by Seth Rogen
The Israeli made a sexually suggestive face to me.
Israeli Man: I fix! Make it fine! Gal Gadot.
Me: No! Do NOT fix! We are not…uh…needing the fixing of anything!
Israeli Man: Is fine! Matzoh! I do not judge! Is fine!
He wouldn’t take no for an answer. He kept pushing the two heavy beds closer and closer until they made one big bed in the middle of the room. Unfortunately, it would be easier just to move the beds back ourselves than it would be to convince this man we weren’t just a shy couple.
We laughed about it for the entire rest of the trip, and still do. Nothing brings you and your mother closer together than having an Israeli innkeeper assume you’re fucking one another.
Jews have a lot of odd traditions.
They wear kippahs, which are funny little hats about the size of the palm of your hand that, I’m sure NOT so coincidentally, fit perfectly over a bald spot. Am I saying a major tenet of Judaism was formed to protect the vanity of balding Jewish men? Yeah. Yeah, I am.
They get circumcised, which I guess I’ve grown to have mixed feelings about. Do I have animosity toward my private parts? Not really. Do I sometimes wonder what it could have been like to have a penis that lived on in its natural state? Sure. I also think of my phantom foreskin, out there somewhere, penisless, and then I think, It’s probably better off.
I think a lot of Jews wonder what it would be like to experience a foreskinned penis. Is it better? Is it worse? Is it, in general, warmer? It would, by definition, be more penis, which is probably something every guy would be on board with. I’ve thought about starting a business where I sell prosthetic foreskins to Jews so they can feel what it would have been like to have non-Jew junk. It would be called Gentile Genitals and it would make a fortune.
When Jewish people turn thirteen, they have Bar or Bat Mitzvahs, depending if you are a boy Jew or a girl Jew, respectively. You get up onstage at temple in front of everyone you know and read from the Torah in a crazy singsongy tune that I’m 100 percent sure has no musical logic to it in any way, shape, or form, which is objectively humiliating. To make things worse, you have to prepare for a fucking year for this shit.
There are three good things about having a Bar or Bat Mitzvah:
A party. You get to have one after your service, and at that age, I’d been led to believe that having a party thrown in your honor is a fun thing, which is something I’ve since greatly reconsidered.
You get gifts. Often in the form of money. Which is a thing that I wanted to have to buy things I didn’t have. A good haul could get you several THOUSAND dollars. That’s right. All ’bout the Binyamins, baby. (I’m sorry.)
In order to have a Bar Mitzvah, you have to go to Bar Mitzvah class, which sucks. BUT you also have to be invited to all the Bar and Bat Mitzvahs of everyone in the class, and there were about sixty kids, so that’s essentially an entire year of going to parties every single weekend, which was a pretty exciting prospect.
I was entering high school the following year, and I had one goal: I wanted to have a girlfriend/be a boyfriend, which I had never had/been before. I’m not sure I really wanted a girlfriend for the right reasons. It wasn’t sexual, as the idea of even taking my shirt off in front of a girl horrified me. I remember hearing about Orthodox people having sex through a hole in the sheet and thought, Man, that would solve a lot of my problems.
I wanted a girlfriend because I was scared shitless about going to high school, and I thought it would make me seem like less of a loser and therefore less likely to be eaten alive by older kids. It’s like Edward Norton wanting all his friends to beat him up before he went to jail in the Spike Lee movie 25th Hour. Norton’s character, Montgomery “Monty” Brogan, is about to serve a seven-year sentence for selling drugs. He figures he might as well go in there on the right foot, which in his case meant looking like a guy who had a proclivity for having the living shit kicked out of him, which I guess is a good thing in prison? Anyway, he had a scary situation ahead of him, and he did what he felt he had to do to prepare.
Similarly, I thought, What better way to enter high school than in a relationship, firmly staking my claim as an adult? I’ll have social status, a teammate, and everyone will like and respect me, and my life will be great.
Not the right reasons.
