The Boys Across the Street

by Rick Sandford

“Souls on Fire by Elie Wiesel,” and I noted the title down on one of the back pages of my James book. When I looked back up at Levi, I changed the subject. “Are you a virgin?”

  He didn’t seem particularly offended by my question and I could sense a certain curiosity about my motivation in asking it. Maintaining his eye contact with me, he barely nodded his head.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him. “You know, your sexual peak was at eighteen, and that’s already six years ago.”

  “We don’t believe in sex before marriage,” he said.

  “Is your marriage going to be arranged?” I asked. “I mean, will you have any say in the matter about who you get married to?”

  “I’ll have complete say.”

  “Hmm,” I mused, and then I thought I might as well see if I could get to the bottom of the threat I had received. “The other day two of the guys came over here and told me I shouldn’t talk to the kids. They said it was my responsibility not to talk to them, but they didn’t tell the kids why they weren’t supposed to talk to me. And so I told them that it was because I wasn’t Jewish, I was an atheist, and I was homosexual.”

  “There’s nothing wrong about the children speaking to you on the first two grounds. It doesn’t matter that you’re not Jewish or an atheist. The problem is your homosexuality—it’s a sickness, a disease, and when it’s acted on, it becomes a criminal act.”

  A sickness. A disease. A criminal act.

  “What about my wearing tzitzis or a yarmulke or this hat? Since I’m not Jewish, what does that mean?”

  “Nothing. They don’t mean anything, for you. You’re not a Jew.”

  “Really? Leviticus, the laws of Moses—they don’t apply to me?”

  “You’re not one of the chosen people.”

  That was the first time I had ever actually heard one of them use that term.

  The Chosen People. The Master Race.

  “Do you think your homosexuality is right?” he asked.

  “I don’t believe in ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ ” I told him. “I think those things—‘good’ and ‘bad’ and ‘right’ and ‘wrong’—are just arbitrary value judgments. Something that you might think is ‘right’ I might think is ‘wrong.’ It’s completely subjective.”

  Levi thought about this for a moment. The more I talked to him, and the more I was able to look at him, the more he became an individual. Underneath those clothes and that beard was a young man. He had a straight nose and a white but slightly oily complexion, and buried somewhere deep within his clear eyes was a human being petrified by existence.

  “Do you believe in things you can’t see?” he asked.

  “Well, I don’t know how the phone works, but when I’m talking to a friend I believe he’s talking to me on the other end of the line.”

  “That’s not belief.”

  “I’m sorry, then—what is your question again?”

  “Do you believe in something that is beyond everything, something that you can’t see, like God?”

  “I guess I would have to say no.”

  “What was your religion when you were growing up?”

  “Protestant. American. Middle-class. During my most formative years I went to a Congregational church, and then we moved and my parents went to whatever Protestant church was closest to the house.” I suddenly gave Levi a big smile. “You know what I was trained to do when I was a kid?”

  He shook his head.

  “I was taught to worship a Jew. We sang songs about him and we even prayed to him.” I paused a moment to let this information sink in. “I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m so attracted to you guys. Even though I’m an atheist now, I still have this need inside me to worship a Jew, and so when I see you—”

  “Did you ever believe in God?” he interrupted me.

  “Oh, yeah, when I was a kid. And then when I was twelve I read this book called Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis—have you read it?”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s a book about an evangelist, and in it he doesn’t believe in God, and that was the first time I had ever come across the concept that you could doubt God’s existence, and so for me at twelve it was like—well, if you could even doubt that God existed, then—then ‘He’ didn’t exist.”

  “Is your family religious?”

  “Oh, yeah, they’re a mess. My mother was an organist in her church, and one of my sisters turned into a Mormon and the other one became a born-again Christian.”

  Levi thought about this for a moment, and then he asked me, “Is your father very religious?”

  “Well, I don’t really know my father. When I was growing up I didn’t see him very much. When I woke up in the morning for school he’d already gone to work, and I was in bed before he came home at night.”

  “What did he do?”

  “When I was a little kid he worked in restaurants, and then later he worked in a casino at Lake Tahoe—that’s where I went to high school.”

  “So you were never religious again?”

  I shook my head. “When I was twenty, though, I became a born-again Christian for a year. It was pretty pathetic. I hitchhiked around the western United States with a Bible. And then one day I realized I was unhappy. I came back to Hollywood, and I met this boy I really liked, and one day we were going past that big Catholic church—up on Sunset? And we went in and this boy said he was an atheist, that he didn’t believe in God, and I loved him, or thought I did, so I said: I’m an atheist, too. I’ve been one ever since.”

  Levi just looked at me for a moment. I felt he was trying to use my answers to reach some preconceived notion he had, but I wasn’t sure what it was.

  I suddenly thought of something else. “Oh, and that boy? That boy I was in love with? Well, he was raised Catholic, but he was adopted and I think he was really Jewish. He had curly brown hair and a big nose, and it’s because of him that I’ve always been attracted to Jewish boys. You know: big noses, big cocks.”

  I could sense a war going on within Levi. He was being torn by his contempt, on the one hand, and his curiosity, on the other. I was just about to ask him if he had a big cock when he suddenly spoke up. “So you think of us as sex objects?”

