The Boys Across the Street
Page 19
A dialogue of sorts began, questions were shouted across the street, answers attempted, but the communication was a gabble of hopeless passions and assertions. Ultimately, however, they had made me angry.
“Are you embarrassed?” one of the boys called out to me.
Do I care about my windows being broken? Do I care about being shot at? Do I care about material objects? Do I care about my physical person?
Do I care about being alive?
Is that what being angry means?
“Yes.”
And I wondered . . .
Was that my real defeat?
Was that affirmation their final victory?
When the police arrived I stepped down to the sidewalk and approached their car, but they waved me away, and I went back to the steps and waited. Most of the boys cleared out, but I noticed Meir, the exotically dark-skinned boy with the large straight-lined nose, standing across the street with a friend of his.
The police parked down the street, just across from the school. After a few moments they got out of the car, their movements vested with authority, in anticipation of whatever this encounter might bring. They walked back up the sidewalk toward me and we made our introductions.
They asked me what happened. I explained that three BB’s had been shot through my window and that I had later been shot in the neck.
“How do you know they were BB’s?”
“I don’t. I was just making that assumption. I don’t even know what BB’s are.”
“But you assumed that since you were still alive, it probably wasn’t a bullet.”
I laughed. “Right.”
They went over to my window and looked at the three holes. The officer who signed the report later, Alistair, placed his hand against one of the panes, and four cracks went splintering away across the glass. When I made some kind of protesting sound he said, “It’s going to have to be replaced anyway.”
Yes, well. . .
They asked me where I’d been sitting, and I showed them, sitting on the stone block as I had been, and facing out. The wound was on the left side of my neck, and the officer with Alistair, Nieman, pointed up the street away from the school. “So the shot came from over there?”
“Well, I think I was turned this way,” I said, surprised at the possibility that the shot might not have come from the school. The officer made no further note of the discrepancy.
Then they accompanied me into my apartment. Books were in neat stacks on the floor and the bed was made, but dirty clothes were piled on top of it, and I suddenly wondered what they must think of all this. Did they notice the gun belts hung over one bookcase? Did they notice the picture of me as a Nazi on the back of the front door?
It was twilight, and Nieman turned his flashlight on.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said and, stepping over the books on the floor, turned the overhead light on. For the most part they stood forward of the bookcase projecting from the wall near the door, Nieman nearer the window.
Alistair studied my collection of the Norton Critical Editions. “Lot of books.”
I laughed. “That’s what I do.”
“Did you see who shot you?”
“No. The street was quiet. When I looked around, I saw the shade fluttering on the window facing the street, upstairs and nearest us.”
“Do you know who did it?”
“I have a pretty good idea. I think it’s a big ugly boy who hates me and calls me names.”
“But you didn’t see him do it?”
“No. But right after they had fired this shot”—and I pointed to the hole in the window nearest my desk—“I looked out and saw the Big Ugly Boy across the street.”
“When was this?”
“Just before the guys go to play ball in the park, probably between two and two-thirty.”
“Why do you think they’d want to hurt you?”
“Because of this.” I indicated my hat.
“Why is that?”
“I’m not sure. I guess it’s because it’s what the rabbis wear.” “Why are you wearing it?”
And here it was, the big question: Why?
“I’m not really sure. I guess it’s because I want to see what it means to them. I mean, I’ve read their Bible, and now I’m on the Mishnah, which is the second of their holy books, and we’ve had some great discussions, me and some of the kids.”
Bullshit, bullshit. I could practically read it in their eyes. But was it crazy bullshit?
“They know I’m not Jewish, and that I’m an atheist, and that I’m homosexual, and some of them don’t like it. They threatened me a few days ago, two of the older guys, they said they didn’t want me talking to the kids, and I asked the kids if they told them why, and they didn’t, and so I told them, and then I told the mother of the kids next door— ‘I’m not Jewish, I’m an atheist, and I’m homosexual.’ ”
I was much too excited, I was running on, it didn’t make any sense, and even as the words were still pouring out of my mouth, I felt that the gist of it, for them, was that there was (although perhaps legally insufficient) definite provocation.
