A Rain of Frogs 

McMuckle Makes a Minyan

“We need eight more to pray for a hit, right? I'll get them. Is there some temple, tabernacle, whatever, where I can hustle us up a quickie minyan?”

“There's Shlomo Bim's—the saloon.” Lipchutz looked discomfited.

“Sixty-forty,” said Ivor McMuckle. “And win or lose, you double the retainer.”

Ivor McMuckle, a song plugger, has been summoned to Hyperion II, planet of the Last Diaspora, where all faiths mingle in a shared state of abject poverty. He sells off shares in excess of 120 percent of a bad, really bad, pop tune. His client, Maven Lipchutz, a lounge pianist with a dream, is not beyond a little interspecies hanky-panky: the Maven’s light o’ love, Heidi, is a singing fish. Final judgment devolves upon a Higher Power, said Higher Power being among the company of the conned.  read the story >>

The power of prayer

“‘When two or more are gathered together in my name...’ If their faith is sincere?” Maven Lipchutz looked nervously over his shoulder. “No sentient being doubts the efficacy of prayer.”

“More than two. That’s three,” said McMuckle, a fixer much respected throughout the Large Magellanic Cloud

“Jews need ten. A minyan.”

“Ten. Not two or more? Alcoholics Anonymous and the Nazarenes make it work with just a deuce. You Jews need a minivan?”

“Minyan. Nope. Prayer won’t work without the full lineup on the bench. To make sure it's not a hustle. God watching and all...”

“Whatever works,” said McMuckle. “And are you seriously suggesting that we pray for a hit?”

Trouble in paradise

“This is it, the Big One,” said Schmulka Weisbrod between gasps. “The Maven wants a top ten hit; you got to give some quid pro quo. There's a slim chance but first you got to square things with God. It’s that fish. Lipchutz has snapped his wrapper. Get off your ass and get to work. You’re gonna be one short on your minyan, McMuckle. Sorry about that. And take a spotted hare. God loves bunnies.” Weisbrod gave out a mighty exhalation and slumped lifeless in McMuckle's arms.

“Exalted and sanctified is God’s great name,” said Shlomo Bim.

“Whatever,” said McMuckle. “You got a defibrillator in this place?”

A farrago...

on the Abrahamic religions―closer to Jim Henson’s Pigs in Space than the Septuagint―McMuckle is a happy borrowing, a bissel here, a bissel there. Special thanks to Ezra and Josh Feigenbaum, proprietors of the Feigenbaum and Suss saloon on New York's Rivington Street in the 1950s, where slivovitz and scalding tea were a specialty of the house. Add a dash of McSorley’s Old Saloon on Cooper Square. The bar’s name, Svartze Shikse―which I considered translating as “The Gypsy Girl” then discarded―is lifted in toto from Jaroslav Hašek's Good Soldier Schweik. McMuckle Makes a Minyan is likewise a Bernard Malamud and Isaac B. Singer homage; read their stuff―that’s an order.

The characters of the song plugger and the piano thumper (an ever-hopeful wannabe, lean on talent, long on aspiration) are studies drawn from life: life as defined by the author's (too) many years as a radio engineer in the salad days of Rock N Roll. The radio station was 1010 WINS, then at New York’s Columbus Circle, where record company promotion men hovered like carrion bees. The spotted hare appears courtesy of Warner Bros.

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