SUNDAY AFTERNOON, WOOKY WITH THE FLU (1/4/04)

What else to do on a Sunday afternoon when you are languishing with “the real flu” than to tell you about the first time I got roaring drunk, age 15. O what a special time that was . . .

In the mid-‘60s, it was a simple dichotomy: If you were a Camp Ramah kid, and you had just finished your junior year, and your parents could afford it, you were trundled off to the much trumpeted Ramah Seminar in Israel.

The rest of us defaulted to the Ramah Seminar stateside at a clammy used-to-be Christian orphanage in Nyack. This was the option intended for us down-and-outers: a morning of fairly serious classes, an hour or so of semi-enforced study each evening, the rest of the day completely unstructured, laissez faire, with “advisors” (never to be called “counselors”) who attempted, with near-futility, to "advise" us in the direction of productive activities. This was the summer of 1965. The good news was that it was kind of like living on a commune. The bad news was that there were neither free drugs nor free sex, or at least so we thought.

That final evening of Seminar took and filtered the customary unstructuredness through the mind and palette of Jackson Pollock. Guys and girls who were savvy enough to pair up snuck off to get laid. When I think back, that was most of them. I had a terrible crush on a girl named Sheila, two years older, who knew how to play the puppy love and raging hormones of a naïve 15-year-old off against each other. She teased me and was friendly, even coquettish, by day, but that night she was making it with Eli, an Israeli “advisor.”

So the few pathetic remnants, I the youngest among them, decided that we would drink away our farewell. What were the libations? Someone had secreted away two six-packs of off-brand malt liquor and a fifth of Four Roses, no ice, one bottle of ginger ale. My three companions were a little savvier, so they got happy. I, having had no experience, got roaring, puking drunk. We cut that rotgut with ginger ale until it ran out, then with lukewarm water.

And the audience went wild. I remember little of the acute drunkenness, save pitching-and-rolling side-to-side in my bunk chanting the entire weekday Amidah (page-after-page of petitional prayers) impeccably by heart.

That was clearly my most glorious moment. For, shortly thereafter, the skids ensued. I need not become graphic, but to this day I am sure that my gullet had chucked up way more than I had chucked down.

The Prosecuting Angel was swift and ruthless in meting out his judgment:

As dawn broke, and I could no longer recite the morning Amidah with such acuity, we were to be bused from Nyack to Jewish Theological Seminary in Upper Manhattan, to go our separate ways. That meant that – rotten-sick-to-my-stomach, wall-to-wall Astroturf lining my mouth, the Anvil Chorus clanging in my head – I was to wait patiently for four hours at the Seminary, take a subway, bags in tow, to Grand Central Station, and board the otherwise trendy and quite romantic Twentieth Century Limited for the 19-hour shuffle-off-to-Chicago, where I was to be greeted by my doting parents. And, as a sidebar, my noodgey traveling companion, Barry, kept reminding me that I had promised him all summer that before we got to Grand Central, I would join him for a hot pastrami sandwich at the late Lou G. Siegel’s.

I remember mercifully little of the actual trip. I do recollect renting a pillow for a buck and sleeping off the drunk. This, by the way, has never stopped me from boasting to my kids, by cracky, how I had once traveled on the legendary Twentieth Century Limited.

If not the trip, what reminiscences do I retain?

Well, I do remember that while drying out on my bunk on the morning after, the Head Advisor lectured me ad (already) nauseum about what a shameful disappointment I had become for everyone who had heretofore so respected me. Amazing . . . now that the summer was over, he finally gave me advice.

I also remember only too well feebly knocking on door after door of the Seminary’s Rabbinical School dormitory rooms, begging student after student to let me use his sink long enough to brush my moss-green teeth . . . and repeatedly being told without a scintilla of compassion in English, Yiddish, Hebrew, Aramaic, Ugaritic, to “get lost.” Only now, 39 years later, does the cloud of my disdain for the Conservative rabbinate, class of 1965, lift, as I make my peace knowing that they were merely pawns in the master-plan of the Prosecuting Angel.

I also remember greeting my parents, keeping a smile plastered to my face, begging off on a/nother pastrami-sandwich lunch at Golda’s on Devon Avenue, complaining to them of this awful “sinus headache,” for which only two Bufferin would do. May they rest in peace, they went to their graves none the wiser, and if they bump in to that Prosecuting Angel, I have good vibes that my secret remains safe with him.

And finally, there was that first triumphal march down the majestic length of Devon Avenue on my way to synagogue. You have to remember Chicago’s mores well to keep in mind that taverns pretty much lined every block of Devon Avenue on one side of the street or the other, and each of those taverns belched forth the most acrid stench of beer, malt liquor and, uh . . . Four Roses. The visceral stimuli conveyed by that aroma turned my triumphal march into a cross-the-street-and-back-again zigzag, second only in slapstick to Peter Falk’s command to Alan Arkin, “Serpentine!” in that unforgettably hysterical scene in the original In-Laws. My pathetic weekly serpentine of penance down Devon continued until I went away to college.

You want me to say, “those were the days”? OK, those were the days. Frankly, I don’t think about them too much anymore. But, on a Sunday afternoon, feeling wooky with the flu, I really don’t have a much better place for my mind and spirit to be.

I’m glad that you stopped by.