Mendel laughed and waved his hands “no” to me. “Don’t you be telling anyone I was in your apartment—”
I teased him. “But you told me you wanted me to wear this one—you said it was the prettiest!”
Mendel laughed but backed away and went off to where the police were just arriving. Their car pulled up, and as one of them got out and started walking toward the upturned car he made a joke: “So where is he? Where is Evel Knievel?”
While the police started making out their report I began to wander about the accident site. The boys had separated into various groups, and I approached first one and then another of them as nonchalantly as I could, but invariably, when the periphery of their circle was transgressed, they would casually disperse and realign themselves somewhere else.
At the center of one group of boys, on the other side of the overturned car, I noticed a young man holding court authoritatively. He had one of those sideless shirtlike things on. He was tall and gangly, with short dark hair and glasses; his nose had a bump and his chin an unruly mass of half-grown whiskers.
“So do you know who was driving the car?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, with a what’s-it-to-you attitude.
“Who?”
Another boy answered me. “It was Zvi Ritchie.”
I looked back at What’s-It-to-You. “Who is Zvi Ritchie?” I asked.
“He’s ju-just this kid,” he stammered.
“He’s sixteen,” the boys filled in. “He just got his driver’s permit today.”
I looked at What’s-It-to-You for confirmation, and since the information I’d been asking for had already been (too freely?) revealed, he summed up Zvi Ritchie for me: “He’s a genius geek.”
I loved that definition. “Are you a genius geek?” I asked.
Some of the boys laughed and one of them said he was just a geek. What’s-It-to-You walked away, not to be bothered.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“His name’s Avi,” I was told. “We call him Catfish, though. That’s his nickname.”
I thought I might keep an eye on this Avi and was about to follow after him when the tow truck arrived. I stopped and watched as a man got out and began to attach something from his truck to the car. As I stood there in contemplation of this man’s work I became aware of someone standing just behind me. I turned around and saw a younger-looking boy standing by himself. He seemed familiar. He had one of those shirtlike things on over his undershirt, with the strings.
“What is that?” I asked.
“What?”
“That thing you’re wearing, with the strings?”
“Tzitzis,” he said, without elaboration, and as he looked away I remembered who he was: he thought sex was a “beautiful rare jewel.”
“What does it mean?” I asked, and I reached over and took hold of the strings hanging from one corner of his shirtlike thing.
“It represents the six hundred and thirteen laws of Moses,” he said.
That sounded like Leviticus to me.
I stood before him, rolling the strings of his—tzitzis— between my fingers, raising the shirt aspect of it from his body, and feeling the oh so easy possibility of just pulling him to me, the eroticism of that strange underwear of his linking us together.
He seemed to be getting nervous and I wondered if it was blasphemous if a stranger held your tzitzis. He gently stepped away from me, trying not to appear rude, but I wouldn’t quite let go the strings, and the shirt part of it was lifted tentlike between us.
There was a sudden loud scraping noise and I looked around: the overturned car was being dragged slowly down the street, pulled at an angle by the tow truck. I could feel the strings of the tzitzis slipping from my fingers. And then the car was tipping, with a painful crunch of metal, tipping back over onto its wheels. As I let the strings go, the car finally banged down into its upright position and there was scattered applause.
When I turned back to my little friend he was gone. I caught just a glimpse of him as he disappeared among some other boys.
I walked down into the street where the car had been, and watched as it was hauled away around the corner, scraping against the pavement. Most of the boys were going back to the school and I was sorry that the excitement was all over.
I wanted some kind of consummation.
I wanted an eradication of race, creed, and religion.
I wanted to share a “beautiful rare jewel.”
6 / the yarmulke
Several days after the accident, I noticed that the room across from me, the room where I’d seen the bodybuilder, was now apparently being occupied by Avi, the “Catfish.” He took down the brown paper that had covered the window, and whenever he was in his room I would watch him. I used my binoculars only after dark. It was fascinating to see him wandering around in there, sometimes with just his pants and tzitzis and yarmulke on. Sometimes his friends joined him and they would sit around, often involved in heated discussions, and I longed to know what they were talking about, what their priorities were, what they cared about—their lives seemed utterly mysterious to me.
But I had begun a communication of sorts with them, and so I decided I would try to approach them more on their own terms. The first thing I had to do, of course, was get a Jewish version of the Old Testament, so that when I talked with them I could use a text they would respect. I went to a Christian bookstore in Westwood and found a copy in Hebrew, but I couldn’t find a Jewish version in English. I finally went to one of the bookstores on Fairfax, the center of the Jewish community in Los Angeles, and started asking around.
It turned out that the Old Testament was called Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures, and it was divided into three parts: Torah: The Five Books of Moses; Nevi’im: The Prophets; and Kethuvim: The Writings. The most official version of the Tanakh in English was published in 1985 by the Jewish Publication Society and included translations by a novelist I’d heard of, Chaim Potok.
