“Why don’t you want to know?”
“I don’t see the point. If I find out I’ve been exposed to the virus, that means I’ll feel guilty and inhibited whenever I have sex, but, on the other hand, if I haven't been exposed to it, that means I’ll probably be afraid to have sex. Either feeling—guilt or fear—seems horrible.”
“You’re not afraid to die?” the Nondescript Boy asked again. He still didn’t see how I got around that one.
“Two people I had sex with died this week. Forty people I know have died of AIDS so far. What am I supposed to do?” I suddenly felt that I had to cut through these boring rationalizations. I decided to let Avi and his friend be my catalyst for seeing what all this might be about: “I knew this boy named Paul K. We had sex once, and he was absolutely beautiful and full of life, and he was a really good person. And he got sick and died, and you know what I felt when he died? What good is all this? Life. Why should I care about being alive if Paul isn’t here? If Paul isn’t here, then how important could life really be after all? I’m forty years old, I’ve had sex with—I guess—two thousand men. I’ve had a great life, so why should I care if I die? Just so I can hold on to getting old? I don’t think it’s worth it.”
“So, if someone wanted to kill you, you wouldn’t care?” the Nondescript Boy asked.
“Well, I don’t want to die,” I began again, but it didn’t feel right. “Intellectually, I can say I don’t care if I live or die, but I know that a part of me, my body, wants to live. In 1971 I was living in Sacramento and I was hitchhiking one night and these boys picked me up in a car and I very stupidly got in the backseat between two of them. They asked me for some money and I said I didn’t have any—”
“But did you?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
“I don’t remember. But let me tell you. The guy in the passenger seat pulled out a gun and put it to my head, and the boy in front of me, and the two boys on each side of me, pulled out knives, and they asked me for my wallet, and when they found out I was lying they got mad.”
There were various ways to tell this story: I could go into all the details or just skim the surface. Avi and his friend were listening to me very attentively.
“They made me get undressed and then they threw my glasses out the car window, and then they drove me to a dirt road south of Sacramento and beat me up. But the point I wanted to make was that when they put that gun to my head I could say in my mind that I didn’t care if I died or not—I mean, the car could have hit a bump in the road and the gun could have gone off: anything could have happened—and I remember very clearly the feelings I had. I was thinking that it didn’t really make any difference whether I was killed or not, and yet at the same time I was very aware that everything I was doing, every action and everything I said, was based on the imperative to save my own life no matter what.”
“So you did want to live,” the Nondescript Boy said, satisfied that the world was as he felt it must be.
“My body wanted to live,” I said, and I wondered if I should tell them what I did to save myself. What the hell. “I was a Christian then, and you know what I said to them? I told them that I felt God would take care of me no matter what happened. I think that freaked them out a bit and I think that’s why they didn’t hurt me any more than they did.”
We reached the corner of Waring and Alta Vista: the school was just across from us and my apartment was just up the street. It was time to go our separate ways.
“Do you use c-condoms?” Avi asked, and as I looked at him he suddenly seemed to me such a kid. He had a few pimples on his face and his light beard really was a scraggly mess. The self-assurance that had charmed me the night of the accident was now, in this more intimate conversation, much more tentative. He seemed to be having some sort of problem talking, some speech impediment, almost a stutter, and I wondered if I made him nervous. I suddenly wanted to wrap my arms around him and hold him and gently kiss all his insecurity away.
“No, I don’t use condoms,” I answered him and then explained, “I don’t fuck people and the men I have sex with don’t usually go down on me, so there’s no real reason for me to use them. And I don’t want the people I’m with to use them.”
Avi started off across the street, but the Nondescript Boy stayed beside me, just looking at me.
“You see, I have a specific sexual proclivity,” I told him, and then I raised my voice to make sure Avi heard me. “I love the taste of semen: I’m a cocksucker.”
Avi called to his friend, and the Nondescript Boy jogged across the street to join him.
“Do you boys sleep together?” I called over to them as I made my way up my side of the street. I watched them as they arrived at their gate and started working on getting it open.
“Now, don’t be getting any ideas, Rick,” the Nondescript Boy answered back.
They were having some problem with the lock and finally Avi jumped over the fence and opened it from the inside. He let his friend in and then the gate clanged shut after them as they started up around the side of the building.
I called after them once more, “Have fun!”
They didn’t answer me.
When Orestes and I finally got together he was slightly amused by my transformation into an Orthodox Jew, but it didn’t kick any of his fantasies into high gear.
He slipped a video into the VCR and it was one of my old movies: Games, with Al Parker and Leo Ford and Brian Nichols.
And me.
Ten years ago.
Worshipping cock.
I was beautiful.
We took drugs and then Orestes fucked me: he fucked my mouth and he fucked my ass . . .
And when at last I finally came, I watched my dick spit its stuff all over my chest. . .
It took six hours.
