The little boy came right back at me: “You have to be very courageous to believe in something.”
I was willing to concede that point. “That’s true. Sometimes.” But I wanted to get back to the question of this inevitable, perfect, and created world. “What about the Holocaust? Do you think God wanted that to happen?”
This was obviously a tricky point for them. They weren’t agreed on how to answer me. The taller of the two boys, the better-looking, the more thoughtful, let his friend answer. “God wanted those people with him.”
“And so he made them suffer?”
“Maybe they did something bad.”
I looked at him in disbelief.
He hurried to offer an explanation. “Let’s say a man is good, but he isn’t circumcised, then he will have to come back in his next life to get circumcised.”
I wasn’t exactly sure how this related to the Holocaust and God’s existence, but I’d never heard of this before. “The Jews believe in reincarnation?”
Both boys answered me at the same time. The taller boy said “No” and the smaller one said “Yes.”
I gave them a shrug: What gives?
They went into a conference. The taller boy answered. “Yes, the Jews believe in reincarnation, but it’s a special thing. Not everyone gets reincarnated.”
“The Anointed One gets reincarnated,” the smaller boy said.
“He is always with us, yes,” the taller boy affirmed.
“He’s alive.” The little boy seemed to be emphatic about this.
“What’s the ‘Anointed One’?” I asked.
“That’s what we call the Messiah,” the taller boy explained.
“You think the Messiah is alive?”
“He is always with us. He returns with every generation. We’re just waiting for him to reveal himself.”
I didn’t quite know what to do with this information. I had a momentary vision of a second—first—Messiah coming here on Alta Vista Boulevard. “Aren’t you going to be mad at him when he does come for not revealing himself during World War II?”
“No,” and here the taller boy seemed to be making a special effort to clarify an important point. “You see, the Jews weren’t ready then. Before the Messiah comes, we have to be prepared and ready as a nation.”
This was really shocking to me: the regulation of collective self-hatred. Well, for now, for the moment, I would offer myself as another possibility, a window on the outside world and— maybe even—a salvation.
“Do you believe in Moses?” I asked.
“He saved our people,” the smaller boy said.
“That’s the story. That’s what it says. But except for the Bible there is no other historical evidence for his existence.”
“His name is Moses,” the taller boy said, indicating his friend.
I looked at the boy with his rounded, almost chubby face. “Your name is Moses?”
“Moshe,” he said.
I turned to the taller boy. “What’s yours?”
“Isaac.”
“My name’s Rick.”
We looked at one another: we all had names.
“I just wanted to make the point,” I said, “that all recorded history is within the last five thousand years or so, and in the scheme of things that’s nothing. I just read a couple of weeks ago that they discovered a genetic link that indicates that every single person on this planet is descended from a woman who lived in western Africa one hundred and fifty thousand years ago. Can you imagine how long ago that is? The Torah was written, at the most, three thousand years ago. I mean, there’s no difference between the Torah and the old Greek gods. I just finished reading the Iliad, and they thought the gods all lived on this mountain in Greece—”
“That’s just a story,” Moshe asserted.
“I think what you believe is just a story,” I said.
We looked at one another and once again we seemed to be at a stalemate.
“Have you read Leviticus?” I asked.
“We’ve memorized the Torah in Hebrew.”
“You’re kidding!” I was horrified. “Really? The first five books of the Bible?”
“It’s not the Bible,” Moshe said, exasperated.
I excused myself and ran into my apartment. I grabbed my 1611 King James Version of the Bible and came back outside. I opened it to Leviticus and looked up one of my marked passages. “So, if I ask you what Leviticus— chapter 20, verse 13— is, you can tell me?”
“It’s not like that,” Isaac said. “It isn’t written that way.”
“It’s on scrolls,” Moshe explained.
“It doesn’t say this?” I asked, and proceeded to read the Leviticus passage to them: “ ‘If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.’ ”
The boys reflected on these words.
“Do you think that’s true?” I asked. “That men should be put to death for having sex with each other?”
Moshe felt there was a distinction to be made here. “Before they’re married?”
Isaac tried to cover up for his friend’s misunderstanding. “That isn’t the real Torah,” he said. “You have to read it in the original.”
“Well, the reason I read the 1611 King James Version is that, apart from any value the book might have in terms of its content, it’s a very important book for the history of English literature and the English language. I think what it says is stupid, though.”
Moshe looked at the book as if it were contaminated. “If my father found that book in the house he would throw it out so fast. . .”
“That isn’t what we’ve memorized, anyway,” said Isaac.
“It’s bigger than that,” Moshe asserted, still looking at the Bible suspiciously.
I separated the first five books and held them between my fingers. “You’re just talking about the Torah, right?”
“It’s much bigger than that,” Moshe declared.
“You’re talking about the Talmud,” I suggested, “with all the commentary and explanations.”
“It’s not exactly the Talmud,” Moshe was a little bulldog now.
