My encounters with the boys were considerably more reserved. I continued to sit outside during the day, but I never dressed up in my full rabbi regalia again, although I still wore the hat most of the time, and sometimes the tzitzis.
When the boys came out of the school and started up the street to go to the park they would glance over at me, but there were no more greetings or flirtations or mincing imitations. They would look at me to see what I was doing, as if to somehow get a better fix on me, but the days of our being friends seemed to be over. Occasionally one of them would surreptitiously give me the finger.
One day Mendel and the Fat Redhead left the school after the main group of boys and I thought I would try to mend some of the broken bridges. I felt that Mendel liked me, even if I was some sort of bug under glass.
“Hey, Mendel!”
He stopped and turned back to me: “Next time it’ll be in the head, bud.”
He waited a second to see if I had anything to say, and when I didn’t, he and his fat friend turned and continued on up the street.
That took me off guard. I guess Mendel must have been in the compound that day when I was yelling how much I hated their religion. I don’t remember him there. Mendel is too cute to be religious, and even worse than the ugly tone he’d directed toward me, it was sad to hear him defending their ideology.
If he ever becomes a rabbi, maybe he’ll say it was all because of me.
When I received my hospital bill I was shocked: my little visit, plus the X rays, came out to $512 and even though I had insurance, I was still responsible for $288. That was money I just didn’t have.
I started making a more concerted effort to get work, calling in to Central Casting every day to see if anything was going. I was using a headset so I had my hands free, and while the phone rang and rang and rang in my ear (waiting for them to pick up and give me a job or tell me to call back), I worked on my stories.
One day, when I saw the boys start heading up the street toward the park, I went outside to sit on one of the stoops and watch them pass. In addition to my black pants and a white T-shirt, I had on my black dress hat.
When they saw me, two of the boys crossed the street to talk to me: the Big Ugly Boy, the one I had first thought shot me, and Harry Newman, the little beaver who claimed he shot the BB’s through my windows.
Harry was in a jocular mood. “So are you going to miss us? Wednesday’s the last day.”
“Of course I’ll miss you. Spring break was terrible. I was very lonely without you boys running up and down the street.”
“So you still think I shot you?” the Big Ugly Boy asked.
“I did at first, but I don’t anymore. Now I think it was that guy with the wire-rimmed glasses in the beit midrash.”
“So are you going to sue the school?” Harry asked.
“Why?” I was incredulous. “You did me a favor. You gave me an ending for my stories. I didn’t have an ending. So you shot me. That’s an incredible ending.”
Harry started to protest, but I interrupted him. “No, no: I think we understand each other very well—underneath, subconsciously, I mean, it wasn’t my ending. My ending was that one of you boys would renounce your religion and come over and we’d have great sex.”
“Like Avi?”
“Well, Avi. I mean, he’s so sweet. Of course Avi. My fantasy with Avi is that he’d come to me and we’d have sex and then afterward he’d get over his speech impediment and it would all be because of me, because I loved him.”
They just looked at me.
Apparently there wasn’t anything to say to that.
And then they turned around and walked away.
I watched them until they were out of sight.
And then wondered at what I’d said . . .
Could I ever “love” anyone?
Did saying it make it so?
Arbitrarily . . .
Avi?
During the next couple of days I could sense the school year ending. On Tuesday the boys didn’t go to the park in the afternoon as usual, and I noticed a large number of them returning to the school with their dress clothes wrapped in the clear plastic of a dry cleaner’s.
And some of them seemed to be moving.
One afternoon while I was inside writing at my desk, I noticed Avi cross in front of my apartment several times with bags and boxes and load them into a car. The Nondescript Boy was helping him. I saved what was on my computer and went outside. I was wearing black pants with my tzitzis and hat.
“Avi!”
He didn’t respond.
I tried again. “Avi!”
He turned to me, put upon and exasperated, his eyes glowering in his catfish face. “What!?”
“Are you guys leaving?”
“No.”
I felt like he was lying to me, so I stayed outside and watched them.
They made one more trip, and then the two boys went to get in the car. Apparently the front passenger door was locked, because Avi had to stand beside the car while the Nondescript Boy got in on the driver’s side and then reached across to open it. While he was standing there, he turned to look back at me. I raised my hand to him and he looked away.
Once they were both inside, there was some delay in getting the car started and then there was a very sloppy pullout, a feeble attempt at burning rubber, and finally an awkward business of having to slow down because of an oncoming car.
I never saw Avi again.
Wednesday was the last day of school. I made a point of being home and sitting outside that day to see how the school year was going to resolve itself, to see if, perhaps, I might get an apology or some special goodbye. I was wearing my hat and long black pants, but no shirt, and I was browsing through The Artscroll Weekday Siddur, my Jewish prayer book. I was amused to find that in the morning prayers they thanked God for “not having made me a gentile” and for “not having made me a woman.”
