Clothing Optional Read online

  Think I’m kidding? Then how else would you explain the following conversation that actually took place between me and an unnamed executive at an unnamed movie studio?

  “Great script, Alan. We just have a few notes.”

  “Sure.”

  “Starting with the character of the wife.”

  “Eleanor.”

  “Yes. She seems rather serious and unsexy.”

  “Well, Eleanor Roosevelt was rather serious and unsexy.”

  “Fine, but if we want to get Queen Latifah to play this part, we might have to make a few minor adjustments.”

  “Queen Latifah?”

  “Yeah, she’s real hot since that movie she did with Steve Martin, and she’s looking for her next project.”

  “Queen Latifah as Eleanor Roosevelt?”

  “Wouldn’t that be great?”

  “No, it’s absurd.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Eleanor Roosevelt wasn’t black.”

  “Why are you being so difficult?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just having a little trouble envisioning the star of Barbershop 2 being married to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”

  “She’s an incredibly versatile actress, Alan. We’re even thinking about having her and whoever plays Franklin do a big dance number.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Maybe a hip-hop thing in the White House or in front of Congress.”

  “But FDR had polio. He was in a wheelchair.”

  “We have a note about that, too.”

  I ultimately got fired from that job. The unnamed executive at the unnamed movie studio told my agent that I was out of touch with today’s audiences.

  Dedication

  This book, Modern Ethics, could not have seen the light of day without the encouragement of Rabbi Nathan R. Rosenzweig, who served as a living inspiration for the values explored within the pages that follow. Even these words underestimate what he has given to this journey, which has been more than three years in the making.

  When I first approached Rabbi Rosenzweig, the spiritual leader of our local synagogue, and told him of my desire to explore the moral choices confronting twenty-first-century man, he nodded, locked the door to his study, looked into my eyes, and asked me why I was doing this.

  “What do you know?” he pleaded. “Who sent you?”

  “No one sent me,” I assured him. “I’m just doing research for a book.”

  “Swear.”

  “Swear?”

  “To God.”

  “To God?”

  “Who then?”

  “I swear to God, Rabbi Rosenzweig.”

  “Good. Now, you see what I just did? I presented you with a modern ethical choice. Whether to think I was hiding something or give me the benefit of the doubt because I’m a rabbi who would never even think of embezzling from the temple’s building fund.”

  He leaned back in his armchair and exhaled a prodigious sigh that only a man of God could muster. I had sought Rabbi Rosenzweig’s counsel as he had written on this very subject himself in his novel I Swear I Didn’t Do It (Shalom Press, 2002), which a starred Kirkus review said was “written with the uncanny authority of a man intimately familiar with the darkest recesses of the guilty mind. If one didn’t know better, you’d say the rabbi himself was the protagonist and that this was not a work of fiction.”

  “So, how can I be of help?” he asked.

  “Well, I plan on citing cases where different people had choices to make and what went into the making of their eventual decisions.”

  “What people?” he snapped as his back arched in what could best be described as clerical recoil. “Anyone local?”

  “Well, if anyone local has a story to tell…”

  “Because even a local person can do things out of character due to pressure to yield to the monetary demands of a recently widowed congregant threatening him with exposure after he took her to a desert spa for a weekend on a wrongheaded attempt to help her cope with the first step of the grieving process.”

  “Oh my…”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing, Rabbi.”

  “Swear to God?”

  “Who then?” I laughed. He didn’t.

  “So the man in this particular example,” he continued, “a man with a wife and family of his own, mind you, had a choice to make. Does he risk losing everything dear to him, or does he first try to reason with the woman before resorting to covering his head with a prayer shawl to avoid detection when he goes out at night to slash the tires of her SUV?”

  Oddly enough, I was familiar with the tire-slashing incident. We live in a small town in suburban New Jersey, and the boy who was charged (a troubled eleven-year-old who lost his father to the highly coincidental heart attack he suffered while buying jogging shorts) happens to live a few doors down from me.

  “Steven Jogardnick.”

  “Who?” asked the rabbi.

  “The kid who’s under house arrest for slashing those tires.”

  “Oh, right,” said the rabbi. “That fat little turd with the unsightly overbite.”

  “Fat little turd?”

  “One of God’s foul tips, don’t you think?”

  “But if Steven was wrongly accused…” I protested.

  “I’d advise you to be mindful of your tone, young man. Remember the seventh commandment. About honoring thy rabbis.”

  “Excuse me, but the commandment says to honor thy father and thy mother. It says nothing about rabbis. And that’s the fifth commandment, by the way. The seventh says one shall not commit adultery, which I believe the man in this particular example has already broken, along with the third, eighth, ninth, tenth, and very possibly the fourth if he committed any of the above on a Saturday.”