“What do you do for a living?” Alistair asked me, beginning to fill out the report.
“I’m an extra,” I said, and, indicating the jacket I was wearing, “Sometimes I’m a cop.”
There was the barest of acknowledgments: we all wear costumes.
As I was going on, justifying myself, I began sizing up the two of them, and Nieman (Jewish?) seemed particularly cute: short and lean, with close black hair and wide pretty eyes. Ultimately, I think they felt I was harmless, and when Alistair finished filling out the report he told me they would list it as Assault with a Deadly Weapon.
As they were leaving they gave me a copy of the report. Nieman handed me the wrong (pink) copy at first and then, as he gave me the proper (yellow) one, said he was spaced out. They told me they would give the case to a detective who would probably call on me within a couple of days.
Los Angeles Police Department
Preliminary Investigation Of ADW/Vandalism
INVEST. DIV.: HWD DR: 9106
LAST NAME, FIRST, MIDDLE: SANDFORD, RICK STEVEN
SEX: M DESC.: W AGE: 40 DOB: 12-31-50
PREMISES (SPECIFIC TYPE): 1-STORY APT
DR. LIC. NO. (IF NONE, OTHER ID & NO.): E0443881 I.D.
OCCUPATION: STUDIO EXTRA R.D.: 674
PRINTS BY PREL. INV./ATTEMPT: N
DATE & TIME OF OCCURRENCE: 5-29-91 15:30
DATE & TIME REPORTED TO PD: 19:45
TYPE PROPERTY STOLEN/LOST/DAMAGED: BROKEN WINDOW
EST. DAMAGED ARSON/VAND.: $100 ea
MOTIVATED BY HATRED/PREJUDICE: X
REPORTING EMPLOYEE(S): P. ALISTAIR
SERIAL NO.: 3546
DIV./DETAIL: HWD X42
After they left I stayed in my apartment. I watched Meir and his friend across the street. All the time the police had been here they had stood there, looking across toward my apartment. Meir was impassive. I remembered the evening I’d given him some Velcro for his yarmulke. I wondered what he was thinking now.
I sat down at my computer and started to write about the day and what had happened. Parts of it were difficult to think about and sometimes I would skip ahead so as not to have to go through it again, but then later I would go back and try to fill in the blanks. And the most difficult question of all was: Why?
I called a couple of friends to tell them what had happened, including Tom, the boy who had given me my first yarmulke, and I tried talking my way through my motivations:
Why was I wearing a yarmulke and tzitzis? Why did I spend $55 on a hat?
I didn’t really know.
No, that wasn’t true.
I didn’t really want to know.
What I wanted was Understanding—I wanted it to thrust itself suddenly upon me and reveal its inner workings.
What I wanted was for one of them to renounce his religion and tell me he loved me.
What I really wanted was for something—anything—to happen.
And now it had.
But: why?
A detective was going to be here within a couple of days and that same question would come up again: Why was I wearing these clothes, the hat or a yarmulke and tzitzis?
Okay.
I didn’t really know what the hat meant.
The yarmulke was a way of showing one’s respect to God.
Tzitzis represented the 613 laws of Moses.
And . ..
One of the 613 laws of Moses is Leviticus 20:13: “If a man lies with a male as one lies with a woman, the two of them have done an abhorrent thing; they shall be put to death—their bloodguilt is upon them.”
I had it!
One simple reason, the solid bottom line on which was erected this whole strange relationship that had culminated in my being shot in the neck with a BB gun.
They wear clothes that say I should be killed!
It’s the same as it would be for them if I wore a swastika.
It’s offensive.
And that's why I’m wearing these clothes!
It’s a way of invalidating their meaning.
Yes!
