The Soup Kitchen

When I walked into the soup kitchen, the stench of bleach and roasted chicken almost knocked me over. Sunlight shone through the latticed windows, drawing cage designs on the blue tiled floor. Blank-faced workers stood drone-like at long metal counters, chopping vegetables, tossing salads, slathering sauce on chickens. They didn't seem thrilled to be helping the less fortunate, nor excited at the character they were building for themselves. I knew exactly how they felt. I didn't want to be there either. My temple youth group made me come. They made us go to charitable organizations and work for free. I'm pretty sure Rabbi Schwartz got kickbacks from the charities.
"You! Young man!” a large red-headed woman called to me. "You can't be back here. This is the food preparation area.”
This always happened to me. Wherever I went, I looked out of place.
“I'm here to help,” I explained. “They sent me to help prepare the food.”
Her eyes narrowed and she looked at me suspiciously.
“What did you do?” she asked, as if I were a criminal.
“What do you mean?”
“Why are you doing community service? What did you do?”
I laughed. “Oh, I’m not doing community service. I mean, I am, but it’s not that kind of community service. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I’m Jewish.”
“That’s not a crime.”
“Not until the economy crashes. Then they have to blame somebody.”
She raised one bushy eyebrow, then lowered it and raised the other, as if her eyebrows were scales, measuring me. Then a look of recognition crossed her face.
"You the boy Rabbi Schwartz sent?”
I nodded.
“Oh, well that's something else.” Now she laughed. She opened a rusty drawer and pulled out a serrated knife.
“You seem like a good kid,” she said. “I guess I can trust you with this.”
She handed me the knife.
"Do you know how to use it?” she asked.
"I guess,” I said.
She pulled a hairnet out of her apron pocket.
"And this?”
"Yeah.”
I pulled the hairnet over my hair.
"And these?” She pulled latex gloves from her pocket.
I took the gloves and put them on.
“And this?” She offered me a stick of gum.
"No thanks.”
She put the Big Red back in her pocket. "You go chop those zucchinis.” She pointed to the far corner of the room, where a table was stacked high with peeled zucchinis waiting to be chopped. “Chop, not dice, not mince, but chop.”
At the table stood a guy peeling zucchinis. He was clearly there for real community service, sent by a judge.
He was black. About my age, maybe a year older. A hairnet covered his shaved head. Dark blue tattoos snaked around his massive neck. Baggy pants bunched around his ankles. What was truly frightening about him was the way he stared hatefully at the zucchini he was skinning. He ground his teeth pleasurably with every stroke of the peeler. I understood why they didn't trust him with a knife, but I was surprised they even trusted him with a vegetable peeler.
"Hi,” I said, offering my hand to shake. “I'm Ben. I'm your chopper.”
He stared at my hand. I realized I was still wearing a latex glove. He probably thought I was racist, that I was afraid of catching a disease.
"Sorry.” I peeled off the glove. “Forgot.”
He shook my hand without removing his own glove. Zucchini juice squirted from between our hands onto the tiled floor.
"Kwan,” he grunted
"What?”
"That's my name,” he said. “Kwan.”
He released my hand.
I wanted to wipe the zucchini slop off, but if I wiped off my hand immediately after shaking his, he would think I was racist, so I pulled the latex glove over my dirty hand.
We worked in silence for a while, he skinning the zucchinis, I chopping them up and dropping them in an orange plastic bucket. Finally, Kwan broke the silence.
“Whatcha in for?” he asked.
Apparently he also thought I was a criminal, that a judge sent me here. But Kwan didn't seem to be looking down on me for it; he was looking at me like I was a fellow lawbreaker. We were members of the same fraternity.
I wanted to be a part of that group, of the people who make their own law, who don't just do what society expects of them. In other words, I wanted to be cool. And I certainly didn't want Kwan to know I was there for the Teen Mitzvah Corps.
Then I realized I could tell him anything about myself and he would believe it. He didn't know me at all. He didn't know I was on the chess club. I could reinvent myself—be anyone I wanted to be.
But what should I tell him I had done to end up at the soup kitchen? I tried to think of a cool crime. Unfortunately, I said the first thing that came to mind.
“Cruelty to animals.”
Kwan stepped back and held his vegetable peeler defensively. I shouldn’t have said cruelty to animals. Torturing animals was a sign of a future serial killer. Now Kwan would think I also started fires and wet the bed.
“It was self-defense,” I said. “There was a rabid dog. I blew pot in its ear to calm it down. They said this was cruelty.”
“What kind of dog?”
“One of those Lassie dogs.”
“You get high?”
“Sure. All the time.”
I had never done anything of the sort in my life, but I wanted him to think I was cool. It wasn’t a complete lie. I had seen movies where characters do drugs and then the camera shows things from their point of view. It was like I did the drugs myself.
“I wouldn’t of thought it,” Kwan said. “You look like a straight arrow to me.”
“No. I’m crooked, pretty bent.”
Kwan's vegetable peeler clanged on the table. He snapped off his green-stained plastic gloves and pulled off his hairnet.
“Time for a chronic break,” he said, dropping the gloves and hairnet on the peeled zucchinis. “Gonna get high.”
He walked to the back door.
I stood in place, keeping my eyes on the zucchini I was chopping, unsure if I was supposed to follow or not.
At the back door, Kwan stopped and called back to me: “You comin’?”
I dropped the knife and rushed after him, almost tripping on stray zucchini peels.
The alley was littered with broken glass and had the sour milk stink of rancid garbage. Kwan bounded up the fire escape, which swayed and threatened to collapse. I hurried up after him, grasping tightly to the inner railing. Bits of rust broke off in my sweaty hands.