At this age, the only way I knew to get a girlfriend was through dancing. Not just any dancing. Slowwww dancing. It was the only way to really gauge how a girl felt about you, since actually talking about your feelings was unheard of. You would slow dance, and the closeness of your bodies indicated how likely you were to become a couple. If there was full-body contact, you were dating. If there was grinding, you were essentially engaged.
But in order to dance to a slow song, you first had to navigate a minefield of not slow songs. And you did NOT want to dance to a fast song with a girl. With guys it was fine, and funny dancing was preferred.
Luckily, it all became pretty predictable, because every single Bar or Bat Mitzvah had the same DJ play the party, with basically the same playlist. Nirvana was popular, and all the boys would mosh wildly to “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” until Austin Bell got a concussion at Steven Glanzberg’s Bar Mitzvah and they stopped playing it.
“Cotton Eye Joe” is by a Swedish band called Rednex, whose gimmick was that they dressed up like the villains in Deliverance, which is an odd choice for a pop group. But say what you will, “Cotton Eye Joe” is a great song, in a “this song is not great but fun to listen to for two years straight” kinda way.
I don’t know if “gimmick pop” is a genre of music, but if it were, I’d be a fan. “She Blinded Me with Science,” “Blue,” “Scatman,” “Barbie Girl”—if there’s an odd conceptual buy-in required to enjoy a pop song, I am your audience. Unfortunately, these types of bands don’t always have longevity, and Rednex themselves were haunted by the success of their only major hit. So much so that almost every other song on their album Sex & Violins—which I purchased—sounded exactly like “Cotton Eye Joe.” There was a song called “Old Pop in an Oak” that is so derivative, I’m tempted to say that Rednex should be ashamed of themselves, but the truth is…I understand the pressure to give people more of what they want. That’s how you wind up with movies like Neighbors 2. “This one worked! Everyone loved it! They want more! Not NEW more! Just MORE more!” I’ve been there, Rednex. Neighbors 2 is the “Old Pop in an Oak” to Neighbors’s “Cotton Eye Joe,” and I honestly think I’ve experienced personal growth now that I’ve gotten that off my chest.
But no song would create the controversy that was created by “Mony Mony,” originally by Tommy James and the Shondells and later covered by Billy Idol. I’m sure you know the song: “Here she comes now, singing Mo-nay Mo-nay,” followed by three strong drumbeats: “BAH! BAH, BAH!” This pattern essentially continues for the rest of the song.
Now, I couldn’t tell you why or how, but for some bizarre reason it became a tradition to fill in these “BAH! BAH, BAH!”s with the words “Hey, motherfucker, get laid, get fucked!” over and over.
Billy (singing): Here she comes now, singing Mony Mony!
Room Full of Twelve-Year-Old Kids: HEY, MOTHERFUCKER, GET LAID, GET FUCKED!
Billy: Shoot ’em down, turn around, come on, Mony!
Room Full of Twelve-Year-Old Kids: HEY, MOTHERFUCKER, GET LAID, GET FUCKED!!
And so forth for the entire five minutes and two seconds of the song, which is an obscene length for a song that repetitive.
So, there’s a lot of weird shit surrounding this phenomenon. One is, like I said, for the life of me, I could not tell you where this came from or why. There was no Internet, none of us had been to a Billy Idol concert—we didn’t even know who he was. It was just this bizarre thing, as though the collective consciousness was like, “This song needs these words, and we’re gonna put th
em in there.” I found an interview where Billy (first-name basis) said that he heard that it started in British frat houses in the late eighties, so how it made it to the Vancouver Jewish scene in the early nineties is beyond me.
Obviously, the parents didn’t like it, so they started to tell the DJ, “Before you play the song, warn the kids not to say the bad words, and tell them that if they say the words, you won’t play it.”
He would. “Now, before I play ‘Mo-nay Mo-nay,’ I just wanna say that you should NOT say the thing you wanna say during the song, or I will NOT play the song anymore.”
I remember thinking, Who gives a fuck? This song came out before we were born. The only reason we like it is because it gives us a chance to scream the word “FUCK” at the top of our lungs, which is great. So, if we can’t do that, we don’t need to hear this shitty song; just play the Rednex some more. That shit is great.
