Repeat

by Neal Pollack

  To make things worse, Brad had the interest but no actual sex drive. Puberty still hadn’t struck; his body contained about as much testosterone as a Vampire Weekend tribute band. His hairless dingle hung between his legs, as lame as Tiny Tim on Christmas Day, a urinating pseudopod.

  Every day for several hours, Brad went into his bedroom, pulled down his Jockeys, and stared wistfully downward at his minischlong. He knew it could achieve so much more. But no amount of concentration on mental images of Heather Locklear in her T. J. Hooker police uniform seemed to be able to will it into existence.

  He locked his bedroom door.

  Come on, big guy, he said to himself. I know you’re in there. Warrior, come out to plaaaa-ay!

  He thwapped away at his appendage like a cat playing with a nip-filled ball, but the winning formula eluded him.

  God, what if it’s just not going to happen in this lifetime? he thought desperately. Maybe that was the point. Maybe whoever was making him repeat his life over again was trying to teach him that sexual desire was bad. Maybe he was doomed to live forever as a biological oddity, a eunuch, a hairless Ken doll.

  Or maybe not.

  He kept trying. He thought hard. It’s not like he had anything better to do. And there was so much great wanking material in those days. Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman. Any of the Charlie’s Angels, even Tanya Roberts. Chris Evert grunting in her tennis dress. Erin Gray. The deliberately welcoming thighs of Miss Ginger Lynn Allen. Kathleen Turner in Body Heat. Hell, even Miss Piggy in the right light . . .

  Brad felt a rumble in the Bronx, a stirring below.

  Come on, he murmured to himself. Come on!

  He felt an inching up his belly, a worm after a good rain.

  His stamen was swelling, engorging with blood. But the battle hadn’t been won yet. It could always retreat. Brad closed his eyes and concentrated, not touching anything, letting his body find itself. A baby bird needed to leave the nest on its own. He thought harder. His body felt tingly and alive.

  Then he opened his eyes and looked down. His dick had returned. It was there, twitching, just below his belly button. The fact that this boner had been induced, at last, by thinking about the Muppets didn’t make it any less his.

  Hello, old friend, Brad said.

  He gave it the greeting it deserved. Cue the masturbation montage.

  It went on for months. This wasn’t your ordinary sexual awakening, no innocent amateur hour. Brad raised masturbation to the status of divine art. He had technique. He was a master. A master bater. He knew how to pace, to cup his balls, and to gently massage his perineum. He was the only thirteen-year-old on earth with a makeshift butt plug fashioned from a desktop eraser. There was more than a decade of pent-up grown-man lust in Brad’s body, and he didn’t care how loudly he grunted while sliding his hips up and down the inside of his closet door. Brad would have rolled around by himself on a bearskin rug in front of a fire if he could, whanging the whole time. He was writing the Kama Sutra of schlong wringing.

  Brad’s masturbation career reached its glorious apex one Sunday afternoon, as Don and Rose went downtown to hear a talk by the Dalai Lama. Brad remembered that event from the first time around. Their seats would be obstructed-view, back row. And then Don would have a painful but not serious sinus attack and end up at the emergency room, spending six hours watching Murder, She Wrote. The family would return home six hours later, exhausted but with an eight-ounce squeeze bottle of high-powered prescription nasal spray. That was plenty of time for a jerkfest.

  As soon as Don and Rose locked the front door, Brad dashed to the bedroom with a Price Club–sized bottle of hand lotion and two rolls of toilet paper. He was so excited that he squirted almost the moment he touched himself. But it didn’t matter. Five minutes later, he was ready again. He had so much to give!

  After the second time, which took a little longer but not much, Brad followed a hunch. He went into his dad’s study—Don was a U of C professor, and by then they had an apartment that was half a city block long, with a view of the lake, no less—and followed his nose to Don’s cigar cabinet. He opened it and immediately saw a half-smoked joint there among the Cubans.

