by Barry Wolfe
I am awakened from a deep sleep by a phone call from, of all people, Shannon Creamer. Shannon is a beautiful blond-haired, blue-eyed “shiksa” who rocks my boat in every direction. I’ve lusted after her since my first wet dream. Shannon is every Jewish boy’s forbidden fruit. Those Jewish boys who do not know her, and whom she does not want to know, call her in their sour grapes manner, the Grave Virgin. Many of these guys actually believe that she really isn’t saving herself for marriage, but is in fact planning to take her charms with her to the grave. The odd thing about our relationship is that however much I want us to be boyfriend and girlfriend, she considers me only her best friend. Why that is not enough for me has to do with the weird way in which teenagers categorize relationships. For a teenage boy intimate knowledge of the soul of a girl is no comparison to intimate knowledge of her body. Hormones Ueber Alles, I guess. But we can and do talk about anything. Neither one of us is afraid to reveal any shameful thought nor any action we aren’t proud of. And we talk often about the meaning of life and of our plans for the future.
Now don’t get me wrong, ours is not an affection-free relationship. In fact, we frequently go to Valley Street in Silver Spring, Maryland, ‘the most popular lovers’ lane in my neck of the woods to make-out. But I am not allowed with mouth or hands to venture any further than her neck. Kissing or touching her below the neck is verboten. Shannon is only the second girl I’ve ever kissed. It still amazes me how something so pleasurable had been something so feared. When I was 14, Barbara Goldberg, a girl who lived around the corner from me, invited me to a New Year’s Eve party that also happened to be the eve of her 13th birthday. Babs knows very well how hung up I am about my lip. When the clock strikes midnight, she wants me to kiss her Happy New Year and Happy Birthday. I think she is trying to humiliate me. When I refuse, she steals my hat and says she won’t return it until I kiss her. I become so enraged and feel so humiliated that I leave hatless. A year later, I had plastic surgery on my lip that totally eradicated my ugly scar. Still it is difficult for me to believe that any girl would be willing to kiss me. One day Babs and some other kids in the neighborhood are over my house and we are engaged in forbidden play. No, not that! We are playing my brother Adam’s High Fidelity record player, which he forbade me to touch. As we are dancing, Babs starts up with me. “Now, Izzy, you have no excuse. You are going to kiss me with your brand new lip. Sensing humiliation, I back away. She keeps coming toward me and I keep backing away until I bounce off the wall and into her arms. She is kissing me passionately. Thinking is no longer possible for me—not even thoughts of humiliation. I kiss her back just as passionately. I enjoy it immensely. Afterwards, everyone there applauds. That kiss gives birth to a brand new way of seeing myself.
When Shannon and I make out, I invariably cream my pants, but it is never clear to my inexperienced eye whether Shannon has joined me in orgasmic ecstasy. We often tell each other that our make-out sessions do not mean we are in love, but that we are just taking care of our mutual sexual frustrations. On other occasions she likes to tease me sexually. When we were horsing around one day, she let me touch her knee and then she rolls her skirt back inch by inch. With each inch she would allow me a little more access to her thighs and then she would laugh. But when I reached the middle of her inner thigh, her hands would clamp down on mine. She laughed every time. If I tried to push my hand—now manacled by hers—any further up her thigh, she would become indignant. “Stop it, Izzy,” she would cry out. “No means no! “I understand that,” I would reply, “but it had been ‘yes, yes, yes’ and then no. That’s a little harder to deal with.”
About six months ago, Shannon started seeing this hard ass named Nick Karpas, a Greek god with all the height and looks I could ever want. He is a definite delinquent and he has approximately half of Shannon’s brains. They both agree, however, that he is God’s gift to her. But he forgets to mention that he believes he is God’s gift to all women. From what I could see, he never treated her very well, but the worse he treats her, the more infatuated she becomes. I could not fathom this logic at all. The worst part of it for me, though, was that since she started going with Nick, Shannon and I have had zero make-out sessions.
