My Date with the Rabbi
Five minutes into our date, the girl informed me she was a rabbi
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
-Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
“Every good date is the same; each bad date is its own fucking story.”
-Otto Fischkin, Otto Karenina
The whole thing was a fluke. My roommate Johnny Orange and I had fallen on hard times, and were being made to find a roommate for the spare room we’d been using as a sex dungeon.
It was an ancient tale, one as old as poverty and the pursuit of extramarital tail itself:
Hard times had ruined our hard times.
I posted an instagram story announcing that we were looking for a common-law husband to fill our spot in the Little Jerusalem area of the Upper West Side. One woman reached out whom I had never met before. Her name was Rachel, and from a quick snoop of her instagram, I knew she was someone I wished to meet (in that she was a single woman, and very attractive.)
By the time she messaged me, however, we had already filled the space; I broke the bad news to her, and she replied, Can I see the bedroom anyway? You know, for real estate purposes.
Listen, I have watched enough realtor porn to know that this line is a line; however, I am also a neurotic Jew with a paradoxical blend of God complex and self hatred. What I responded was this: I literally just told you, we found someone.
She replied, I know. I’m asking you out…
After I came, I replied, Oh. Yeah, come over. For real estate purposes.
Smooth as sandpaper, baby.
That Sunday night, we grabbed a drink at the wine bar near my place. She ended up being quite cute in person. Long brown hair. A black leather top and jeans. Pearl earrings. She ordered a glass of the Mediterranean Cab (aka, “The Uber.”) I was still fresh off my appendectomy and couldn’t yet drink, so I ordered myself a club soda, on the rocks.
Five minutes into our date, after I had told her I was a 6’5” standup comedian working on his debut novel who had published two poems and three short stories and once won a screenwriting award and played college basketball for a semester before quitting and eventually graduated from Vanderbilt with a math degree and a minor in art history and once in 2009 placed 13th in the country in Pokemon Platinum the video game and also paid my way through college playing online poker and oh by the way did I mention I am 6’5”, she informed me that she was, in fact, a rabbi.
I replied, “The fuck?”
When I told Johnny Orange about this the next day, he said, “So what if she’s a rabbi? You’re Jewish.”
I was like, Yeah, I’m Jewish, but I’m not Rabbi-level Jewish. I’m Rewatch-Curb-Once-A-Year Jewish.
I think I’m closer to ISIS than I am to Rabbi.
Still, the prospect of dating a rabbi was intriguing, and we kvetch’d at the wine bar for some time. She told me she still wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her rabbiness—is the correct term, “rabies?”—but that she had gone to rabbinical school simply because she felt that it was her calling in life. She asked if I knew what my calling was. I told her I liked to substack about funny places I had received subpar blowjobs.
Against all odds like Hanukkah oil, the date actually went OK, and she asked if we could go back to my place. My appendix-scar was hurting like all hell, and the way that I limped us back to my apartment was not the slightest bit sexy. I took her to the room she had wanted to lease, where Johnny Orange had left a plate of bacon crumbs. “Just one more thing in this apartment you can’t have,” I joked.
I took her upstairs to show her my Joan Didion collection, and we started to hook up. I was surprised at how far things were going, considering we hadn’t yet had a Jewish wedding. Just in case God was watching, I slammed a water glass onto the floor, and stomped it to pieces.
She looked at me and said, “I want to [sleep with] you.”
I looked up at the ceiling and said, “Nice try, God, but I’m not fucking the Rabbi.” I know a test when I see one. Abraham was asked to kill his son. Otto Fischkin was asked to fuck the Rabbi. I don’t eat apples offered to me by snakes, and I don’t fuck rabbis I meet on instagram. No thank you, Devil.
Then she said, “Are you sure?” to which I replied, “Fuck it. I already don’t keep kosher,” and speedily disrobed as if I had just caught fire.
My scars from my recent laparoscopic appendectomy hadn’t yet healed, so my bare stomach, freshly shaved from the surgery, was blindingly pale and covered with bruised incisions like purple craters making my soft torso resemble a vat of decades-old Swiss cheese. Somehow, she wanted to continue.
She told me to put on a rubber. The issue was, all I had were lambskin condoms, and she had just eaten dairy for dinner, and would need several more hours before it was kosher for her to ingest meat again.
At this point, you may be asking yourself, Why does Otto Fischkin consider this such a bad date?
Well, I'll tell you.
We eventually moved to me receiving an Australian french kiss, which was fantastic, but perhaps too fantastic, as I writhed a bit, causing my appendix to flare, causing me to jolt in shock, causing me to throw out my back, causing me to scream, causing her to become nervous and chomp down where the moon don’t shine, causing me to scream even louder and start believing in God.
By this point, I was her least favorite person this side of the Western wall. As she dressed, she said, “Hey, I feel like I should say this—your voice is painfully, boringly monotone.”
“Um,” I said.
“For someone with such an interesting profile on paper, you were quite bland all night,” she said.
“Um,” I said.
“And below the belt, for someone 6’5”, you were disappointingly sm—”
“UM,” I SAID.
Ever since this date, cripplingly self-conscious of my apparent lack of tonal variety, I have been talking to people with the forced inflections of a prepubescent boy speaking Cantonese. I say I Love You to my parents like I’m being electrocuted. I dirty-talk like I’m reading Slam Poetry at an old folks home.
She asked if she could use my bathroom before leaving, and I replied, “Yes,” in falsetto.
As I walked her to the door with taurine speed, I noticed a pill bottle hanging from her purse.
“Is that my fucking Xanax!” I exclaimed.
She groaned, and returned the stolen pills to my medicine cabinet. On her way out, she paused, and, turning to me, said, in Yiddish, “You know, I’m not a thief. I just like getting high.”
But because she said it in Yiddish, she pronounced it, Ccchhhhhai.
Devoid of all irony, I looked the rabbi in her unholy eyes, and said, with the stern gravity of Humphrey Bogart delivering a diagnosis, “Rabbi Rebecca—I think you need Jesus.”
She actually texted me the next day, apologizing for her rude remarks and her narcotic thievery. She said, if I could forgive her, she would be willing to go on a second date.
I did not reply.
But I’m a careful, God-fearing man. There’s a very specific way to ghost a rabbi. I deleted her number, faced East, and recited the Mourner’s Kaddish ‘til sunrise.
Otto Fischkin is the alter ego of Sam Frank Jr. Sam is a writer and standup comedian based in New York City. He has been published in The Bangalore Review, The Gramercy Review, and his standup comedy has been mentioned in the New York Times. He was named “Best Screenwriter” at the 2021 Austin Lift-Off Film Festival.
Sam is working on his debut novel about a traveling circus.
Sam can be reached at samfrankjunior@gmail.com
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Legal Disclaimer: For legal purposes, this work is fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Oops.
no way🤣🤣🤣