The Boys Across the Street

by Rick Sandford

  As it happened, I couldn’t have put my shirt on even if I’d wanted to. I didn’t have one with me; I hadn’t brought one outside.

  It was getting too cold to get sun anyway, so, as they passed behind me on the sidewalk, I got up, gathered my chair and my book, and crossed back to my side of the street.

  4 / sightings

  It was after two o’clock in the morning. A man in a car was following me. I thought he might be attractive, but I couldn’t be sure. He would slow down, take a good long look at me, and then move on, park, wait for me to get close and then drive ahead, go around the block, overtake me again, pull in a driveway, watch me approach, and then pull out and drive back past, wait for me to turn around and then, just when I was within speaking distance, gently step on the gas and drive out of range. I had finally decided that it wasn’t worth it, to play that game: walking around the block again, loitering x more minutes on some street corner or another, and eventually finding myself stumbling to bed around dawn. So, walking east on Waring, I headed home.

  The guy was still following me, but I didn’t care anymore. I just kept on walking. He drove past me very slowly and then pulled over just ahead at the corner.

  Okay: if he stays there I’ll try just one more time.

  When I got to the corner we were parallel with each other. I turned to get a look at him. He looked back. I stepped toward him. And then he started the car and turned the corner.

  Fuck it: I’ve got some poppers at home, I’ll go jack off and I’ll be fine.

  I came to my street, Alta Vista, and turned right, heading north toward my apartment, four lots up the block. I was almost home when I noticed a lighted window across the street in the dormitory of the Jewish school.

  Facing toward me (looking into his own reflection) was a good-looking boy with dark hair. He didn’t have a shirt on and he had an incredible body: massive pectoral muscles, large potent nipples, and a Davidesque stomach.

  I stopped, dumbstruck, and stared. He was lifting weights, pulling a barbell up to his chest in a measured rhythm, and straining the muscles and veins in his arms. Two younger boys were in the room with him and, much more typically, they were in their casual Jewish regalia, the white shirts, black pants, and yarmulkes. They had pale funny faces and under their dumpy clothes there was a sense of misshapen bodies. Like me, they were watching the half-naked young man.

  I’d seen him in the window for the first time the night before when I’d come home late from a dinner with friends. Then, as now, I’d been stunned. It was like coming across a giant movie screen that somehow, in the middle of the night, on my street, was showing one of my favorite movies. I’d gone into my apartment, grabbed my binoculars, and come back out and found a place on the lawn directly across the street from his window. For the next hour or so I watched him as he went through his workout. He didn’t do just one exercise and exhaust it, but went from one thing to another, sometimes going to the floor and disappearing out of sight, but always returning to the exercises that allowed him to confront the glass and watch his reflection against the dark of the night. Through the binoculars, he was practically staring me in the eye. The boys in the room looked up to him with adoration, relishing the presence of this big beautiful man among them, and he glowed in their admiration as a hero: obliging, considerate, and wise.

  Watching him again now, I guessed he was about nineteen. He was wearing wire-rimmed glasses and, like his little friends, he had a yarmulke on the back of his head: he was an apparition of beautiful, physical intelligence.

  The man in the car drove past, and I felt his eyes on me. There, on the sidewalk, I was a pillar of salt looking back at. . .

  The light in the window went out.

  “Faggot!”

  Dark and quiet.

  Me?

  Receding taillights.

  Did a Jewish boy call me faggot?

  Earlier in the day I’d asked one of the boys who’d been in the room with the beautiful weight lifter the night before if he was going to be a bodybuilder, too. He had stopped and looked at me carefully. “Did you watch?” he asked. When I told him I did, he turned and went away.

  And now they were calling me faggot. I wanted to yell “Jew!” back at them, but it didn’t come. The man in the car was turning around up the street. I dashed over to my apartment to get my binoculars and sit outside: maybe if the guy in the car saw I had other more important things to do he’d stop and talk.

  Or something.

  By the time I got outside again they’d turned the light back on across the street. I sat on the raised portion of the walkway in front of my apartment, lifted my binoculars, and focused. I could see one of the boys with his hands pressed up against the window looking out. Were they really so aware of me? Could I be such a threatening presence? I felt so invisible.

  The man in the car pulled up just in front of me and stopped. Once again he was watching me watching them. He didn’t drive on.

  Had I made my point? This was obviously where I lived. If he wanted to, we could just go inside and have sex there. All he had to do was park. Was he interested? He must have been; he was just sitting there. He couldn’t just want people to follow him around, could he? Okay: one last time. I stood up and walked down the steps, out between two parked cars, and into the street. I was almost to the passenger window, and about to lean down to say hello, when—

  He gave the car some gas and oh so slowly drove on down the street. What bullshit.

  Asshole.

  I was the asshole.

  I turned back toward my apartment and sat down on the raised part of the walkway. The light was now out in the window across the street where the boys were, but I could hear the side door over there opening, and voices. The thought just passed through my mind: Could they be coming over here to confront me?