9 / crystal
I’ve only taken crystal about half a dozen times, but I think I’ve discovered the trick of how to avoid messing up your metabolism’s whole inner time clock. If you take it at night (and “it” is a high-intensity speed experience) and you start to crash in the morning, the key to not letting your waking and sleeping schedule get completely out of whack is to force yourself to stay awake until evening comes around again.
After I left Orestes I went to the gym and worked out. It was just after six in the morning and I was still fairly high. There was a real exhilaration in stretching my muscles and actually enjoying the employment of my body’s energy, without the usual feelings of boredom and the concomitant daydreaming about anything but what I was doing.
By the time I got to the sauna I was feeling great. It wasn’t even seven o’clock in the morning and I’d already had some great sex and a great workout. I was by myself in the sauna when one of the old Jewish men came in. He took note of me and ambled over.
“Real estate today,” he said and shook his head. “I’m lucky, I made most of my investments thirty years ago.”
When I first joined the gym it had been called the Beverly Hills Health Club and its clientele had been almost exclusively old Jewish men (which was fine with me: without working out, I still had practically the best body there), but when the new management took over, most of the old men left. The few holdovers, with their lifetime memberships, usually came to the club early in the morning, and over the years I had struck up an acquaintance with a number of them, but I didn’t recognize the old man speaking to me now.
“Thirty years ago,” I ventured. “That would be about 1960.”
“That’s right. I moved here in 1959.”
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Belgium. I still go back. I have a place there.”
“So, where were you during World War II?”
The old man suddenly extended his left arm toward me, showing me a tattoo there. “I was released from Buchenwald.” Though I’d written a story about the concentration camps, since I hadn’t been alive then I found the history of that time pretty much one with all oth
er history previous to my existence. It always amazed me to come across people who actually had memories of what were, for me, just words in books.
“How old were you when you went in?” I asked. “Twenty-five, in 1942. I was twenty-eight when I got out in 1945.”
“How were you captured?”
“I was in a café and the SS came in and I had some papers— you had to have papers and they stamped if you were a Jew or not—and mine were stamped ‘Non-Jew.’ ”
“So how did they know if you were Jewish or not?” “Because of the people I was with.”
“What happened then?”
“I was in a camp in Germany for most of the war—I was lucky, it wasn’t so bad. They sent me to Auschwitz in 1942, but the worst camp was the one in Belgium. I saw a man I knew there, a man I knew in school. We saw each other and he said, ‘I know you, we sat on a bench together.’ ”
“You mean, one of the other prisoners?”
The old man shook his head. “No, one of the ones that ran it.”
I was amazed. The story I’d written had been about two friends who later meet in a concentration camp, on opposite sides, but I’d heard of that actually happening only once. “Did he help you?” I asked.
“No.”
“Were you friends?”
He shook his ahead. “No. Me and another boy were the only Jews in the class and he picked on us.”
“So it didn’t surprise you?”
“No.”
My biggest argument against the existence of God, at least as far as the boys across the street were concerned, was the Holocaust, and I asked the man, “Were you ever religious? Before or after?”
“No. You couldn’t be religious—you had to be tough. But, you know, I wasn’t religious before that—I had to work. I worked seven days a week.”
“I live across the street from an Orthodox Jewish school,” and then I tried to be more specific and say it right: “A—Chassidic school. . .”
“They’re the ones. It was the Orthodox that caused it to happen. They’re the ones responsible, always trying to be different. It never would have happened if it hadn’t been for them.”
I was stunned. I’d never heard that accusation before. I didn’t know what to say.
The old man started pacing back and forth, looking down at the ground as he did so. Suddenly he came over to me, as if he’d just remembered the answer to a difficult question. “My son?
He won’t pick up a penny. Says it’s not worth it. I say to him, you just keep dropping the pennies—I’ll pick them up.”
And then he left.
I stayed in the sauna for quite a while longer, deliciously sweating in the heat, and then I took a whirlpool. As I was getting dressed to leave I modeled my outfit for some of the men downstairs in the locker room, but, for the most part, none of them seemed to care or even notice that I was wearing a yarmulke and tzitzis. By the time I got home it was nearly ten o’clock, and the beautiful day stretched away emptily before me.
I made myself some coffee, took my director’s chair and set it up outside, and, dressed only in shorts with my yarmulke and tzitzis, picked up my book. I was reading The Antichrist by Nietzsche, but it was hard to concentrate, and more often than not I found myself staring off into the distance, the book resting in my lap, and my mind deep in contemplation of the life around me.
What were those mockingbirds doing? What were their lives like? Where did they live? How important was a nest to them? Did they sleep standing up? What did their twittering mean? What did my chirping imitations sound like to them?
What did they think about me?
Time passed.
The Jews are the most remarkable nation of world history because, faced with the question of being or not being, they preferred, with a perfectly uncanny conviction, being at any price: the price they had to pay was the radical falsification of all nature, all naturalness, all reality, the entire inner world as well as the outer.
