“That’s my sister,” I explained, “and that’s her first husband’s sister.”
Yitzchak reached across and grabbed one of the photographs from his brother. It was of me, naked, standing on top of the mountain with Lake Tahoe in the background.
“You’re naked!” he shrieked.
The boys couldn’t get over these pictures, and I wondered if it had been such a good idea to bring the whole basket of photographs outside. Moshe put the pictures he had found aside and started digging through the rest of the basket to see if he could find any other photographs of naked people, while Yitzchak held on to the picture of me with both hands, as if he were afraid it might escape his grasp.
“You’re naked outside!” he exclaimed again.
“When you and your family go up in the mountains together, don’t you take pictures of each other without your clothes on?” I asked.
“Never!” Moshe stated definitely.
“You should,” I told them. “It’s fun.”
Yitzchak continued staring in wonderment at the picture of me without any clothes on. I reached over to take it from him, but he held it tight and wouldn’t release it.
“Can I have this picture, please,” he begged me.
“It’s my only copy,” I told him.
“But you can get another one,” he pleaded.
“I don’t have the negatives,” I said, and wasn’t sure if I was lying or not. I held my hand out for the photograph, but Yitzchak jumped up and ran a couple of yards away, where he stood—staring still at the picture.
“Yitzchak!” I said, a little exasperated, holding my hand out toward him.
After looking at me naked on the mountaintop for a few more moments, almost as if committing the image to memory, he reluctantly walked over to me and handed it back. I enjoyed the fact that I could trust these two boys, that there was a basic sense of propriety we all understood and respected.
I took the pictures of me naked and held on to them as we continued to look through the rest of the photographs. I found several other naked pictures before Moshe or Yitzchak did, and appropriated them as well.
“Please let me see,” Moshe begged.
I shook my head.
“We’ve already seen you naked,” Moshe reasoned. “What difference would it make?”
I shook my head again and stood up, planning to put these particular photographs in a hiding place. I started back toward my apartment. Yitzchak stayed behind, looking through the rest of the pictures, but Moshe followed me. “Let me see! Please/”
I put the pictures up on one of my bookshelves where little boys couldn’t reach them without a chair.
“Why?” he asked. “Do you have a boner?”
I laughed. “No.”
“Then why?”
Some friends of mine had told me that it was against the law to show kids certain pictures, that it was contributing to the delinquency of a minor or something, and ever since then I’d been very discreet about showing any naked pictures of myself to the boys. I hated not being honest with Moshe. I hated being trapped into being a dreary old grownup.
“I talked to some people,” I said, deciding to be forthright about my reasoning, “and they said I shouldn’t show any naked pictures to kids, because I could get in trouble.”
“I won’t tell anyone!”
I looked at Moshe, standing in the doorway, looking up at me. He was so earnest in his desire to get his own way, to see my pictures.
“Okay,” I said, giving in and handing him the pictures. They were just some amateur shots of me standing around in my apartment. I watched Moshe as he went through them.
After he was finished, he looked up at me with a little frown on his face. “Why didn’t you want me to look at them?”
He obviously didn’t believe I could get into trouble for showing them to him. I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t like the way I look in them.”
That was true as well, and this time he believed me.
One day, promising that I would buy them some candy, I accompanied Avraham and Yaakov to the store. I had never actually been abroad with the boys before and it was exciting. We walked down Waring, past the front of the school, and over to La Brea.
The store, La Brea Kosher, was about four blocks south of Melrose, and on the way there we passed a number of Jewish schools and synagogues. It was a Friday and we arrived just after four o’clock, when the store closed, and so had to make our way home empty-handed.
On the way back, I asked Avraham what his father did for a living.
“He’s a mortician.”
“He has to stay with dead bodies at night,” Yaakov said.
I wondered how much procedure this entailed. From what I’d read in the Mishnah, there were tons of laws concerning corpses and what was clean and unclean.
I looked at Yaakov. “Do you remember when we first met and you told me a black man had attacked your father, and you said your father jumped over ten benches—was that at the mortuary?”
A big grin spread across Yaakov’s face at hearing his story repeated.
Avraham shook his head. “He’s always telling stories. He gets in trouble for it.”
There was a gas station at the corner of Melrose and La Brea that sold candy, and I asked Avraham and Yaakov if they wanted me to get them any. They shook their heads.
“What would happen if you ate non-kosher candy?” I asked.
“God would get mad,” Avraham said.
“He’d get very mad,” Yaakov confirmed.
“How would you know?” I asked.
“He’d keep Moshiach from coming.”
How horrible to convince little kids that the coming of the Messiah was dependent on their smallest actions!
“I’ll bet you anything in the world the Messiah never comes.”
Both Avraham and Yaakov burst out laughing.
“He’ll come, you’ll see,” Avraham said.
“And then he’s going to kick ass!” Yaakov yelled, going into some kind of kick-boxing mode.
As we walked along, Yaakov began attacking me. He would come upon me from different angles, practicing some kickboxing moves, and otherwise jumping on my back. It was a little difficult for me to figure out exactly what the intentions behind these assaults were, but at the same time it was very enjoyable being a physical object for Yaakov’s energy.