  Oh, sweet, magical weed! Brad thought. I have missed you so.

  Brad took the joint as his birthright. He hadn’t been high in nearly thirteen years. He went into his bedroom, opened a window, and inhaled. It tasted dank and bitter. God knew how old this joint was, or where the weed had been grown. But Brad didn’t care. It was stressful to live your life over again, and he was high at last.

  He came eight times. Then nine. He was an autoerotic menace, Onan the Barbarian, the emperor of hand cream. It seemed to go on forever.

  His parents walked into the living room. The Dalai Lama had ended the talk early in this timeline, and Don’s sinuses were fine. Brad was sprawled on the sofa. It smelled like the upstairs rooms of Studio 54 in there.

  “Son of a bitch!” said Don.

  “Crap,” said Brad.

  “Oh my!” said Rose.

  “I can explain,” Brad said.

  “No need to explain, I get it,” said Don.

  “What do you mean, you get it?” Rose said.

  They started bickering.

  Brad lost his boner. But at least he knew where to find it now.

  Brad Cohen became a bar mitzvah—again—on Saturday, March 5, 1983, at Congregation Beth Israel on the South Side of Chicago. This wasn’t some new, flashy, suburban temple celebrating forty-plus years of successful assimilation. No, this was the place where Saul Bellow had been bar mitzvahed. The sanctuary dated back to 1923, ancient by American standards, and the congregation’s history dipped all the way back to the 1860s—actually ancient—long before large numbers of Jews sought asylum on American shores.

  Also, somewhere along the way Beth Israel had gone reform. Men and women could sit together. Sunday school became more “cultural” and less about memorizing liturgy with a grumpy old Pole traumatized by his treatment at the hands of the Cossacks. By the time Brad arrived, the music and lyrics of Debbie Friedman had drowned out the tired, droning men, replacing it with a more laid-back, heartfelt “Kumbaya” vibe. They were all Free to Be Jew and Me. The congregation had a long-haired rabbi who played the organ in his overalls at Beth Israel’s summer camp in the Dells. Yom Kippur services included a slideshow of nature scenes accompanied by a recording of “Morning Has Broken.” Sung by Cat Stevens, for God’s sake. The enemy of the Jews!

  The study process was easier the second time through, though just as unenjoyable. Brad didn’t start from Aleph-Bet ground zero. He was stringing together vowel sounds and reading simple sentences by the time he was nine, knocking out basic prayers by age ten, and fully locked in on his Torah portion well before his big day. Brad actually had time to dig deep on the haftarah, just because he could. He memorized a double portion, singing using the traditional Askenazic melody.

  One day after lessons, the slack-jawed cantor went up to Don and Rose and said, “Your son is the finest bar mitzvah student that I’ve seen in forty years. I have never seen such a thorough work ethic. He will succeed at anything he tries.”

  Don and Rose were really surprised, but then they always were by their son. Brad rarely tested as a genius. Most of the assessments placed him at above-average, but hardly extraordinary, intelligence. But when it came to application, he was the best. He had a deep internal drive to succeed, powered by some mysterious infinite source.

  They didn’t have to know that Brad was so far ahead because he had a forty-year head start, and that his “drive” was actually highly calculated and somewhat cynical laziness. His strategy now was: take the same classes again, put in just a little extra effort, and rise to the top like delectable cream.

  It was the era of Alex P. Keaton. People valued a certain kind of raw starched-shirt intellectual ambition. This time around, B
rad was going to be a kid who fit in with the grown-ups.

  Of course, that meant there weren’t a lot of kids in the temple on Brad’s special day. Don had three sisters, and Rose had a brother and a sister each, so there were cousins, lots of them, plus a half-dozen guys who Brad had played video games with. This helped lower the average age under sixty. But it was still an old shul filled mostly with old shul-goers.

