“You should be careful lying down,” he told me, explaining that the neighborhood was extremely dangerous and that just the other day a friend of his had been kidnapped and he had seen it.
“A Jewish boy?” I asked.
He said yes, but it was a Jewish boy who went to the public school. I asked who kidnapped him, and he said it was a schvartzer.
“Do you know what that means?” he asked me.
“A black person,” I said.
He asked me if I understood Hebrew. I said I just knew the blessing for the tzitzis, and I said it for him. He corrected me on some of the pronunciation, and I practiced it again a couple of times.
Suddenly Yaakov nudged me and indicated someone walking toward us on the sidewalk. It was a large and surly black man dressed in white. We watched him as he passed on by.
“See that man,” Yaakov said, and I watched the retreating figure. Suddenly the black man turned around and looked at us, and I shifted my gaze back toward Yaakov, who wanted to tell me about him.
“He heard you talking about him,” I told Yaakov, who hadn’t seen the black man turn around.
“He did!?”
“He heard you say, ‘See that man.’ ”
Yaakov looked back and forth between me and the retreating figure of the black man, excitement at the potential danger brimming in his eyes. And then he told me a story, how that man had broken something at his father’s workplace and pulled a knife on him, and how his father had jumped over ten benches. “I swear to God! You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to . . .”
I told him I believed him (although I wasn’t exactly sure how massive “ten benches” were), but I didn’t understand why the black man did that.
“Schvartzer: he’s crazy,” he said.
Something in the look I gave him must have prompted his further consideration.
“Some white people can be crazy, too,” he said. “Once I saw this white man with long hair and a big knife chasing some black people around a parking lot, and we called the police.”
As I talked to Yaakov I wondered at his sense of time and his sense of reality. Were these the real considerations of young Orthodox Jewish boys—kidnappings and black people and knives?
In the scheme of things, I thought, my pseudo-Judaism and my queerness must be fairly lightweight stuff.
While we were talking, two of the high school boys came over. One of them was the Serious Young Man I’d spoken to about his tzitzis, and the other was a big ugly boy with a pimply face who started calling me “faggot!” and doing a little mincing act as he approached us.
I tried to get them into a discussion. The Serious Young Man wanted to talk, but the ugly boy just wanted to insult me. Pretty soon more boys came over, two of them on bicycles. The big ugly boy was still being abusive and told Yaakov if he saw him talking to me anymore he was going to tell his mother. Yaakov was indignant at being told what to do and began circling around us menacingly. At one point, while I was being called a faggot and being told how sick and disgusting I was, Yaakov came and took a stand in front of me. He planted his hands on his hips and, defying them all, asserted with authority, “He’s my friend.”
“No he’s not—he’s a faggot—he’s sick—ask him.”
Yaakov turned to me and asked, in a straightforward manner, “Are you a faggot?”
I said I was.
He was astonished, and stepped back across the brick partition of the walkway. He couldn’t believe it. And in that moment I realized I’d missed a great opportunity: “You tell me what a faggot is, and I’ll tell you if that’s what I am.”
They also told him I wasn’t Jewish, and I could tell that Yaakov was offended at the allegation. A little boy sitting on one of the low walls bordering the walkway suddenly spoke up and stated the case with authority: “He’s pretending to be Jewish.” Squeezing his hands between his knees, he smiled shyly at me with his understanding of my motivation. I think what made him so shy and pleased was the (incredible!) concept that an adult—me—was pretending to be something that he was; that I was, in a way, pretending to be him.
Yaakov looked at me and asked, “Are you Jewish?”
“No.”
He was shocked, and I think he felt we were playing a joke on him. On the one hand I almost wanted to apologize, but on the other I wanted him to stand up and be responsible for his own feelings about things, and not just the labels applied to them.
A few minutes later I saw the Big Ugly Boy whispering something into Yaakov’s ear. I was talking to some of the other boys and wasn’t really paying attention, but then I noticed him as he passed in front of me and with great intent slapped his hand to his ass, all the while looking me right in the eye. The Big Ugly Boy and his friends laughed, and Yaakov grinned at his newfound favor.
The next day when the kids got home from school I said hello to Yaakov, but he was hurrying on across the street, and that gave him an excuse for not having to acknowledge me. Still later, he passed me again, and I asked him how it was going. He turned and shrugged an okay to me. There was just the slightest smile on his lips.
Poor kid. Do you treat someone as he treats you, or as someone else tells you to? Is someone who seems nice bad—just because he’s a faggot and pretending to be a Jew?
13 / mendel
When I was talking to Yaakov, and the older boys came over from across the street, I had a sense of lines being drawn, that they were pitting themselves against me: normalcy over perversion, Jew opposed to Gentile, good versus evil.
Among the boys that joined the assemblage in front of my apartment was Mendel, of the impish grin. His tight curly brown hair had grown out some since I’d last seen him and wasn’t as attractive: it made him look a little more conventionally Jewish, but he was as gregarious as ever and had the bright rambunctious attitude of a kid having the legitimate right to tease a small animal (me).