We’d just turned back onto Waring when Avraham suddenly said, “You’d be a good father. Why don’t you have children?”
“I’m queer. Besides, I couldn’t afford it. I can barely afford to support myself now,” I told him. “If I had to be responsible for other people, then I probably couldn’t do the things I want to do. When I work, I have a very easy job, I only have to work three or four days a week, and in my spare time I can write. If I had to be responsible for some little kids, I don’t know what I’d do—”
Yaakov jumped up on my back, and I spun him around. “How would you like it if I was your father, Yaakov?”
He jumped off my back and stood apart from us, taking stock of whatever figure I was presenting. He looked to Avraham, widening his eyes in disbelief, and then he burst out laughing and went running down the street yelling, “I already have a father!”
“I think you’d be a good father,” Avraham repeated as we continued on together. “You know how to talk to kids.”
“Avraham, your parents had children because of their religion, but I think most people who have children just do it as an excuse to express their feelings toward other human beings. They’re too frightened or egotistical or embarrassed to admit the way they feel, and so they have to have kids to justify their own—what?—love of species. And there’s, what, five billion people in the world—it’s so sad. I think that’s why queers are so important: they have the courage to love other people without making more of them.”
Yaakov had met up with Yitzchak at the corner and they started playing together, running around and then chasing each other across
the street.
“Be careful when you cross the street!” Avraham yelled after his little brother, and then more quietly to me, “Stupid kids.”
“You know, in a way,” I said, “I do think it would be nice to be Moshe and Yitzchak’s father, since they don’t have one. I mean, I really do like them and they need a father, they need somebody, but I just couldn’t do it.”
We were almost to Alta Vista when Avraham suddenly asked me about my homosexuality. “When you do it with another man, do you put your cock in their ass or do they put their cock in yours?”
“Usually they put their cock in my ass,” I told him.
“Doesn’t it hurt?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Sometimes. It did at first, when I first had sex. It doesn’t anymore.”
We walked on in silence for a bit, Avraham thinking all this over. As we turned up Alta Vista, we could hear Dimitri playing his violin, its music blessing the street with beauty.
“You’re not like other grownups,” Avraham said, making a definite distinction. “You tell me everything.”
I shrugged my shoulders: I didn’t know what to say.
When we got to my apartment we sat outside and listened to Dimitri practicing in his room. Looking over toward his window, we could see him walking back and forth as he played.
And then I thought of something.
“Avraham, by any chance, does your father work at the mortuary up on Santa Monica Boulevard?”
Avraham said he did.
“Really? The one near Fairfax?”
“Yes, so?”
“Do you know what that building used to be?”
He shook his head.
“When I was eighteen and first came to Hollywood, the place where the mortuary is used to be a gay bar called the Stampede. It was the first gay bar I ever went in. Isn’t that amazing?”
I looked around us and everything suddenly seemed so beautiful: the afternoon light all amber and glowing, Dimitri’s music resonating the air, Yaakov and Yitzchak playing together down the street, and here beside me Avraham, with his dark inquiring eyes.
I contemplated the vicissitudes of time . . .
“When I got drafted to go in the army I told them I was homosexual, and they made me go see a psychiatrist to make sure I wasn’t lying. He only asked me one question. He said, ‘Where do you hang out?’ and when I told him the Stampede, he went ahead and filled out my papers. And so I didn’t have to go to Vietnam. And now the Stampede is a Jewish mortuary and your father works there.”
I looked at Avraham, contemplating his beauty, and he smiled back at me.
“It’s a strange world, isn’t it?”
30 / yitzchak
On Independence Day I was supposed to go see a film with Josh, but he got invited to a party and so instead I sat outside all day reading. I had gone back to Fairfax and discovered a bookstore I hadn’t noticed before, the Mid-City Chabad, and there I found Despite All Odds: The Story of Lubavitch by Edward Hoffman, a book that gives a simple overview of the movement.
As I sat there reading about the Lubavitchers, and watching their occasional comings and goings, I found it interesting that as far as they were concerned this was just another day for them: there were no holidays but Jewish holidays. I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about that. On the one hand, I resented the tacit “Fuck you!” it implied while, on the other, I respected them for not kowtowing to the majority.
In the middle of the afternoon, when it was hottest and all activity seemed to cease, Yitzchak came over to see me. Unlike Moshe, Yitzchak didn’t appear to have any particular agenda in his life—nothing he needed to know or find out. Maybe it was in deference to his older brother that he was so quiet: watching, listening, assimilating.
After we exchanged greetings, I didn’t know what to say to him—we didn’t really have any grounds for our relationship— and so we sat there together in silence. While I read, he picked up my binoculars and looked through them. I tried to concentrate, but invariably I would be drawn to look at this little human being sitting near me, with his dirty shirt on, the strings of his tzitzis hanging down beneath it, little yarmulke crowning his light brown hair, and peyos curving back around his ears. He was beautiful and shy and charming, and in his presence I simply wanted to melt into him.