But the real goal was a slow song. “End of the Road” and “I’ll Make Love to You,” both by Boyz II Men, were great options. “Can’t Help Falling in Love” by UB40 wasn’t bad, but their bullshit quasi-Jamaican beats made them almost tread into fast-music territory, so they were risky. Also, the fact that the world accepted a white British band that just did synthy reggae covers of other songs is truly fucking amazing in retrospect.
Hands down, the ultimate slow song to feel out if you really had chemistry with another person was “I Swear” by All-4-One.
“And I swear…by the moon and the stars in the sky…I’ll be there. (I’ll be there!!)” It’s ironic that so many young Jewish men and women had their first feelings of intimacy sparked by what I’ve since learned is a decidedly Christian song.
My Jewish elementary school had uniforms, so I’d never really had to decide what I wanted to wear. Bar and Bat Mitzvahs were my first chance. And I was jumping right to formal wear.
We didn’t have a lot of money, so pretty much everything would come from thrift stores, which Vancouver had many of, the best being a gigantic place called Value Village. I was a strange dresser and found fashion inspiration in odd places. I was obsessed with rap and hip-hop, so the only piece of clothing I had at this point, apart from my school uniform, was a black leather L.A. Raiders cap that I convinced my parents to buy me after I saw Ice Cube wear one in a magazine. But that wouldn’t fly for a Bar Mitzvah, so I had to find inspiration elsewhere.
The movie Tombstone came out in 1993, and while it wasn’t a massive box office or critical hit (The New York Times called it “morally ambiguous”), it made an impression on many, mostly due to an amazing performance by Val Kilmer that was publicly praised by President Bill Clinton, which is the single most nineties sentence one could write. As 1994 rolled around, a young me was smitten with not only Kilmer’s performance as Doc Holliday but the entire Western aesthetic. The result? A fuckload of vests.
I could not own enough vests. I’d have bought more torsos just to wear them all if it were an option. I loved me a vest. It packed me in, gave me shape, and, most important, kinda made me feel like a cowboy who was dying of tuberculosis, which Val Kilmer had somehow made seem super-awesome. I also wore a pocket watch, which in a truly impressive act of delusion, I convinced myself was cool as fuck.
It wasn’t.
Time after time, weekend after weekend, a slow song would come on, boys would ask girls to dance, girls would ask boys to dance, and I’d generally find myself standing on the side watching it all happen, spinning my pocket watch like some sort of 1920s Mafia snitch. And again, it wasn’t just the clothes. I was, in general, awkward, ill-motivated, and just not at the right level of maturity for any type of romantic relationship.
I remember being at Julia Morinis’s Bat Mitzvah and noticing two other guys also standing on the side, watching with longing as the other kids had fun. I’m one of those guys, I thought. What a fucking bummer.
And then I noticed two OTHER guys. They weren’t standing on the side, watching with longing. They actually seemed like they wanted nothing to do with the girls or the boys or the dancing or any of that. I knew them from my Bar Mitzvah class. Their names were Sammy Fogell and Evan Goldberg, and I knew we’d be going to the same high school.
Sammy was one of those thirteen-year-olds who look like they’re about nine or ten. People called him “Psycho Sam” because he had a crazy temper. Evan was gigantic for his age and had sort of a Baby Huey meets Homer Simpson–ish quality to him. He had this habit of yanking on the collars of his shirts, so they were always all stretched out and saggy.
I watched as they scavenged for discarded glow sticks, cutting them open and pouring the glowing noxious goop that was inside all over their hands.
I went over.
Me: What are you guys doing?
Evan: Pouring this glowing shit all over our hands and shit so they glow.
Me: Awesome. Did you think of splattering it all over your clothes? Then they’d glow, too.
Fogell and Evan looked at each other, then back at me.
Fogell: Fantastic idea.
Actually, I thought, I’m one of these guys.