The roof of the three story building was covered with gravel. The sun pounded down on me. There were no clouds in the sky, which meant that satellites would know what I was doing.
Kwan flipped open a pack of cigarettes and took out a plastic bag filled with green stuff. He started stuffing the green stuff into a purple glass pipe.
My heart pounded. My arms and legs went numb. What if the drugs made me freak out and jump off the roof? I’d splatter on the sidewalk and everyone would see my insides. I peered over the edge of the roof, hoping to see an awning that could break my fall if I did end up jumping. Nothing. No awning. Just the empty sidewalk, the street, an occasional car.
I moved to the middle of the roof, to be as far away from falling off as possible.
I wouldn't inhale, I decided. I didn't want to jump off the roof, didn't want to hallucinate pink pterodactyls crawling after me. I would fake-inhale. Then I would fake hysterical, uncontrollable laughter.
I tried to make conversation. Maybe it would calm my nerves.
“What did you do?” I asked Kwan. “How come you’re peeling vegetables?”
I immediately realized I shouldn't have asked that. I was implying that he was guilty, that he actually did do it.
“What’d they charge you with?” I corrected myself.
“Drugs,” he said.
“Did you do it?” I asked.
“Did I do drugs?”
“No. I mean…”
“Guilty as charged.”
“So the punishment for drugs is working in a soup kitchen,” I said. “If they catch us, they’ll just send us back downstairs.”
Kwan grinned. He handed me the pipe and a blue plastic lighter. “Start her up.”
I took it from him. It took all my willpower to stop my hands from shaking. I brought the pipe up to my face and pressed its cold glass to my lips.
A low-flying helicopter buzzed over our heads. At that moment, I was absolutely certain it was a police helicopter, that they knew we were doing drugs, and were going to arrest us. I threw Kwan’s pipe off the side of the roof to dispose of the evidence. Kwan’s mouth went slack, his eyes wide. The helicopter departed as quickly as it had arrived. A tinkling broken glass sound came from the sidewalk below.
Kwan opened his mouth wide like he was screaming, but no sound came out. He ran to the edge of the roof, lay on his stomach, and peered over.
I lay next to him and looked down. Little purple shards of glass littered the pavement, glittering up at us.
“What did you do that for?” he asked with a frightening calm.
“There was a helicopter…” I tried to explain.
“Were you trying to hit it?”
“No.”
About then I realized that the helicopter probably hadn't been after us and that throwing the pipe off the roof had been unnecessary.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Kwan clenched his fists. The veins on his neck stood out, pulsing under his tattoos. I could hear his teeth grinding. If we still had the pipe, I could blow smoke in his ear and calm him down.
I inched away from the edge of the roof—I didn’t want him to throw me off. I didn’t want to be shattered into a thousand pieces like the pipe.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated.
He pounded his fist against the roof.
“I’ll buy you a new one,” I said.
“It ain’t that,” Kwan said. “You could've hit somebody.”
He was right. I was lucky that the sidewalk had been empty.
“Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“You just throw things off of roofs without even looking first?”
I hung my head in shame. I tried to think of an excuse, an explanation for why I threw the pipe off the roof, but my mind had gone slack and couldn’t grasp onto anything. Any chance of him thinking I was cool was gone. I wasn’t cool, never was, probably never would be. There was nothing left but the truth.
“I’m on the chess team” I said.
“That supposed to be a threat?” Kwan hopped up, strode up to me, and bumped his chest into mine, as if to say he wasn’t intimidated by my chess master skills. He bumped me back until I was just inches from the other edge of the roof.
“It’s not a threat,” I said. “I mean I’m not cool. I was just pretending to be. I’ve never smoked pot before.”
He grabbed me by the shirt and tried to lift me up, but only succeeded in ripping my collar.
“This was your first time?” he asked incredulously. “What about the dog?”
“I didn’t blow pot in its ear.”
“What did you do to it?”
“Nothing. There was no dog.”
“So what are you doing community service for?”
“I’m not doing community service. I’m doing a mitzvah.”
“A what?”
“A mitzvah. It’s like a good deed, but for Jews.”
He furrowed his brow, confused.
I sighed. “I’m a volunteer,” I admitted.
He let go of me and took a step back, a betrayed look on his face.
“My parents made me do it,” I said. “I don’t want to be in the Teen Mitzvah Corps, visiting orphanages and old people. They made me. I thought that if you thought the police sent me here, then you’d think that...you know. I just wanted you to think I was cool.”
Kwan's face was expressionless for what seemed a long time. Then, suddenly, a big smile spread across his face. He started to laugh. Hard. He fell down and clutched his side. Tears spilled down his cheeks. He tried to speak, but couldn't get out any words through his laughter. Finally, after a lot of gasping and panting, he managed to gather his breath.
“I lied too,” he said. “I did the same thing. I wanted you to think I was cool. I wanted you to like me. I wasn’t really sent here for doing drugs.”
Now I joined in his laughter. I laughed so hard that my chest hurt and I fell over. Tears of laughter and relief filled my eyes. The two of us lay on our backs on the gravelly roof of the soup kitchen, cackling hysterically. Finally I managed get myself enough under control to speak.
“So why are you here?” I asked.
“Armed robbery,” he said.
I stopped laughing instantly, but Kwan kept going. He slapped me on the shoulder.
He sat up, lifted up his pant leg, and showed me the electronic bracelet strapped to his ankle. “I’m only allowed out of the house for school and community service.”
He stood and walked over to the fire escape, wiping his face and grinning broadly.
“Come on,” he said. “Let's go get some rolling papers and smoke up.”
I followed him to the fire escape.
"No thanks,” I said. “I've got some chopping to do.”

30 November 2008
Jerusalem, Israel