I told him I’d written about him and he was pleased, possessed as he was of the adorable arrogance that comes with being self-consciously charming. Some of the other boys wanted to see what I’d written and I told them it was on the computer, but that I could print it out for them.
I went in the apartment, turned on the computer, brought up my “Orthodox” file, and printed out the first nine pages. I scanned them as they began to come out and was surprised to find only one reference to Mendel and then not by name: it was the day he told me I looked good and then said he was only kidding.
When I returned with the first couple of pages I saw a man with a beard walking across the street toward the boys. Unlike them, he was wearing a coat. He told them to go back to the school.
“The faggot’s been writing about us,” the Big Ugly Boy said, and the bearded man—teacher? rabbi?—gave him an admonishing look.
The boys said they wanted to wait just a minute or two to see what I’d written about them. The bearded man leaned against a car in front of the nursery school next door and the boys gathered about him. Although he was arbitrating among them, I couldn’t really gauge how important he was to the boys. They seemed to regard him more as an older brother than a father, and even though the argument/discussion seemed to be reaonably good-natured I could tell he was losing points.
“You don’t get any respect,” I called over to him.
“That’s right,” he said, and with that there seemed to be a consensus that they could stay to read what I’d written.
As the pages came out of the computer I brought them out in batches of twos and threes. They all crowded around to see them, taking the unnumbered sheets from one another, and passing them back and forth. After reading the first couple of pages Mendel suddenly looked up and asked me, “Do you think you’re good-looking?”
“I’m old,” I said.
When I finished the printing I gave the boys the last of the pages and then, sitting on my blanket, I watched them. They huddled around the car where they’d gathered away from me, leaning against it and sprawling over
the hood and trunk. Occasionally one of them would look over at me, sometimes there would be a laugh, and I wondered: What did I write in those first nine pages? Could I really just hand them over without checking them? Was I really that sure I hadn’t incriminated myself somehow?
After the bearded man had finished reading all the pages, he gathered them together, explaining to the boys that I needed them back. I told him I didn’t actually, that they were all on the computer, and he asked me if he could keep them. Sure. I noted that the pages weren’t numbered and he pointed out that the entries were dated.
Rolling the pages up, he escorted the boys back across the street to the school, with everyone in pretty high spirits, it seemed to me. I asked the boys what they thought, and a couple of them told me I was a good writer.
After they were gone I got my things together and retired to my apartment. Immediately I printed out another copy of the nine pages I had given them.
I reread what I’d written—pretending I was them as I did so—and when I came to my encounter with Mendel I cringed:
. . . A few minutes later three of the boys came out of the school, talking together and going up the street. They were on the sidewalk opposite me, and when they saw me the cute one, gregarious, dark-haired, bright-eyed, called out to me, “Hey, Rick!”
I called out hello to them.
“You’re looking good, Rick!” he yelled over to me.
The boys get a kick out of complimenting me—in some strange way it’s how they make fun of homosexuality: telling a guy he looks good and knowing, or thinking they know, he gets a kick out of it. I’m not quite sure. In any case, I had the presence of mind to call back, “You look good, too.”
They were a ways up the street by now. But he and his friends paused just long enough for him to call back, “I’m just kidding!”
I was definite in my response: “I’m not.”
This stopped them. The two boys with the speaker laughed and started kidding their friend. I think there is something humiliating for them in being thought attractive, although, of course, it must be very satisfying to be thought good-looking, and maybe even more exciting to be thought good-looking by another man. There is also the fact of their rigorous Orthodox upbringing in which a very strict dichotomy exists between “human beings” and “animals.” I think this eschewing of the physical has something to do with this dichotomy and the fact that most of the boys, and Jews in general, are generally so ugly. Certainly, their whole presentation seems to be an emphasis on what is unattractive, as if to somehow deny themselves as “animals.”
For a second I had him flummoxed, but a moment later he got in the last word: “Rick—you’re a funny guy.”
14 / baseball and velcro
After reading through my “Orthodox” file I realized how paltry a thing I really had. Although I’d defined my encounters with the boys in my mind, I hadn’t actually written as much as I thought I had and what there was, more often than not, was just excerpts from letters. They made me see that if I was going to write seriously about the boys, not only would I have to start paying much closer attention to them—prying the individuals out and away from the nearly indistinguishable mass they confronted me with—but most important, as nearly everything they did and said was fascinating to me, I would just have to knuckle down and start writing more.
I was sitting out in front of my apartment and musing on these matters when the boys came out of the school and started up the street toward the park to play ball. As I sat there, watching them file past me, it suddenly occurred to me that I might go up to the park and watch them play ball myself. I didn’t actually have any interest in sports, but the idea of watching these boys with their yarmulkes and tzitzis running around a field and chasing a ball suddenly seemed rife with possibility.
I put my chair and things back in the apartment, loaded my binoculars and a notebook in my backpack, and then cycled up to the park. When I arrived they had taken over one of the baseball diamonds and were picking teams for a game.