We didn’t say anything for quite a while. Occasionally, when I looked up from my book, our eyes would meet and we would consider each other for a moment or two. I felt as if I could look into his eyes forever and, in a way, I think that’s what he wanted me to do. I could feel some process going on, in and behind his eyes, but I couldn’t define it and, conversely, as he gazed on me and into my eyes, I wondered if he knew what he was seeing . . .
It was only conventional politeness that made me look away, or maybe I was frightened, of what he could or did see, and then of what I might see.
And so I went back to my book, making a pretense of my autonomy.
“Do you want to know who shot you?”
I looked up, and little Yitzchak was just sitting there, watching me, holding my binoculars in his lap as he straddled the low brick wall.
I was very interested, but I answered him as casually as I could. “Yeah, sure.”
“It’s the boy who lives over there,” and he pointed toward the dormitory across the street.
“Which window?”
“The one in the middle.”
“On the ground floor?”
Yitzchak nodded.
That was the room next to Avi’s, where the guy with the short curly hair lived. “Do you know what his name is?” I asked.
Yitzchak shook his head. “I’m not sure. Maybe it’s Levi.”
Another Levi!
I tried to think back. I knew who he meant. I hadn’t had too many dealings with him, but I knew he deeply disliked me. I remembered his imperious tone of voice once when he told me to put the binoculars down, and another time when he told me to go away or he would call the police.
If I were to bring suit against the school, and if the question came up of who shot me, what would I say? Would I tell them that Yitzchak had told me it was the curly-haired boy named Levi?
I looked at little Yitzchak sitting there and I knew I could never do that. I could never put him in that position. And I wondered what it meant: Had he found out? Did everyone know? Was it a secret?
Well, whatever it was, it had suddenly become more than just a secret between us—it had become an expression of trust.
Or maybe it was just curiosity: If I tell Rick who shot him, what will he do?
A little later Moshe came over and joined us with one of his sisters, a girl named Rachel who looked to be younger than Moshe but older than Yitzchak. And then we were joined by some other kids, including Sruli Perlman and two of his younger brothers, Mendy and Mooki, and finally Yaakov from next door.
I had never really talked to Sruli before, and I asked him how old he was.
“Twelve.”
“Are you excited about your bar mitzvah?”
“No. I don’t really want to do it. It’s too much work.”
“But you get lots of money, don’t you?”
Sruli shrugged his shoulders, and then he suddenly asked, “Are you a homosexual?”
I nodded.
Yaakov came over to me then. “What’s a homosexual?”
This was very strange, having to explain sexuality to a ten-year-old. “Well, it means I have sex with other men, that makes me homosexual, and your parents, for example, they’re heterosexual.”
Yaakov was indignant. “They are not!”
I was startled by Yaakov’s vehemence. “I mean,” I tried to explain, “your father’s a man and your mother’s a woman, and since they have sex with each other that means that they’re heterosexual. I have sex with other men, like myself, and that makes me homosexual.”
Yaakov was getting into his little bulldog stance. “My parents don’t sex,” he said, offended by my vile aspersion. His
family’s honor was at stake and he was getting ready to take on anybody who said they did: he put his hands on his hips and spread his feet apart, braced for an attack.
Moshe thought Yaakov was silly. “How do you think you got here, then?” he asked.
“You’re stupid!”
Moshe turned to me confidentially. “He doesn’t know about it yet.”
“I’ll fight you!” Yaakov threatened Moshe.
“I dare you!” Moshe shot back.
“I dare you!”
“Yaakov, he didn’t insult you—it’s just a word, it’s not necessarily bad—”
“My parents don’t sex!” he insisted.
Yaakov is one of the most aggressive little kids I’ve ever seen, and to see him defending his untenable position was painful to me, especially since everyone there knew he was wrong—or did they?
I looked around at the other little kids, Sruli’s two little brothers and Moshe’s sister Rachel, who hadn’t said a word, and I wondered: What on earth must this conversation sound like to them? What could it mean? How did they explain to themselves what Yaakov and Moshe were fighting about?
“But I have sex,” I explained, trying to get the conversation back to myself and ease the tension. I turned to Sruli. “And that’s why the guy in the beit midrash shot me.”
“How do you know it was one of the bochurs?” Sruli asked.
I suddenly caught sight of Yitzchak, sitting quietly on the little brick wall. He didn’t say anything and I wondered if he thought I might tell on him.
“It’s just a feeling I have,” I said.
Later in the week some of the smaller children went on a field trip. A bus came to pick them up from school and parked across the street. I watched the kids get on the bus, and among them I noticed little Yitzchak. He sat by a window on the side of the bus facing the street. He saw Dovid and Yossi in their yard playing ball and waved to them. And then he saw me.
I was taking a break from the phone (calling in for work), and sitting on one of the stoops outside, watching the activity on the street. When Yitzchak recognized me he waved and I waved back. He had a big smile on his face and I was really happy and excited for him: he was going somewhere and we were staying here. Once I picked up my binoculars and looked through them to see him better and he laughed.
The Boys Across the Street Page 22