When I’m fully awake, I hear her sobbing over the phone. “Shannon? What’s wrong?”
“Oh Izzy, I’m so unhappy. Nick told me he is seeing another girl and he wants to cool our relationship. How could he do this to me, Izzy, I love him so much.”
“Shannon,” I reply, “I told you he wouldn’t stay true to you. His philosophy is to get as far as he can with every girl he meets. He just wants to get in your pants.”
“How do you know this, Izzy?” she asks with great exasperation.
“Because he blabs his conquests all over the place,” I reply, matching her exasperation. “He can’t keep his mouth shut if his life depended on it.”
“Oh Izzy, I can’t believe it. You wouldn’t believe the things he said to me. He told me he loved me.
“You and everything else in skirts. Come on, Shannon, I’m sorry you’re hurting but you’ve got to wake up and see him for what he is.”
“I can’t take this. Izzy, let’s go to Valley Street.” Although I know she is only trying to soften her pain, I have no objection being her salve, if not her salvation. In fact, I jump at the chance.
“Let’s do it,” I say a little too eagerly. “I’m sure I can get my father’s car. I’ll pick you up after dinner. How’s 7:30?”
“That’s fine,” Shannon says tearfully. I think I hear a tinge of regret in her voice that she has so hastily decided she wants to see me.
I‘m so excited (and let’s face it horny) that I arrive in front of her house 10 minutes early. I sit in the car staring at my watch and listening to Doo Wop on WOOK. Ironically, the song playing is "Been So Long" by the Pastels, a Doo Wop vocal group with one of the smoothest sounds around. I have to sit in the car because I‘m not allowed in the house. Shannon’s father is a prominent physician and just as prominently an anti-Semite. Her mother is also a social snob, but for some reason she likes me and makes allowances. Often she serves as a buffer to protect Shannon’s friendship with me from her husband. They live in a beautiful house in the North Portal section of upper northwest Washington. I think of North Portal as the Land of Mansions. I have never seen houses that big. It is a mystery to me why Shannon’s father bought a house in that neighborhood because it is populated by a large number of well-to-do Jewish families.
As I continue to listen to WOOK, I’m getting more and more excited, and I pledge to myself that I will get to second maybe even third base tonight. After all, she isn’t Jewish, so what’s it matter. As soon as I hear the words come out of my mouth, I’m appalled. Why should it matter that she’s not Jewish? But isn’t that the rule? You can take liberties with shiksas, but not with Jewish girls. Who made this rule? What’s the point? If you mistreat Jewish girls and shiksas, won’t they both cry and learn to hate men?
At 7:35, Shannon comes out of the house and walks to the car with her head down. As soon as she enters the car, she starts bawling. “Oh Izzy, I’m so miserable. My heart is broken. How could he do this to me?” She sits really close to me and nuzzles her head into the crook of my arm. She cries all the way to Valley Street. When I park the car, Shannon puts her cheek to mine and says, “Izzy, please hold me. Hold me tight.” I am caught between lust and empathy. I feel myself becoming aroused by her closeness, by her soft blond hair and her breath on my neck. Yet having been dumped on several occasions by girls I thought I was in love with, I can imagine how she’s feeling. She then looks at me with imploring eyes and moves in to kiss me. We start making out. "One Summer Night" by the Danleers is playing on the radio. The setting couldn’t be more perfect, a balmy July night with the fragrance of honeysuckle in the air. I am so aroused that I completely forget my pledge. I just want to make her feel good. I kiss her neck and move my hand over her breast. She begins to moan a little and offers no resistance. I begi
n gently rubbing and tickling her back. I then put my hand under her skirt and she whispers, “Oh Izzy,” and kisses me harder. I feel the soft, smooth skin of her inner thigh and know that I am close to coming. But as I move my hand further up her thigh, I feel something different, something very strange. I feel a covering that seems to possess little perforations. The covering feels like rubber or something. This material is so beyond my realm of experience that I haven’t a clue as to what it might be. I suddenly bolt upright and exclaim, “What is that? What are you wearing?”
