“With startling honesty, daring, and originality, Rick Sandford tells the truth about himself and his experience as vividly as any writer I know, and he invests that truth with the excitement it deserves.”
— DON BACHARDY
Synopsis:
In this semiautobiographical novel, Rick Sandford tells the story of a former gay porn star—also named Rick—who lives across the street from a Chassidic boys’ school, and his relationship with the students and their families. Rick is drawn to the boys’ religious fervor, and, in an attempt to gain deeper insight into their faith, he dons Chassidic dress and dares to confront the codes in Leviticus condemning homosexual behavior—codes that he believes are responsible for the bigotry that has dogged his life.
As his relationship with the boys deepens from mere fascination to friendship, Rick finds himself confronting his own prejudices. Despite being an avowed atheist, he finds himself captivated by theology and the boys’ religious devotion. And they, in turn, are equally drawn to understanding Rick’s ardent embrace of their most contemptible of sins. The collision of these radically different worlds, fueled by the increasing closeness between Rick and the students, results in a raucous, funny, and always-frank look at the many natures of passion.
As thoughtful as it is irreverent, The Boys Across the Street is a powerful blend of eroticism and religion—a novel filled with unforgettable characters, certain to stir debate at every turn.
the boys across the street
the boys across the street
rick sandford
faber and faber, inc.
an affiliate of farrar, straus and giroux
new york
For
Avraham and Yaakov
and
Moshe and Yitzchak
Faber and Faber, Inc.
An affiliate of Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
Copyright © 2000 by Stacey Foiles for the Estate of Rick Sandford
Introduction copyright © 2000 by Craig Lucas
All rights reserved
Distributed in Canada by Penguin Books of Canada Limited
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2000
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following: Excerpt from the Encyclopedia Judaica. Copyright © 1973. Reprinted by permission of Keter Publishing House Ltd. Excerpt from Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language. Copyright © 1961 by The World Publishing Co. Reprinted by permission of Macmillan General Reference, a wholly owned subsidiary of IDG Books Worldwide, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sandford, Rick, 1950-1995.
The boys across the street / Rick Sandford. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-571-19960-7 (alk. paper)
I. Title.
PS3569.A5163B69 2000
813'.54—dc21 99-38697
Table of Contents
acknowledgments
introduction
1 / isaac and moshe
2 / boyfriends
3 / the other side of the street
4 / sightings
5 / the accident
6 / the yarmulke
7 / tzitzis
8 / avi
9 / crystal
10 / the blessing
11 / gentleman’s agreement
12 / yaakov
13 / mendel
14 / baseball and velcro
15 / brothers
16 / the first day of shavuot
17 / the second day of shavuot
18 / anti-semanticism
19 / the hat
20 / unfinished business
21 / tailing sea horse
22 / levi
23 / “wouldn’t it be funny ... ?”
24 / the shooting
25 / the police
26 / the detective
27 / after the fact
28 / the sacrifice
29 / summertime
30 / yitzchak
31 / moshe
32 / the proposition
33 / pennies
34 / avraham
35 / epilogue
acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following four men. There are so many others whom Rick loved and who loved Rick not acknowledged here. I thank these men because I believe that they were instrumental in bringing Rick’s writing to book.
Rick met Robert Drake in 1988 in a writing group led by Robert. Rick was angry, suspicious, and vulnerable. He was also an exquisite writer—that’s what Robert saw. Without Robert Drake there might be no book. He never abandoned Rick as a writer despite publishers’ fears about Rick’s work. All of us— you, Rick, and I—have Robert to thank for this book and for Rick’s stories coming to print; without him, they would live only in my boxes of Ricky’s things. Thank you, Robert.
Peter Cashorali met Rick in Robert’s group as well. They loved to play Jesus and Simon Peter. When Rick died, Peter prepared his body for the journey. I know Ricky would have laughed heartily while basking in the comfort. Thank you, Peter.
Peter Choi provided Rick with the means to sustain himself financially without too much effort. He continued to be there as a practical and loving friend through Rick’s dying. Thank you, Peter.
Don Bachardy loved Rick, which was a source of great pride and joy for him. Don gave Rick the grace of deep acceptance. His gaze reflected Rick as beautiful, strong, courageous, and wanted. Thank you, Don.
I thank these men for Rick. I cannot know if he would have fulfilled his dream of writing without them. I do know they contributed to the pages that open before you.
For myself, I would like to thank Rick Sandford for staying alive as long as he did, for being my friend, my nemesis, my husband for a day, and a constant love in my life for twenty-seven years.
