Read Drunken Angel (9781936740062) for Free Online

headed to France, where we drove around Paris tripping on acid. Slept in an abandoned lot next to a Turkish camper overrun with rats, and next morning, horrified, drove hell-bent for leather to Marseille, a city of Africans with scarred cheeks, sunglassed Moroccans with bronzed chests, and police officers in white kepis out of Casablanca . But there was no one willing to peddle us smack. And no one could really blame the Marseille dealers if the sight of three American furry freak brothers with a long-haired brute Bronx bodyguard in tow made them doubt our true intentions.

12
    TIRED, BROKE, WE RETURNED STATESIDE. I WAS now almost nineteen and went to a podunk college in Michigan on a promise of a possible football scholarship. Long-haired, earringed, brain corrupted by LSD, my chin ringed by a Mormon’s beard, twenty pounds under my playing weight, unwashed, pasty-faced, stoned, I stood insolently in front of the coaches with beer breath and bloodshot eyes, and I got benched, and then dropped.
    Began to cruise around with Goldie and Moondog, two local Ann Arbor heads who hipped me to the White Panthers, a political pot party formed to free rock activist John Sinclair (sentenced to ten years for a single joint). I spent a month in their safe house, crashed on a fold-out couch that contained a duffel bag packed with weed, which I smoked the way others chew mints. One day, in walked the Panthers’ house band, the MC5. Their underground hit “Kick Out the Jams, Motherfucker” became the prototype of punk. I recall being backstage at one of their famous Ann Arbor gigs too, and it may be that Beat legend Allen Ginsberg—whom someday I’d
perform with—was there. Hard to say, though. The memory is fuzzy because I was so zonked.
    Done with sports for good, I was admitted as an undergraduate in American lit with a minor in Jewish studies at the City College of New York, still known, at the time, as the Harvard of the Proletariat.
    I studied with Yitz Greenberg, a Jewish studies pioneer, in a course on Israel and the Superpowers, and enrolled in a seminar with Elie Wiesel, the dean of Holocaust literature.
    Elie, as we called him, frail, refined, wore an air of somber courtesy. But underneath lay an invincible sadness that was like a reproach. Virtually everything he said accused the world and confirmed what my mother had tried to teach in her own crude way.
    Another Holocaust was certain to come. Governments of any kind cannot be trusted. The world is and always will be against the Jews. The Holocaust was a civilizational crime, but in a very real sense, no one, yet, had truly paid for it. In fact, those most culpable were now prospering.
    Once, Elie stood at the blackboard, elbow cradled in his hand, eyes wistful, and pronounced in that slow, sad, thoughtful way of his: “The Holocaust is not the end point. No. It is a new kind of beginning. For mankind, a singular sort of precedent. History has shown that once something unprecedented appears in this world,”—he scanned our transfixed eyes—“rather than go away, it sets the stage for future reenactments of the same, more genocides, but on an even larger and more criminal scale.”
    Inflamed with anxious visions of impending Holocaust, I dreamed of armed resistance. Tried to think of ways to acquire guns. Even called Elie once, at his home. He listened, appalled, as I ranted and raged, drunk on Gallo port, about the need to rise
up. The Hit Man and the Angel warred in me. The Angel won. With virtually no resources, I launched a magazine called Jewish Arts Quarterly .
    The first issue contained work by Wiesel as well as lesser-known scholars and poets. My way now seemed clear. I must become a Jewish writer. I launched myself on this course with prophetic gusto. After many months of determined effort, I decided to announce my career path to none other than the quintessential Jewish writer of all time: Isaac Bashevis Singer.

13
    THE