  “Some of you. There’s a boy named Mendel who I think is cute, and there’s a beautiful boy named Mordecai—”

  “What do you find attractive about men?”

  “Basically, I think the most beautiful thing there is in the world, the most amazing thing, is an erect penis ejaculating, and every time I’ve been around one I’ve felt honored. I’ve felt that I was close . . .” and I paused to think what I was saying. “I have felt that I was—God, so to speak.”

  Somehow that wasn’t quite right.

  “When was the first time you had sex with a man?” Levi asked.

  “When I was sixteen, when I was visiting my grandmother in Phoenix. I was sitting out by the pool at her apartment building, and I was getting red, and this guy asked me if I had some lotion for my skin and I said no, and so we went up to his apartment and he said—what?—oh, I remember, he said, ‘I’ll give you a blow job if you give me one.’ ”

  “And you liked that?”

  “Well, I had never had sex before. And I’d never jacked off before—I didn’t start jacking off until I was seventeen, I started late—I’m retarded.”

  “What do you mean—‘retarded’?”

  “I’m just being facetious. I’m not really retarded, although I still don’t shave on my cheeks. But I had never had an ejaculation, and so it was a little frightening to me, I didn’t know what was happening. When I came I remember he asked me, ‘Is that it?’ And then when I went down on him and he came, I thought that he had cancer: I didn’t know what his sperm was. Later, when I went home, I thought about it and suddenly everything I knew and had heard about sex all came together with my experience—and then I wanted to have sex again, over and over. But he didn’t want to.”

  “Did you like it—did you like having
sex?”

  “Well, it was a little scary at first. I mean, at first I didn’t really like the taste of semen, so you know what I did? When I jacked off I started eating my own cum, and after a while I really came to love it, and now I’m obsessed with it—I love the taste and texture of semen more than almost anything else in the world.”

  Levi glanced over his shoulder, back toward the school, as if he was afraid someone might see us talking together or overhear us. “When was the next time you had sex?”

  I thought for a moment. “The next time I had sex was, let’s see, the next summer—when I ran away from home and went to Hawaii. I stayed at the YMCA and had sex with some guys there. And then the next year I came to Hollywood and that’s when I really started having sex a lot. It’s just a rough guess, but I think I’ve had sex with more than two thousand men.”

  Levi’s expression was absolutely unreadable. After twenty-four years in that Jewish environment he had mastered the ability to present a totally inscrutable face to the world.

  “Have you ever had sex with a woman?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “No. I’ve never had sex with a woman, I’ve never driven a car, I’ve never smoked a cigarette, I’ve never had a checking account or a credit card, and I haven’t seen TV since 1969: I’m very pure.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m an extra. I’m a stand-in on a TV show.”

  “No, I mean, what do you do when—”

  “When I have sex? Well, I’m a cocksucker, and I like to get fucked. I don’t like to fuck. I think sex is a power game and I like to be the one in the powerful position—”

  “So men fuck you?”

  I nodded. “You wanna see?”

  Before he could answer I got up and ran into the house and found the magazine with the interview of me and the pictures from my porno films. When I handed the magazine to Levi he held it in his hands very gravely as I turned the pages for him. He looked at the photographs with a magnificent impassivity. I could only glean his response by the questions he asked me. “What about—what about the shit?”

  “Well, if I know I’m going to have sex, I usually douche— you know, like an enema—so it’s not usually a problem.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of getting AIDS?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I’m forty years old. I’ve had a really good life—”

  “Aren’t you afraid of dying?”

  I shrugged my shoulders again. “Levi, I just can’t go around being afraid all the time. It’s boring. It’s different for you, you’re twenty-four, you have your whole life before you—you’ve never even had sex, so I can imagine, you’d be afraid of dying. You want to live. You want something in the future. I don’t. I don’t believe in the future. I just want to have fun. I want to have as many cocks ejaculating around me as I can. Unless I’m kidding myself, and I may be, I’m more afraid of getting old than I am of dying. One of my best friends got AIDS, and he died, but the day he was diagnosed and he found out he had it—you know what he said? He said, ‘You don’t know what this feels like.’ And that’s true—I don’t.”

  Levi thought about this for a long moment, and then handed my porno magazine back to me. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. And then he asked, “Are you happy?”

  “Well, I think it’s stupid, but—I took the Scientology personality test and I scored a hundred percent on happiness. It freaked the guy out who was giving me the test. He tried to sell me some of their classes because I didn’t get a hundred in one of the other categories, but I told him I’d be afraid to take one of those classes because then I might jeopardize my happiness.”

  “Does your family know you’re gay?”

  I nodded my head. “They read my diary when I was seventeen. And you know the man I told you about, that I first had sex with? Years later, when I was talking to my grandmother, she told me she thought she knew what was going on, and she said if she had been sure, she would have had him arrested. Can you imagine?”

  “Do you see your family very much?”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t seen them in about five years. I told them that either they could have a son or they could have God, but they couldn’t have both. They chose God.”

  “So you don’t speak to your parents? You don’t see them?”