  There Brad stood, in his blue yarmulke and flowing tallith, the arc glowing golden behind him, sacred letters inscribed on sacred wood, a gateway to the mythical old man in the sky who harshly watches over us all. The rabbi turned to the ark and chanted on his heels as the congregation. Then he opened the ark. The light of God didn’t come pouring out. No one’s face melted. Instead, there sat the Torah, rescued from Poland like all good Torahs, resplendent in gilded brocade and white cloth. Out it came, with a loud sh’ma. The rabbi walked up and down the aisles, singing:

  Blessed is the Lord who gave us the Torah

  Blessed is the Lord who gave us the Torah

  Blessed is the Lord who gave us the Torah

  Torah, Torah, To-rah!

  Brad followed behind, trying his best to look as though he was into it. All of Brad’s parents’ friends were beaming at him. He was smiling back. He was going to give them a show. Brad wanted to impress the alta kockers. He had a bowl haircut and braces so thick they could have borne the weight of the Southern Pacific line. In other words, an archetypal bar mitzvah boy. This is what they’d all come to see. Today he was a Nice Young Man.

  Brad knocked out his Torah portion, no problem. He wailed through that haftarah like a confident champ. Then came time for his sermon. In his first incarnation, Brad had lazed off the task completely, forcing Rose to slap something together for him at the last minute, which she did reluctantly, cobbling together a few hundred words, half of which seemingly were “friends” and “family” and “tradition,” culminating with the corny line: “And now the words that you’ve all been waiting to hear—the buffet is open!” Brad delivered it without much enthusiasm.

  This time, though, it was a thousand words of pure prophecy from a prodigal child who, at age two, had accurately predicted that Elvis would die on the toilet. Brad would hide no longer. It was time to reveal his powers to the world.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, looking outward, “beloved friends and family . . .” He turned his gaze left on the bimah, where sat the temple’s two rabbis: Lipstein, the boomer hippie, and Sherman, older, more hidebound.

  “Rabbis,” Brad said, “and congregants, we live in a time of immense conflict and great social change.”

  “Oh, brother,” Brad could hear Sherman murmur behind him. But Brad pressed forward.

  “My Torah portion today was taken from Exodus, the most profound literary expression of the desire of a people to be free. Today, we’re free to congregate as Jews because of that desire, and because of the sacrifices made by millions of our ancestors. And we should be equally grateful to the founders of America, who waged war so we could have the freedom to congregate under a religious banner as we see fit.”

  At this point, Brad had cobbled together a reasonably decent paragraph from an average newspaper editorial, sentiments in a can that he could easily deliver at Boys State without offending anybody. But then he pivoted.

  “But we have to remember that, even as we today celebrate our freedom, there are millions of people all over the world who don’t have that luxury. The black people of South Africa live under a cruel system of apartheid as severe, violent, and unjust as our former Jim Crow laws.”

  Rabbi Sherman, a Reagan voter, moved in his seat uneasily, as did quite a few of Brad’s relatives.

  Brad continued: “Central Americans find themselves daily brutalized by corrupt dictatorships, many of them propped up and funded by the US government for vague and cynical reasons. And in our own country, gay and lesbian people find themselves denied a whole raft of basic civil rights, including the freedom to marry and to adopt children.”

  That brought about a little gasp. This was 1983, after all, and the Gay Plague had just started to descend over America. He intended to be an advocate long before it became fashionable. Even now, he was right, as he would continue to be, about everything. And he knew it. So he continued as the crowd looked on, stunned by this very strange speech.

  “Indeed,” he said, “our very notion of the word ‘freedom’ is extremely malleable. We’re free to drink ourselves under the table, as long as we don’t drive. But if you get caught with a joint in your pocket, you could go to jail for years, particularly if you’re black or Hispanic. How far are we willing to extend our freedoms? Where is the Exodus for people convicted of innocent, consensual crimes?”

  Other than the fact that it came out of the mouth of a bar mitzvah boy, that didn’t raise a lot of controversy. Not in the liberal lakefront district that was soon to help elect Chicago’s first black mayor. But Brad was saving his money shot, the one that would make the bimah shake. He uncorked.