“It’s called the Mishnah,” Isaac said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s like the Torah, but it’s not.”
“Hmm.” I didn’t know what they were talking about. “Well, if you have an English translation I’d like to see it.”
For a moment we remained suspended there with our unresolved thoughts, and then I asked them, “Why do you wear those things on your head?”
“It shows our respect to God,” Moshe said and then, in case I didn’t know, “They’re called yarmulkes.”
“Do you wear them all the time?” I asked.
They both nodded, and Isaac further explained, “It represents our humility before God.”
I thought about that for a bit, contemplating the yarmulkes on the back of their heads. It looked to me like the revenge of bitter old men with bald spots, coercing young men into an eternal condolence for the ravages of time.
And then I began to wonder about their haircuts: they each had a lock of hair on either side of their faces, from the temples down over the ears.
“Do you wear your hair that way on purpose?” I asked.
They both simultaneously moved a hand to the side of their heads and said, “Peyos.”
“What’s . . . peyos?”
“It’s one of the commandments,” Isaac explained. “We’re not supposed to cut our hair.”
“Why?”
“We have to remember God,” Moshe said.
How weird it all was—all this effort for the sake of Nothing. “So what do you think is the point of life?” Isaac suddenly asked me.
“The ‘point of life’? Well, I don’t think there is any. Except to be happy and have fun.”
“And what’s that?” Isaac asked.
“Well, for me, fun i
s reading books and having sex.”
This was true, and I said it with full awareness of its power to engage. And it really was amazing: with what other teenage boys in the United States could you use the question of God and the reading of books as a means of seduction?
“Are you married?” Isaac asked.
I winced. “Ooh. No.” And then I elaborated. “I only have sex with men.”
Moshe was curious. “You have sex with men? How do you do that?”
“What do you mean, how do I do that?” I asked him rhetorically. “How do you think? I suck cock and get fucked.”
Moshe was insistent. “How?”
“How? How do I get fucked? Up my ass.”
Now Moshe was incredulous. “It’s not possible.”
“Of course it’s possible. You can even go over on Melrose and rent a video and see me getting fucked by two guys at the same time.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I used to make porno films,” I told them. “I made thirteen. Wait. I’ll show you,” and once more I jumped up and ran into my apartment. This time I went to my file cabinet and got out the issue of Skinflicks with the interview of me inside. I ran back out to the boys, and opened the magazine to a page showing two cocks pushed together with me trying to engulf them both in my mouth. “That’s from the Gold Rush Boys. I got fucked by both those cocks in that movie.”
“That’s you?” Isaac asked doubtfully.
“Well, that was what? Seven years ago.”
“It would hurt,” said Moshe.
“Well, it can be a little difficult at first, but men have a prostate gland inside them, and when it’s massaged—like with a penis up inside them—it feels great.”
“What’s a . . . prostate . . . gland?” Isaac asked.
“It’s this little organ inside your body that helps produce semen.”
The boys turned the pages of the magazine.
“When I made movies my stage name was Ben Barker. That was my only interview.”
The boys had turned to a color picture showing my tongue reaching out toward a huge uncircumcised cock.
“I wish my cock was like that,” I told them.
“Why?”
“Because it’s so big, and if I wasn’t circumcised my cock would probably be more sensitive and I’d have stronger erections.”
“But being circumcised is better,” Moshe said. “It’s cleaner.”
“I don’t think it’s worth it. Being mutilated.”
Moshe looked at the picture. “He’s circumcised.”
“No he’s not,” Isaac said.
“Isaac’s right,” I said. “You can’t even see the head of his cock because of his foreskin—and that’s with an erection.” I pointed to a picture on the opposite page. “He’s circumcised. Can you see the difference?”
Moshe contemplated the different pictures.
“It’s hard to tell in that picture,” I said, indicating the circumcised penis, “but I think that’s the biggest cock I’ve ever sucked. He was great.”
The boys handed the magazine back to me. They hadn’t even dared to touch the Bible.
We were all quiet for a moment. I wondered if they would dream about these pictures tonight, if they would dream about me. I mused aloud, “I love semen.”
Moshe was adamant: “Why?”
“Because it tastes so good. Because—I don’t know. I guess because it’s the original life force.”
We were all quiet again.
I had an afterthought: “It’s so spectacular when it shoots out.”
The boys were looking at the ground, apparently deep in thought.
“This morning,” Moshe said, “there was this sticky—”
“That’s a wet dream,” I explained.
“I didn’t have a dream.”
“You don’t remember having a dream. That’s great. You’re lucky.”
Moshe was obstinate: “ Why am I lucky?”
“Because your sex life is just beginning. It’s been more than two decades since I’ve had a wet dream. You have a lifetime of ejaculations stretching away before you . . .”
The two boys and I looked at one another over an abyss of more than twenty years, the boys concerned with their nocturnal emissions and I with the specter of fading potency.