—Stacey Foiles, Executor, the Estate of Rick Sandford
introduction
I first set eyes on Rick Sandford from the stage of the Gershwin Theater in 1979. I was singing in the chorus of Sweeney Todd, and Rick was seated near the front between his friends Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. Rick and Don were passing a bottle of poppers back and forth, sniffing and grinning up at the huge industrial set.
After the performance the four of us went for drinks at Wienerwald on Seventh Avenue. This had all been arranged by my ex-lover, who knew of my reverence for Isherwood. In the faux beer garden, Rick (then twenty-eight) functioned as talk-show host, filling the gaps, as I was too tongue-tied to do more than bare my teeth in imitation of a smile. I remember Isherwood saying, “When it comes to plays, it doesn’t matter if you have a really good plot or any of that business; the audience will stick with you for the whole way if you have one really good character they can watch.”
The Boys Across the Street has, among many other astonishments, one really good character to watch. The character, Rick Sandford, lives alone in one room; when not having sex, working out, or earning what little cash he has as a stand-in on TV shows he is unable to watch—he has no TV—he is collecting unemployment and reading. The supreme autodidact, he devours philosophy, poetry, plays, novels, criticism. And he watches. Since he doesn’t have the income or inclination to buy a car which might enable him to go places and shop for things he doesn’t need, he fills his free time with the pursuit of physical pleasure and the nearly equal pleasure of gaining knowledge. His only other social activity is to go to practically every movie ever made. No one I have ever known has had a more encyclopedic knowledge of movies.
But we’re talking about a character, the protagonist of a fiction. I hope no one will ask or t
ry to determine what part of this book is “true.” It is all true, whether any of it happened or not.
Rick lives across the street from an Orthodox yeshiva, and his interactions with the students make up nearly all the action, told in a lucid and unadorned prose more Cather than Updike. The boys are drawn to Rick because he speaks to them openly, without design or condescension. Coming from an all-male environment where they are daily required to thank God they were not born female, the boys are fascinated by Rick’s candor and iconoclasm, particularly about sex.
In a very real sense the other major character is the street which divides these believers from the non-believer, the Jews from the Gentile, the virgins from the man who claims to have slept with two thousand men, and most significantly the (presumed) heteros from the homo. What unites the two sides of this chasm? In addition to their estrangement from mainstream American culture, Rick and the boys also share a need to belong to something, someone, and a deep curiosity—a seemingly innate desire for truth and knowledge. Admittedly, this gets beaten out of most of us, and Rick watches as it happens to his boys.
The motivation behind much of Rick’s own behavior, increasingly provocative and bizarre, is at first opaque to him. But unlike so many, he is willing to be in the uncomfortable place of not knowing, to keep asking why he does what he does, until he hits upon the truth: his own intrapsychic, previously unconscious reason for disguising himself as what he is not—a Chassid.
But it is not his attire which most deeply offends the boys: it is Rick’s homosexuality. “We don’t believe in that,” they insist.
Noam Chomsky has observed that if you speak the truth to people who have been lied to all their lives, you will sound as if you are from Neptune—crazy, criminal, or both. Rick frequently strikes the boys (and sometimes the reader) as just that—except that his voice has none of the hallmarks of insanity: he speaks rationally, he stops throughout to question his own perceptions, feelings, and beliefs. What is he, then, a mystic? If so, his only god is cock, and the taste of sperm his holy communion.
When I first knew the real Rick, his lovemaking was vehement and overemphatic; he could take two cocks up inside him, but it was more like an Olympic event than an expression of love; he could deep-throat, but it was brutal, insistent. Blood came out of the head of my cock after he sucked me off. What drove him to this seemingly desperate desire to consume the other man? And so many? What in the world had happened to this child?
Rick, the character, wishes he hadn’t been born and is not afraid to die. This astonishes the boys. They have been taught to “be fruitful and multiply.” Rick thinks it is the worst possible sin to bring a child into this world and that self-pity is the most disgusting of human traits.
The real Rick could not understand what was wrong with the actions of the character of Louis in Angels in America; he thought no sick person had the right to expect to be taken care of, even by a lover. When everyone rallied around Rick during his final illness in 1995, he was completely gobsmacked. It was as if he had never before taken in the simple reality that he was loved. And among many other things, the book is an attempt to make the imaginative and necessary leap from Rick’s terrible experiences to his capacity for love.
It grows increasingly clear that the American Dream is death— and I don’t mean that the American Dream is killing us, which it may well be—I mean that what we seem to be dreaming about and striving toward is death. Movies, TV, and journalism are filled with ever more startling and gruesome images of human destruction. We want to know how fast the car was going when the celebrity was eviscerated. Whole evenings can now be spent watching real people die in avalanches, tornadoes, tsunamis, fires, and sports accidents. We are kept sufficiently entertained by the massacres of other people’s children and the various ethnic cleansings, and though we believe that the government and media lie to us, we also believe that we can do nothing about it. We are a nation of know-it-alls who have no power, so we wait for death, getting high on various substances while we stare at televised drivel.