  “We, as Jews, are just as complicit. While I believe that the state of Israel has every right to exist and to thrive, I also don’t believe that it should be used as a cudgel to keep down the Palestinian people, who have just as much a historical claim to the land as we do.”

  “Lies!” Brad heard from the crowd. He looked up. His mother’s cousin Charlie had risen to shake a finger. There were boos and murmurs. Brad’s would have been a controversial opinion in 2009. But in 1983, at the height of Yasser Arafat’s career, it was heresy.

  “Search your heart,” Brad said. “You’ll know it to be true.”

  Over in the rabbi corner, Sherman whispered to Lipstein, “Who does this little shit think he is?”

  “I happen to agree with that little shit,” Lipstein whispered back.

  “Maybe I should tell that to the board when it’s time for you to take the senior rabbi job away from me,” Sherman said.

  “Go ahead and do that, you fucking dinosaur,” Lipstein said.

  “Don’t you mouth off to me, boychick!” Sherman said, loud enough for the whole congregation to hear.

  While the rabbis bickeringly tugged at each other’s tallith, the rest of the congregation murmured, some more loudly than others. But Brad didn’t want the congregation to leave thinking that Rose and Don had raised an enemy of Zionism. He had much more complex goals.

  “On the other hand,” he said, “let’s not glamorize the situation in the Middle East. Islamic radicalism in Iran is a real threat to freedom, especially to ordinary Iranians, who are fleeing to America to find a better and more prosperous life. Also, if we’re not careful, propping up Islamic radical fighters in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union will lead to more trouble and despair than we could possibly imagine.”

  Brad looked out at the crowd. No one had any idea what he was talking about. The Taliban didn’t exist yet, and neither did Al Qaeda. But they would soon.

  Brad had stumbled into a method that would give him the moral high ground in every possible writing situation. There were differences between this timeline and his first timeline, but they were so subtle and minor that they didn’t seem to matter. So, he figured, he might as well give the illusion that he was helping to push things forward, that he was in some small way an actor in that history. Along the way, he’d stir up people. It was a winning formula for success.

  Brad thanked the crowd once again for coming. Then he said, “And now the words that you’ve all been waiting to hear—the buffet is open!”

  After the service, Brad’s uncle Alan approached.

  “Interesting speech,” Alan said. “A little thin, though, more than a little didactic, and inconsistently argued.”

  It’s always hard to impress family.

  One afternoon a couple of years later, Brad was sitting at home watching Battlecats. Old habits died hard. He’d snu
ck a couple of puffs off one of Don’s joints.

  It was the episode where the Clawmaster, the rogue druid who was constantly battling Prince Catspian for control of the Battle Kingdom, pretended to ally himself with the Dog Army, only to change sides at the last second, preserving peace, allying himself with King Tom Tabby, making himself appear like the savior of the Battlecats while secretly positioning his laser cannon to destroy the capital. It was actually a surprisingly successful political allegory of the times, one that Brad and the writing staff had never been able to recapture in the reboot that had destroyed his career in Hollywood. Now as the first run reappeared in the culture, Brad sat through every new episode. He needed to be familiar in case he had to work for Battlecats again.

  Don came into the room. “What are you watching this crap for?” he said.

  “I dunno,” Brad said.

  “You’ve got better things to do,” said Don.

  Don didn’t say stuff like this often. He didn’t need to. Brad usually was doing better things. But he clung to Battlecats, the last vestige of his former life. Why, though? This second incarnation seemed to be doing just fine. He had no real reason to watch other than to glimpse the occasional cheesecake shot of Panther Lady.

  “You’re totally right, Dad,” Brad said, and he turned the TV to Wall Street Week. It was time for Brad to pursue a higher, older ambition. Why cling to failure when you had the power to fabricate success?

  Cats would battle no more in Brad’s life. The New Century awaited him.

  This time he’d stay a lot longer than two months.