Satori in Brighton Beach . . .

or how I found redemption on Barrow Street By Jack Schimmelman

PROLOGUE (a prayer) Dearly Beloved Each day I think of you, my heart creates a new leaf. I wait for you. I wonder where you are. You breathe. I speak to you with all the colors of my Being. Understand my dancing on a full moon night in old ruins on the isle of Santorini, an island whose other half fell into the sea so many lives ago. It is important that these words live within you before we meet. It is important that we recognize each other. I cannot take otherwise. I do not know time, or whether this is true. We wander through the seasons of love. We fly from there to here, from here to here. You are wind and flower. I am rain and earth. We do not live without the other and I am alone. You are the touch and smell I feel each morning, each night. I welcome you into my body. You paint my soul. I welcome you into my breath. We breathe music. Dearly beloved. It is your wave I move to these days; your sweetness and laughter. I wait in light. I wait in the center of night.

JOHNNY WEINBERG

In a moment of time, in a moment of space there lived in the borough of Kings, in a town that was known as the biggest Apple in the land, a 39 year old round curly headed boy from the Bronx. On this 22nd day in March 1987 at approximately 9:13 p.m., Winter and Spring are duking it out in an annual dance of ferocious change. Thunder, lightning, rain, the torrents of winter's last cries, are the eternal seasoned partners. On this equinox evening, the round curly headed Bronx boy sits in the dark on his bed in a small 5-room Russian cottage built by Yugoslavians in Brighton Beach. Brooklyn. He is 2 inches shorter than his weight dictates, no job, no money, no hope, one old car, one young white round cat. On this stormy equinox night, our hero crunches peanut butter and stares at his favorite wall. The painted wall. He methodically tries to loosen various chunks of crunched buttered nuts from the roof of his mouth. He sighs slowly, wondering if anyone has ever died from an overdose of extra crunchy, slightly salted, peanut butter. He contemplates his potential. In a moment of contemplation, in a moment of desperation, it happens. A wind blows through his cottage, through his mind. Then he sees it. Suspended in mid-air between him and his painted wall is a large circle of electric blue light. He stops chewing and stares. It is perfectly round and luminescent. It begins about 1 foot from the floor rising close to the ceiling, with a 4-foot radius. A big, electric, blue circle of light. As he stares, an old infant's face slowly emerges from its center. Smiling at him. The ancient smile illuminates his bedroom, fusing an infants heart with his. Being unable to smile back, he sprints through his walls, onto the street, his mind wailing, his body paralyzed on his bed in Brighton Beach. Brooklyn. He is deeply moved, excited and scared out of what remains of his mind. With his face frozen in an advertisement for pain, a thin beam of sound flows from the child and weaves a path into his left ear, dances in his brain, expands in his heart and exits with his breath. Frozen still, he pretends to move to find the source for this powerful blue light-circle hanging, smiling in front of his bed. He looks everywhere. Under the bed, over the bed, in his drawers and in his closet. His closet is dark. His drawers are around his knees. The circle remains and he is still seated on his bed. Thirty seconds pass. And then his life. He can barely think: "when in doubt, deny it." 2

The circle of light expands until the entire room is bathed in a sea of cobalt blue. While feeling a tiny electrical current at the root of his spine and being without breath for what seems like an eternity, our hero can barely open his mouth to inhale one last drop of life. Immediately, blue waves cascade through his body leaving the room in black and white and our hero vibrating. Silence crawls from his core. The baby sleeps, cuddled in his soul. After a lifetime of pain, he is able to move. He switches on his lamp. The painted clock on the painted wall echoes midnight. Three hours have passed in a moment. He switches his room to dark, lies down on his back and his eyes remain open for a very long time without a flutter. Peanut butter drips from his teeth onto his tongue and dissolves into his veins. Turning his head to the right, he looks through his open window onto his garden into the lens of his mind. Spring has triumphed. She is calm. He is drained. No thunder, no lightning, a light mist remains. At five minutes past midnight, on the first day of Spring, Johnny Weinberg, a 39 year old, round curly headed boy born in the Bronx, sleeps in Brighton Beach.