  “Your point?”

  “That shouldn’t a rabbi, with all due respect, be better familiar with the Ten Commandments than the one in this example seems to be?”

  “Yes, I firmly believe that a rabbi should.”

  “Then why isn’t this rabbi—”

  “This is an unpredictable world we live in. And life doesn’t always run along the direct course we chart to reach our goals. So if a young man dreams of becoming a rabbi but then his father dies so he has no choice but to take over his plumbing and heating business to support his aging mother, then he does what he has to do at that time. And if years later, after his mother passes on, he still has that burning desire to be in the rabbinate but has neither the time nor patience to learn the Hebrew language so he goes online and gets a clergyman’s certificate, is he any less a man of God than someone who has graduated the Jewish Theological Seminary? I don’t think so. Plus, given those circumstances, I truly think that the young man in the example has done quite admirably given that he is actually…”

  “A plumber?” I asked with the same horrified intonation with which one would deliver the line “You mean to tell me that two of my sons were Bar Mitzvahed by a man who’s better trained to lie on his back and scoop the sludge from a clogged sink?”

  “Call that young man in this particular example what you wish,” he responded. “That is your prerogative. Just know that not only do I disagree but I fully expect that anything we’ve discussed will not leave this room as it falls under…”

  “Author-plumber confidentiality?”

  And though I personally didn’t subscribe to the validity of such a bond, I suddenly found myself with my own decision to make and the full understanding of its rather far-reaching implications. On the one hand, the reputations of an innocent boy and a slutty widow were at stake. On the other hand, the tranquillity of a faithful community would most definitely be upset by the news that the man who chants the prayers for their dead may not know a Torah from a sump pump. Sensitive to the fact that either choice could provide a most disastrous result, I wondered if there was a compromise to be discussed.

  “Bargain?” he asked. “You want to bargain with a rabbi?”

  “I’d
love to,” I answered. “But since there are no rabbis here at the moment, maybe you and I should take a crack at it.”

  “And just what are you proposing?”

  “That I won’t tell anyone you’re a fraud if you confess to the tire-slashing incident.”

  “I can’t do that,” he responded. “Such an admission would destroy my credibility with the congregation.”

  “Then what if I don’t tell anyone you’re a fraud and if you return all the money you embezzled from the temple’s building fund to pay off the slutty widow?”

  “Can’t do that either,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s a lot more money than I’ll ever be able to pay back on my salary.”

  “Then what if I don’t tell anyone you’re a fraud and you give me the slutty widow’s phone number?”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “Maybe so,” I answered. “But that’s my final offer.”

  “Don’t do it,” he insisted. “She’ll destroy your life.”

  “Let me worry about the destruction of my life.”

  “I can’t have this on my head.”

  “All of a sudden things are going to be on your head?” I asked. “Until this conversation absolutely nothing that was going on in your sordid life was anywhere near your head. So don’t bullshit me, okay? Given all that I know about you, I’d say you’re getting off rather easy.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “Come on, buddy. All I’m asking for is a simple seven-digit telephone number. Now cough it up.”

  “Make it six.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’ll tell you six of the digits. This way if I’m ever asked if I gave you her phone number, it won’t be on my head when I say no.”

  “Again with your head?”

  “Please.”

  “Fine. Just make sure that the six digits you give me are in the right order.”

  “Really?”

  “Hey!”

  “Okay, okay.”

  It was an encounter that could best be described as life-altering, as I got a new girlfriend and a new plumber and changed temples in the same afternoon. So it is for these reasons that this book is dedicated to Nathan R. Rosenzweig—if in fact that’s his real name.

  Happy

  The vestibule of an apartment building. Nothing out of the ordinary: a door one enters from the street, a small area with a tenant directory on the wall, and another door that one has to either use a key or be buzzed by a tenant to open.

  SL of the vestibule is a small lobby, with a few apartment doors and an elevator door on its perimeter.

  Drab is the motif here. Chipped paint, faint vestiges of graffiti that defiantly still peeps through the efforts of a whitewash, and lighting a few watts dimmer than it really should be. The overall feeling is that although the place is clean and well maintained, it is probably part of a low-income housing development that years and lack of funds have gotten the better of.

  The time is the present.

  AT RISE: Donald Rappaport, forty-two, opens the outside door and enters the vestibule. He is wearing a suit and looks extremely hot, as his forehead is beading with perspiration and the underarms of his suit jacket are drenched with huge wet spots.

  He scans the directory, finds the name he’s looking for, tries to open the inside door, realizes it’s locked, then pushes the button next to the name on the directory.

  While waiting for a response, he tries to cool off by fanning himself with his attaché case.