I climbed to the top of the bleachers facing the sun and unpacked my binoculars. I discovered that although I’d brought the notebook, in my hurry I’d forgotten to bring a pen. Oh, well.
I didn’t want to seem to be intruding too obviously in their world, so I sat as far away from them as I could, just up from first base, but the fact that I was the only person in either set of bleachers and no one else was paying any attention to them at all couldn’t be overlooked. Almost immediately they started calling out to me and one another, “Look, Rick’s here! It’s Rick! Hey, Rick!”
I only vaguely acknowledged their calling my name, acting as if I did this every day, and they just happened to be here. Besides, they had a teacher supervising them and I didn’t want to get in trouble with him. I’d missed seeing how the teams got picked, and by the time I was all settled in they were just splitting up, half of them moving out to the field, the others behind home plate.
As the boys took their places I noticed Mendel and his friend the Fat Redhead, the one whom I’d made the remark to about worshipping the penis instead of God. Mendel called up to me, pointing to his friend, “Is this the fat redheaded kid you wrote about?”
I smiled in acknowledgment, and the Fat Redhead gave me the finger.
I don’t know anything about baseball, but I thought maybe I could at least keep score since I was starting at the beginning, but barely a play into the game I was completely at a loss as to the big picture. I was too enthralled by the minutiae: how the boys interacted, how they responded to me, how they felt about pulling off a good play, how they dealt with defeat, and, most particularly, how they dealt with the problem of their yarmulkes.
Whenever the boys ran—after a hit or trying to catch a ball—either they would lose their yarmulkes or else their hands would inadvertently go to their heads in an effort to keep them on. Apparently, most of the boys kept their yarmulkes in place with bobby pins, and it was funny sometimes to see these little skullcaps bouncing up and down on the back of their heads. One of the boys—Meir, they were calling him—lost his completely as he went after a ball. After he tossed the ball back into the game, I watched him as he walked over to where his yarmulke was lying on the grass. He leaned over, picked it up, and casually replaced it on the back of his head.
There was something in his movement, some offhanded grace as he followed through on the retrieval of his yarmulke, that was very moving to me, and in that moment I realized he didn’t have any Velcro for his kepa or else it wouldn’t have come off so easily. Then I wondered if any of the boys had some . . .
I could give them those Velcro strips as a present!
What could be more perfect, more practical, or more appreciated? Once this proposition entered my head it became even more difficult to pay attention to the game. I picked up my binoculars and started watching the individual players. For the most part, I concentrated on the style of each successive batter, and, one after the other, as they stood there waiting to swing at the ball, their friends would tease them: “Rick’s looking at you!” I tried not to play favorites, but the boys were aware of some of them.
They think I like Meir. The first time I really noticed him was the previous afternoon when the boys came over and I gave them my nine pages of notes. He didn’t talk much, but I was aware of him because of his exotically dark skin and large straight-lined nose that, in its distortion of his features, emphasized his shyness. Several hours later he and another boy were going to the store, and I ran after them. I wanted to know what they thought of what I’d written. As I approached them, the boy with Meir took off like a shot and ran away up the street—in a kind of fear, I guess. Meir said I should go after him, but I declined his kind offer. I asked him what he thought of what I’d written. He said I was a good writer. That was appeasement— for all that he might have meant it.
Meir or his friend must have said something about our encounter because now, when he was at bat, the other boys started calling up
to me, “Look at those legs, Rick! Aren’t his arms great!” Meir was embarrassed, but I continued to watch him through my binoculars and was happy when he made a hit.
As the game proceeded I noticed that whenever the Fat Redhead passed by he would dart glances up at me. When he and his team were not at bat, he and Mendel played the outfield, carrying on a conversation with each other and not paying any attention to the game. I wondered what on earth they were talking about.
A couple of times balls were hit to centerfield, and when the Fat Redhead didn’t run to get them his teammates yelled at him, but he didn’t really seem to care. Once, when his team was at bat and he was waiting his turn, he came around to my bleachers and lay on the bottom plank, and then, several innings after that, he approached me from the field. “Come on, Rick, you don’t hate me,” he said, looking up at me through the fence, his words more a plea than a question.
I shrugged my shoulders: Okay, if you say so.
He turned to his teammates. “See? We’re friends. Rick doesn’t hate me.”
I was impressed: the power of the written word.
Because of where I was sitting I was very aware of the two first basemen. One of them was Mordecai, a young man I remembered meeting before. He was an Arabic-looking boy with an aristocratic bearing and he hated my being there, watching them, watching him, and when he was at bat he was particularly vehement in giving me the finger.
Near the end of the game, while his team was in the field, someone got a hit. One of his teammates fielded the ball and threw it to Mordecai as the batter raced toward him. To catch the ball, Mordecai moved off the base by nearly a yard. A moment after he caught it, the batter touched base.
The teacher called the play: “Safe!”
Mordecai freaked out and started yelling, “He’s out! He’s out! I caught the ball! He’s out!” It was an amazing display of an intensely volatile anger, as if somehow force and reiteration could change the truth.
The Boys Across the Street Page 9