From Jester To King XLIV

When I first got to New York I had nowhere to stay and ended up sleeping rough for a little longer than three weeks in Battery Park. It’s all a bit of a haze. But there was this big fat guy there and everybody adored him. He was just a little shorter than me but must have been weighed more than 250. He reminded me of a whale. A big whale of a guy hustling for quarters on chess games. Always smiling and joking. Often coughing and wheezing. He was mediocre at best but managed to grind out a couple of dollars each day playing tourists or children. He could beat me but I have never been any good at chess or strategy games. But it gave him enough for his falafel. He always ate falafel from the stand opposite every day without fail. It was all he could afford.

To start with I didn’t know all that much about him, and it turns out his parents emigrated from Russia when he was four, first to Israel and then his mother came here when she met a new man. So he was Jewish. To Buffalo originally but he didn’t want to stay there, didn’t like the new boyfriend. So he quit college, came to New York on his own with no money as you do to sleep under park benches. He was homeless, passportless, green-cardless, he had nothing but this green hold-all bag he used to carry around slung over his left shoulder. It was like he came from nowhere and would equally disappear in a puff before you could get a chance to say your goodbyes. I asked him why he didn’t stay on someone’s sofa. He shrugged. Why not get a job? He shrugged, no one would give him a job, and anyway he hated the idea of working, getting up in the morning. He gave nothing away though, shrugged off any hardship and never complained about anything. He loved the falafels though, and could get through more than five or six in one day with ease. Then there was the third guy in our little group, Ray Bolsano. Ray was merciless with his teasing about his weight, but he just laughed it off good-humouredly. From Ray came the nickname that has stood to this day, Falafel.

And so there’s me with Ray and Falafel in New York with my stupid-headed idea of breaking into comedy and absolutely no money. And there I am in this tattered old sleeping back sleeping next to a giant fat man under a bench in Battery Park. The loudest snorer I can remember even in the open air with all the traffic starting up at five in the morning, and the thing bothering me the most is Falafel’s perpetual snore. But I liked having him next to me, made me feel protected, like I had someone. He used to tell me I was funny, though I don’t really think he understood my sense of humour and was just being nice because he knew I was a comedian or a wannabe comedian and that was the right thing to say, anyhow we just seemed to sort of operate very well on a surface level like you do with some people who you really don’t have much in common with. He was actually a bit of a flatterer. We were both really big and tall so that seemed to match up somehow. But in the daytime there were about seven or eight guys playing chess and when I wasn’t wandering around the city or trying to get a gig, I would sit with them and watch them play laugh and fool around with each other but it was obvious that Falafel was very low on the pecking order as far as pure chess skill was concerned but he took it with good grace and just laughed it off.

But everybody loved him. Why? Hard to know exactly. He was friendly and kind I suppose and whenever you came up to him he called your name out -- STEVE-EN -- in this reassuring way as if he hadn’t seen you for aeons, big smile on his face, and this goofiness about him, like he didn’t know his arse from his elbow, which he didn’t but he wasn’t afraid to hide it.

This was all more than twenty years ago. I left to go back to SF and lost contact with everyone except Ray.

I got a text yesterday morning from Ray. Falafel has died. Who Falafel? For the first couple of moments I didn’t associate the food with anything but the food and then the name came flooding back, oh my god, Falafel my sleeping partner my snoring protector. I called Ray back immediately. Falafel, the life and soul, perhaps I was overdoing it a bit in my mind, but somehow he left his mark on me, like I think he did on everyone else. Ray went into detail how very sad it was how he was diagnosed with glioblastoma three years ago, which is a very rare and invasive type of brain tumour and despite taking out the tumour the cells were still there and then it was just a matter of time between Tel Aviv and Amherst upstate New York and permanent care until Falafel died. And Ray told me about how he had gone to visit him and seen him in hospital in Amherst and how he could hardly move any longer, how awful it was to see, to have his carer Jamie do every last thing for him, but she was an angel and they’d played little card games together and she’d taken selfies with him and encouraged people to send him cards and messages on Facebook because he really missed the human contact and wanted just to know people cared and hadn’t forgotten about him, but the thing is people find it so difficult to associate and spend time with very sick people, anyway it was just  matter of time and now he has gone, he passed away in the night, Jamie had sent an email to a few close friends and relatives, and because I’m in London I can’t really go to the funeral although I kind of want to. He was only 52, it’s a shock because really anything can happen and I worry about my health every single day, and I should quit smoking even the vape thing, I mean how awful for his mother and sister. But I told Ray I’ll try and make it to the funeral, I don’t know why I said that because I really don’t think I can afford it, Then we had a brief catch-up about him and that was that.

Anyway this morning Ray sends me a link by text message. So I click on it. A long article in the New Yorker about dated 2013 and on the front page of the article is a picture of Falafel! Our Falafel! Falafel is the world’s best backgammon player, according to the rankings according to all the opinions of his peers,  people made films about him, the Israeli press wrote about him, Falafel never became world champion but made millions from side games against wealthy A-listers, how he spent his life travelling around the world from one tournament to the other, making and taking bets, one of which was to see if he could get to a lower weight than one of his backgammon friends who was very slight and only about 1.75m and the bet was that if they could swap weights then they’d win $5m, and they did and were paid out on it. I have never played backgammon in my life but I couldn’t have imagined Falafel being good at anything let alone being the best at it, but then it suddenly struck me that there was something very unique about him and then I could believe he was destined for something, greatness, fame, some sort of legacy, because, and I should know, it’s usually the oddballs who have something to say for themselves, the ones who aren’t afraid to be a little different and strike their own path and Falafel was certainly one of these, his intransigence about his weight and eating habits, I mean he was so badly overweight but it was like he didn’t care, and I’m not a doctor but if you are going to be so reckless about your health as to be 120 kilos and not care about doing anything about it, then it certainly isn’t going to add to your life expectancy, there was a sense that he didn’t care and not only didn’t he care, it was like he knew something or was attuned to something about life that we were too afraid to be attuned to, which was that you were going to die, and he was ok with it, and was just going to do on earth what he was put here to do. So backgammon it was, but I think it could have been anything. RIP my good old friend Michael ‘Falafel’ Nathan, I actually miss you.