Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

You want to know how bad it got? Would you believe me if I told you? Probably not. They never do. I’ll tell you anyway. All right. Here goes.

I was on fabled Alaskan Air Flight 265, Fairbanks to Juneau, the night that word got out that someone — his name isn’t just lost to history, it was never known to it — was going to six-pack the entire plane.

When I heard that I knew it was time to get right with God.

And, unfastening my seat belt, I rose at my seat and, raising my arm and extending my glass, toasted first class, toasted economy class, toasted smoking and nonsmoking, toasted the crew, the folks in the lavs. Thinking: the look, the look, the proprietary smirk. Hold that look. Whatever it was that platformed the heart and smugged the senses and leant to a guy his surveyor’s instincts, like a fellow on horseback, something at once possessive and hospitable. Something father-of-the-bride, say, founder-of-the-feast, chairman-of-the-board, leader-of-the-band. Something maitre d’, master-of-ceremonies. Something patrician, the long, deep bloodlines of first families and old dough. And something underneath, something villainous and wicked, something You’ll-Get-Yours!

As if to say to them: You see? You see how hard-core the greed is behind this, behind all the joke anonymity — Look who says he’s anonymous — and grab-bag glee. And might have brought it off, right then right there have ended all the big-shot posturing (which was already beginning to spill over, which was already beginning to spill over and leave mere just money behind holding the bag, which had already, I mean, started to cost actual lives — in mad heroics, in throwing sound bodies after broken ones, good lives after bad, in all the leap-before-you-look strategics of futile, crazy kamikaze), and might have brought it off. Closed down the bidding right then, right there. If at that moment the stewardess hadn’t come up to me and within the hearing of at least nine or ten passengers told me she was grateful I’d identified myself because there’d been a mistake, that Alaskan Air apologized for the delay but the ground crew in Fairbanks somehow hadn’t gotten the word and had failed to lay on the requisite additional liquor they would have needed for me to six-pack a sold-out 747. She said she’d notified the captain and he’d made arrangements with the tower in Anchorage to set down and take on supplies though she was afraid there’d be a several-hundred-dollar landing fee that I’d have to pay and that after I gave her the green light she’d have to clear it with the rest of the passengers anyway.

Too late it occurred that I hadn’t thought all this through but had engaged in some pretty fair leap-before-looking kamikazics of my own. Too late it occurred that the real founder of the feast may have been on board, sitting back, watching me, waiting on my green light before springing through his. To jolt my Hebrew ass. But then I realized that spurious mercies was what it was all about in the first place, and took my chances.

“Folks,” I said, collecting their attention, “folks?” And cupped my hands to shout our situation to them through. Concluding, “FAA regulations require a community decision on this one. Who wants to divert to Anchorage? May I see hands?”

Relying, you see, on the kindness of strangers. On their generosity ransoming my generosity. Which, of course, in those flush times, it not only had to do but did. The nays had it, and forty minutes later the pilot turned on the Fasten Seat Belt sign and was about to illuminate the No Smoking one in preparation for our landing in Juneau when the real six-packer stood up and identified himself. “Go back,” he demanded, “go back to Anchorage. Turn this fucker around and let’s go get that liquor! What say, fellows,” and, pointing at me, said, “my friend here is thirsty!”

And this time the ayes had it. Because of the fuel situation. Because we just might not have had enough to make it back to Anchorage, and risk and foolhardiness were generosity too, a sort of princely largesse and lavish bounty when what you’re giving is your life!

Never mind my humiliation. My humiliation wasn’t even in it. Not at these prices. Not for those stakes.

In all fairness, did I say, what else could be expected of me? In all fairness, did I answer, nothing, nothing at all?

What could I do?

Well, I could become a missionary.

I became a missionary.

Taking advantage of my company plane privileges, and sending my posters and announcements on before me, the purple mail I didn’t bother to go in for myself when it turned up in the rabbi trailer, I began to fly to the other crew camps. I flew to the camps at Prudhoe Bay and Toolik, Galbraith Lake and Happy Valley. I flew to Dietrich and Coldfoot camps, to 5 Mile and Fairbanks. And though I was gone from it now more often than I was there, Prospect Creek continued to serve as the base camp for Mother Church. Except for the topography (and even the topography was more or less the same, the guiding principle of the pipeline geologists being, I suppose, to lay as straight and low a line as possible Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, sea level to sea level), the camps could have been gas, food and lodging stops just off an interstate.

Preceded, as I say, by my purple mail campaign, that one-sided indigo correspondence based on all those already failed, in-house missives I had for model — the memos, bulletins and announcements I insisted (as those I myself received, and which I not only ignored but, if I saw them at all, regarded merely as a kind of neutral fallout, like dead leaves in a gutter, say, dry and past their color, are a neutral fallout, looking on such sad-ass stuff as mere second-per-second hype, insisted they would mine) would change, though I didn’t even know them yet and only had their names off Alyeska’s Address-o-graph machine, their lives. Borrowing (though I don’t believe I knew this) from my Christian friends the mystic possibilities, coming on strong with joy for joy, arms opened wide in forgiveness. Ahead of my time in the forgive-and-forget department, wiping their slates of incest and child abuse, fornication, drunkenness, wife bashing and all the rest of the seven deadlys, inventing customized, Jewish, no-fault sin.

Signed Jerome Goldkorn, Chief Rabbi, Alaska Pipeline.

And climbed down from my airplane at Prudhoe, at Toolik, Happy Valley and Galbraith Lake, at Dietrich, at Coldfoot, at 5 Mile, at Fairbanks, not only ahead of my time but out in front of theirs, too. Or what would have been theirs if there’d been enough Jews waiting out on the tarmac for me or in the presecured Atco units, the card rooms and chapels, dining halls, clubs and theaters to constitute a them. It was all right, I told myself, Rome wasn’t built in a day either, and went off to look for them in the infirmary, tracked them down in their trailers, or out on site where they worked. If you’re going to judge only by — what? — the sock hoppers I managed to sign up or got to agree to go on retreat or come to services, I don’t suppose I was much of a success (although Alyeska had no cause for complaint and, I’ll say this much for them, they never did, and this much for myself — I worked my ass off), but I was planting the seed, laying the groundwork, showing the flag, and when I returned, dropping like Santa out of the sky, I had food for them, the recipes for which Shelley gave me over the phone and which I passed on to Alyeska’s bakers and chefs.

“Here,” I would say, dispensing mandel bread, dispensing kugel, dispensing kishke, kasha and varnishkes, holding putchah out to them (a sort of jellied calves’ hoof), thermoses of full-fledged chicken soup, gefilte fish made from arctic char and salmon, dispensing macaroons, “from the kitchens of Prospect Creek! Enjoy, enjoy! Will we be seeing you come Chol Hamod? Can we count on you this Lag b’Omer?”