while his stupid sisters cried.
But it was okay; now during class Menachem Mendel had something else to think about. Superman had black hair, not like Menachem Mendel’s red hair. Everyone knew that the Rebbe had special powers. Who would win in a fight? Superman or the Rebbe? Superman could punch hard and should shoot red light out of his eyes, but the Rebbe could pray to Hashem. He knew he shouldn’t think about it but sometimes he couldn’t help himself. Thinking that Superman could beat the Rebbe was a sin. Maybe they would team up to fight Doomsday. The Lubavitch Rebbe and Superman Team Up to Fight Doomsday. Superman and the Lubavitch Rebbe beat up Rabbi Mermelstein.
Also, Menachem Mendel wondered, could the Rebbe be Superman? He kept on checking under his shirt to see if there was a red and blue ‘S’ but he only found his yellowed tzitzit, the material worn slick by his fingers running up it. All this filled Menachem Mendel’s head, nourishkeit, Rabbi Mermelstein would say, and Rabbi Mermelstein had noticed that Menachem Mendel, who never paid attention was paying even less attention than usual. At the end of class, while all the other boys filed out of the classroom, Menachem Mendel sat by his desk.
“Menachem Mendel please wait,” Rabbi Mermelstein said and wheeled his green chair next to Menachem Mendel’s desk.
“How’s your mother? Your poor mother?” Rabbi Mermelstein’s face was lined and tired because of all the kindness he did, Menachem Mendel knew. His mother told him.
Rabbi Mermelstein took Menachem Mendel’s hand and put it on the top of the desk. Rabbi Mermelstein laid out each one of Menachem Mendel’s fingers and then guided them towards his pant leg. He moved it back and forth and Menachem Mendel felt something inside Rabbi Mermelstein’s pants harden from a snake to a staff like in the story of Moshe and Pharoah. Ten plagues: blood, frogs lice boils, hail, beasts, darkness, death.
“You were very good today, Menachem Mendel,” Rabbi Mermelstein intoned, closing his eyes. He moved Menachem Mendel’s hand up and down his leg, first slow then faster. Menachem Mendel did what he always did during lunch with Rabbi Mermelstein, he pretended that the hand wasn’t his, that it belonged to another Menachem Mendel. A better Menachem Mendel who lived in a nicer house, who had a father, and whose family had a car and maybe even a television. A Menachem Mendel that had an undershirt with a “S” on it.
Rabbi Mermelstein moaned.
“Such a talmid chochom.”
Superman flew in the air and wore a blue and red suit with a red cape, an “S” on his chest. If the Lubavitch Rebbe could be Superman then anyone could.
Menachem Mendel grabbed and squeezed and dug his nails into whatever was in Mermelstein’s leg. Rabbi Mermelstein howled, sputtered and grabbed him, his hands like two claws in a prize machine but this Menachem Mendel was too fast. He was Superman, Kal El. He didn’t even need a phone booth to change. He shot out of the classroom faster than a speeding bullet, faster than the train that rattled above Atlantic Parkway. Up the stairs and through the lunchroom, where the other Menachem Mendels called out to see what was going on. He heard Mermelstein behind him like Doomsday clomping after him. Menachem Mendel almost flew.
He took the stairs two-by-two, then three by three, then flights each as he climbed the tower. He only paused at the very tippy top, far above Empire Parkway where the people looked so small he could squash them between his fingers. Menachem Mendel grabbed the thick rope of the bell and pulled, his hands burning. He rang it again and again until his ears throbbed and his vision went blurry and he couldn’t hear anything else but the bell was so loud it reached to the heavens, telling the Messiah, late as he was, it was time to arrive.
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