  Some deliberation was going on beside the door, by the side of the building. And then there was some sort of resolution as three boys started out from the shadows and into the pale orange of the streetlight. They headed right for the gate, which clanged shut as they left the school’s enclosure, and then, crossing the street, they made their way directly toward me.

  A tall boy, the bodybuilder, was in front, his two acolytes trailing respectfully behind him. He was wearing a long blue robe. In contrast to the usual Orthodox disdain for color, it was very striking, its skirtlike aspect emphasizing, as perhaps mere nakedness could not, the sheer physicality seething beneath.

  “Is your name Rick?”

  He had stopped on the sidewalk about five yards away from me. His little friends were grouped together in the street behind him.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you like watching guys work out with binoculars?”

  I had a bit of difficulty measuring the weight of the accusation. Would a religious boy actually hit me? My answer was tentative:

  “Uh. Yes?”

  The boys in the street had to shift their positions as the watcher’s car drove slowly past again; I wondered what he was thinking.

  “Well, I don’t appreciate it. I’m not working out to have some . . . guy . . . watch me.”

  You’re lying. You love having those boys hang on your every word, you love having them watch you, wishing your body were theirs—

  “Well, actually, I was wondering ...” I was having a little trouble getting my position together. “I mean, I watch guys work out at the gym all the time ...” I don’t have to watch you. “And I’ve been talking to you guys and you talk about the importance of the mind and the spirit over the body, and I was wondering: just what are you working out for?”

  “For girls!”

  This was the last word and he practically spit it at me. He turned away and started walking back across the street, striding past his two little friends, who continued to look at me. In the middle of the street he suddenly turned back to get in the last word yet again: “I’m working out for girls—not guys. For girls!”

  He led his two charges back thro
ugh the gate and they marched up beside the building and into the shadows, but they didn’t go inside. They were probably assessing the battle, or rather he was. Did the two boys still look up to him? Was he a hero?

  Did he win?

  He won.

  I guess getting the last word in is the measure of victory. My fantasy rejoinder came too late.

  “You’re working out ‘for girls’? That’s very naive. Obviously you don’t know very much about women. If you can say ‘I love you’ with a straight face, that’ll get you further than the best body in the world. ‘Girls’ don’t care about great bodies. Guys do.”

  The side door of the school finally opened and the boys went back inside. The light came back on in the workout room and the boys put up some brown paper they used to cover the window when Mr. Bodybuilder wasn’t working out. I sat there on the walkway by myself for a long time: I couldn’t go in, I couldn’t let my defeat show. Let them make the retreat.

  “If you don’t want to be looked at, then why have the window wide open? To get a little air? You know people can see in, you know you have a great body, and you know you want anyone to see it who can. You’re lying if you say you don’t.”

  This confrontation was just a little show for his friends. And what a pathetic little show, really: making a stand in support of some stupid idea of masculinity, and one, come to think of it, with its roots in the dreary old strictures of the Bible.

  I put the binoculars to my eyes and looked up at the moon. It was full, and I felt reassured somehow seeing Tycho, that crater near the bottom of the sphere with its emanating rays.

  Checking in with eternity.

  The lights went out across the way. Had I actually broken off his workout? And what was he doing working out after two o’clock in the morning, anyway? And . . .

  Was it an infringement of privacy to use binoculars to look at your neighbors?

  I’d bought the binoculars (Army, 7 x 50) for a very specific purpose: to see Bruce Springsteen in concert. And when the concerts were over I’d introduced them into other aspects of my life. Mostly I used them when sitting out in front of my apartment reading, lifting them up to watch people down the street or, more often than not, to observe mockingbirds.

  This wasn’t the first time I’d been called to account on my use of them, however: when I was standing in on The Hogan Family, I’d been watching one of the stars during one of the rehearsals and, aware of my observation up in the stands, he had suddenly turned to me and given me the finger. When I didn’t put the glasses down, he’d given me the finger with the other hand as well. I never brought them to the set again.

  The street was empty, the watcher in the car hadn’t come back, and I felt slightly sick. Like I was wrong. But I didn’t know how exactly.

  I am vicarious, therefore—

  I am invisible.

  But I’m not.

  I’m here.

  I guess that’s how I’m wrong.

  There was a movement just across from me, and when I turned toward it I was startled to see a fairly large creature come sniffling around the corner of my apartment. It wasn’t one of the cats and it wasn’t a dog—it had a long nose to the ground: it was a possum! An opossum, here in the middle of Los Angeles. I put the binoculars to my eyes, but I couldn’t make them focus. It was too close. I put the glasses down, but the moment had passed.

  The creature had turned about and disappeared behind the building.

  5 / the accident

  I was sitting at my computer when suddenly there was an incredibly loud noise just outside, coming from the street. It obviously involved a large mass in some sort of collision, and yet it didn’t sound like the only thing it could be—a car crash. There were no screeching brakes or full-throttled horns.