To compare it with the King James Version, I immediately turned to the Twenty-third Psalm. Both versions begin the same way, “The Lord is my shepherd,” but whereas the King James then has “I shall not want,” the Jewish version reads: “I lack nothing.” Compared with the 1611 version, this new Jewish translation, though perhaps more accurate, seemed pretty crude.
“I am that I am.”
So God calls himself in Exodus 3:14. I was reading Northrup Frye again and he suggested that, instead of a noun, “God” might better be understood as a verb. This seemed like a revolutionary concept to me and I wondered what the boys would think of it.
Several of them passed me on their way to the park, and we acknowledged one another. I had now become a recognized part of their world. I had been spoken to and, since it had been established that I was homosexual, some of the boys, when they saw me looking at them, would either strut with a proud and adorable arrogance or do a contemptuous limp-wrist act, while still others ignored me. It was a fascinating thing to watch, and as I developed my ability to catalogue these various reactions I noticed that the better-looking boys were usually the flirts, and the taunters were invariably the ugly.
More boys came out from the school and started up the sidewalk toward the park, and as I watched them engrossed in deep conversations—watched the way they grouped themselves and the way they related to one another—I wondered what they were talking about. I longed to be one of them but with my hard-won self-assurance, that self-assurance I didn’t have when I was their age.
The best I could do was watch and contemplate and impose myself upon them, just letting them know that across the street there was someone who coveted their animal bodies, and longed to bear witness to an unholy spilling of seed . . .
When yet another group of the boys went by, I decided I would just go ahead and ask them about “I am that I am,” or “Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh,” as it is in the Tanakh, and I got up and ran across the street to them.
“Excuse me, do you know about these words?” I ask
ed, stopping them in the middle of the street and holding the book open for them to look at.
They gathered around me and looked where I was pointing.
One of the boys began a translation of the words: “I am that—”
“It’s Shem,” said another.
“It’s God’s name—you’re not supposed to say it out loud.”
I turned to the boy who’d pronounced this abjuration. It was the Serious Young Man, the boy who hadn’t believed my fantasy about being a Nazi.
“Do you consider this—these words—a noun? Or a verb?”
“It’s God,” the Serious Young Man said. “It’s a noun, a verb, an adjective—it’s everything.”
I looked around at the boys to see if they were agreed about this, and was just about to say something when Mendel came up to us with a friend of his, a fat redheaded kid.
“Hey, it’s Rick the faggot,” the fat kid said.
I tried ignoring him and turned back to the Serious Young Man. “Well, in the sentence you just said, when you said ‘God,’ it was a noun.”
The Serious Young Man shrugged his shoulders, his silence indicating he now felt it necessary to respond to me on the fat redhead’s terms.
“In English, ‘God’ is a noun,” I said, “and I was just thinking, wouldn’t it be amazing if it had been translated wrong and ‘God’ was really a verb?”
“It’s God’s name,” the Serious Young Man said, obviously uncomfortable and willing the conversation over.
One of the other boys must have felt the unfairness of this exchange, for he suddenly spoke to me with genuine interest. “It’s everything—it could even be a preposition.”
“What’s it like being a faggot?” the fat redhead asked.
I turned on him. “You know,” I said, “if you worshipped the penis instead of God you wouldn’t be such a bitter little boy.”
And I turned on my heel and left them, the little group standing in the middle of the street, absolutely quiet. I could just imagine that going around the school: what a revelatory, utterly blasphemous, mind-boggling concept that must be for them. Great!
As I walked back to my apartment, they didn’t call anything after me, not even “Faggot!”
There was a knock on the door, and when I answered it, my neighbor Tom was standing there. He had found a nicer apartment up near the Sunset Strip and was moving his things there piecemeal. I think his car getting sideswiped had been a sign for him that it was time to move on. He said he had a present for me.
This did not particularly thrill me, since I felt that it would be almost impossible for anyone to give me a present that might actually mean something to me, and I dreaded having to feign pleasure.
He extended his hand and offered me a small piece of sheer material.
It was a yarmulke.
“Really?” and I took the little skullcap in my hands. I was suddenly thrilled with expectation: What would the boys say?
“Do you like it?”
“Tom, I love this! This is exactly what I’ve wanted—and I didn’t even know it! Where’d you get it?”
“I went to a funeral for this friend of mine who was Jewish and they gave them to everyone.”
The yarmulke was made of a cheap flimsy material, the barest excuse for the purpose it was meant to serve. I put it on and looked at myself in the mirror next to my door. I turned to Tom. “Well? Do I look like a nice Jewish boy?” and I twisted my neck to see it better. “I don’t believe it! I really like this, Tom. This is great! Are you sure you don’t want it?”
“Positive.”
“Well—thanks. I really do love it. Thank you.”
After Tom left, I wondered what I should do. I felt I must go out immediately, somewhere, anywhere, maybe up to the store. But if I bicycled to the store, how would the yarmulke stay on? I looked around and went to my desk. I had some paper clips, and using one of them, I fastened it to my hair.
I got my bike and, checking myself out in the mirror one last time, prepared to confront the world as a Jew.
