Sunday, December 16, 2007

From the Future Creedmoorer Archives - "Misyovon the Creedmoorer Rasta-man" Chanukah 5776

*Yes, I am back for one post, which I am posting today rather than on Nitel Nacht as I do not know where I will be on that august, or is it December, night*

Dr Michael Weinberg left Borough Park just after Shacharis, even though his flight back to Eretz Yisroel was scheduled to take off at 11:30 PM. For Dr Weinberg had been the Medical Director of the one and only Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital many years hence, and he was curious to see what had happened in the fifteen years since he moved to Yerushalayim to open a drug rehabilitation center.

He drove his rental Jeep Grand Cherokee, the same car he had driven when he resided in Monsey, so familiar to him even if this incarnation of his erstwhile vehicle was so much more advanced and computerized than the last one he had driven, along the familiar roads that connected Brooklyn with Queens. As was his custom every time he returned to the United States for a visit, he stopped off at one of the few stores he missed, Home Depot, to purchase some 220 volt rechargeable tools, for as the son of a successful building contractor, the doctor was born with a drill in his hand and still enjoyed maintaining his own home and office.

When he reached Creedmoor, his first stop after checking in with security was not the medical lounge or the new director's office. With the exception of a Dr Eugene Khaitman, Russian born and like Dr Weinberg himself Ivy League trained and now treating the imagined neuroses of the wives of the nouveau riche tycoons of his native S Petersburg, the hospital had been in the slippery, slimy hands of a succession of incompetent and corrupt graduates of butcher training institutes in Kolkat (formerly Calcutta), Chennai (formerly Madras), and Kabul (formerly the semi-paved capital of a semblance of a semi-inhabitable country). Never mind that our dear doctor does not speak a word of Hindi or Pashtun; he really had no interest in even smelling the non kosher curry which replaced the corned beef that was once served in his former office.

Instead, he headed straight for the infamous D-ward, also known as Kiryas Naye Creedmoor, where according to the last set of US welfare records, EU disability payments, and yes, Zionist entity Bituah Leumi handouts, ninety-three trillion patients resided in a ward designed for perhaps two dozen of the worst incurables known to the medical profession before the advent of Thorazine and its successors such as Haldol and Geodon. For this ward was the domain of the Admou'r meCreedmoor, who managed to convince bureaucracies across the world that every one of his imagined multiple personalities was a real person, eligible for welfare. And every so once in a while, he forged discharge records for a couple of trillion of his charges, assigned them to vacant buildings that were heavily insured, and produced documents showing the buildings had suffered severe fire or water damage.

Dr Weinberg expected to hear the familiar sounds of the Admou"r's off tune and off key and off the wall rendition of the famous Neturei Karta nigun "Hashem Hee Malyknee," for the doctor's planned short sojourn in Home Depot turned into a major shopping expedition that would send the doctor's luggage far into overweight territory. That meant that he had arrived at 3:45 PM, which was early Shacharis in Creedmoor.

Instead the doctor was treated to a rather raucous song that sounded vaguely familiar to him: "Pilgrim State if I forget you, let me use a hammer to bang in a screw...." Needless to say, such lyrics were a total insult and affront to the highly mechanically inclined doctor, and he wondered where in the world they were coming from. A second later, he met the source, wrapped in an orange plastic bag and soiled in all his glory: "Misyovon the Creedmoorer Rasta Man!"

"Yechi, mon, yechi da melech da Halle Berry, ah mean Hayley Solass.." "WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE!" shouted Dr Weinberg, who knew full well from his years of experience with drug addicts that the once popular reggae singer would finish that last word with four letters which themselves form a word that means a void or a deep depression and is prefaced by "black" when it refers to an astronomical phenomenon or a losing investment.

"Hey, mon, dis real Chassid spirituality really turns me on! I left your lower worlds a long time ago when I was still kinda popular kauze I done had myself a habit taller than I is and dem Jews just didn't pay no more. So you know I ended myself up in Rikers and met the source of all spiritual expansion, mon, da Rikers Island Reggae Rebbe!"