  I shook my head.

  “Don’t you think you’re acting immature?”

  I looked at Levi incredulously. “Levi, look at you! You’re twenty-four years old—you’re in the very bloom of your youth—and you’re throwing it all away! Look at the way you dress and that beard! You look like an old man. You should be going out and having fun—having sex. If I’m being immature, I’d say you’re being too mature.”

  I suddenly remembered something I’d read in Ecclesiastes, and I excused myself and ran into the house and got my Tanakh. A moment later I came back outside and opened it to a passage I’d marked, and read aloud: “ ‘O youth, enjoy yourself while you are young! Let your heart lead you to enjoyment in the days of your youth. Follow the desires of your heart and the glances of your eyes—’ ” and I concluded with that, not reading on.

  Levi asked to see the book and I handed it to him. He looked down at what I’d read, and then back up at me. “You didn’t finish,” he said, and read the next little portion: “ ‘—but know well that God will call you to account for all such things . . . ’ ” Levi handed the book back to me, and with that turned and started across the street.

  “But there is no God!” I called after him.

  He didn’t respond but just continued on walking.

  “It was nice talking to you!”

  He mumbled something, but I couldn’t hear what.

  Although I’d clearly lost our little scriptural confrontation, on some deeper level I felt I’d won. Even though he’d asked many more questions than he answered, the intensity with which he’d pursued his questioning had revealed an interest that wasn't impassive, and I think he knew it.

  Moshe and Yitzchak had been playing in the playground of the school yard, and when they saw Levi walking away they climbed over the fence and ran back across the street to me. I slipped the porno magazine into the book of drawings of Christopher Isherwood.

  “So did you talk about sex?” Moshe asked.

  I nodded.

  “Do you want to fag him?” he asked.

  I watched Levi turning the corner at the end of the street, and reflected on that. I nodded my head. “Yes, I think I would. I would like to fag him.”

  Moshe laughed at the incredible picture of me fagging one of the bochurs, and little dreamy-eyed Yitzchak squealed with delight.

  23 / “wouldn’t it be funny ... ?”

  I was talking to my neighbor Dan about the problem of italicizing foreign words in stories, specifically “tzitzis,” “yarmulke,” and “yeshiva.” The Chicago Manual of Style suggests italicizing words not found in a standard dictionary. Of the words that I was concerned with, only “yeshiva” was in my dictionary. Dan was just about to tell me what he thought when I saw the boys, a big group of them, going up the street to play in the park.

  I told Dan I had to go and he said he understood. I hurried into my apartment to get my things. I made sure I had my binoculars and books in my backpack and then I headed out. I was almost to the park when an ice cream truck tinkled by and I stopped it to get a Popsicle.

  I bought a very phallic “Super-Pop” and was just on my way over to the game when a woman suddenly stopped me.

  “Excuse me. Hello.”

  “Hi.”

  Now that she had my attention she seemed unsure how to proceed. “There’s some people making a movie, they were just here, they were looking for people,” and she sized me up (all I had on was some shorts and sneakers). “They were looking for beach types.”

  “Well, I’m on my way to see a baseball game.”

  “Oh, you’re ...” She indicated my yarmulke.

  “No, I’m not Jewish. I live across the str
eet from a Chassidic school, though. As a matter of fact, I’m on my way to go and watch them play a baseball game right now.”

  “I was adopted,” she said, “but I just found out I was born in Russia and I’m part Jewish. Isn’t that amazing? I’m part Russian, part American Indian, and part German.”

  This woman was in her forties, I’d guess, she was moderately attractive, she had red hair, and she was wearing white pants with a pink “Caesars Tahoe” T-shirt.

  I asked her about the shirt. “Are you from there? That’s where I grew up, Tahoe.”

  “No, I was just visiting. I’m traveling around the country, seeing things.”

  “Oh. Well. I’ve got to go.”

  “My name’s Jean.”

  “I’m Rick.”

  It seemed like she wanted to follow me.

  “Would you like to come and watch the game with me? It’s just around the corner.”

  “Sure. I love baseball.”

  And we were off. We walked over to the park, passed the tennis courts, and made our way to the baseball diamond, where the boys were already playing. As we neared the bleachers I heard my name called out several times, as well as a few cries of exasperation. I could also sense the boys’ curiosity regarding my female companion.

  I didn’t hear the word “faggot” all afternoon.

  I sat back and tried to size up the situation: who was playing, how the teams were divided up, who were the captains. Since Jean and I were sitting immediately adjacent to first base, we really got to focus on the boys playing that position. Patrick, the Serious Young Man, was there now and he looked over at us. “The yarmulke,” he said. “You’re not Jewish.”

  And I thought: God—aren’t we over that yet?

  As soon as we were settled in the bleachers, Jean started talking to me. In a way I wanted her to be quiet so I could concentrate on the game, but she didn’t seem to require any particular response from me and the only time she actually asked me to pay attention to her was when she showed me two pictures of her children. One was a black-and-white shot of an adorable baby that looked like it could sell baby food, and the other was of a nice-looking boy with glasses, who looked like he might be in junior high school.