“No, we’re ashamed of him,” someone said.
“Are you glad you’re not a virgin?” I asked him.
He said, “No,” but I figured he was lying. He had a big smile on his face at thus confounding me and my expectations.
The boys stood there, proudly confronting me as one big implacable force.
“Are you aware that your sexual peak is at eighteen? And then it’s all downhill after that? It would be too bad if you wasted your youth on renunciation. You should have fun while you’re young.”
“We’re not going to have sex until we get married,” one of the hard-liners proclaimed.
A younger-looking boy elaborated. “Sex is like a beautiful rare jewel. If you had a beautiful rare jewel, would you show it to just anybody?”
“Why not? If it was so beautiful, why shouldn’t as many people see it as possible?”
“But wouldn’t you be afraid someone might steal it?”
“I don’t think it’s good to care too much about things. You know what the anarchists used to say? ‘Property is theft.’ ”
“If I had a rare jewel. . .” The boy was persistent in contemplation of his precious stone, almost conjuring it before me: it was a ruby. “If I had a rare jewel, I would protect it.”
“Well, I think you’re wrong,” I said. “Haven’t you ever heard the old adage that you can’t love someone unless you love everyone?”
“I’ve never heard that before.”
“Well, think about it. I think Christopher Isherwood said that, but it might have been Nietzsche.”
Another boy joined in the conversation. “Having sex is just like being an animal.”
“What’s wrong with that? We are animals—”
“But we have to rise above that!”
Finally, I deigned to use their terminology: “I don’t think God made our minds and bodies so that one would have any particular ascendancy over the other. I think he made them so that they should both be utilized equally.”
Met with silence, this last remark seemed to have some impact on them.
________
The next evening a friend of mine named Josh stopped by to talk and get stoned. He was thirty-two and trying to become a more than occasional filmmaker. We were sitting outside and I was telling him about my experience with the boys when one of them came across the street toward us.
“Hey, Rick!”
It was the serious young man I’d first given my story to the night before. He’d brought along three of his friends, and they stood behind him, dark and solemn.
I was gratified to see “from my lips to God’s ears,” and went out to meet him.
“Tell them what you told me,” he said. “They don’t believe me.”
“About what?”
“The concentration camp.”
“Oh.” I didn’t quite see how I was going to manage it. “Well, I mean I was being sort of facetious, but I’m attracted to Jewish boys, and my story that’s getting published is about these two boys who are friends in Germany. One’s Jewish and one’s not, and when the boy who isn’t makes a pass at the one who is, the Jewish boy rejects him. The other boy becomes a Nazi, and at Auschwitz he has sex with Jewish boys who remind him of his boyhood friend.”
They looked at me in silence for a moment and then a car drove by. We moved over to the curb on their side of the street. As we re-formed our little group on the sidewalk, Josh came over to join me.
“What does ‘facetious’ mean?” one of the boys asked me.
“Well, ‘facetious’ sort of means you’re kidding, like you’re not totally serious. I mean, I wouldn’t really want to be a Nazi.”
“The homosexual Nazis were pretty much wiped out by 1934, anyway,” Josh explained.
“This is Josh,” introducing my friend to the group.
“Are you Jewish?” one of the boys asked him.
“Yes.”
“Are you gay?” another inquired.
“No.”
I had an explanation: “Josh and I are like brothers. He does things I can’t do, and—”
“He does things I won't do,” Josh finished for me.
More boys from the school joined us on the sidewalk, and in a few moments there were two little groups, one around me and the other around Josh.
“Why do you like Jewish boys?” one of them asked me.
“Mostly, it’s guilt by association. I used to be in love with this boy—he was adopted and raised Catholic, but I think he was really Jewish—and after our relationship ended I was attracted to other guys who looked like him, and they all turned out to be Jews. Sometimes they might be Italian, but mostly they were Jewish. And of course, the main thing—even though it’s not always true—I like Jews because they have big noses, and that’s an exciting phallic symbol.”
“What’s ‘phallic’?”
“Having to do with penises, cocks. You know what they say: guys with big noses have big dicks. I mean, obviously that’s not necessarily true, but it’s a nice idea.”
The boys reflected on all this for a moment, and then the Serious Young Man asked, “Which of us standing here do you think is attractive?”
“I think you are,” I said.
“Why?”
“You have a nice nose, you wear your glasses well, and you have a clear, bright expression.”
He wasn’t about to give in to me. “Who else?”
I looked around and saw an Arabic-looking boy talking with Josh. He had thick black hair and an aristocratic bearing. “I like him,” I said.
This delighted the boys I was talking to, and one of them
called over to their friend, “Hey, Mordecai, you got a boyfriend!”
Mordecai joined us for a moment, to size up this person who thought he was attractive. He had dark, beautiful eyes.
“I think you’re sexy,” I told him.
His friends hooted and hit him on the back, and he moved away from me.