Isaac looked at his watch. “We have to go.”
I smiled at them. “Have a nice day.”
And as they walked away I imagined myself in their dreams, in those oh-so-wet dreams, that “sticky” splashing me: their— blissfully—anointed one.
2 / boyfriends
It was about ten o’clock at night and I had just bicycled to the store to get something to eat. On my way back home, as I rode past the school, I noticed a number of the boys sitting on the porch of one of the two school buildings that faced my street. They were smoking. One of them said hello, and I circled around in the street, pulling my bike up alongside the fence surrounding the school.
“How are you guys doing?” I asked.
They said they were fine.
“I wrote a story about you guys, about a conversation I had with two boys named Isaac and Moshe.”
“You wrote a story about us?”
“I think it’s good, too.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s just a conversation I had, but it’s about everything: God and sex and the meaning of life. Do you want to see it? I’ll go get it,” and, very excited at the prospect of their actually reading my story, I cycled over to my apartment.
Some of the high school boys board at the school and late at night, when the adults are gone, they start their socializing: playing basketball, taking walks, or just sitting outside and smoking. I was fascinated with this world of theirs, a world of uniforms and studying and masculine camaraderie. I grabbed a copy of my story and ran back across the street.
They had all come down from the porch and gathered together near the fence. Some of them climbed over, while others came around through the gate. I handed the story to one of the boys, who started to look through it.
A tall boy with glasses, looking over his shoulder, turned to me. “Who’re Isaac and Moshe?”
“I don’t know. They were just these two boys I spoke to one day.”
“Were they dark?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I guess.”
“I think I know who you mean. They’re from Israel; they don’t go to school here.”
One of the smaller boys looked up at me. “Did you put in the Jews’ point of view?”
“Well, I’m not a Jew, but I wrote down what the boys said to the best of my ability.”
“So what’s the point of the story?” asked the boy who held it in his hand, a serious young man obviously disinclined to read the whole thing.
“I guess it’s best summed up in the last paragraph.” I turned the pages, directing his attention to the final lines: “And as they walked away I imagined myself in their dreams, in those oh-so-wet dreams, that ‘sticky’ splashing me: their—blissfully— anointed one.”
He read it over a couple of times. “What does it mean? I don’t understand.”
“Well,” I explained, “you have to have read the whole story, but when Isaac and Moshe walked away I was imagining them dreaming about me. If you’d read the story, you’d know that ‘sticky’ was a word that Moshe used, and I was imagining myself as their Messiah, being anointed when they jacked off on me.
The boy just looked at me. Had I blasphemed? Or was that only to be expected from a person such as myself? He handed the story on to some of his friends, who started looking through it.
“I’m getting my first story published this year,” I told them. “It’s about the Jews, too. It’s about Auschwitz. It’s my ultimate fantasy. I’m a commandant in a concentration camp, and I get to have sex with all the Jewish boys I want. I wait at the train unloadings, and when they get off, I just choose the ones I like best.”
The boy continued t
o stare at me in silence. I don’t think he knew if I was kidding or not.
“So what do you do for a living?” one of the other boys asked. “You’re a writer?”
“I’m a writer, but I make a living, I pay the rent, by being an extra in movies and TV shows.”
“What movies have you been in?” another tall boy asked me, this one with a rather goofy grin on his face.
“The last couple of years I’ve been a stand-in on some TV shows, but I was in E.T., 1941, Streets of Fire, 2010, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Lethal Weapon: I even got to be a Nazi in To Be or Not to Be by Mel Brooks.”
“What’s a stand-in?”
“Well, on a TV show, after the actors rehearse the scenes, they have to block it with the cameras—there’s usually three cameras on the shows I work on, and that takes a lot of time, so they have people like me, stand-ins, watch the rehearsals, and then when the camera crews come in, we do what the actors do until they have it all set up.”
The boys were looking at me with blank expressions. I sighed: How do I explain this?
“My job exists as a courtesy to the actors, so they won’t get bored while the cameras set up their shots.”
The boy with the goofy grin was staring at me as if I were an alien. “Who were you in E.T.?”
“Remember when the government men came to the house, and there were all those men in white outfits? I was one of the guys in the front yard with a Geiger counter.”
Now that I had impressed them with my Hollywood credentials, I wanted to get the conversation back to them. “So what do you do? Do you guys ever jack off together?”
“No.”
That was too easy. “Is anyone homosexual over there?”
“No.”
“Does anybody over there ever stop believing in God?”
“No.”
“Are you guys all virgins?”
“Yes.”
“Really?” I was stunned: teenage boys admitting their virginity—wasn’t that a contradiction in terms? “None of you has ever had sex?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“Mendel did.”
“Who’s Mendel?”
“Me.”
The boy who acknowledged this distinction was very cute, with tight curly brown hair and an impish grin.
“So do all the boys look up to you?” I asked.
The Boys Across the Street Page 2