Dr Weinberg did not even have to go through the trouble of finding the latest Patel psychiatrist in Creedmoor so that he could use his emeritus status at the hospital to obtain and read this new patient's chart. First of all, as a major Jewish music fan and amateur chazzan himself, he knew exactly whose stench was defiling his dalet amos (and realized how happy he was that he never let his children listen to the recordings of this performer in his heyday), and as an avid reader of the "haimishe" press, he was all too familiar with the latest star of the rather tame scandal pages of said press, namely "Gugunbosso Masriach Ben Doodoo Motokeke Adambobo", the Rikers Island Reggae Rebbe, a scam artist and unlicensed pharmaceutical retailer and wholesaler born and raised in the now largely Ethiopian slums of Be'er Sheva who now resides nine of every twelve months each year in a custom built duplex cell within the confines of Rikers Island, as he knows exactly in which qualities and quantities to peddle his wares so as never to land more than a 270 day Class C Felony sentence. While incarcerated, this miscreant mashpia enriches his burgeoning coffers by selling various psychedelic pharmaceuticals to prisoners, guards and staff alike, all under the supervision of a warden whose own habit renders him oblivious to the goings on among his charges, and whose political connections render him undismissable until such time as his substance abuse causes his body to malfunction at the same level as his three remaining brain cells.

Since New York was back in the hands of the looney left, the three strikes rule was unheard of outside Yankee Stadium, so the Reggae Rebbe was able not only to spend three months of every year peddling poison in his beloved Bushwick, but also to spearhead, or is it spearchuck, a major new religious movement. This new Chassidus was based on some Ethiopian cult which in turn gave rise to rasta, combined with Dimona/Chicago Black Hebrew drug and food fetish theology, and just plain greed. Having learned from Israeli criminals who put on black yarmulkes during their trials and got away with reduced sentences, he pronounced himself a rabbi, and showed an ordination certificate from a yeshiva that just happened to share an address with a notorious Russian pork restaurant in Be'er Sheva.

And one day, a Chassidic reggae performer, who was nearing the end of his fifteen minutes of fame and found it difficult not to use substances that he had used in his pre-Chassidic past (especially as he had now exhausted and moved on from fifteen different versions of Chassidus, from Chabad to Tosh to yes, Creedmoor), ended up arrested and sent to Rikers for pre-trial detention after he consumed said substances on the rickety stage of a Harlem dive.

Once in Rikers, he met his new spiritual guide and mentor (or perhaps misguide and dementor) the one and only Reggae Rebbe. The Rebbe welcomed his new Chossid in his typical way - with free samples of substances that would mean that the new Chossid could easily spend nine whole months with his Rebbe - and that is what happened especially as the Rebbe had several judges in his (brown and yellow) spotted loincloth pocket.

But the spiritual high which his new Rebbe purveyed would have a disastrous effect on the performer, whose few remaining neurons were misfiring as often as the pistons of the 1967 Volvo that Dr Weinberg had rescued from an Israeli dump and was intending to renovate for over a year now until his wife, like himself a physician from a wealthy home, put down her Manolo Blahnik clad foot and insisted that he either finish with the car or fill it with gunpowder and ship it off to some chain smoking mechanic in Ramallah (Dr Chana Doueck Weinberg was a Syrian Jew who did not exactly have much use for Muslims, even if neither she nor her husband, Agudah voters to the core, cared much for the State of Israel that they nevertheless supported with tax money and much volunteer medical work). That meant that he could not be held in a correctional facility, but instead, as it was said he rapped on the way to his new home: "Da Jah say my fate to be Rebbe Pilgrim State!"

Yes, the performer, now named Misyovon by the frum physician who evaluated him, was on his way to Pilgrim State, an institution to which even Creedmoor and G-building pale in comparison. As the Admou'r's antics were well known by now, and Misyovon had confessed to being a Creedmoorer Chossid for three weeks four years hence, Creedmoor was supposed to be off limits for Misyovon.

But Pilgrim State was slated for closure, and its three remaining patients under the age of 90 were summarily and sub-intelligently sent to the now fully decayed, dilapidated and decadent Creedmoor facility.

And that is why Dr Weinberg, stymied in his attempt to visit the Admou"r who spends Chanikeh in his warmer Alcatraz abode, was serenaded with: "From the forest itself come da ganja which I lack cause dem Jews dey done stabbed me in da back. Took dem years to see through my reggae act chop em down chop em down chop em down chop em down..."

Dr Michael Weinberg, whose purchases at Home Depot included a large cordless circular saw that could easily be recharged using the flickering 110 volt current at Creedmoor just as easily as the 220 volts that powered his large home in Har Nof, was seriously tempted to "chop down" Misyovon using said saw. But knowing full well that such an act would be ossur al pi halacha and might land HIM a berth near the Rikers Island Reggae Rebbe, he simply walked out to his rented vehicle as he sang to himself: "He did it all for GELT, some quick and easy GELT, now he's singing nonsense in a dunce cap made of FELT!"