  I waited a moment to hear how the noise was going to resolve itself, to see if the aural picture might come through my window, but there were no lightning flashes or explosions, the loud scraping finally stopped, and the night became as it was before. I got up and went outside.

  In the street, right in front of my apartment, a large car was turned over on its side, the top facing me. Two boys were crawling out from under it, through the driver’s side window, which was raised somewhat off the pavement. They were obviously a couple of boys from across the street, with their black pants, white shirts, and those strings hanging down the sides of their pants. The smaller of the two boys kept repeating over and over, “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

  My next-door neighbor, Kimberly, an engineer who wanted to be a social worker, was just coming home and had seen what happened: the car had been parked in front of the school; the driver pulled out very fast and veered across the street, side-swiping two cars parked there; then the car swerved back toward the other side of the street and smashed directly into another parked car, the impact turning it over on its side.

  While we were talking, our neighbors started gathering on the street and Jewish boys began coming out from the school to see what had happened. The boys who had been in the car had disappeared.

  Chris, one of the guys who lived in our building, joined Kimberly and me on the sidewalk. He was an aspiring writer in his late twenties with thinning, wispy blond hair. As we wandered out on the street, he recognized one of the demolished cars as belonging to Diana, a pretty girl who lived next door to him.

  “She’s going to freak out,” I said.

  Chris and I looked at one another. Suddenly the idea of how upset she was going to be, the sheer random bad luck involved, and the fact that it was, after all, only an assault against a material object, passed between us as a kind of exultation. In a moment we were racing each other from the street, up the steps, and down the walkway of our courtyard apartments in order to be the first to tell her and see the look on her face.

  Chris had the lead, but just before we got to the door he stopped running and I “won.” I knocked on the door and turned to Chris. “Why’d you stop?”

  He was just about to answer when Diana opened the door.

  “I think one of the Jewish boys just hit your car,” I told her. She was on the telephone, she said she already knew about the accident, and our chance to see dismay cloud her features was not to be. As we returned to the street, slightly dispirited, Chris suddenly turned to me. “Why did we just do that?”

  I shrugged. “Fun?”

  Coming upon the scene of the accident again, we found an almost carnival-like atmosphere: people were everywhere, and far outnumbering the few civilians were the Orthodox Jewish boys.

  They were swarming all over the place, pouring out of the school like some kind of bothered insect colony, all of them so alike in appearance: the yarmulkes, the black pants, and the white shirts not tucked in. Tonight, however, some of them were in a state of undress, and I could see that over their undershirts they were wearing some loose, sideless, free-flowing garments. It was then I noticed that those strings I’d seen hanging down the sides of their pants were actually a part of these things. I’d always assumed that the strings were just attached to the belt loops of their pants.

  “Hey, Rick,” one of the boys called to me, “put your shirt on!”

  I’d been writing without a shirt on, and it amused me that the sight of my naked torso remained such a worrisome thing to these boys.

  Another one of my neighbors, Tom, joined us on the street. Tom was a blond New York transplant, a member of Queer Nation. While we were going over the details of the accident, he suddenly realized that his brand-new sports car was one of the two that had been sideswiped. Tom took this with a measure of grace and, after appraising the damage, went back to his apartment to get his camera.

  “Rick, put your shirt on!”

  As the boys milled about, recounting the accident, examining the particular indentions of the crushed metal, and even taking pictures alongside the upturned car, they would pass me with a mixture of curiosity and disapproval.

  Tom came back outside with his camera and took p
ictures of his car. While I was talking to Kimberly and Chris, passersby stopped to see what had happened and to listen to further retellings of the story. All the while the boys continued to wander about.

  “Rick, put your shirt on!”

  I turned around to see who had said this and saw a boy looking at me with an impish grin on his face. It was Mendel, the non-virgin, and I smiled at him. As I turned back to my neighbors I suddenly realized that I could make a statement: my putting a shirt on didn’t necessarily have to be an acquiescence to their value system. I ran into the house and put on a pink T-shirt that had a message on the front in big block letters: Christians are asswipes.

  I came back outside and got a few laughs from my neighbors and we even started taking pictures with Tom’s camera. Chris, very influenced by Thomas Pynchon, wouldn’t have his taken, and when I went after him so that we could be immortalized together, he ran away.

  Puffing my chest out, the better for the letters on the T-shirt to be seen, I went out among the boys. Although several of them hailed the covering of my torso as a victory for modesty, they were a little disconcerted at the message on the shirt itself.

  “What does it mean?” one of them asked.

  “It’s my tribute to you boys,” I teased him. “No, actually a friend of mine made this up for me when we went to the opening of The Last Temptation of Christ and the Christians were protesting.”

  Some of the boys gathered around me to see what was going on, to see what the shirt said. Another boy asked me what it meant, and as I turned to him I noticed Mendel standing a few feet away from me. I pointed to him.

  “Mendel told me to put a shirt on, and I said I would but he would have to pick it out. So we went in my apartment and looked through my shirts and he said he wanted me to wear this one.