“Oh, you mean my girdle? My mom bought me this Playtex Living Girdle. She said I had gained too much weight and I needed to flatten my tummy.”
“Well, it feels like a rubber chastity belt,” I complain.
“Well, it does offer extra protection for my virtue,” she says sarcastically. “Besides, would you be so fast with your little Jewish girlfriends?”
“I don’t have any Jewish girlfriends.”
“I know how you Jewish boys think. I’m a Shiksa. See I even know the lingo. I’m a Shiksa and you think it’s alright to get as much as you can off me.” I’m stung by her lumping me with other Jewish boys.
“Shannon, you don’t realize how I feel about you.”
“Izzy, you tell any girl who lets you kiss her that you love her. And if they let you feel them up, you’d be their devoted slave forever. I know you! Besides, we’re just friends, remember.”
The mood is completely broken. All hope of love and lust evaporate as I sit sullenly, trying to cope with my disappointment, frustration, and shame. My hangdog look pisses off Shannon. “Poor Izzy,” she offers in that mock sympathetic tone that always infuriates me, “You look like the runt of the litter who knows he won’t get fed. Do you even know what the meaning of love is?” she continues. The conversation becomes very complex and abstruse because of her obsession with Western philosophy. As Shannon attempts to explain the differences among the varieties of love-- Eros, Phileo and Agape, I zone out. No feeling is possible after a dose of Shannon’s pedantry. “Enough, Shannon. Let’s go home,” I angrily say. She can see I am annoyed but she says nothing. As I’m getting ready to pull away, I see a light in my side mirror. It’s a policeman shining a flashlight into the car behind me. I become entranced by the intense discussion that ensues between the burly policeman and the unseen driver about the nature of the activities that are taking place inside the car. At first, I can’t make out what’s being said, but as the two raise their voices, I hear the driver say, “But Officer, we were only necking.” The policeman retorts, “Yeah? Well put your “neck” back in your pants and follow me to the police station.” When I hear “police station”, I pull the car out of its parking place in a hurry and speed away before a similar fate awaits us. When we know we’re beyond the reach of the policeman, Shannon and I start laughing so hard that I almost swerve into a parked car.
As we are driving back to her house, Shannon gives me her sweet, compassionate smile. “Izzy, I am sorry if I hurt you. That’s the last thing I want to do, because you are such a great friend.” At the sound of the word “friend”, my sense of shame rears its ugly head. Always a friend and never a boyfriend; this is my tragic fate. When she points out with a smile that I’m blushing, I feel even worse. She thinks I’m embarrassed by her compliment. In fact, I’m ashamed of my shame. I do not reply. All I can think about is how much my mind, my heart, and my balls hurt.
When we reach Shannon’s house, she looks at me with an expression of sincere, solicitous concern, an expression that gives her commonly pretty features the appearance of elegant beauty.
“Izzy, will you be ok?” she finally asks.
“Yeah, Shannon, I’ll be ok. I’m always ok,” I reply, unable to keep the sarcasm out of my voice or the tears from welling up. At a loss for words Shannon gives me one last pained look and gets out of the car. When she reaches her front door, she turns and enthusiastically waves with a smile so bright it almost illuminates my internal night. But when the door closes behind her, I feel empty, lonely, and lost.
What she had said about her being a Shiksa cuts me deeply. I don’t want to think that way. I hate it when I hear Jewish guys talk about Shiksas as if they are the lowest of the low. The conventional wisdom is that one can kiss, touch, and feel up Shiksas anywhere they will let you. And they will let you because they don’t have the self-respect that Jewish girls possess. In fact, there are many Jewish girls who are labeled Shiksas because they “put out”, letting guys get to second or even third base. In my crowd there is little distinction between the words Shiksa and slut. No Jewish guilt need apply.
