That was a surprise. I thought he must be about six.
Although Yitzchak had explained me to the other boys, I don’t think this explanation really made sense to him, and when I caught him watching me I think that’s what he was trying to figure out.
The boys came running back with a Hebrew Tanakh, very excited and out of breath. Mine was wrong, and they opened theirs to show me, to compare and make sure, and then Avraham realized he’d been looking at chapter 21. He turned back a page and found the equivalent passage. Breathlessly, he read out the words in Hebrew, a few at a time, followed, in a real rush of excitement, by his own English translation.
When he finished the passage he looked at me in wonderment and said, “You’re right!”
His exclamation was absolute: there was no sense that he had “lost” or that I had “won.” What was exciting to him as he exclaimed “You’re right!” was the thrill that there was an answer, and that he had found it.
But then, just as suddenly, there was an amazing consternation among the boys: how could such a thing be in the Tanakh! As I watched them it was amusing to me that the context of a thing was not any part of their consideration; for them the words had their own absolute meaning, and somehow it was unthinkable that these words should be in their holy book: it was against everything they believed in.
Once more the three boys took off, this time to get an explanation. I started taking my things inside, and Yitzchak watched me as I prepared to go.
A few minutes later they were back and even more out of breath; they had received their explanation. Dovid listened as Moshe started to tell me what they’d been told, and then Avraham began with his version. They were both greatly excited, but finally Moshe gave way to the older boy. “It’s what a man says when he gets very mad,” Avraham said. “It isn’t the way things are, it isn’t the truth, but something a man would say when he gets very mad.”
“Well”—I smiled at Moshe—“I think your book is right.”
Moshe knew I was teasing him, and he smiled back at me, but in his smile was the assertion that he didn’t “agree” with me.
Okay.
But I had proved my knowledge: I had proved that there was something in their book which they couldn’t believe existed. “Accursed be the day/That I was born! ...”
And they were impressed.
I got my stuff together and locked my apartment, and when I was ready to go I noticed the boys had moved across the street and were playing a game: they were taking turns trying to bat a ball into a box on the ground several yards away. As I bicycled up the street, on my way to the parade for the returning troops, I waved to them and called out, “Bye.”
They stopped for a moment to watch me ride past.
I felt great.
Victorious!
17 / the second day of shavuot
The next day I received my federal tax refund in the mail and I decided to go and check out the price of filing cabinets. I was on my bike and, as I rode past the school, I noticed Avraham and Dovid playing in the compound. They were excited when they saw me and called out to me, “We burnt you!”
“No you didn’t,” I said, riding up to them. “I burnt you.”
“First you burnt us, then we burnt you, then you burnt us, then finally we burnt you best.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
When I got back (the filing cabinets were much too expensive), I set my things out in front of the apartment and prepared to read. I’d planned to spend the day finishing the introduction to the Mishnah, but I didn’t get through it until nearly midnight. Since the holiday celebrating Moses receiving the law on Sinai lasts two days, it was like the Sabbath for the third day in a row: there was no school and everyone was dressed up.
Avraham came over to talk with me. I told him I had written about him, about yesterday. He asked to see it. I told him it was on the computer, and it would take several minutes to get it, but I went inside and organized the entry for “The First Day of Shavuot” and printed it out.
When I finally got all the pages together, I came back outside; two boys I’d never seen before had joined Avraham and were sitting with him on one of the low walls bordering the walkway. The older boy wore one of the old-fashioned black dress hats which are reserved for special occasions.
I handed Avraham the pages, and while he started reading them, I talked with the boy in the black hat. He was in the eighth grade and he said he used to go to the yeshiva, the chabad, across the street. He explained that “yeshiva” just meant “school.” “Chabad” was something more specific; he didn’t say what. He told me he’d been kicked out of the school.
“Really?” I was very curious.
“They kicked me out because someone said I went to movies and somebody else said I was walking on Melrose.”
Wow.
The other boy was his brother and said they were now going to another Jewish school on Pico Boulevard, one which wasn’t a chabad. I didn’t understand the distinction, and he explained that this school had a greater proportion of Hebrew versus English learning, while the school he was going to now placed a greater emphasis on English.
“Moshe didn’t say that, I said that!” Avraham suddenly exclaimed, and pointed to a paragraph where I had written that Moshe had identified some American servicemen as Nazis.
I told Avraham I would change it right now, and I ran in the house and made the correction on the computer.
When I came outside again, I continued my talk with the boy in the black hat and we went through the basic preliminaries: no, I wasn’t Jewish; no, I didn’t believe in God . . .
“I know it’s a cliché,” I said, “but I really do think that everything is relative.”
“But some things are bad—”
“I don’t think so—unless you choose to call them bad. It’s a value judgment, a subjective value judgment. For instance, I’ve had sex with about two thousand men, and I don’t think that’s bad.”
“But don’t you feel it’s against nature?”
“No.”