The enemies of culture, then, in my view include ignorance, distraction, knowingness (“Been there, done that” cynicism), and speed. Plato says that you can’t think when you’re in a hurry, and it’s true. You also can’t think when you’re working yourself to the bone at a meaningless job or when you’re perpetually distracted—watching endless sitcoms or whatever human disaster currently occupies the airwaves. As Pierre Bourdieu has persuasively argued, “Television poses a serious danger for all the various areas of cultural production—for art, for literature, for science, for philosophy, and for law.”
Here, then, is an anomaly: a work of art narrated by someone who doesn’t own a TV, whose quiet days are his own, who admits to knowing very little, possesses almost no creature comforts, doesn’t habitually indulge in consciousness-deadening drugs like alcohol or pot, doesn’t have children or even much of a future. Someone striving toward consciousness without the familiar carapace of “knowingness.” Someone who reads and questions and arrives at his own beliefs instead of simply receiving them. A life-affirming novel by a real man who has died.
Maybe there is hope for us yet.
—Craig Lucas
September, 1999
the boys across the street
1 / isaac and moshe
The two boys were sitting on the steps of a walkway across the street. All dressed up in black suits, with little black beanies on the back of their heads, they didn’t seem to have anywhere to go or anything to do. They had been wandering up and down the street for a while, but now they were still, and their attention was settling on the person directly across them: me.
I was reading.
I’d brought my canvas-backed director’s chair out of the house and was sitting in it facing the sun. It was the last Saturday before the end of the year and the weather was beautiful: all I had on was a pair of gold-colored trunks. My feet were propped up on one of two low brick walls that bordered the walkway leading to the courtyard apartments where I lived, and on it I had arranged my dictionary, my binoculars, and a cup of coffee.
But I was finding it difficult to concentrate. I had moved into my apartment thirteen years ago, the Jewish school across the street had opened shortly thereafter, and in all that time I had never really engaged any of the students in conversation. I guessed the two boys across the street from me to be about fourteen. They were Semitic-looking and the taller of the two was rather attractive.
I knew how to begin the conversation. I had imagined it in my mind a hundred times, and now, as I looked down at my book, and back over at them, I wondered if this was the moment. What the hell.
I looked at them directly.
We were definitely looking at one another.
Okay:
“Do you believe in God?”
They both immediately stood up. Not only were they being addressed by an adult, they were being asked the most basic question about the only thing that really mattered.
“Yes—of course. Don’t you?”
“Of course not,” I answered, matching their self-assurance. “I think life is meaningless,” and I had to catch myself before I added, “and stupid.” If life was meaningless, it couldn’t also be stupid.
“Then how did all this come to be?” one of them asked.
That sounded like a trick question. I answered cautiously, “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know,” the shorter of the two boys said, very satisfied, “but I know.”
“How do you know?”
“It says in the Torah.”
“That’s just a story.”
“It’s God’s revelation.”
“Men wrote that book—not God.”
Stalemate.
In the silence, a car passed between us. When it had gone by, there was a sudden interjection from up the street.
“The Jews killed the son of God.”
I turned around in my chair and saw a fat man in a torn T-shirt leanin
g against a car, his arms folded over his belly, a smile on his face.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said, and turned back to my book. I was baiting the boys, but not like that. His was a conversation I didn’t want to take part in, and I was willing to sacrifice my talk with the kids to avoid it.
I don’t know what happened to the fat man, but as I sat there trying to read I became aware of the two boys approaching me. They weren’t just walking toward me across the street, however; they had split up and were coming at me from two different directions. One of them was angling down the street and then back up to me, while the other was making his way from behind: they were reconnoitering a target.
When they had at last regrouped, they were standing just beside me. My chair, however, was on an embankment several feet above the sidewalk, so, from my perspective, they were slightly below me and looking up. I acknowledged them with a nod of my head: Yes?
The smaller of the two boys began the offensive: “If there is no God, then how did all this happen?” He made a gesture indicating the street, and meaning the world: the apartment houses, the palm trees, the parked cars, and the sky.
I gave a different answer this time: “Arbitrary accident.”
Both boys scoffed at this.
“Do you think this is a perfect world?” I asked them. “Do you think this is the only way things can be or ought to be? I think that shows a lack of imagination.”
“Then how did you get here?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.” The smaller boy, in particular, was contemptuous.
“But I have the courage to admit that I don’t know. You have to be very courageous to believe in nothing,” I told him.
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