What would they say?
On the way to the store I passed a couple of the boys, but they didn’t seem to notice me and I made no particular effort to call attention to myself. They must make the discovery themselves. And, of course, they could only really see it as I bicycled away from them, when it would be too obvious if I looked back.
At the all-purpose drugstore I got some cookies, and as I approached the checkout counter I noticed there were a couple of lines, and in one of them the last person was an Orthodox Jewish boy. I went and stood behind him.
Sensing someone beside him, he looked around and our eyes met for a moment: there was recognition—he knew who I was and/or he could see the yarmulke on my head—and then he turned back to make his purchases.
After he had paid for his things and was preparing to leave, he acknowledged me. “So, what’s with the yarmulke? Are you becoming Jewish?”
“A friend of mine gave it to me: he got it at a funeral, and he thought I might like it. I’ve never had a yarmulke before.”
I had to step to the counter to buy my cookies. As the clerk rang up my purchase, the boy turned and left the store. He hadn’t seemed amused, nor had he indicated any enthusiasm at our continued conversation, but I was still very excited.
By putting on the yarmulke, I had immediately become one of them: as far as the outside world was concerned, I was a member of their community. No matter what they might think of me individually, whether they liked me or not, we—they and I—were representatives of a single idea, whatever that might be, and as I got back on my bicycle, I was thrilled.
This association absolutely demanded communication!
I cycled down Poinsettia, past the park where the boys played ball and past the Orthodox Jewish boy I’d met in the store. As I rode past him I felt his eyes on me and I felt proud.
I could also feel the wind playing around the edges of the skullcap, wanting to blow it away.
The next day I made a point of sitting outside with my yarmulke on. When the boys came out of the school and started up the street on their way to the park, there were the usual greetings, the whispered jokes and laughter, the flirtations. I couldn’t tell if they saw my yarmulke or not. Had the boy I’d spoken to the day before said anything to anybody?
A few minutes later two boys who were straggling behind started up the street, and suddenly one of them called out to me, “Hey, Rick, why the kepa? Are you becoming Jewish?”
As I turned around in my seat to see them better they crossed the street toward me. They stopped in the driveway several yards away. The boy who’d spoken to me was tall but ensconced in a baby fat well on its way to becoming chronic obesity.
“What’s a kepar
“Yarmulke. It’s another word for the same thing.”
“It’s Yiddish?”
“Hebrew,” he said impatiently. “So why are you wearing it?”
“Well,” I began my explanation, “I’m writing a gospel, the story of Jesus, in the style of the 1611 King James Version of the Bible, and since the Bible was written by Jews I want to feel like a Jew while I write it.”
The boy with the baby fat looked at me in silence for a moment, and then shook his head. “You’re a strange guy, Rick.”
An hour or so later when the boys came back from the park, I was sure the boy I’d spoken to would have told all his friends that I was wearing a yarmulke, and anyway when they came down the street, approaching me from behind, they would be sure to see it as they got near me.
Usually when the boys cross the street, either coming from or going to the school, it is at the driveway for the apartments next door, or at some other point farther up the street. Very seldom do any of the boys actually walk down the sidewalk in front of my apartment.
But this day when they returned from their playing, a group of them came right on down the sidewalk and stopped beside me. I looked up from my book. “Hi.”
The Serious Yo
ung Man was among them and he stepped forward to confront me. “What are you doing wearing a yarmulke?”
“A friend gave it to me.”
He indicated his little following. “Do you know why we wear them?”
“To show your respect to God?”
“That’s right.”
One of the other boys suddenly interjected a question: “Do you believe in God?”
“No. But that’s not why I’m wearing it,” I told them. “You have your reason for wearing a yarmulke, but that’s not necessarily my reason.”
“What’s your reason?”
“I’m wearing it because you’re wearing it. It’s my tribute to you boys.”
The Serious Young Man was outraged. “You have no right to wear it! You’re an animal! You don’t even know what being Jewish means.”
I sat up in my seat. Now I really was interested. “Oh? And what does being Jewish mean?”
The Serious Young Man looked at me for a moment, his various retorts competing for verbalization in his mind.
He must have decided that the best answer was no answer because he started to walk away, but before he had completely turned his back on me he said, “It’s too complicated to explain.”
Realizing the bind he’d got himself into and as disgusted with himself as he was with me, he crossed the street to the school with his friends trailing him. Even with the last word he hadn’t achieved a clear victory.
My answer to him came later: “It’s all right to have a long answer, but you should have a short answer, too.”
7 / tzitzis
I started wearing my yarmulke all the time. I wore it when I went to the gym (although not during my workout), I wore it when I went to the movies, and I wore it when I went to the store.
For the most part, there was no reaction from anybody. My friends indulged me: some thought it was cute, others thought I was crazy, and one, a Catholic, said I had no right to be surprised if I got beaten up. Josh thought I might get some sort of anti-Semitic reaction, but if I did I was never aware of it.
The Boys Across the Street Page 5