I think the concept overwhelmed him: what must it be like to do something bad and yet not think of it as bad! While we were talking I learned that he and his brother were here with their father for a service over at the school, but he didn’t seem to care about it very much. What did interest him was my fascination with the boys and the fact that I was writing stories about them.
I sensed that he felt cut off from the world and that the world’s incredible indifference to him and his way of life made him feel a little irrelevant. I think it amazed him that here was a forty-year-old homosexual atheist who was not only writing stories about the boys across the street but was wearing a yarmulke.
“I’m not wearing my tzitzis,” I told him, “because I need to take them to the cleaners. I hear you can’t put them in the washing machine because the strings will get messed up.”
“You can put them in the washing machine if you put the strings in a pair of socks—that’s what my mother does. And then that way they won’t get tangled.”
“That’s great. Thanks a lot.”
As Avraham finished reading the pages I’d written about him, he passed them on to the eighth-grader.
“Where did you get your hat?” I asked him.
“On Fairfax,” he said. “In one of those stores.”
I nodded. “It’s really nice.”
“Thanks.”
He tried to read what I’d written but he never got very far because one or the other of us kept interrupting his reading to talk. He asked me for a copy of what I’d written, but I didn’t make him one. I was suddenly a little nervous about my stories floating about, although later I was sorry I hadn’t. I think he really needed some way to see his life from the outside.
While we were sitting there a boy I didn’t recognize came over from the school and told them that the service was over. The eighth-grader and his brother stood up and prepared to go back to the yeshiva.
“Are you goi
ng to get in trouble?” I asked the boy in the hat.
He shrugged his shoulders: Yes, but so what?
“It’s no big deal,” his brother said.
We exchanged farewells, and I said it was nice meeting them.
When Avraham and I were left by ourselves, I asked him what he thought of the story. He said he really liked it and exclaimed, “There’s so much in it!”
“In my stories I’m not sure how to spell ‘Chassidic’—do you think I should spell it with an ‘h’ or ‘c-h’ and do you think I should use one ‘s’ or two?”
“Two ‘s’s, and ‘c-h’ definitely.”
“Okay.”
The kids next door were going to the park, and they asked Avraham if he wanted to come and play with them, but he said he didn’t want to. “It’s boring to play with them,” he told me, and after they left we spent the rest of the afternoon talking about religion.
What most amazed and frustrated him was the fact that I didn’t believe in God. “How do you think all this came to be?” and he swept his arm around in a circle.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but I certainly don’t think there was some unified consciousness planning it.”
Avraham shook his head. “You know, it’s been proven that the first page of Torah is so perfect only God could have written it—no man could have written it.”
I looked at him incredulously.
“It’s true,” he said. “The Hebrew letters are so perfect only God could have invented them.”
“I think that’s silly.”
Avraham felt he must try some new tack. “You know about the war in the Persian Gulf? Those were miracles that show that the Messiah is very close. The Arabs aimed missiles at Israel and they didn’t explode! That’s a miracle!”
“Avraham, I think it’s a pretty sad day when you have to call bad technology a miracle.”
He looked at me and shook his head. “Someday you’re going to believe in God, and then it’s going to be so powerful—” and he threw his arms open in contemplation of the explosion that would happen in my mind.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“You’re so hard to convince!” he said, impressed with my obstinacy. “Maybe only a great rabbi could convince you that God exists. There are bad people who, when they look into the eyes of certain very holy men, say they will never be bad again.”
“But I don’t believe in ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ ” I told him.
While we were talking, some of the older boys had gathered in one of the rooms across the street, the room where Avi, the Catfish, lived. They shouted to Avraham not to talk to me, and among their admonishments I heard my epithet and name: “faygeleh Rick.”
“The bochurs don’t want me to talk to you,” Avraham explained.
“What’s a ‘bochur’?” I asked.
“They’re in the beit midrash.”
“What’s the—beit midrash?” I asked.
“They study the Talmud.”
“Are they in high school?”
“No, they’re out of high school.”
I could see Avi in his room across the street, conferring with a group of guys and looking out the window.
“Is Avi a bochur?” I asked.
Avraham nodded. Hmm. I’d thought Avi was in high school. As I was looking over toward the school, Avraham suddenly interrupted my contemplation. “Why don’t they want me to talk to you?”
“Well, first of all, I’m not Jewish,” I said, “I’m an atheist, and I’m homosexual. The tzitzis you’re wearing? One of the laws they represent says I should be killed for being homosexual.” He asked me what I meant and I went into my apartment and brought out the Tanakh. I showed him Leviticus 20:13. He said he knew about that; they had told him all about it.
While we were talking, one of my neighbors in the building, Dan, “a Jew from Kentucky,” as he facetiously describes himself in one of his songs, joined us. I had given him my story “The First Day of Shavuot” to read, and he was returning the pages to me. I introduced him to Avraham, one of the characters in that story, and Dan, easily projecting the transitions of story to publication to screenplay, asked him how he felt about becoming a character in a movie.
Dan’s sense of humor has a kind of irony I am fairly sympathetic to, but Avraham is very literal—as anyone must be, I suppose, having moved to a new country—and the full meaning of Dan’s remarks escaped him.