We spent the rest of the night, and many others, collecting glow sticks, cutting them open, and slathering ourselves with the (highly toxic) contents. We refocused our energy from dancing to slow songs to drinking discarded beers and martinis and smoking cigarette butts. A few times, I think, I even saw some other kids looking at us with longing. But then “I Swear” would come on and they’d go dry hump while we slowly poisoned ourselves with glowing radioactive sludge. Up till then, all the friends I had were out of convenience. I hadn’t really selected any of them. I was just near them all the time, so they were my friends. But me, Fogell, and Evan chose each other.
The Bar Mitzvah year ended, and high school was next. I didn’t feel ready. I was still scared of taking my shirt off, scared of everything in general really.
But at least I wasn’t alone.
I started taking karate because I was afraid of getting beat up, which is ironic because pretty much all that happens in karate is you get beat up.
I was obsessed with martial arts. Jean-Claude Van Damme, the Muscles from Brussels, was my favorite, followed very closely by Steven Seagal, who, I think, even though he passes himself off as an Italian with the last name “Seh-gall,” is actually a Jew with the last name “Segal,” which is great rebranding.
I loved the film Bloodsport, which (insanely) is allegedly based on the true story of Frank Dux. It’s about an American soldier—he’s from Brussels in the movie, which is never explained—who enters the most elite underground fighting competition, the Kumite. The ultimate villain in the film was an actor named Bolo Yeung, who was a bad guy in countless martial-arts movies, going back to Bruce Lee, and was easily identified for having the biggest fucking pecs I’ve ever seen in my life. The dude was half pec. Over my bed, the last thing I saw before I fell asleep and the first thing I saw when I woke up, was a poster from the film that featured Van Damme, mid–jump kick, nailing Bolo in his chest, the implication being that his kick was SO strong, even those massive pecs were useless to stop it.
I also loved The Karate Kid, which I related to more, because, well, it’s about a white kid who learns karate. In that film, Daniel LaRusso is being bullied by a group of kids in his high school who all do karate. But not just any karate: Cobra Kai karate, a dishonorable school of fighting that teaches truly unsavory techniques, like the foot sweep. Daniel meets Mr. Miyagi, a bonsai salesman with a fucking dope-ass car collection, who ultimately teaches him the honorable way to fight, and he kicks the shit out of the Cobra Kai bully using an awesome crane kick.
I was a soft kid, and I was generally scared. And by soft I don’t mean just, like, mentally soft. I was literally soft. I had a Pillsbury Doughboy quality to me. I seemed flaky and delicious, like you wanted to poke me and make me giggle.
When I was abo
ut seven years old, I was with my mom at the Vancouver Jewish Community Center, where she was taking an Israeli dancing class. When the class was over, I noticed a karate class starting in the same space, and I knew a kid in it! He seemed so psyched. I remember looking at the kids in their karate gi and being like, “I fucking want that shit.”
My mom enrolled me, and I met the teacher, who thank god was NOT Jewish. I’m not saying a Jewish dude wouldn’t be a great karate teacher…actually, yes, I’m 100 percent definitely saying that a Jewish dude wouldn’t be a great karate teacher.
My teacher was Shawn Ho, a Japanese Canadian guy who was, simply put, the most badass motherfucker I’ve ever met in my life, and I owe a lot of my confidence to him. He was short. Smaller than me. He was friendly, light, and funny. His age was literally impossible to tell, but I think he was in his fifties at the time, which is crazy. He seemed like he could take anyone out with the flick of a finger.
We did Kyokushinkaikan karate. Our motto was “Never give up. Always do your best.” A solid starting place in general.
I learned a good lesson in karate, which was that just by not quitting, I’d progress. When I started, I was the worst of about twenty kids. After two or three years, I hung in there, and eventually everyone else who was ahead of me when I started dropped out of the class, and I became the highest-ranking student.
Slowly, though, I started to realize that our school of karate maybe wasn’t modeled on the ones I grew up watching in movies. Or, at least not the school of karate that you were rooting for.
Shawn: Never be afraid to foot sweep! If you have to, grab hair, gouge eyes, spit in their face, grab their balls and twist! Whatever you have to do to win.
Holy shit…I was in the Cobra Kai.
My theory was really cemented when I was about twelve and we went to a tournament for the first time.