Yet, it is at least partially true that I, like all of my male peers, come to believe that the female gender is divided into two categories: the pure and the “fast”. It’s assumed to be difficult to find a fast Jewish girl, but Shiksas are thought to be genetically programmed to “put out”. In the presence of the “pure” female, one is supposed to experience transcendent feelings, worship her on one’s self-constructed pedestal, but never touch. With the fast girl, the tramp, the slut, one respects nothing. A boy is supposed to degrade and then enjoy such girls sexually, or in the current parlance, “Get what you can off of her.” My problem is that I accept only half of the double standard. I wax poetic about the pure, pity the tramp---and touch neither. Shannon is the rare exception. When I do touch her, I fall in love. She is probably correct when she says I would tell any girl who allowed me to kiss her that I loved her. The fact that she let me touch her breast did make me her slave. Whenever we “made out,” I would wet my pants with an orgasm of monumental gratitude. From then on I could never say no to Shannon. Emotionally I seesaw between being quite withdrawn from girls and leaving myself completely unprotected. Of course, Shannon is not the only girl with whom I allowed my vulnerabilities to show. Such emotional display often scared girls into predatory acts. I would then be dropped or inexplicably used.
Many of the attitudes of my Jewish peers are so distasteful that I often want to flee my own Jewishness. Too many of my Jewish peers and their parents view gentiles with the same contempt that many gentiles possess for Jews. Next to “Schwartzeh” the most demeaning Yiddish term I hear is reserved for gentiles: a goyisher kop. Literally this is translated as a gentile’s head, but it always conveys the idea that gentiles aren’t very smart. I hate to see myself aligned with people who are so hostile to the differentness of others when I feel so different myself. Yet I crave acceptance from both Jews and gentiles. I want acceptance from gentiles because I hate the thought of being forced to limit my associations to just Jews. I crave acceptance from Jews because I fear the gentile’s perennial hatred of Jews. Add to this dilemma the fact that I don’t know what it means to be a Jew. Is a Jew someone who believes in and follows the commandments of the religion Judaism? What if I don’t believe in God? How am I then a Jew? Am I a Jew because Jews are actually a separate race of people? What is race? Am I not white? I anxiously want to fit in and yet I keep my distance from every group. I want to be liked by everyone, but not to be constrained by the demands of any group.
I hate these categories that can turn my good mood into rage, humiliation, and despair. I see in my dark reveries, hanging over me like ghostly vapors, images of the arrogant and condescending gentile, the irresponsible, barely articulate Negro, the mean-spirited redneck; the arrogant WASP scion of the moneyed families that presumably rule the country, the filthy rich Jews who presumably rule the world. I lament these stereotypes that plant myths in our brains and lead to hateful segregation. The toxic fruit of such stereotypes, I think, poisons all hope of human kindness and understanding. I remember as a child the openhearted way I would greet another child. We would accept each other instantly as merely individuals with common interests and unique qualities. I never was concerned with the child’s race, class, or even gender. Inevitably, I lost, as we all do, the simple “take you as you are” attitude toward other children. Eventually, this immediately granted acceptance
is soon eliminated and replaced by cruel and ugly images of one another, images that separate us forever. It is a different person that I would encounter through the looking glass of these categories. Or so my 17-year-old mind has concluded.
On a scorching hot day in August, I take myself to Rock Creek Park to contemplate the confusion of my existence. I sit on a huge boulder in the middle of the creek, swatting away flies and mosquitoes. I imagine myself as two very different people in the same body. There is Izzy the way I think people perceive him and then there is the way Izzy truly feels inside. I was co-captain of the basketball team, Senior of the Year, president of my homeroom class, a popular B student, a scholarship winner and seen by others as an “all around nice guy.” But inside I am burdened by lust, guilt and fear in relation to my sexual feelings, confused about my Jewish identity, bewildered by the clannishness of social groups and my marginal presence in all of them, hungering for more than a superficial relationship with a girl, and sitting in silent judgment of the people around me. And in a few short weeks, this confused, marginal boy with Negrophobia, will enter Howard University.
Chapter
5.
I’ve Got the Heebie-Jeebies