We were discussing the eternal dichotomy of life versus art when the guys who had been across the street in Avi’s room, including Avi, came over. The first guy to cross the street was fat, had a slight beard, and spoke with a strong New York accent. As he neared us, Avraham rolled his eyes, and said this was “the Butt”—because he always butted in on everything.
As he came to the front of the steps he spread his arms and said, “This is the place to get sun, isn’t it, the best place, right here?”
He was wearing his tzitzis without a shirt over them, and this caused a bit of consternation among his friends who were with him. Avi had positioned himself behind the others, so I had to shift around to see him and say hello. “You shaved,” I said, noting his smooth cheeks. He just nodded.
The Butt turned to Avraham. “Why are you talking to this guy? Where do you live? You should go home.”
Avraham, who lives next door, wasn’t impressed and wouldn’t tell him where he lived.
The Butt turned to me. “Do you consider yourself an intelligent fellow?” he asked.
“I like to read,” I answered.
He didn’t like this answer. “Don’t be evasive—that’s not what I asked. Why can’t you answer a simple question? Do you consider yourself an intelligent fellow?”
I answered, “Yes.”
“Then why don’t you write a book like this?” and he picked up the Mishnah. “Why don’t you write this?”
I picked up my story about Moshe and Avraham and handed it to him. “I wrote this.”
He looked at the story, but couldn’t be bothered to read it. One of the other men, dressed in a suit and hat and with a full beard, took the pages from him and began reading. The others read the opening paragraphs over his shoulder, and they all got a laugh about my buying the Mishnah to impress them. While the bearded man read the rest of the story, the Butt turned his attention to Dan, who was sitting on one of the low brick walls. “You’re Jewish.”
Dan admitted this was so.
“Where you from?”
“Chicago,” Dan said. Dan had told me he was from Iowa. “You were born in Chicago?”
“No, I was born in Iowa.”
“You’re lying. You were born in Russia.”
Dan shrugged his shoulders and, speaking with a thick Eastern European accent, admitted his game had been seen through. This dialogue was a little disconcerting to me. Dan was teasing the guy, bullshitting for the sake of bullshitting (not, I feel, a profitable mode of communication with these people), while the Butt was being belligerent. Underlying it all was an equality based on their mutual Jewishness which, rather than serving as some kind of bond, seemed to stimulate a nasty antagonism. A few minutes later Dan went back to his apartment.
The bearded man finished my story and handed it back to me.
“What did you think?”
He was determined to be noncommittal. “You have a good prose style.”
I thanked him.
When the Butt and his friends realized that Avraham had no real intention of bowing to their authority, they made a retreat across the street and gathered for a conference. I wondered what it was all about. The bearded guy was probably giving them the gist of what I’d written and, going over the pros and cons of my influence, they were probably trying to determine what the official line of action should be.
Increasingly I got the feeling that the purpose of their religion, and perhaps any religion, was to achieve power by supposedly protecting people from the chaos and meaninglessness of life—which is just what I must represent to them�
��and, after I looked through the Mishnah, it seemed to me that Orthodox Judaism, in particular, took pride in having an official answer for every eventuality.
What are the official plans of action for Gentiles who wear yarmulkes, for homosexual atheists? To avoid their company is undoubtedly the most primal directive. But what happens when your children like such a person?
Avraham and I watched the bochurs talking about us across the street. I almost got up and crossed the street to talk to them, but decided against it. Eventually the guys from the beit midrash went back into the school, and Avraham and I continued our talk for the rest of the afternoon.
Trying, once again, to convince me that there truly was a God, he pulled out, as a last resort, one of his most powerful salvos: the Messiah was coming this year.
“Really? You mean, a year from now, in May 1992, if we were sitting here talking, the Messiah would have come?”
“You’ll see.”
“Do you think any of the boys over at that school might be the Messiah?” I asked him.
This was clearly preposterous to Avraham. It was interesting that, on the one hand, he respected the school and the people there and yet, on the other, seemed to find it difficult to credit them with any kind of real holiness.
“Do you think I might be the Messiah?” I asked him.
For a moment this stopped Avraham completely, and he looked at me closely, rolling the question over in his mind. And then he laughed. “But you don’t believe in God!”
There you go.
As the afternoon wore on, Avraham came up with a couple of interesting questions. “Is ‘damn’ a bad word?”
I had my dictionary right there and I opened it up to show him the definition so he could read it for himself. I told him that in 1939 it was against the Motion Picture Production Code to use that word in the movies, and when David O. Selznick wanted to use it in the movie Gone With the Wind, he had to pay a fine. I also told him that the head Catholic office at the time condemned the film and told Catholics not to see it.
We talked about movies for a while, and he said that when he was allowed to watch them on TV, “R” movies were the best. He told me about his friend Sruli Perlman (the knockout young man I’d seen win the bicycle race the other day), who snuck into a theater to see Pretty Woman.
The Boys Across the Street Page 12