I was aware that Josh was talking to the boys about metaphysics: it was the element about my “Isaac and Moshe” story that he liked best (he wanted me to cut out the “clinical” parts). Every now and then I would hear snippets of his conversation: “. . . You really think, you literally think, the world is 5,750 years old? . . . What about the dinosaurs? What about carbon dating?”
But while our two conversations continued, his audience dwindled as mine increased.
“When you have an erection,” I explained to them, “you’re very vulnerable. When a man and a woman have sex, they can only have sex if the man has a hard-on. The woman doesn’t have to do anything; that’s why she’s in the more powerful position. The one that does something is always in a weaker position. That’s why I’d rather get fucked than fuck someone: because I . . . like . . . power.”
The boys just looked at me, and in the sudden silence we could hear Josh, trying to make points with the only boy still talking to him.
“I think there is an eternal consciousness that we are all a part of—”
“But isn’t that God? What’s the difference?”
I looked at the boys around me and tried to impart my philosophy of life to them as simply and completely as I knew how.
“You only live once, you’re only young once: you should have fun. You should have as much fun as you possibly can.”
“What’s ‘fun’?”
“Anything you want it to be.”
Later Josh told me they had asked him if he knew I was gay. “Yes.”
“Did he tell you?”
“Yes, but I already knew that.”
“You did? Then. . . .”
Josh said their deliberations died away.
Then: How could you be friends with him?
3 / the other side of the street
It took me more than two years to read the Bible, and as I neared the end I would stay at home on the days I wasn’t working and set myself up outside with my director’s chair, binoculars, and cup of coffee, as well as my d
ictionary and Asimov's Guide to the Bible, and I would read. The sun would traverse the sky, I would turn pleasing shades of brown, and as I read I would keep tabs on the neighborhood: the ravens building a nest in the eucalyptus tree above me, the mockingbirds with their territorial imperative, and, of course, the descendants of the people I was reading about, the Jewish boys across the street.
On weekdays in the afternoons, they would leave the school in varying groups and classes, and go up Alta Vista on their way to the park, where they would play ball. After an hour or so they would return, straggling back down the street to the school. On Fridays, in deference to the coming Sabbath (which begins at sundown), they would go and come back earlier.
I regarded the boys across the street almost as an alien species, ignoring them as they ignored me, but occasionally I’d ponder their visual assertions: the skullcaps, their dark suits year in and year out, and the strings hanging down the sides of their pants.
When the school first opened, before they soundproofed it, there had been a mini-riot on our street over the noise they made. The police were called, and a rabbi and some of the students were arrested. The next day there were notices distributed up and down the block by the Jewish Defense League: “warning to all anti-Semites in this area (straight or gay). We of the JDL will not tolerate any attacks on Jews. We are on patrol to defend this community. If one Jew is bothered, YOU will pay in blood, never again.” A week or so later everyone on the street received a letter from the school saying they wanted to cooperate with their new neighbors and listing phone numbers to call if there were any problems.
For the most part, there weren’t. One Friday night, though, a car caught fire, and the next day when the owner found out that the Jewish boys had watched the incineration without calling the police or the fire department (they’re not allowed to use telephones on the Sabbath), he got really mad and ran around in the street cursing and yelling.
As for myself, I’d spoken to them only once. One day when I was trying to read they had some horrible Israeli music blaring and I went across the street to tell them to turn it down. They’d been very obliging and, other than that, we’d had no real communication until I spoke to Isaac and Moshe in December.
By March the TV season was over, the show I was working on had finished shooting, and hiatus had begun. Workless days stretched before me, and since I’d finished reading the Bible other projects took its place: catching up on two years of unread newspapers, cataloguing Christopher Isherwood’s library onto my computer for his estate, and then thinking about my next big undertaking: the writing of a blasphemous, homoerotic gospel in the style of the 1611 King James Version of the Bible.
As time went by, the boys became steadily more aware of me. When they came clanging out of the gate on their way to the park, I would put down the book or paper I was reading and watch them.
Sometimes they would look over at me.
Sometimes we would even acknowledge that we were looking at one another.
Since the boys all dressed the same, it was almost impossible for me to know which ones I had spoken to before, but there was only one of me, and since my name was written on the back of my director’s chair they very definitely knew who I was.
“Hey, Rick, how’s it going?”
I would nod, sometimes I would answer, and I could feel the attraction growing: they wanted to know about me as much as I wanted to know about them.
When I started work on the Isherwood library I had to stay indoors, but my desk was just to the side of a large window that faced the street, so I could keep an eye on things. One afternoon while I was at my computer I noticed a couple of the boys running up the street.
I decided that was a good excuse to stop working, so I grabbed my director’s chair and a book and set myself up in front of the apartment.
A few minutes later three more of the boys came out of the school, talking together as they walked up the street. When they saw me, the one in the middle—very cute and gregarious— called out to me, “Hey, Rick!”
It was Mendel, the only Jewish boy over there who wasn’t a virgin.
“Hello.”