  DONALD

  Fucking hot…

  He pushes the button again and while waiting for a response tries to cool off by fanning himself with his tie.

  DONALD (cont’d)

  So fucking hot.

  He pushes the button a third time and while waiting for a response tries to cool off by fanning himself by opening and closing the outside door a number of times.

  DONALD (cont’d)

  Fucking Florida.

  Through the intercom we hear the offstage voice of an older man.

  MAN’S VOICE

  Yes?

  DONALD

  Mr. Haliday?

  MAN’S VOICE

  Who’d like to know?

  DONALD

  I would.

  MAN’S VOICE

  And you would be…?

  DONALD

  From New York.

  MAN’S VOICE

  And you think that narrows it down?

  DONALD

  Oh, don’t mind me. I’m just a little disoriented. You see, my parents live in Boca Raton and I just flew here with my wife and kids because tonight’s the first night of Passover.

  MAN’S VOICE

  And you think that narrows it down? This time of year everyone from New York comes to Florida.

  DONALD

  Well, I wouldn’t say everyone.

  MAN’S VOICE

  Oh, that’s right. John Gotti’s still in jail. Now, what can I do for you?

  DONALD

  Look, my name is Donald Rappaport, and after we landed in West Palm Beach, I rented a Ford Taurus and dropped everyone off at my folks’ place in Boca and then drove straight here, on I-95, to Delray Beach to try to find George Haliday because I want to speak to him. Are you him?

  MAN’S VOICE

  I could be. But only on one condition.

  DONALD

  Which is?

  MAN’S VOICE

  That I don’t have to hear one more word about your itinerary. Deal?

  DONALD

  Deal.

  MAN’S VOICE

  Then yes, I am George Haliday.

  DONALD

  The George Haliday?

  MAN’S VOICE

  A George Haliday.

  DONALD

  But I’m looking for the George Haliday.

  MAN’S VOICE

  The George Haliday who’s the superintendent of this building?

  DONALD

  No, the George Haliday who used to play for the Mets.

  MAN’S VOICE

  Oh, that the George Haliday.

  DONALD

  Yes, that the George Haliday. Are you him?

  MAN’S VOICE

  I was.

  DONALD

  Well, that makes no sense.

  MAN’S VOICE

  How come?

  DONALD

  Because either you’re the George Haliday who used to play for the Mets or you’re not. It’s not like you used to play for the Mets but you no longer used to play for them. You either did or you didn’t, so you either are or you aren’t.

  MAN’S VOICE

  Ow!

  DONALD

  Something wrong?

  MAN’S VOICE

  Yeah, I just threw my back out trying to follow that speech.

  DONALD

  Sorry.

  MAN’S VOICE

  May I remind you, sir, that I am a janitor. Break something, I’ll fix it. Soil it, I’ll clean it. Lose it, I’ll replace it. Anything more complicated, I have to call somebody. Please don’t make me have to do that with this conversation.

  DONALD

  Okay. All I want to know is…

  MAN’S VOICE

  …if I’m the George Haliday who once played baseball.

  DONALD

  Yes.

  MAN’S VOICE

  Yes.

  DONALD

  You are?

  MAN’S VOICE

  Yes.

  DONALD

  You’re Happy Haliday?

  MAN’S VOICE

  I’m Happy Haliday.

  DONALD

  Great!

  MAN’S VOICE

  Now, is there something you’d like to talk to me about?

  DONALD

  Yes, very much.

  MAN’S VOICE

  And you would like to have this talk face-to-face?

  DONALD

  Yes, I would.

  MAN’S VOICE

  So then I’ll buzz you in,
okay?

  DONALD

  Okay.

  MAN’S VOICE

  See how simple life can be if you just get to the point?

  The buzzer sounds. Donald pushes open the door, enters the inner lobby, and approaches the door on the SL wall. He waits patiently for it to open. While he does, he fixes his hair and collar as if he was primping for an important meeting.

  The door opens and George “Happy” Haliday appears. He is a sixty-four-year-old black man with gray hair, eyeglasses, and an infectious smile.

  HAPPY

  George Haliday.

  DONALD

  Donald Rappaport.

  They shake hands.

  HAPPY

  Well, it’s nice to finally have a face to go along with the voice.

  Donald just stands there, as if mesmerized.

  HAPPY (cont’d)

  You okay?

  Donald is in awe.

  HAPPY (cont’d)

  Will you be talking soon?

  DONALD

  Oh, sorry. I guess I’m just a little starstruck.

  Happy looks around at the setting, taking in the mundane dinginess of it all.

  HAPPY

  Well, I can see how all this might be overwhelming. But don’t worry. I think you’ll find that we janitors are just like ordinary people—once you get past all the glitter and the goddamn paparazzi. So…Donald …Qué pasa?