I tried to concentrate, but a single sentence of Nietzsche’s would send my mind spacing out, and when at last I returned my gaze to the words on the page, the ultimate meaning of his thought would seem to be hiding in ever smaller increments, in
a phrase—“being at any price”—or even in individual words— “nation,” “pay,” “all.”
A boy rode by on his bicycle.
He glanced over at me as he passed and then turned back with a classic double take, calling out to me as he did so, “Hey, Rick!”
I stood up on one of the little walls bordering the walkway and shouted after him, “What do you think of my tzitzis?”
He shouted back to me from up the street, “Hot!”
Once I’d stood up, I realized how lethargic I’d become, just sitting there, and decided I’d go for a walk: maybe get a candy bar or something up at the drugstore. I left all my stuff outside— after all, who would take it?—and headed on up the street.
I was feeling great in a sharp-edged dreamy sort of way, and the simple physical act of walking became a wonderfully affirmative experience. Just after I turned the corner and was walking west on Willoughby, I noticed someone approaching me. The sun was in my eyes and even with my dark glasses on I couldn’t tell who it was; all I could distinguish was the black pants and the white shirt, indicating that it was probably one of them.
When I was abreast of the man I finally recognized him: it was the tall boy with the goofy grin. Just as we passed each other I realized he was doing a kind of double take over my tzitzis.
“Hello,” I greeted him.
He said something I didn’t catch, we continued on our separate ways, and then five or so paces later I turned back to look at him, just in time to see him turning back to look at me.
It was a lovely concurrence.
He said something, again I didn’t catch it, and then he was gone.
When I got to the drugstore I scoped out the candy displays, but the thought of eating any of it made me feel slightly nauseated—the crystal—and I was aware of myself as the chemical composition I really am.
I began to mosey back home. I walked down Poinsettia, past the park where the boys played ball, and saw one of them walking slowly ahead of me. I realized I would catch up with him, with my brisker walk, and I wondered what kind of reaction he would have when I passed him. He was rather heavy and had a green shirt on. As I got closer I realized it was Baby Fat, the boy who’d told me what a kepa is.
He looked around to see who was behind him and then, before I could tell if he recognized me or not, he turned away and continued walking, but he seemed to be deliberately slowing down so that I would overtake him, and as this inevitability approached, I began to feel slightly apprehensive. As I came up to him I said hello. “How’s it going?”
“Fine.”
We were walking beside each other now.
“Where’d you get the tzitzis?” he asked.
“Atara’s on Fairfax,” I answered.
He suddenly stopped and confronted me. “Why are you wearing the tzitzis? And the yarmulke?”
“Because you do,” I told him.
He studied me for a moment, assessing this comment, which sounded like a compliment, a crazy one perhaps, but not ultimately threatening, and he said, “You’re a strange guy, Rick,” casually dismissing me, the way he had when we’d spoken before. He wanted me to be a harmless curiosity, but as we continued on our way together, just the two of us, he apparently realized he couldn’t leave it at that. “You know, these things mean something. They represent our continual awareness of God, and it isn’t right for you to wear them.”
“They mean that to you,” I told him. “They don’t mean that to me: that’s not why I’m wearing them.”
He suddenly became sarcastic. “Do you like wearing strings down the sides of your pants?”
I shrugged: I wasn’t sure.
He was contemptuous: “Monkey see, monkey do,” and then, as he continued talking, a kind of hurt crept into his voice
. “These are holy things, and we don’t want you wearing them.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t want people thinking you’re one of us, we don’t want someone to see you and think that you’re—you’re”—and he raised his arm before him and let his wrist go limp— “androgynous.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It means a man who acts like a woman.”
I resented that. “I don’t act like a woman.”
“It’s not right, you’re not taking it seriously,” he said, and I began to sense a kind of helplessness in him, an offense and a desperation. “By wearing these things you’re mocking God, you’re mocking religion ...”
“I don’t believe in ‘God,’ ” I told him. “I don’t believe in ‘religion.’ ”
I felt like Baby Fat might burst into tears and I began to feel something of his pain: since he’d been raised to be a professional Jew, and brainwashed by his whole culture, his family and friends and teachers, obviously there must come times when he just had to crumple in the face of the lies he was defending.
At that moment one of the phys ed teachers (interestingly enough, not a Jew) came from behind us. He didn’t say anything to me, but as he overtook us he put his arm around Baby Fat and walked him on ahead of me, down Alta Vista.
A moment later they were laughing: the teacher had somehow made a joke out of me or the situation, and as they walked on down the street together I was glad of that. Although I wouldn’t mind being a catalyst for any and every kind of questioning, I didn’t really want to hurt anyone.
But maybe that was a contradiction in terms.
10 / the blessing
On the following Saturday, the Sabbath, I was once again set up outside. All I had on was my gold trunks and my yarmulke. As I sat there reading (Plutarch’s life of Crassus), one of the boys yelled at me from across the street, “Hey, Rick, where’s your tzitzis?”
The Boys Across the Street Page 7