26 / the detective
I couldn’t sleep. I woke up about four o’clock in the morning, tormented by an equation without a resolution: someone had shot me. I couldn’t resolve the issue in my mind, but even though my dreams and consciousness were all a part of one another and the distinctions wouldn’t clarify themselves, I was uncomfortably aware of one ineluctable fact: I made a difference. And somebody didn’t like that. I kept my eyes closed and stayed under the covers, hot in my dark little cave, very aware of my cracked windows with the holes in them, cognizant of the big hospital bandages, one over the place on my neck where I’d been wounded and the other over the place on my arm where they’d given me the tetanus shot. At about six-thirty, dirty gray dulling the dark outside, I heard the thump as the newspaper landed outside my door. I began to hear people coming and going, but I didn’t want to get up, I felt weirdly depressed, and I just wanted to stay in the dark until everything was okay.
There was a strong knock on the door.
Okay, so I wouldn’t be able to resolve all this before I woke up. I stepped to the door naked and opened it a crack. A man in his fifties was standing there, neat and trim, with dress pants on, a white shirt, and tie.
“I’m Detective Bucher of the Los Angeles Police Department,” he introduced himself, showing me his badge.
“Oh. Uh—just a minute, let me put something on,” and I grabbed the big blue robe off my bed which I’d been using as a blanket, stepped back to the door, and asked him in.
The room was a mess. All the stuff that had been on my bed the night before was now on the floor, and to get a seat for the detective I had to climb over my bed and retrieve my director’s chair from the kitchen and then shift my bicycle over so there’d be some place for me to set down the chair. With these preliminaries taken care of, I sat cross-legged on the bed facing him.
He handed me his card, an off-white color: “Los Angeles Police Department” and a “Detective” insignia were embossed in gold, with the other information—his name, ID number, and the precinct address and phone—in black.
He asked me what happened, and as I started to tell him about the shooting, I saw Avraham walking across the street, on his way to school, and I pointed him out to the detective. “That’s Avraham, he’s a great kid, he’s twelve. He just moved here from Israel with his family. They live next door. The other day I was talking to him when two of the older guys, the ones who are in something called the beit midrash, came over and threatened me. They told me to stop talking to the kids and said it was my responsibility not to talk to them. Then the other night I saw two cops up the street, and I asked them if I was doing anything wrong in talking to the kids—I mean, I’m not initiating these conversations and it’s not like I’m trespassing or anything—and they said there was nothing wrong about it. I use binoculars sometimes, and I asked them if there was anything wrong in using binoculars to look at people across the street, and they said it was, in fact, an invasion of privacy, and since then I haven’t used them to look at the boys . . .”
I talk fast anyway, but I felt like I had to tell the story of my life in thirty seconds, and was hurrying as fast as possible to get out as much information as I could.
Detective Bucher interrupted my spiel. “Where were you when you were shot?”
“I was sitting outside on one of the stoops in front of the building.”
“Could you show me?”
“Sure,” and I led the detective outside and showed him where I was sitting, angling myself toward the school so there wouldn’t be a repeat of that embarrassing situation with the policemen when one of them pointed up the street away from the school and suggested that the shot had come from there.
Detective Bucher then walked over to the window, and I had a sudden premonition of him touching the glass and it breaking out and then having to come up with money I could not afford in order to replace it. He looked at the holes in the glass and, in particular, at the one that had pierced the screen.
He looked at how the screen was attached to the window frame and then lifted it off, and began looking in the sill grooves. After a moment he lifted up a small copper-colored pellet.
“Is that a BB?” I asked.
He said it was, pocketing the evidence and then replacing the screen. “You can tell the shot came from over there.” He pointed toward the school.
“You can?” I asked. “How?”
“By the way the glass is shattered.”
I was impressed.
We went back into the house and I continued my account of the shooting. “I think I know who shot me, although I can’t be sure. I think it was this one boy who calls me names all the time; a few days ago he told our plumber that he wanted to kill me . . .”
