Alan Goldfein

Things Equal to the Same Thing Alan Goldfein

Buddy Becker lost his woman Sally Asher to a rabbi. Rabbi Paul Say. Buddy was a Jew. Buddy's woman Sally was a prostitute, from the depleted coal-hills of West Virginia. Both Buddy and the rabbi had met Sally when cruising the main acknowledged Baltimore hooker street for what men cruise hooker streets for. Both Buddy and the rabbi, Paul, were men who were remarkable in their own ways-and certainly not for their hooker-proclivities. And Sally was as well a unique woman in her own right. First, the rabbi: Paul Say was a shy, sexually inexperienced bachelor in his late twenties, and he regarded that pallid greenness of his in life's most crucial nature, most essential nature, as a considerable failing: how might he presume to, as it were, lead people, a congregation, even as a miniature modern image of, Moses? Maimonides? Abraham?-it pained him to even think of himself in the tradition of such giants of faith. The prostitute, this Sally, well she might at least help by lending the rabbi some level of experience-even if that experience would be stunted, stained and less than moral. The Rabbi Paul Say was a tormented man who, eventually, and not only because of his torment, came to find in himself a love for prostitute Sally Asher. Buddy Becker, the rabbi's competitor for Sally's love, is a hustler, but in a rather benevolent non-mercantile motif, and a reader who claims to have read Everything, from the ancient Greeks on through James Joyce. This "hustle scholarship" has allowed Buddy his survival-by-entertainment: the permission to mooch at friends' houses -if the moochee happens to be a woman. A bit of Aristotle said this, Heidegger said that, and Buddy The Explainer, is in. . . But when Buddy finds himself womanless, he finds a hooker. But hooker Sally Asher is different. She's special-her sentiments, her perceptions, her instinctive understandings, even her weaknesses. She may be the most honest and trustworthy of this unlikely trio. The rabbi's cruising for a prostitute had to do with embarrassment and inexperience and the painful contest between biology and religion, while Buddy Becker's cruising had to do with habit and spare time killing, and fun. But both men, afflicted by their warpings of weakness, fell in love with this unusual lost "hickabilly", who was, in her way, one strong woman, survival-bent. . . Emotional adulthood for hustler and for rabbi? Two marred men to be stirred and risen.