“You’re looking good, Rick!” he yelled over to me.
I laughed. I wasn’t sure what the joke was, but at least I had the presence of mind to call back, “You look good, too.”
They were a ways up the street by now, but I could see Mendel getting teased by his friends. Trying to make amends, he rejoined, “I’m just kidding!”
I was definite in my response: “I’m not.”
That stopped them. Mendel’s two sidekicks really started laughing and giving him a bad time.
For a moment I had him flummoxed, but then he did manage to get in the last word: “Rick—you’re a funny guy.”
After the boys had gone to the park I decided to stay outside reading until they came back. Since my apartment is on the west side of the street, if I want to get sun in the late afternoon, I have to reposition myself drastically to avoid the shadows of my building. If it’s hot enough, late in the day I move my chair across the street and set it up on a little paved walkway in front of a seldom-used gate to the school.
This I did, taking my chair and book with me.
During the daytime, the area between the school buildings and the fence is used as a playground for nursery school children, and several jungle gyms have been built there for the kids to play on. The kids are usually supervised by one or two women, invariably pregnant and wearing horrible wigs (I later learned that it’s a custom for the women to cut and cover their hair after marriage so as not to be attractive to other men). Around five in the afternoon, when the children are picked up by their parents, the street is logjammed and, while bearded men dressed in black parade about imperiously and bewigged mothers navigate in huge beat-up station wagons filled with kids, one of the women oversees their comings and goings with a megaphone. All in all, it is quite a spectacle.
After I’d set myself up across the street and was comfortably reading, I heard one of the five-year-olds, looking at me through the fence, say in a kind of wonderment at my near-nakedness, “There’s no sand or water!”
Before long, other small children were gathering together behind the fence to look at me. Tiny little boys and girls began trying to get my attention, but I wouldn’t look at them and continued reading my book, Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature” by Northrup Frye.
After a while they started to call me names and ascribe outrageous behavior to me, the worst of which was “You eat the toilet!”
When this didn’t work, they gathered together and started spitting at me. I was far enough away and they were young enough that their little liquid projectiles couldn’t reach me, but occasionally, when the breeze was right, I would catch some of their spray. Finally I turned around. “Stop that.”
They screamed and ducked behind the wall and ran away, but after several moments they were back in their places, once again spitting at me.
One of the women who supervised the children, seeing so many of them grouped together in a corner of the yard, finally came over and asked them what they were doing.
“That man talked to us,” one of them said.
“What did he say?”
I wondered what incredible story they might make up. After all, if I could “eat the toilet,” I could do anything.
“He said, ‘Stop that.’ ”
“Well, he’s right,” she admonished the children. “Don’t bother the man.”
I was amazed. They might look at me and conjecture the worst of all possible behavior, but when push came to shove, they respected their elders enough to tell them the truth. The little girl who had answered the adult had quoted my words exactly: “Stop that.”
Some time later, as I continued reading, the boys began returning from the park. Seeing me on their side of the street, some of them, I could tell, were a little disconcerted.
“Rick, put on your shirt
!”
I looked at them as they passed behind me. “How can I get sun if I put on a shirt?”
“It’s not modest. Put on a shirt!”
I had an idea: “If you take off your yarmulkes, I’ll put on my shirt.”
They scoffed at my proposal and sullenly walked on past me.
After most of the boys had come back from the park and it was starting to get a little chilly, two of the homelier boys made a tardy return to the school. They had apparently gone to the store to buy something, because one of them was carrying a bag. As they neared me one of them called out, “Rick, put your shirt on!”
I turned in my chair to see them better. They were both very unattractive.
The uglier of the two boys spoke. “You offend the women without your shirt.”
I smiled at his preposterous assertion, but the other boy backed up his friend’s allegation. “You really do.”
They’d stopped walking and were standing several yards away from me. We looked at one another and I tried to imagine those women, perpetually pregnant, wigs covering their heads, veritable baby-making machines, being offended by my naked chest.
I offered them my proposition: “I’ll put my shirt on if you take off your yarmulkes.”
The uglier boy, the one who had told me I was offending the women, reached up and took off his yarmulke and held it at his side.
I was surprised, and expressed it in my look to him.
Then I turned back to my book.
I couldn’t even focus on the page: How contemptuous was I? Was my proposition just a lie?
I looked back at the two boys, still standing there, the uglier one with his yarmulke still clasped in his hand. There was a look of profound disgust on his face, and when I made no other move to cover my nakedness he replaced the yarmulke on his head.
That look was a little too much for me. To see someone so unattractive, someone who would have to work hard all his life for any kind of acceptance; to see someone so disadvantaged make such a pathetically gallant gesture; and to see such disfiguring emotion pass over an already misproportioned face—all this was daunting enough, but it was the nature of that emotion that caught me off guard. Not only was he disgusted at me for my lying Gentile ways, he was even more disgusted with himself for actually having deigned to meet my challenge to his beliefs.
The Boys Across the Street Page 3