Detective Bucher was a pleasant man, very responsive, and his professional demeanor, for the sake of gathering information, was as engaging as possible, and I felt I just couldn’t let that engagement down. At the same time I wondered about his own prejudices: religious, political, sexual.
“The reason they shot me was because of this hat,” and I got up and retrieved the hat from my desk, and put it on.
“Why? Is it German?”
“I’m not sure. It’s a ‘Fléchet.’ One of the boys said it’s what their rabbi wears.”
“Why are you wearing it?”
“Well, to tell the truth, I don’t really know. But I’ve been thinking about it and I think, although this is only part of it, the bottom line, in terms of wearing clothes, is that this is my way of protesting their wearing tzitzis. Do you know what tzitzis are?”
Detective Bucher shook his head.
I dug around among the dirty clothes on the floor and found my tzitzis, and I lifted them up to show him. “These are tzitzis: they wear these over their undershirts and under their regular shirts most of the time, but it varies, and these four sets of strings with the knots in them? These just hang at their sides, and they represent the six hundred and thirteen laws of Moses, and one of those laws says that if you have sex with another man you should be killed. That’s a statement they are making with the clothes they are actually wearing, and so I think that is the bottom line about why I’m wearing these clothes: I am trying to destigmatize them. Because I really do despise their religion, and their belief in God, and—”
“Do you hate Christianity, too?”
“Oh, sure, and Mormonism, and Islam, they all come out of Judaism. I’ve read the Koran—”
“So you hate all religions?”
“Well, I mean, I hate those religions because I know about them, I don’t really know about the other religions, Hinduism and Buddhism and stuff, but the ones I do know about I despise, but I like the kids. And, you know, it’s funny. I mean, when I grew up I knew that Jesus’ being Jewish was downplayed
, but I just found out that it works the other way, too. I told two of the kids, ‘You know what I did the first twelve years of my life? I worshipped a Jew.’ And one of them said, ‘Jesus wasn’t a Jew,’ and his friend said to him, ‘Yes he was.’ And this boy said, ‘Well, he wasn’t a Jew when he died,’ and his friend said, ‘Yes he was.’ It was very funny. They’re really smart, though, they’re smarter than most kids I know. I mean, take any ten kids from that school and compare them to kids from Fairfax, or even Beverly Hills High, and I bet they’d be smarter. So it is really fun to talk with them, because they’ll talk to you, about ideas and about God and what life is all about, and we’ve had some great talks—I’ve written most of them down. Some of the guys don’t like me and get abusive and call me faggot, but most of them are good kids. Oh, yeah, once I said to one of them, one of the ones who’s always calling me names, ‘If you worshipped the penis instead of God you wouldn’t be so bitter’—”
Detective Bucher blanched slightly at what I said and interrupted me. “So they know you’re gay?”
It was rather sweet watching him deal with his own understanding of diplomacy and I appreciated his effort: when he asked his question he was careful about using politically correct terminology (“gay”).
“Oh, yeah, and they know I’m not Jewish and I don’t believe in God, and in fact, when they told me not to talk to the kids, that’s exactly what I told the kids, so they’d know why they weren’t supposed to talk to me: ‘I’m not Jewish, I’m an atheist, and I’m a homosexual,’ and I told that to Avraham’s mother, too, so she’d know. I don’t want there to be any confusion,
other than the fact that I’m wearing Jewish clothes. You see, I’m writing a blasphemous, homoerotic version of the Christ story in the style of the 1611 King James Version of the Bible, and since that’s all about Judaism I thought I’d be Jewish until I’m done. That’s all I’ve been reading about for the last couple of years, I think it’s the most important thing that’s ever happened to this planet, in terms of ideas—I think it’s awful but I think it’s worth studying, and now I’m reading the Mishnah, which is their second major holy book, after the Tanakh ...”