Late in the afternoon some of the boys started leaving the school. They were in an exuberant mood that suggested they might not be doing this again this year, and as I watched them leave in their various groupings, I wondered about them in the outside world. When they were in airports, dressed like that and with everyone looking at them, what did they think?
As I sat there, lost in contemplation of them, two boys came out of the compound through the gate. I guessed them to be about twelve. The taller of the two was wearing a bright yellow shirt. The other boy had on a red shirt and I recognized him: he was the boy I had spoken to a long time ago, the one who had said that sex was like “a beautiful rare jewel.”
When they saw me looking at them, they started toward me, just stopping at the edge of the curb across the street. We considered one another for a moment, and then the taller boy suddenly put an arm around his friend and, bending down to put his other arm under his legs, lifted the boy with the red shirt up off the ground. It was just a bit of a struggle.
And then the boy in the yellow shirt set out across the street, walking straight toward me, the “beautiful rare jewel” docilely watching me as his friend carried him to . . .
To what?
It was like Abraham bringing his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God.
And I was God!
I was grinning at them in absolute, profound delight.
When they reached my side of the street the boy in the yellow shirt put his friend down and spoke to me. “Rick, how’s it going?”
“Absolutely wonderful,” I told them, and then, after a brief and awkward pause, they continued on up the street together. I was too overwhelmed to turn around and watch them walk away, but as I looked down at the book in my hands, it seemed incredible to me.
What were they doing?
It was certainly a joke. But what exactly was the joke?
Was the joke that I was God? A God?
Was the fact of one of them carrying the other associated in their minds as a sacrifice?
Whose idea was it? Somehow, on some level
, they had made a mutual decision. Was it spontaneous or had they planned it? Was it based on some previous associations: Rick is a homosexual, he likes boys, therefore: we’ll bring him a boy?
My sacrifice, my “Isaac,” was adorable. He looked at me with a matter-of-factness that just hinted at a sense of bemusement. I felt in him a willingness to play this part in the ritual, to be offered up as a “beautiful rare jewel,” and this acceptance of his, as he gazed on me, was lovely almost beyond words.
And I wondered: Was it a game?
Okay, I’ll be Rick and you be the sacrifice. I was Isaac last time. Okay, you be Abraham, and we’ll let Yitzchak play the sacrifice this time . . .
29 / summertime
When the school year ended, most of the boys went away, but some of the bochurs stayed and new ones arrived, in order to study the Talmud over the summer. The smaller boys who lived in the neighborhood went to various camps during the day, but in the late afternoons and early evenings, before they had to be home, we spent a lot of time together.
A new boy moved into the room just across from me, where Avi used to live. His name was Dimitri, he was fifteen, and he played the violin. Avraham told me he was a child prodigy and had played concerts all over the world. In the afternoons, while I sat outside reading, he would practice his music and I would find myself looking up from my books and staring off into space as he made his strings vibrate with the most exquisite melodies.
I finally finished my two big projects, going through my unread newspapers for the last two years and cataloguing Christopher Isherwood’s library onto my computer, and with that done I started doing more research on the Jews across the street.
Originally, Chassidism was a movement that sprang up in Poland in the eighteenth century among impoverished Jews reacting against scholarly Judaism. The leader of this movement was a man called the Baal Shem Tov. After he died, Chassidism splintered into various groups centering on different rabbis. One of them, Rabbi Schneur Zalman, developed a system of “spiritual growth” called Chabad, an acronymic abbreviation of the Hebrew words for wisdom (chochmah), understanding (binah), and knowledge (da’at), Chabad later became based in Lubavitch (a town about three hundred miles west of Moscow), with the two terms “Chabad” and “Lubavitch” becoming synonymous.
The head of Chabad that summer was a man named Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and he was called the Rebbe. He was the seventh leader of the Lubavitch and had been their Rebbe since 1950, the year I was born.
One afternoon, while I was reading, I saw Levi walking by across the street. He was the only bochur I had ever really spoken to and I wanted to ask him about a book called the Tanya— it was written by the first Rebbe, Schneur Zalman, and was apparently very important for Lubavitchers.
I got up and ran across the street to him, calling his name.
“I can’t talk now,” he said, waving me away with his hand.
“I just wanted to ask—”
“I’m sorry—I really can’t talk now—I’m sorry,” and he hurried on away from me. I watched him go and then slowly turned around and came back to my place in the sun.
Avraham was standing by my chair. Apparently he’d seen my brief encounter with Levi.
“He’s not supposed to talk,” he said. “He’s davenen
“What’s that?”
“Davenen—praying. You’re not supposed to talk when you daven.”
I looked back up the street where Levi was just turning the corner. I liked that—the idea of praying and walking at the same time—and I liked that word: daven.
Twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, I would see Levi walk by. If he happened to glance over at me I would say hello, but he never answered my greetings and so I stopped doing even that.
But then I had an idea. I took a piece of paper and wrote on it, with a thick black ink pen, in big block letters: “HELLO, LEVI.” When I was finished, I walked to the corner and taped it to a light pole, so that he would have to see it as he walked past.
I don’t know if he saw it the next morning because I wasn’t up when he took his walk, but that afternoon, as he passed by on the opposite sidewalk, he turned and stared at me. I had imposed myself on his wisdom, understanding, and knowledge . . .
I waved.
He didn’t respond, but he didn’t look away either.
Dovid and Yossi, the two little boys next door, stopped speaking to me. For a while I still greeted them, but then it just began to feel too strange. Yossi did a better job of ignoring me because we didn’t really have a relationship in the first place, but when I spoke to Dovid he would turn his head just slightly to the side and, without answering, look at me as if trying to divine my purpose beneath the strange foreign language I was speaking.
And I would look back at him and wonder what his parents had told him.
In the afternoons, Dovid and Yossi would ride their bikes up and down the sidewalk. Leaves and seeds from the eucalyptus tree in front of my apartment had covered the ground, and when the boys sped down the walk, the wheels on their bikes would invariably skid whenever they passed by. One day, after watching this happen several times and once seeing Dovid nearly fall and hurt himself, I went in my house and got a broom.
For the next hour or so I worked up a real sweat, sweeping all the detritus from the sidewalk and pulling up the weeds that had grown in the cracks. While I was doing this, Dovid and Yossi left off cycling on my stretch of the walk. Occasionally they would stop and watch me working, but then they’d get back on their bikes and go riding up and down the block.
When I was finally finished, and they were momentarily poised in the adjacent driveway, I looked over at them. “I think it’ll be better now.”
They didn’t say anything, but Dovid cocked his head to the side and looked at me with that deep consideration of his, a small furrow of concentration between his brows.
“Well, have fun,” I said, and I took the broom back in the house. When I came back outside to read some more, they were racing up and down the sidewalk again, almost as if I hadn’t cleared it just for them.
When I was working inside during the summer I usually kept my door open, even though I didn’t have a screen, and one afternoon, while I was writing, Yaakov and Yitzchak suddenly appeared in the doorway.
“Rick, can we have some money?” Yaakov asked.
I turned toward them. “What do you need money for?”
Yaakov shrugged. “We want to get some candy at La Brea Kosher. ”
“I don’t really have any money. I’m just collecting unemployment.”
Yitzchak saw something on the floor. “Here’s a penny,” and he came in the room and picked it up. “Can I have it?”
Sometimes when I get undressed my change falls on the floor and usually I just leave it there. I liked the idea of having money on my floor. Need some money? Then just reach down and pick it up.
“Any money you find on the floor you can have,” I told them, and with that pronouncement they started scurrying about the room, looking for coins.
There was something gratifying in the idea of these little boys searching my room for pennies.
“I found a quarter!” Yaakov suddenly yelled, and then he looked up at me to make sure it was all right. “Can I have it?”
I nodded my head.
Yitzchak bent down and started looking under my bed, while Yaakov headed for the kitchen.
“There’s lots of money in here!” Yaakov shouted, and I turned to see him looking in the drawer of a desk I had in my kitchen. Yitzchak ran to join him, and turned back to me. “Can we have this money?”
I shrugged: Why not?
They started going through the drawers of the desk and then, when they had finished searching around in the kitchen, came back into my living/bedroom to count their loot. They had the change spread out on my bed when Yaakov noticed a large jar of pennies on one of my filing cabinets.
“Can we have those?” he asked, standing up on the
bed to see it better.
I shook my head. “That’s my desperation money—for when I don’t have any money left. You’ve gotta leave me that.”
Yaakov turned back to Yitzchak who was counting the change. “Oh, no! You mixed it up! Now we won’t know which is mine and which is yours!”
I suggested that they split it evenly. They went through a careful process of counting the money and separating the coins into two piles. When they were done they each had several dollars. After pocketing the coins, they turned and offered me a brief “Thanks, Rick!” and then sped out of the apartment on their way to the store.
“Show me some pictures!”
Moshe and Yitzchak were sitting on one of the low brick walls beside me. Yitzchak was looking through my binoculars, but Moshe was bored.
“Do you want to see some pictures of me when I was a little boy?” I asked.
Moshe said he did, so I went into the house and got out a small basket in which I kept all my photographs. I brought it outside and opened it up. I had some representative pictures of myself from when I was a baby until fairly recently, but most of them were from a time when I took my camera to the sets of the movies and TV shows I worked on, and I showed Moshe photographs of me variously dressed as soldiers or policemen or aliens.
At first I went through the pictures myself and, whenever I found one that I thought might be interesting, handed it to Moshe or Yitzchak and explained it. But after a few minutes they were both rooting through the basket, holding up one photograph or another for me to identify.
“Who’s this!?” Moshe suddenly exclaimed.
He had come across a few pictures of me and some friends hiking up at Lake Tahoe. We had taken photographs of one another on top of Mount Tallac without our clothes on.
The Boys Across the Street Page 21